skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Middlemen are predestined to death at some point or another unless they can keep demonstrating a compelling service, a reason to exist.

Banks are an example of middlemen who continue to exist because they provide a compelling service (everyone needs to store and move monies). Travel companies are an example of middlemen who died because they couldn't provide a compelling service (everyone can do their own bookings now directly with airlines, hotels, et al.).

If "AI" puts search engines like Google Search and data aggregators like Yelp out of business, then that's because their services are not compelling. Good riddance. Middlemen continuing to exist without providing compelling services are just collecting free rent, nobody should have to pay rent for nothing.

As regards the "open" internet, that died a long time ago when most use cases for the internet centralized on a handful of websites and services.

"AI" doesn't change the fact most group conversations happen on Reddit now, that most direct communications happen over Discord or Teams (or email) now, that most traffic gets routed through Cloudflare now, that most companies contract with Amazon Web Services for servers now, that everyone speaks Chrome now, and so on.
It should be resumed on Feb 1st. I understand why they’re concerned (everyone wants more money) but from what I can tell this is just grant approvals, and it will resume on the first.
There was similar hype around "intelligent agents" taking over the web back in the early 2000's, that might serve as a good corrective. Does anyone know a good writeup about it?
Sad to say google strips that switch for me straight up, but my situation (I used to conduct [when it was a half decent search engine] a few hundred involved searches each day tracking down and verifying data - and it seemed that bothered google greatly,) may not be as others here in Australia.
What makes it a “microblog”?
Ah, looks like it didn't update. Should be better now.
Personally, I think the Author's point about getting Operator to just book your holidays for you or to rely on it for automatically recommending the "best" restaurants or so is ironically just a return to the past when we hired some agencies or friends to do these things for us also. Well, the return of such systems might also open in turn opportunities for arbitarge again; when savvy user who took the time to observe things directly could get better deals.
I wasn't aware that it is that critical. I have been doing C projects of all sizes and on different platforms and with different toolchains for forty years, including many where the same code runs on different platforms and is built with different toolchains, and I have never come across an undefined behavior for which there was no practical work-around in reasonable time. I have also never seen a language specification that answers all questions, not even Pascal or Ada. I agree that implicit conversions are an unfortunate feature of C, but I think the same about all languages where you can easily assign floating point to integer variables (or vice versa), for example. Cross-toolchain and cross-platform experiments are a constant activity with all the programming languages I use.
Much of the same commentary was confidently asserted during the 90’s about online shopping, stock trading, and dating.
It’s not “either or.” It’s been decades since a “package the world” approach has been practical at human scales.

(I think it’s great that distributions provide one extra set of eyes. But we’re deluding ourselves if we think that can scale to the actual realized demand for both new software and continuous change to software. It’s also not very fair to the distributions.)
> not even sure what the benefit or angle is for spamming fake job applications

Ok, tinfoil hat time. Suppose for a moment that the AI hype is true, and that two years from now everyone will have access to god-like coding ability on the cheap. Even if it's untrue, there are plenty who believe this is the case. Seems to me like there are two ways for that to go:

1. Coding jobs get scarcer and scarcer and the only remaining ones are populated people willing to work unreasonably hard to keep them.

2. Coders being the group with the most on-the-job experience re: driving an AI (acquired back in the days when coding was all it was good for) all quit their jobs to start their own companies--because why bother with the bureaucracy of a large company when you can now do the same work with four employees?

I'm not sure who exactly would want to influence the general vibe towards 1 and away from 2, I guess somebody who believed the hype enough to see 2. as a threat, but not enough to see it as an ideal outcome. Or maybe someone whose product is more valuable against a backdrop of an impossible-to-navigate job market. Whoever they are, DDOSing job applications would be a way to achieve that goal.
This is mobster boss talk. "Be a shame if something happened to him".
> Previously if I wanted to know about the French Revolution, I would have Googled it, and likely landed on Wikipedia and maybe 2 or 3 specialty sites. Now, I just ask ChatGPT

This is a common sentiment. I have been using chatgpt for various things, and there are times when I will turn to it for technical help, sysadmin or figuring out some shell / cli commands. However by and large I definitely still prefer googling something. I would much rather read a wikipedia article of the French Revolution than trust whatever chatgpt had to say about it. I figure chatgpt is just spitting out the very same wikipedia article with some rewording and the occasional hallucination and I would rather just read straight from the source. Same with programming questions - between reading a stack overflow thread with the answer and chatgpt I feel a lot better reading stackoverflow, seeing the context the replies, the alternatives etc. and deciding based on that rather than just trusting gpt.
Not a rhetorical question: Could it be that part of the speed difference is due to the file system speed? I was shocked when I saw how much modern(ish) Windows file systems were slower than modern(ish) Linux ones.
In the 60s, you'd have offices with thousands of such machines: https://aurorasginjoint.com/2017/08/19/a-look-at-billy-wilde... (in the movie, he mentions 30k employees on all the floors). On this floor, I believe they're mechanical calculators with extra functions (unsure what).
The person deleted their comment before I got a chance to respond, so this is more of a response to them than to you.

