MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitwize | 2025-04-06 19:16:10+00:00
My father is a retired mechanical engineer. Back in the early 1980s he was working on some engine designs and found that the programmable calculators he was using just weren't up to the task of grinding out the mechanical advantage curves he was attempting to characterize. So first he got a Tandy Pocket Computer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_Pocket_Computer) and later a full-fat TRS-80 (the Model 16, the most expensive and powerful model they sold at the time, and part of the Model II line which was incompatible with the TRS-80s most people are familiar with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_II), took a couple of college courses on programming, and wrote an engine simulator in BASIC replete with a graphical display that animated the position of the piston and crankshaft and plotted the curve on-screen.

I mean, the man is a stone-cold genius. Anything he needed to know how to do, he would bro down and learn it, often in a very short time. Even though I didn't understand half of what he was trying to do back then, it was a wonder to young me, especially since it came about by merely feeding instructions into the machine.

Eventually, for my fifth birthday, he went down to Crazy Eddie's and got me a Commodore VIC-20, so I would keep my grubby mitts off his expensive professional equipment. I then began writing my own BASIC programs, to make the PETSCII birds from the tutorial manual fly according to my own plan and so forth. The love of computing had been planted. And here I am. That five-year-old kid, awestruck by having an electronic genie I can type my wishes to and see them granted, is still in there somewhere. The grind of Scrum, meetings, deadlines, legacy code, and the looming spectre of "vibe coding" turning my work and passion into a triviality haven't snuffed the flame yet.
by shw1n | 2025-04-06 19:16:18+00:00
The idea here is that some percentage of "the left" and "right"'s views are arbitrary, so the chances of someone independently coming up with a perfectly matching set to either side is low

Agreed re: the center can have an ideology, that's the bottom circle in the graph

I fully agree that any group can behave tribally, even the rationalists (which I'm not part of).

Also not advocating ignoring politics, I'm advocating for consciously acknowledging whether one wants to discover truth or remain in their bubble, and some methods for doing the former if desired.

B/c while inaction can harm, plenty of "actions" without understanding have led to horrible outcomes (e.g. Salem witch trials). This is what truth-seeking can avoid.
by palata | 2025-04-06 19:16:27+00:00
To think that the only visible impact will be in 210 years just shows how uninformed you are.

From the scientific models we have, we're pretty much screwed. From the measurements we make and compare to the models, it appears like the models are optimistic.

What's sad is that people like you now say "it's not as bad as they say" and 20 years from now you'll be the first ones to say "we didn't know, why didn't they tell us?".
by kerkeslager | 2025-04-06 19:16:49+00:00
> This begs the question: how could you reliably distinguish advertising from other forms of free speech?

That's a great question, but let's not lose sight of the fact that failing to legislate on this is 0% reliable. If we even are able to identify and ban 25% of advertising, that level of reliability is a massive improvement over doing nothing. Don't fall for the perfect solution fallacy.

The reality is that some really basic, careful definitions of advertising would identify a huge percentage of advertising, without catching any cases that aren't advertising.

As a starting point, if a corporation pays a person or corporation to display their corporation's name, product, or logo on a physical property, broadcast, or publication when they aren't directly selling your product, that's advertising. Maybe you can think of some cases where that catches some stuff it shouldn't, and I'm open to revising it.

> What about giving out free samples? Is that advertising, and thus should be illegal?

> What about putting a sign up on your business that says the business name? Is that advertising?

I think this sort of handwringing is pretty silly. I don't care about either of those--I do care about "free samples" in the sense of auto-renewing free trials, but that's because the intent is to trick people into forgetting to cancel, not because it's advertising.

Draw the line very conservatively, making a very clear definition of advertising that we can agree on illegal, and go from there as we see the effects (i.e. what loopholes people start to use). Regulation is an iterative process--start small and build.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-06 19:16:55+00:00
Indeed. I'm European and I also see the EU's "banning of disinformation" as a form of censorship in gift wrapping. What about the government disinformation during covid? Did they punish anyone for that?

