MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by biorach | 2025-04-16 08:10:31+00:00
> it does usually take 3 or 4 people to run a rotary milker, 1 for udder cleaning, 1-2 for attaching milkers, and 1 for post-milk sanitizing. But of course the people working there are generally the most desperate of society because they get shit and pissed on all day and stink even after bathing, so only costs around $10 an hour.

Maybe things are very different in the US but in the systems I'm familiar with (UK, Ireland, New Zealand) rotary is usually done by 1 or 2 people, the work requires care and knowledge so they are generally paid well above minimum wage and are experienced agricultural workers, they generally dont get covered in piss and shit and they don't stink
by nickf | 2025-04-16 08:10:42+00:00
This. Also, re-evaluate how many places you actually need public trust that the webPKI offers. So many times it isn't needed, and you make problems for yourself by assuming it does. I have horror stories I can't fully disclose, but if you have closed networks of millions of devices where you control both the server side and the client side, relying on the same certificate I might use on my blog is not a sane idea.
by dmos62 | 2025-04-16 08:12:31+00:00
Love it! I too have been toying with reasoning about uncertainty. I took a much less creative approach though and just ran a bunch of geometric brownian motion simulations for my personal finances [0]. My approach has some similarity to yours, though much less general. It displays the (un)certainty over time (using percentile curves), which was my main interest. Also, man, the UI, presentation, explanations: you did a great job, pretty inspiring.

[0] https://dmos62.github.io/personal-financial-growth-simulator...
by this15testingg | 2025-04-16 08:12:54+00:00
exactly; I hope ycombinator and its proponents can enjoy living in the ancap fantasy land where you have to pay to be alerted for a climate change fueled mega hurricane (also caused by this exact same reckless, unregulated greed) because NOAA was disbanded. Billionaires shouldn't exist, but neither should millionaires.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-04-16 08:13:06+00:00
> Code that you can understand and fix later, is acceptable quality per my definition.

This definition limits the number of problems you can solve this way. It basically means buildup of the technical debt - good enough for throwaway code, unacceptable for long term strategy (growth killer for scale-ups).

>Either way, LLMs are actually high up the quality spectrum

This is not what I saw, it’s certainly not great. But that may depend on stack.
by nivertech | 2025-04-16 08:13:22+00:00
This Red/Blue submarine problem seems to be a better fit for ABM simulation, rather than Monte Carlo based on Markov processes.

IRL this will be a path dependent since both sides will learn from the past actions and probabilities will be changing, i.e. the memorylessness Markov property will not hold.

In ABM the ships (agents) can move on 2D space, which makes detection easier.

Also, obviously there are lots of externalities, like weapons, food, and sailors supply, ceasfires, surrenders, politics, etc.

All of the above is easier to simulate using ABM, rather than Monte Carlo.
by orwin | 2025-04-16 08:14:28+00:00
I think it exists two different general ideas of what politic mean.

For some (including me), politics are, following the oldest definition: 'how do I and fellow humans organize ourselves to live together' this often leads to a belief that everything is politics (for me it's true, but it's a belief, not a fact).

For other, I think that when they say politics, they think of geopolitics and partisanship, which is fair, because it's how politicians and political journalists themselves define politics. For this group, hopefully, not everything is politics.

So to me, this disagreement about wether or not all is political is often semantic rather than ideologic.
by miki123211 | 2025-04-16 08:16:05+00:00
Apple made a huge mistake by keeping their commitment to "local first" in the age of AI.

The models and devices just aren't quite there yet.

Once Google gets its shit together and starts deploying (cloud--based) AI features to Android devices en masse, Apple is going to have a really big problem on their hands.

Most users say that they want privacy, but if privacy comes in the way of features or UX, they choose the latter. Successful privacy-respecting companies (Apple, Signal) usually understand this, it's why they're successful, but I think Apple definitely chose the wrong tradeoff here.
by sksrbWgbfK | 2025-04-16 08:17:48+00:00
Already done in 1789 it seems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar

And one implementation here: https://frcal.qt.ax/

> Let's ask President Trump to replace the outdated Gregorian calendar with this one. ;-)

Don't tell him it was a French idea, especially during a time where rulers were beheaded, he wouldn't like it.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-16 08:17:57+00:00
>I don’t understand the sentiment calling it a vulnerability

- You're Germany. - You join NATO for protection from Russia, an actor with a long history of military aggression[1] - Your export economy is based on manufacturing. - The energy driving your manufacturing sector is ~60% cheap gas from Russia, your military aggressive partner. - Russia invades Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 to no ones surprise - Leaders of USA and Eastern Europe warn you of Russia's influence on your economy - You ignore all this and build another gas pipeline from Russia - You are surprised Russia invades Ukraine(again) and gas sanctions cripple your manufacturing economy

MFW German leaders and HN commenters see no vulnerability in this.