I really hate this sort of "faux long term" shit that I keep hearing about how "it's really a good thing because maybe the DNC will get better!!!!!!!!", because it sort of makes this assumption that the election of a demagogue isn't going to have any long-term, permanent damage.

My wife is a Mexican immigrant. She does have a green card, but as it stands I'm slightly worried that the dipshit in office is going to try revoking those, meaning we might be stuck moving to a different country. I think we will be ok, but frankly I do not care about someone's completely unearned opinion about how we're going to get a leftist utopia "eventually".
Long before OpenAI killed the open web, advertising suffocated it. Advertising is the reason why it would even occur to anyone that it would be more fun to just have a robot book them a vacation than to deal with the misery that is every internet booking website.

Something like Operator may well be the death of the ad-funded web—as TFA observes, who is going to see the ads? But the reason why a tool like Operator has why sort of appeal is because advertising already killed the open web and replaced it with a lifeless corpse.
Wow, you had agencies and friends to do these things for you?
Trump admin fires members of cybersecurity review board
Well LLMs don't generate their precious blackmail material so there's no legal reason to hand anything over.
How does the current system pay for bookings like this? And where does it get the customer's contact information to provide to the tour operator? Does the customer fill it all in when signing up for the Operator service?

(That seems like a lot of trust to me!)
Indeed.

People have spent lots of words talking about the how the saturation of generative AI output will spoil future trainig, which is true, but is most immediately a problem for the AI model developers themselves.

But even with them only acting as consumers, they break almost of the economic and social bases for how the internet works.

Advertisers want their ads to be seen by humans, experts/pontificators want their words to to be seen by humans, artists want their images to be seem by humans.

These things provide the foundations of the internet as we know it.

If online tools are being used by bots who are unaffected bu ads, and texts are summarized by bots instead of read directly, and images are synthesized dynamically instead of appreciated directly, the internet itself breaks.

As the author notes, the next most likely equilibrium involves an even more commercial, more expensive, more gated, more impersonal future than we might have already seen ourselves careening towards just a few years ago.

Enjoy what you've had!
How certain are you that the source itself is trustworthy? Tripadvisor, yelp, and amazon are filled with fake/paid reviews along with the absence of negative reviews which premium members have paid to remove.
The people of Chicago only care about the streets being plowed and swept.
I feel like file browsing and pull requests actually got better? That’s what I use 99% of the time.

Projects is a mixed bag, but not terrible. I feel like Github is generally good at making things as complex as they need to be, and no more.
Tangentially, some cruise lines offer credit to customers who are also shareholders.

https://www.cruisecompete.com/shareholderbenefits.php
I think OP overestimates the number of people using Operator in the foreseeable future.

Also it's optimised for todays web for websites and forms and I suspect they continue develop it this way for two reasons:

1. This works TODAY, which is important for a business.

2. As others commented in this thread, people won't necessarily trust it blindly, seeing visually what it does exactly is a feature.
I wouldn't be blocking ads if they weren't so trash. For a long time I had YouTube whitelisted, but they kept abusing their users.
> captcha-enabled manual-labor-required

Maybe check what Turnstile is/does before commenting? Cloudflare only needs you to solve captchas periodically and then they use your browser fingerprint to classify you as a human accessing a site.

Towards the rest of your comment:

I don't understand how this is a bad thing?

As far as I know, TripAdvisor gets a commission on all sales, so do most e-commerce providers as that's how e-commerce works?

I don't understand your argument.
Sonic the Hedgehog, 1991. First level of the game. Gorgeous translucent waterfalls on the family TV of the time. Weird solid vertical bars on a high-end monitor or in a modern emulation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0weL5XDpPs&t=45s

Artists couldn't plan for a very specific amount of smear but they sure could plan for a general amount of smear.
This is deliciously ironic for me. For those who aren't aware, Armin is the original author of Flask, the Python web framework. Around the same time, there was a very similar library called Bottle. They were almkst identical in functionality, but while Flask became very popular, I always preferred to stick with Bottle because it was a single file with no dependencies, which meant it was very easy to just copy into your project.

It also made it very easy to hack around with, and I got to the point where I understood the entire thing. I did couple it with Gevent for the server and websockets, but I was able to put together some heavy-lifting projects that way.

I still feel a strong impulse to use it for small web projects. Sadly, it didn't keep up with a lot of the more modern practices that Python has introduced over the years, so it does feel a bit dated now.
I mean, we do? There’s Tailwind now, and there was a time when 50% of the web was bootstrap or wordpress.
Most smart home tech is sold because it sounds or looks cool, not because it is actually helpful. For instance, smart bulbs are dumb because they break the most obvious correct control in your house: The light switch. Smart switches are a lot better of an idea, and they recognize the reality that most of the time the best time to turn on the light is by touching the switch when entering a room.