Vague and ambiguous laws like these against disinformation enable selective enforcement for the governments to make sure their PoVs go though the media and everything they deem inappropriate or a threat to their authority gets shut down.

Those in power in Brussels are afraid of communication channels they can't control as people become more and more dissatisfied and irate with their leaders, policies and QoL reductions, so they push laws like these plus the ones trying to backdoor encrypted communications in order to gain control over the narrative, monitor and crush any potential uprisings before they even occur.
by RajT88 | 2025-04-06 19:16:57+00:00
What jumps out at me is that it doesn't touch OneDrive.

You could argue two potential reasons for this:

1. This script removes only AppX packages. OneDrive is an *.msi package

2. OneDrive is something they reinstall if you remove it, so they really are cramming it down your throat. They wouldn't include it in any debloat script.
by marcusb | 2025-04-06 19:17:32+00:00
There is not any part of the city where I live where you can readily observe people injecting IV drugs in broad daylight in full view of the police, or who are so high they don’t notice, or don’t care, they are exposing themselves near a daycare[0]. Those things are not normal and are not widely occurring features of most American cities, even the “areas you don’t go to.” In fact, in all my travels, I’ve seen those things in one American city: San Francisco.

0 - to head off the inevitable gaslighting that always comes up when discussing this, these are things I saw live, in person, with my own eyes.
by CRConrad | 2025-04-06 19:18:01+00:00
> > > > Users are expected to either obtain binaries from their distro, or compile them from source.

> > > This purist vision you have of Linux doesn't exist.

> > It does on my computer, and I suspect on a lot of Linux users' computers.

> Linux users? That is, people who use a device that runs Linux? Like Android?

I'm fairly sure the overwhelming majority of Android users only use binaries from "their distro", i.e. from the Play Store.

> The software repository+compile from source paradigm isn't "Linux", it's not even "desktop Linux".

Hey, you were the first to drag Android into this. By your own measure, the overwhelming majority of "Linux" users follow exactly "the software repository+compile from source paradigm" (albeit the "+compile from source" term equals zero in their equation).
by bredren | 2025-04-06 19:18:11+00:00
One thing I’ve seen is large enterprises extracting money from consumers by putting administrative burden on them.

For example, you can see this in health insurance reimbursements and wireless carriers plan changes. (ie, Verizon’s shift from Do More, etc to what they have now)

Companies basically set up circumstances where consumers lose small amounts of money on a recurring basis or sporadically enough that the people will just pay the money rather than a maze of calls, website navigation and time suck to recover funds due to them or that shouldn’t have been taken in the first place.

I’m hopeful well commoditized AI will give consumers a fighting chance at this and other types of disenfranchisement that seems to be increasingly normalized by companies that have consultants that do nothing but optimize for their own financial position.
by palata | 2025-04-06 19:18:16+00:00
To be fair, in 80 years we'll probably be at 4C global warming, where half of the Earth (around the equator) will be unlivable.

I mean it's gradual up to a point, but when you can't survive anymore, it's not like you can ignore it.

> and the coping strategies will develop alongside.

Such as "drill baby, drill!" and tariffs :-).
by pjmlp | 2025-04-06 19:18:35+00:00
There is hardly any evolution from pointer to malloc, C is one of the few systems languages, including those that predated it, where one needs math to allocate heap memory.

I do agree that the evolution is most likely a language that combines automatic resource management with affine/linear/effects/dependent/proofs.

Or AIs improve to the point to render all existing programming languages a thing from the past, replaced by regular natural languages and regular math.
by throw310822 | 2025-04-06 19:19:06+00:00
I hope it's true. Even if LLMs development stopped now, we would still keep finding new uses for them at least for the next ten years. The technology is evolving way faster than we can meaningfully absorb it and I am genuinely frightened by the consequences. So I hope we're hitting some point of diminishing returns, although I don't believe it a bit.
by spzb | 2025-04-06 19:19:25+00:00
Yep. And all on the same IP addresses with the same registrars and DNS servers. Amazing coincidence. (Edit: it's Netlify)

5 stars on Trustpilot. Yeah? Your site doesn’t exist on Trustpilot.

