MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-27 23:06:38+00:00
> not working

No, my friend, what is reprehensible to me is freeloaders who believe that they can just play cat-and-mouse wars by installing software and then scrape whatever web content they want, without giving the company their due expected revenue.

This is cheating of the cheapest cheapskate order. It's dishonest, it's disingenuous to say "please send me your web content but only the stuff I like". Perhaps you feel a little guilty, and needed to take a dig at my comment tone in turn?

I can understand needing to protect/defend yourself against malice and undue surprises. The web is wild and wooly. I can understand how intrusive and troublesome ads can become. But people with adblockers? They are ruining it for everyone -- raising prices, jacking up the cost to deliver and maintain sites, and in fact, you're to blame for ads becoming more intrusive and more ubiquitous, because how else are they going to get past your damn blockers???

But if you're going to visit a site, and you want to see/read their stuff, then I feel it would be ethical to engage with them on a level playing field. Because how badly do you want their stuff? If the ads turn you off so much, then don't go to the site. I simply find 98% of the Web is not worth my time after this calculus. News sites don't really report news anyway; why should I waste my time.

All this Hacker News ethic of cheating with ad blockers and yt-dlp and posting archive.is links to "help you bypass this evil paywall" is just ripping off companies. It is not a victimless crime. It is not working and it is most definitely not funny!
by cruffle_duffle | 2025-04-27 23:06:38+00:00
Conflict of interest is exactly how I term it as well. Tech people with good product sense have to work very hard to override their engineering instincts or they’ll handicap the product.

I’m guilty of it all the time. What helps is remembering that absolutely nobody gives a shit about the code or the architecture. Nobody. It really doesn’t matter. They just want an awesome product.

(Which isn’t to say none of that matters, because it does. We are engineers and know the consequences of shitty technical decisions… it’s just that you have to pull yourself out of that mode when thinking of what needs to be built)
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-04-27 23:07:43+00:00
I don't think the parent made any of those assumptions. They also never labeled you a summer child. They just pointed out where the original suggestion leads.

Was your original question simply about your personal, individual level gains, or were you asking about a broader perspective (how it would affect all of us)? If it's the former, that's not a very interesting topic. Maybe the other poster assumed you wanted to discuss the latter?

It sounds like you took their comments personally, leading you to stop reading early. I can't blame you here, as I have done so myself before, but you might be missing some good points in the post which don't pertain to you specifically.
by d0liver | 2025-04-27 23:08:00+00:00
I need some information/advice -> I feed that into an imprecise aggregator/generator of some kind -> I apply my engineering judgement to evaluate the result and save time by reusing someone's existing work

This _is_ something that you can do with AI, but it's something that a search engine is better suited to because the search engine provides context that helps you do the evaluation, and it doesn't smash up results in weird and unpredictable ways.

Y'all think that AI is "thinking" because it's right sometimes, but it ain't thinking.

If I search for "refactor <something> to <something else>" and I get good results, that doesn't make the search engine capable of abstract thought.
by androng | 2025-04-27 23:08:20+00:00
>No one likes schleps, but hackers especially dislike them. Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to talk to users, or negotiate with other companies, or deal with other people's broken code. Maybe that's possible, but I haven't seen it.

>One of the many things we do at Y Combinator is teach hackers about the inevitability of schleps. No, you can't start a startup by just writing code. I remember going through this realization myself. There was a point in 1995 when I was still trying to convince myself I could start a company by just writing code. But I soon learned from experience that schleps are not merely inevitable, but pretty much what business consists of. A company is defined by the schleps it will undertake.

>The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is Stripe, or rather Stripe's idea. For over a decade, every hacker who'd ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was.

https://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
by vkou | 2025-04-27 23:08:26+00:00
Pretty sure the shithead that killed a family in King County two years ago, while doing 110 in a 40 zone (after already wrecking two cars) didn't give two figs about street design.

Casual speeders would benefit from better street engineering. Excessive speeders don't care. They just don't understand the concept of consequences.

A speed governor would have likely saved four lives, and that 18-year old man from a 17 year prison sentence, but sure, let's all wring our hands about why this is a worse alternative to taking away someone's license.
by jawns | 2025-04-27 23:08:45+00:00
A programmer's JOB is not to think. It's to deliver value to their employer or customers. That's why programmers get paid. Yes, thinking hard about how to deliver that value with software is important, but when it comes to a job, it's not the thought that counts; it's the results.

So if I, with AI augmentation, can deliver the same value as a colleague with 20% less thought and 80% less time, guess whose job is more secure?