Monitoring can be really useful and some subtle scheduled controls can be a nice touch, but people go very dumb and very overboard.
> the only reason I noticed was because 1Password didn't offer to fill in my credentials.

Nice, I always hope this will save me but I never landed on such a phishing site. How did it happen for you?

About domain-based autofills, perhaps less so now than 5-10 years ago: it always seemed weird that the whole security industry seemed to say these plugins, or the browser's built-in password store, are dangerous because there were past vulnerabilities and any website you visit can exploit it. The way I see it: vulns get fixed, I just need to not be in the 1st wave of persons they target (risk type: plane crash, very small odds but sucks to be you); receiving phishing emails or messages happens constantly and apparently it works well enough to continue doing it and evading filters constantly (risk type: car crash, can happen and they get only the creds for the website being autofilled). Would recommend to anyone who then realises something is up when the autofill doesn't work, but ideally would have more evidence to back that up
ChatGPT helps me get an initial grasp of the topic from which I can come up with more questions and research to do on my own. Usually I don't use ChatGPT as a source but rather a springboard for ideas.
And the beginning of intrusive, tracking, subtly manipulative bot industry?
Turnstile is an anti-bot measure. I’m saying users will flock to using bots because it’s easier. Which means sites that require human-at-keyboard will lose business over time by restricting the “easier” route.

Exactly how e-commerce killed off so many holdouts that insisted on in-store/catalog/phone purchases when the internet was growing.
Honestly, when I boot into CoD the menu is enough to make me want to alt-F4 instantly.

It is definitely not designed with PC in mind, but even on Xbox it feels horrible to navigate. Takes too long to get into an actual game and there is a constant “upsell” happening for premium things.

I miss the days of CoD1/2/4.
Travel agents were quite common in ye olden days before the internet.
Next-gen Ethernet standards set to move forward in 2025
If you support Page.startScreencast or even just capture screenshot we could experiment with using this as a backend for BrowserBox, when lightpanda matures. Cool stuff!

https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/
> My understanding of the MAD philosophy is not that it was born out of psychotics…

> The strategy is a form of Nash equilibrium…

Ahem. (cough cough)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash_Jr.#Mental_il...
I love Lean 4 as a general purpose programming language, but I can't use it because no current AI coding assistant can reliably work with me in Lean. I can be trying six languages at once like a chess master playing an exhibition simultaneous match, and they'll all flow in Cursor using Claude 3.5 Sonnet, or even Windsurf. Then add Lean 4 and everyone chokes.

On the other hand, Claude 3.5 Sonnet understands my iPad math drawings better than my colleagues. I am admittedly weird, but AI as an association engine of incomprehensible scope likes trippy. Trippy helps its reach. Philosophy never really worked until now when you can run it on a computer. AI really rewards recursive meta; it picks up speed like ice sailing. We're would-be shamans sitting around the fire a million years ago, imagining we can control the dance of the flames. With AI, we can.

Claude also understands, say, computational group theory or strategies for combinatorial enumeration, remarkably well. So it can assist in math research.

Formal proofs in Lean 4 may be hard to read, but the elephant in the room is how hard conventional math papers are to read. We're terrible at expressing ourselves, so reading a paper is the equivalent of reverse-engineering bad computer code to reconstruct thoughts the author failed to express. And it's embarrassing in 2025 that conventional papers can't be automatically checked.

A new genre will emerge in between: In the "Centaur" model Gary Kasparov popularized after he recovered from his chess defeat by IBM's Big Blue, we want papers to actually be very careful, battle-tested prompts for AI. They will pass as conventional papers for mathematicians still trapped in amber, but they're really just prompts for both us and AI.

The documentation for Lean 4 is aimed at humans. If it were designed to be a hybrid "Centaur" prompt doc, perhaps my tools would be better able to help me code in Lean 4.
This was the "concierge" industry which was Google for us dinosaurs.
By having AI befriend and manipulate individuals. Won't be long before we have 'realness' tests that go beyond things like our ID to ensure we're talking to other humans.
Yes, I remember the argument. In computer chess the first AI system to dominate humans, IBM's DeepBlue, was based entirely on search and an opening book, so search + domain knowledge. Then AlphaGo which dominated in Go, was based on search, an opening book and a pair of self-playing deep neural nets and was equipped with the rules of Go. AlphaZero that followed, dropped the opening book but was still based on search and self-playing neural nets and was still given the rules of Go (and chess and Shoggi, if memory serves). And MuZero that followed that, dropped everything but the search and the self-playing neural nets.