That makes me think this is a trustworthy product and not at all shady.
by maccard | 2025-04-06 19:19:43+00:00
> where’s the business model?

For who? Nvidia sell GPUs, OpenAI and co sell proprietary models and API access, and the startups resell GPT and Claude with custom prompts. Each one is hoping that the layer above has a breakthrough that makes their current spend viable.

If they do, then you don’t want to be left behind, because _everything_ changes. It probably won’t, but it might.

That’s the business model
by SequoiaHope | 2025-04-06 19:19:57+00:00
Yeah and the military is a third of our budget and no one in politics ever wants to cut that. There’s so much excess spending there we could cut $300 billion a year from it and still be the world’s bully. China builds infrastructure in other countries as a carrot to insinuate themselves in global affairs but we just build military bases as a stick. Seems like the former is a little bit better even if both approaches have issues.
by immibis | 2025-04-06 19:20:31+00:00
And then the breaking point becomes the new normal, and the new breaking point becomes farther away.

Microsoft keeps deleting ways to install Windows without signing up for a Microsoft account.

Twice in my life I've created a Microsoft account to do something that required a Microsoft account, and then a few days later they demanded my phone number. Because they know perfectly well that if you demand a phone number during signup, it deters more people from signing up, but if you demand it after they've already started using their account, they're less likely to be willing to throw away the account. I was, though.

For some reason they haven't yet done that with my Minecraft-migrated account. Or did they? Maybe I entered my phone number there and forgot I did so.
by h2zizzle | 2025-04-06 19:21:00+00:00
Lower skill doesn't necessarily need to be low pay. It's a policy decision. Ultimately, you're determining the unit value of labor vis a vis other labor. Maybe trash people and burger-flippers working late nights and early mornings SHOULD earn more than paper-pushers - even if the latter are really really good at [technical skill]. We've certainly made that choice wrt MBAs vs PhDs.
by fsndz | 2025-04-06 19:21:36+00:00
So why are people so excited about MCP, and so suddenly? I think you know the answer by now: hype. Mostly hype, with a bit of the classic fascination among software engineers for architecture. You just say Model Context Protocol, server, client, and software engineers get excited because it’s a new approach — it sounds fancy, it sounds serious. https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-mcp-is-mostly-bullshit
by firoso | 2025-04-06 19:21:41+00:00
I have ADHD. I doubled my productivity going remote and working from a well curated home office.

Charging station for my phone just inside the room, good sitting/standing desk and chair, good laptop, with a dock, 3 displays. A desktop with a vertical monitor I use for teams chat, technical documents, and work management only. Second laptop used for secure prod access tucked under a monitor riser until needed. Whiteboard. Couch with a small station for engineering journaling. I also take video calls from the couch often. Treadmill and elliptical, TV for watching YouTube tech videos while I'm taking a fitness break, bookshelves for my collected engineering journals and useful books. Roughly 275 sqft. Virtual body doubling helps sometimes but is hardly needed.
by TaurenHunter | 2025-04-06 19:21:45+00:00
> The problem in general is that we are all, the US Congress included, guessing what the goal is.

I was guessing too until I took the time to investigate and found there is a method to the madness.

Now, did you really expect negotiation with China? Do you think that was the intention? You gotta think critically rather than just lazily or emotionally assume everything was a failure.
by usaar333 | 2025-04-06 19:22:35+00:00
Ya, I find this hard to imagine aging well. Gemini 2.5 solved (at least much better than) multiple real world systems questions I've had in the past that other models could not. Its visual reasoning also jumped significantly on charts (e.g. planning around train schedules)

Even Sonnet 3.7 was able to do refactoring work on my codebase sonnet 3.6 could not.