I know, I know, AI tools aren't on par with skilled human programmers (yet), but a skilled human programmer who uses AI tools effectively to augment (not entirely replace) their efforts can create value faster while still maintaining quality.
by skydhash | 2025-04-27 23:08:59+00:00
4) People that likes having reliable tools which frees them from "reviewing" the output of these tools to see if the tool didn't make an error.

Using AI is like driving a car that decides to turn even if you keep the steering wheel straight. Randomly. At various degree. If you like this because some times it let you turn in a curve without you having to steer, you do you. But some people do prefer having a car turn when and only when they turn the wheel.
by anyfoo | 2025-04-27 23:09:10+00:00
Yap. But as hinted by the comments before you, if you have CPUs without FPUs, you probably want to enable userspace (e.g. glibc) soft math support anyway, since it doesn’t have the overhead of trapping the instructions and context switching into the kernel and back.

The benefit of OP’s solution in the kernel is that it works for everything out of the box, including pre-compiled binaries, and those that you can’t rebuild for whatever reason to begin with.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-27 23:10:58+00:00
I mean, I’m worried about the trajectory of the country generally. But, we need to be able to talk about the actual laws and process (this assumes we still have laws and processes).

If the country turns into a dictatorship, then it is just rule by dictatorial fiat. But in that case this whole conversation is sort of pointless because we wouldn’t have democracy and our opinions about how things should be run wouldn’t matter anymore.
by jimbob45 | 2025-04-27 23:11:08+00:00
Every single business that has a need for SWEs will obligate their SWEs to use AI coding assistants by the end of 2026, if not by the end of 2025.

If businesses mandated speed like that, then we’d all have been forced to use emacs decades ago. Businesses mandate correctness and AI doesn’t as clearly help to that end.
by azornathogron | 2025-04-27 23:11:10+00:00
> you appear to have changed the word "subtly" to "clearly". i guess intentionally?

Perhaps I misunderstood your suggestion? I'm not sure how an action that is subtle enough that the perpetrator isn't recognised as having done anything would be useful in negotiations.

There is such a concept as "work-to-rule", that is, follow the letter of your contract and instructions from management and go no further than that. Is that the kind of action you're referring to?
by mikedelago | 2025-04-27 23:11:22+00:00
ASDF - another system definition facility - is the de facto standard build system for common lisp.

https://asdf.common-lisp.dev/

In common lisp, you don't need a build system at all; you can `(load "file.lisp")` everything and it should generally just work. But of course, build systems are useful tools, so nonetheless ASDF exists and it's nice enough to the degree that nobody has built a better and more widespread common lisp build system.

Some good trivial examples are in the lisp cookbook:

https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/systems.html
by causal | 2025-04-27 23:11:41+00:00
A few articles like this have hit the front page, and something about them feels really superficial to me, and I'm trying to put my finger on why. Perhaps it's just that it's so myopically focused on day 2 and not on day n. They extrapolate from ways AI can replace humans right now, but lack any calculus which might integrate second or third order effects that such economic changes will incur, and so give the illusion that next year will be business as usual but with AI doing X and humans doing Y.
by em-bee | 2025-04-27 23:11:52+00:00
a disability or illness implies the need to be cured. but for high functioning autistic people it is not clear whether they are actually having a disability or an illness that needs curing. if something doesn't need curing then it's not an illness, nor a disability. so either we don't diagnose people who don't need curing but do need an explanation for their differences as autistic, or we accept that at least some high functioning autistic people are not disabled or ill.

i mentioned before the book "Speed of Dark" by Elisabeth Moon which explores this topic.
by accrual | 2025-04-27 23:12:13+00:00
This is super cool and I'm very glad to see such work! Does NetBSD natively support the 486DX CPUs which still have the FPU enabled?

I know OpenBSD dropped support for i486 in 6.8, making 6.7 the last that runs natively on them (FPU or not). The support was lost when moving to LLVM 9 and enabling `-march=i586 on i386`. However, old Socket 3 boards can still run the latest version of OpenBSD if one drops a Pentium Overdrive in. :)
by kristopolous | 2025-04-27 23:12:32+00:00
It's why these no-code/vibe-code solutions like bolt, lovable, and replit are great at hackathons, demos, or basic front-ends but there's a giant cliff past there.

Scroll through things like https://www.yourware.so/ which is a no-code gallery of apps.

There's this utility threshold due to a 1967 observation by Melvin Conway:

> [O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

The next step only comes from the next structure.

Lovable's multiplayer mode (https://lovable.dev/blog/lovable-2-0) combined with Agno teams (https://github.com/agno-agi/agno) might be a suitable solution if you can define the roles right. Some can be non or "semi"-human (if you can get the dynamic workflow right)
by afiori | 2025-04-27 23:13:59+00:00
On the other hand it might point to something more serious, that the level of tracking Facebook and Google use lets them loosely predict what you are going to think about.