Now, Sutton argues that some of those systems at least did not rely on domain knowledge. They all did: Monte Carlo Tree Search, used for board game-playing AI agents, is nothing else but an encoding of domain knowledge - specifically, domain knowledge about the structure of two-player, complete information games. It's the same domain knowledge that was used to create the minimax-based DeepBlue software that won against Kasparov.

Neural nets have still not managed to win against human players in board games without incorporating such a strong, knowledge-dependent component, as a game-tree search.

So sutton is fudging the details. Not on purpose. He's an RL person. In RL, as in planning and other disciplines, folks tend to forget all the knowledge they put into their systems in the form of inductive biases, or auxiliary (but can't-do-without) algorithms like MCTS. He's like the proverbial fish that don't know what water is, because they swim in it.
I think that’s a fair point although I think this is a very different animal.

When it comes to money, or really any kind of action that has consequences, you want the assurance of a deterministic outcome. That is simply not possible with this technology. Maybe it will be but I’ve seen nothing to indicate that so far.
This is a bureaucracy not a circulatory system
> Just fifty years ago you could buy a home by swinging a hammer for a few years. No degree needed. So it was a thing.

Not even that far back.

I can't even match the standard of living my parents (and friends' parents) raised us in in the 90s/2000s. Exactly 0 of the people I'm thinking of were "professionals" or had any high-quality rigorous education at all.

All had condos/SFH with (gasp) a garage very close to where I still live.

Many of the wives didn't work at all, other than perhaps retail type jobs once we were old enough to be self-sufficient.
Shout out to duck.com
My default
I have. They're better than nothing but not by much.
Yes, we all know the "it's a private business they can do whatever they want" when they are suppressing right-leaning speech and then "social media needs to be regulated" when they allow right-leaning speech arguments.

"Billionaire oligarchs" only became a problem when a few of them became neutral or moderately right-wing.
+1 on turning this into a consulting offer.

Companies won't care that you just run some scripts, in fact they won't care much how you do it at all. They just want testimonials that you've done it for other companies and then price it to match the value they get.

E.g. if it's really $100k/mo and you were viewed as a reputable consultant in this area, so long as you can prove that savings, charging $100k to do your routine is possible.
I’ve actually found it to be pretty nice and relaxing. Trying to customize a prebuild system where you don’t have perfect control over all the components is stressful to me, but I may be in the minority.
I did too, and am. Unfortunately my dad bought two (another for sister) and so we had to "suffer" with black and white TV monitors. May be also why we didn't get a 64, although it may have been too early for that.

I didn't learn that assembly language programming was a thing until maybe fifteen years later, and didn't know the 20 could be programmed that way until another decade later after that. Nor that it supported a modem, etc. So feel a bit cheated.
Oh okay, thats nice i'm from the UK. Would love to connect over call as I see you are a startup owner right?
I enjoy phind.com if I want an AI to summarize a topic. Because while it will give me a nice LLM summary, it will also cite its sources.

Whatever particular aspect of the summary intrigues me is what I'll then go look at the original source for.
>in the same way e-commerce killed off catalog and phone ordering systems

Something about all this feels a bit backwards though, ultimately all these websites have some underlying API they're hitting. The "right" thing would be to just expose that API directly, and then an LLM could convert user input into a request that hits the endpoint. I think that was supposed to be the vision of Siri and such, but it never materialized because even if 3rd party integration was feasible natural understanding wasn't cracked yet.

Now that we finally have good natural language understanding, instead of executing on that vision, we're going backwards and having agents navigate websites as humans do?? If it does take off, the natural end-point is going to be that pages might have an alternate version that's simplified to make it easier for such agents to do their thing, just as web pages adapted for mobile formats.
As some one who used to play CS 1.6 for countless hours as a teenager, this is amazing and I can’t wait to use this for a fun project.
Even if there were no ads, having a robot book your trips would still be nicer as it is still work to do. We used to have travel agents do all the booking instead and merely got rid of them for cost reasons.
It will be so much refreshing if someone write LLVM alternative in D language, its compilation speed is much faster than many compiled languages.

Having said that perhaps Tilde can be a good compiler addition for D in addition to the existing GDC (GCC), LCD (LLVM) and the reference compiler DMD.

It's interesting to note that Odin is implementing its compiler alternative in Tilde maybe due to some unresolved issues and bugs in LLVM [1],[2].

[1] A review of the Odin programming language (2022):

https://graphitemaster.github.io/odin_review/

[2] Understanding the Odin Programming Language (97 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42348655
Yeah, that's why I stick with RPN calculators.
Surround is amazing. I agree that all these vim modes are nice, but nothing beats the real thing.
Maybe the World Wide Web will be will be reduced to a series of blog rings where nerds and oddballs share their peculiar interests and discuss eclectic ideas.
I’ve been pretty happy with aider. I have it running in a separate tmux window and can switch between it and nvim easily.