Really not seeing the "LLMs not improving" story
by tikhonj | 2025-04-06 19:22:38+00:00
Last time I tried to use the official Apache Parquet Java library, parsing "normal" Parquet files depended on parquet-avro because the library used Avro's GenericRecord class to represent rows from Parquet files with arbitrary schemas. So this problem would presumably affect any kind of Parquet parsing, even if there is absolutely no Avro actually involved.

(Yes, this doesn't make sense; the official Parquet Java library had some of the worst code design I've had the misfortune to depend on.)
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-06 19:23:29+00:00
>I'd love to hear your better idea to deal with disinformation.

There is no silver bullet solution since we're not in an utopia. On the one hand all private media is controlled by biased oligarchs each with their own interests. On the other hand, governments in power want to control the narrative towards their own interests hence why in many EU countries we have state media. This is how it's always been and how it's always gonna be, a constant tug of war between interest groups, but I don't want any one side to have complete control of the media as that would be even worse.

>The free marketplace of ideas has obviously not worked.

Why do you think it hasn't worked? To me it seems like it's working, that's why those in power fear it and want to control it all for themselves.

My parents lived under communism. The speech control the EU is pushing resembles very well what communism had but with a better PR spin on it. Communism got defeated in part by total freedom of speech winning in the free market place of ideas versus government controlled speech. The Arab Spring revolutions could not have happened without the free media circulating on the internet. So to see the EU trying to lock down on free speech the same way totalitarian regime did, is incredibly suspicious to me like their afraid of their own people revolting against them.

I don't want unelected elites in Brussels deciding for me what content and opinions I should be allowed to view. If you want to win in the free marketplace of ideas, then come up with arguments for the people on why you consider each piece of information to be misinformation and debate it in public, not just ban it outright.
by jchw | 2025-04-06 19:23:34+00:00
I think overall quality with Gemini 2.5 is not much better than Gemini 2 in my experience. Gemini 2 was already really good, but just like Claude 3.7, Gemini 2.5 goes some steps forward and some steps backwards. It sometimes generates some really verbose code even when you tell it to be succinct. I am pretty confident that if you evaluate 2.5 for a bit longer you'll come to the same conclusion eventually.
by polygamous_bat | 2025-04-06 19:24:33+00:00
> As such, while 5 > 0, and that's a problem, what we don't know (and perhaps can't know), is how that adjusts for population size.

This puts the burden on companies which may hesitate to put their “self driving” methods out there because it has trouble with detecting motorcyclists. There is a solid possibility that self driving isn’t being rolled out by others because they have higher regard for human life than Tesla and its exec.
by p_ing | 2025-04-06 19:25:15+00:00
> Even in the default out-of-the-box configuration, Apple isn't exercising editorial control over what apps you can run

Perhaps not in the strictest sense, but Apple continues to ramp up the editorial friction for the end user to run un-notarized applications.

I feel/felt <macOS 15 that right-click Open was an OK approach, but as we know that's gone. It's xattr or Settings.app. More egregious is the monthly reminder that an application is doing something that you want it to do.

A level between "disable all security" and what macOS 15 introduces would be appreciated.
by ipsum2 | 2025-04-06 19:26:28+00:00
Had to skip to basically the end to find out the reason:

tl;dr:

> On March 25, tech staffers and contractors at the VA noticed an unfamiliar name trying to push changes that could impact VA.gov code. It was Sahil Lavingia, a newcomer to the agency listed in the VA’s internal directory as an adviser to the chief of staff, Christopher Syrek.

> Who’s Sahil Lavingia, you might ask? Why, the founder and CEO of Gumroad! It’s not even the central point of the piece, but the fact is, if you’re supporting Gumroad—a tool that, notably, has survived as long as it did because of a high-profile crowdfunding campaign—you’re allowing its CEO the financial freedom to work in the Department of Veterans Affairs, at the behest of DOGE, for free.
by immibis | 2025-04-06 19:26:44+00:00
You can read the text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/oj/eng

If English isn't your native language, that's okay - these are translated into every European language and you can select a translation here.