So maybe the microphones are safe and pristine, but we should be worried and appalled the same as if they were actually listening.

I like to think about it sorta thermodynamically: consider your behaviour under the blurred lens of interests, what you buy, what you read, how you react to news, etc, in this model humana have, let's say, n bits of entropy; how many of those bits can Facebook decode?
by bitwize | 2025-04-27 23:13:59+00:00
Per E.B. White:

"To foreigners, a Yankee is an American. To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner. To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner. To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander. To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter. And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast."
by endoblast | 2025-04-27 23:14:07+00:00
>In what manner are they procured?

This really is the key: the manner reveals the motivation and morality is about motivations, which makes it understandable why slavery existed in the ancient world.

Suppose your country is invaded by a belligerent neighbour one summer and you manage to fend off the attack and capture most of the enemy soldiers.

What do you do with them afterwards:

(1) let them go, (2) kill them, (3) cut off their right thumbs and release them, (4) make them your slaves?

The obvious problem with (1) is that if you let them go they may return next year and succeed in the job of murdering you and destroying your nation or tribe. (2) and (3) are fairly cruel and barbaric.

Which leaves (4).
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-27 23:14:50+00:00
In 2018, when I purchased a Lenovo T580, what I did was browse their certification tables for models certified for Linux (they would certify some for Ubuntu and some for RHEL.)

Then I purchased one of those RHEL models as a Windows machine, and got the best of both worlds. It turned out to be quite handy as, during the long service life of that notebook system, the usefulness of Linux on my "desktop" wore extremely thin and I realized that Windows had been right for me all along, so after several years of smoothly running Fedora I was able to fall back to a very very nice, Made for Windows 10 system.
by jdiff | 2025-04-27 23:15:04+00:00
I sincerely wish that had been the case. No, I built the meat of the code. The most common benefit is helping to reducing repetitive typing, letting me skip writing 12 minor variations of `x1 = sin(r1) - cos(r2)`.

Similar to that, in this project it's been handy translating whole mathematical formulas to actual code processes. But when it comes out of that very narrow box it makes an absolute mess of things that almost always ends in a net waste of time. I roped it into that pointer capture issue earlier because it's an unfamiliar API to me, and apparently for it, too, because it hallucinated some fine wild goose chases for me.
by magicalhippo | 2025-04-27 23:15:25+00:00
We've got a desktop B2B application which we also run with per-tenant DB. This makes the setup equal between our hosted service and on-prem.

When updating, schema changes goes first and when successful the new version is allowed to be executed by users. We have small launcher app that the users run which starts the actual application to handle this.

Our DB changes are always backwards compatible in the sense that the old version should operate correctly on an updated DB.

Incompatible changes like renaming a column we handle by rolling out the new column first, then wait till the version still using the old column is retired before removing the column from the schema, or similar strategies.

This way partial updates are safe, as the old app will just continue to use the partially updated DB as normal.

We're migrating to a web app, and hope to have something similar. Plan is we'll update the tenant DB and once done we'll change the app routing so that new user sessions for that tenant goes to new app instances running the updated version.

That said, we've not got 1 million users... yet.
by d0liver | 2025-04-27 23:15:45+00:00
I think "AI as a dumb agent for speeding up code editing" is kind of a different angle and not the one I wrote the article to address.

But, if it's editing that's taking most of your time, what part of your workflow are you spending the most time in? If you're typing at 60WPM for an hour then that's over 300 lines of code in an hour without any copy and paste which is pretty solid output if it's all correct.
by DecentShoes | 2025-04-27 23:15:57+00:00
I noticed last week it had suddenly turned from the Terminator into Jimmy Fallon.

It went from "as a language model I do not have opinions or feelings" to "wow, what a GREAT question, I LOVE that you asked me this, it's so interesting!!".

We all know it doesn't have feelings. It's so phony and annoying, and isn't it a waste of compute? I assumed it was on purpose because they determined people prefer an AI that kisses their ass.
by SR2Z | 2025-04-27 23:16:05+00:00
If this is creepy to you, I honestly wonder how you leave the house and function as an adult! The world must be a very scary place for you.

You are the one complaining about the label. Either argue the point - that taking things apart to find out how they work is good or bad - or just don't reply.

You can call me whatever names you want! But if your goal is to have discussions on the Internet, having strong emotional reactions to innocuous comments is probably not a good idea :)
by ofalkaed | 2025-04-27 23:16:48+00:00
It is nice to know that Pipedreams is still going and even with Michael Barone still hosting after all these years. My earliest memory of music and one of my earliest memories is the opening sequence of Rollerball with Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, my father was watching it on cable* sometime around 1980 when I was ~3 and it had a major impact. Few years later I heard Toccata and Fugue in D Minor a second time on the drive home from a family event or something, I don't think the actual piece was played but just a few of the opening bars as a demonstration but it was enough to trigger the memory of the opening sequence of Rollerball and I became a weekly listener for the next 20 odd years.