Someone please stop the planet, I wish to get off, my sanity can't handle this level of stupidity anymore.

[1] https://natoassociation.ca/a-timeline-of-russian-aggression/
by anon373839 | 2025-04-16 08:19:56+00:00
It’s really a question of time and place. There are many foundational topics in life, such as politics, religion, and philosophy. But it’s not always helpful or appropriate to discuss them in a particular setting.

That said, HN already has an extremely wide range of subject matter, so I wouldn’t say politics should be out of place here. It can, though, become a divisive distraction that disrupts other conversations, so I can appreciate that some limits are needed.
by demosito666 | 2025-04-16 08:20:48+00:00
Interestingly, I believe that the reality is exactly the opposite: on the political regimes' spectrum of democratic -> authoritarian -> totalitarian only the middle one doesn't require people's participation. Both democracy and totalitarism need to be actively maintained by significant part of the population, otherwise they converge to the "natural" state of things - authoritarian order. None of the stuff you listed (fair laws, property rights, etc.) occur naturally once it has been set up at some point in past. That's why they talk about "checks and balances" all the time, and they are impossible without active participation.
by jmaker | 2025-04-16 08:21:23+00:00
I haven’t used Cursor yet. Some colleagues have and seemed happy. I’ve had GitHub Copilot on for what feels like a couple years, a few days ago VS Code was extended to provide an agentic workflow, MCP, bring-your-own-key, it interprets instructions in a codebase. But the UX and the outputs are bad in over 3/4 of cases. It’s a nuisance to me. It injects bad code even though it has the full context. Is Cursor genuinely any better?

To me it feels like people that benefit from or at least enjoy that sort of assistance and I solve vastly different problems and code very differently.

I’ve done exhausting code reviews on juniors’ and middles’ PRs but what I’ve been feeling lately is that I’m reviewing changes introduced by a very naive poster. It doesn’t even type-check. Regardless of whether it’s Claude 3.7, o1, o3-mini, or a few models from Hugging Face.

I don’t understand how people find that useful. Yesterday I literally wasted half an hour for a test suite setup a colleague of mine introduced to the codebase that wasn’t good, and I tried delegating that fix to several of the Copilot models. All of them missed the point, some even introduced security vulnerabilities in the process invalidating JWT validation, I tried “vide coding” it till it works, until I gave up in frustration and just used an ordinary search engine, which led me to the docs, in which I immediately found the right knob. I reverted all that crap and did the simple and correct thing. So my conclusion was simple: vibe coding and LLMs made the codebase unnecessarily more complicated and wasted my time. How on earth do people code whole apps with that?
by pjc50 | 2025-04-16 08:21:25+00:00
Someone down below mentioned ads, and I think that might well be the route they're going to try: charging advertisers to influence the output of the AI.

As for whether it will work, I don't know how they're possibly going to get the "seed community" which will encourage others to join up. Maybe they're hoping that all the people making slop posts on other social networks want to cut out the middleman and have communities of people who actually enjoy that. As always, the sfw/nsfw censorship line will be an important definer, and I can't imagine them choosing NSFW.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-04-16 08:23:27+00:00
I've never had any problems with highly competent assholes. However, I cannot see any reason to consider a business man, let alone any "entrepreneur", a genius. What needs to stop is calling someone with no intellectual and cultural achievements a genius. Someone who doesn't have any intellectual achievements and hasn't contributed substantially to human culture like art, literature, cinema, theater, and so forth, is by definition not a genius. Whether they are assholes or not is not even relevant.

To be fair, this topic might be a bit of strawman anyway. I've never heard anyone unironically call a business person a genius.
by ptsneves | 2025-04-16 08:23:53+00:00
There is a veritassium YouTube video describing the story of the electron microscope. At some point somebody even proved mathematically that any improvement was a dead end. Then a group of scientists whose research was mostly shunned, and almost at the point of losing their funding, found a way around the limitations and improved the electron microscope to measure atomic level fields, with great impact on science including materials.

PS: veritassium is just amazing. Yesterday I learned that conservation of energy is a local phenomenon and a geometric consequence, not a law of the universe at all. I am 36 with an engineering background and conservation laws were close to sacred laws of the universe. It turns out, not really and it has to do with the universe expanding. Veritassium just drops it like that, with a nice story.
by ur-whale | 2025-04-16 08:24:00+00:00
> Those who are truly passionate about the law will only be able to pursue it as a barely-living-wage hobby while being advised to “not give up the night job” — their main, stable source of income — as a cabaret singer. They might be a journalist or a programmer in their twenties for fun before economics forces them to settle down and get a real, stable job: starting a rock band.

Controversial stance probably, but this very much sounds like a world I'd love to live in.
by Tainnor | 2025-04-16 08:24:07+00:00
> Unreliable tools have a good deal of utility.