Article 25, clause 1:

> Providers of online platforms shall not design, organise or operate their online interfaces in a way that deceives or manipulates the recipients of their service or in a way that otherwise materially distorts or impairs the ability of the recipients of their service to make free and informed decisions.

These EU regulations tend to specify policies, not mechanisms to achieve them. Mechanisms to enforce the policy, however, are specified.

They are written like that precisely so you won't try to weasel your way around a requirement. If they had said "verified badges may not be sold" then you would try to say "this isn't a verified badge but a they-paid-us badge." By wording it vaguely, it cannot be weaseled.

And indeed, it is a they-paid-us badge... but it's designed to look identical to the verified badge, on purpose, because Elon knew verified badges were something people wanted, and people wanted them because they were a status symbol, and they were a status symbol because they indicated your account was in some sense more trustworthy than average. And Elon knew that.

I don't know whether people still see the badges that way today. Probably not, because all the sane people deleted their accounts and don't care. But it was the case, when the badges were introduced, that they were designed to trick people who didn't know they were now pay badges. You might think everyone knew that, but that's just because everyone in your bubble knew that because they're very online people. Would your grandmother know it?
by shw1n | 2025-04-06 19:27:07+00:00
Ironically this seems another perfect example of the tribalism the article is about, saying:

- the right-leaning folks were just propagandized - the left-leaning folks were justified

- that questioning this at all is indirectly responsible for breaking every government on earth

- assumed politics must not affect me, or that I must get defensive, run away, or not ask questions

The opposition always being assumed ignorant and the tribe always being justified is a perfect example of tribalism
by polygamous_bat | 2025-04-06 19:27:20+00:00
> To take a hypothetical extreme: If all cars but one on the road were Teslas, it would not be meaningful to point out that there have been far more fatalities with Teslas.

However, in such a case, “base rate fallacy” would prevent you from blaming Tesla even if it had a 98% fatality rate. How do you square that? What happens if other companies aren’t putting self driving cars out yet because they aren’t happy with the current rate of accidents, but Tesla just doesn’t care?
by tacticalturtle | 2025-04-06 19:27:33+00:00
Am I misremembering history?

> Blue checkmarks "used to mean trustworthy sources of information," Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said

I thought the blue check mark always indicated that account name on Twitter matched the person behind the account. That’s it. They eventually expanded that to include non-famous people.

Kyrie Irving (an NBA player known for conspiracies like flat earthism) had a blue check - no one would ever mistake him for a trustworthy source of information.
by throw0101d | 2025-04-06 19:27:46+00:00
> "Over time, they are a tax on goods.

To pile on this point, tariffs are a tax and a subsidy:

> Executives from U.S. steel companies were enthusiastic backers of the 2018 tariffs and have urged Trump to deploy them again in his second term. They have called for the elimination of tariff exemptions and duty-free import quotas, saying those carve-outs allow unfairly low-price steel to enter the U.S. and undermine the steel market.

[…]

> Higher prices for imported steel are often followed by domestic suppliers raising their own prices, which then get passed through supply chains, manufacturing executives said. For consumers already reeling from rising retail prices and inflation, pricier steel and aluminum could further lift costs for durable goods like appliances and automobiles, as well as consumer products with aluminum packaging, such as canned beverages.

> “The issue with tariffs is everybody raises their prices, even the domestics,” said Ralph Hardt, owner of Belleville International, a Pennsylvania-based manufacturer of valves and components used in the energy and defense industries. Steel and aluminum are Belleville’s largest expenses.

* https://archive.is/https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/trump-t...

So tariffs are (regressive) taxes in the sense that consumers are paying higher prices (with the money going to the government). But they are subsidies in that domestic companies don't have as much pressure on prices and can get more money.

So if you want to help a particular industry might as well just go with subsidies directly instead of the taxation add-on as well.