I did not learn that it was Rollerball that I had watched the opening of all those years ago until sometime after the turn of the century when the original started getting heavy replay on late night TV because the remake was coming out soon.

*I suppose cable in this context is rather archaic these days, as is the idea of a "cable ready" TV and cable boxes. Wood grained plastic was pretty much the internet of those day.

https://www.retroist.com/p/jerrold-cable-tv-boxes
by pcwalton | 2025-04-27 23:17:54+00:00
> The OP cites these (https://github.com/devkitPro/libogc/blob/52c525a13fd1762c103... and https://github.com/atgreen/RTEMS/blob/2f200c7e642c214accb7cc...), but that's hardly a smoking gun. The function is trivial, just filling in some struct fields.

Yeah, I'm with Marcan 90% of the time, and in my view Marcan is more likely than not right that that function is derived from the RTEMS function, but in my view there's still reasonable doubt. That is to say, purely based on the evidence linked, I only agree that it's probable that the code is copied and disagree with Marcan's claim that it's "not possible" for the implementation to be non-infringing.

The fact that some of the identifiers are similar raises the biggest suspicions. "__lwp_stack_isenough" vs. "_Stack_Is_enough" is suspicious because I'd probably call that "sufficient_stack_available" or something like that. "LWP_STATES_DORMANT" vs. "STATES_DORMANT" is also suspicious because the normal OS term would be "sleeping". Still, the function logic is different enough that, even with that evidence, one could plausibly claim that only the headers or interface were copied and the implementation was clean-room, which is non-infringing per Oracle v. Google.

In US legal system terms, I'd say that a preponderance of the evidence shows that the code is a derivative work (i.e. it's more likely than not that the code was copied at some point), but that there's still reasonable doubt (i.e. a reasonable person could plausibly believe otherwise).
by jsemrau | 2025-04-27 23:18:14+00:00
I am working to better understand AI agents.

What they are. their capabilities, and their and risks and write about it on my Substack

Encyclopedia Autonomica: https://jdsemrau.substack.com

On that note, I also curate a list of resources around AI Agents that fit my narrative:

https://github.com/jsemrau/Agent-Repository
by sdesol | 2025-04-27 23:18:20+00:00
> I once again ask Claude Code to fix the bug, this time including the little bit I learned in #3. Claude Code fixes the problem in one round.

Context is king, which makes sense since LLM output is based on probability. The more context you can provide it, the more aligned the output will be. It's not like it magically learned something new. Depending on the problem, you may have to explain exactly what you want. If the problem is well understood, a sentence would most likely be suffice.
by snats | 2025-04-27 23:19:53+00:00
I am working on the https://moviemovie.club/about, it's a tiny website about film review.

It works like a run club, where you have to make a review first to see other people's reviews.

I am currently implementing watchlists, comments and a mural to make it feel a bit less lonely. Right now I like the UI but it feels to lonely.
by vkou | 2025-04-27 23:20:51+00:00
> A clear outlier case.

Everyone speeds a little when they think it's safe, but some people speed excessively.

This is about making a remedy available to judges, as an alternative to other, less effective, or more draconic (or both less effective and more draconic), forms of punishment.

And judges deal with outlier cases every single day. They job is to look at and weigh all the special cases and considerations, provided by two sides in a dispute, and prescribe one of the many remedies available to them by law.

There's nothing fundamentally immoral, tyrannical, or unfair about requiring an repeat offender who has demonstrated their inability to follow the rules of the road to have a conditional license if they want to keep driving, and there's nothing immoral or unethical about using mechanical mechanisms to enforce those conditions.

Because the alternative is a full revocation (which is catastrophic to the ability to make a living in this country), or prison (which is catastrophic for a whole lot of other reasons). There's a reason that prescribing ignition interlocks for DUIs results in a dramatically lower recividism rate than license suspensions, and a dramatically lower overall social harm than prison.

Locks keep honest people honest, and they put up enough of a hurdle for most less-than-always-honest people to not consistently act like anti-social dipshits. You can circumvent them with effort, but we still use them. They are part of a defense in depth.
by skydhash | 2025-04-27 23:21:28+00:00
LLMs are great machine learning tech. But what exactly are they learning? No ones knows, because we're just feeding it the internet (or a good part of it) and hoping something good comes out of the end. But so far, it just shows that it only learn the closeness of one unit (token, pixels block,...) to each other. But with no idea why they are close in the first place.