This is generally true when you can quantify the unreliability. E.g. random prime number tests with a specific error rate can be combined so that the error rates multiply and become negligible.

I'm not aware that we can quantify the uncertainty coming out of LLM tools reliably.
by Lio | 2025-04-16 08:24:12+00:00
That'll be great for the world's natural outsiders. Those that hate pop music and dislike even taylored ads because of the creepy feeling of influence. Or who don't follow any politicians because they're all out to hoodwink you.

Oh, a subset will be at risk of being artificially satisfied but your hardcore grouch will always have a special "yeah, yeah, fuck off bot" attitude.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-04-16 08:24:26+00:00
I was lucky enough to start my programming journey coding in Assembler on the much, much simpler micro computers we had in my youth. I would not even vaguely know where to start with Assembler on a modern machine. We had three registers and a single contiguous block of addressable memory ffs. Likewise, the things I was taught about computer architecture and the fetch-execute cycle back in the 80's are utterly irrelevant now.

I think if you tried to start people off on the kinds of things we started off on in the 80's, you'd never get past the first lesson. It's all so much more complex that any student would (rightly!) give up before getting anywhere.
by cladopa | 2025-04-16 08:24:41+00:00
As someone who has read thousands of books in his life, and always asks about the books on the shelves on the houses I visit, I would say that there is a so much people that do not read books with intrinsic and genuine interest.

They buy books as a status, intellectual symbol, but they couldn't care less about its content. It's an ornament, like a flowers' vase.

I like audiobooks too. It can only be cheating if you believe there is a proper way to experience a book. I enjoy specially some books narrated by their authors, because it adds the nuances of what they consider important, emphasis and information that is lost on paper.
by dsign | 2025-04-16 08:26:08+00:00
> So far the only products spawning from these tools are tiktok/general internet spam companies.

Help me here. If tiktok becomes filled with these, will it mean that watching tiktok "curated" algorithmic results will be about digesting AI content? Like, going to a restaurant to be served rubber balloons full of air that then people will do their best to swallow whole?[^1]. Could this be it? The demise of the algorithm? Or will people just swallow rubber balloons filled with air?

[^1]: Do please use this sentence as a prompt :-)
by Modified3019 | 2025-04-16 08:26:11+00:00
I found some fragmented search scraps earlier today which I saved.

The thread is possibly: https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=170324391 (now defunct)

The link title was "Pitbull vs Sun, Pitbull wins because.... - Bodybuilding.com Forums"

The link text preview was "it just has to attack in the night time when the Sun is sleeping. amirite or is there a way for the Sun to win?"

Unfortunately this is not in archive.org or archive.is
by majoe | 2025-04-16 08:26:29+00:00
I see, where you're coming from, but in that particular case, the "intuitive" explanation (walk on a graph) is far less intuitive for me than the proper explanation, that a Markov process is memoryless. That said, I used MCMC in the past to do physics simulation, where the Markov property also applies to the underlying physical process. So maybe it's just me.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-04-16 08:26:49+00:00
The only problem I have with this sentiment is that in technical contexts, being direct and clear is very important and that can easily be mistaken for being an asshole.

Let's say someone made a critical error in their code. Now, it would be nicer and kinder to say "Perhaps you could have done that better, it might have harmful impact on users" and you can also tell the person "This is really bad, you messed up, this type of a mistake is unacceptable and horrific" which uses lots of sharp words and feels abusive, so which is better? It makes the person feel bad for sure with the second option, but isn't that the best way to communicate just how bad what they've done is?

It reminds of how Linux Trovalds tears into people sometimes, I disagree with him most of the time (takes it too far) but isn't the sentiment correct? In other words, you need people to feel very bad about what they've done, not as an attack on their personality, character or even competence but to help them understand the severity of the situation.

Personally, I have struggled with this working in the context of infosec, some mistakes are putting people's livelihoods and even their persons in way of harm. My conclusion so far is to draw a line, be direct but never say anything to anyone that you wouldn't want said to you if the situation was reversed.

I want people I work with and talk to (including here on HN) to communicate clearly and directly with me (and vice versa), without sugarcoating things when it comes to technical discussions and we shouldn't conflate directness and bluntness with being an asshole, just as much as genius (what is that anyways and who cares?) with asshole.
by braza | 2025-04-16 08:27:16+00:00
I think the initiative comes from some good principles, but I do not buy it because it not about fostering a dynamic European market and creating conditions for small and medium-sized companies to be able to raise and compete, but it sounds more like, _Hey, let's use the services from our own European cartel companies and help cement them, because "america bad"._

And another fundamental problem:

> Spotify is based in Sweden.[1]

> (Spotify) Paid out a record $10 billion in royalties to the music industry in 2024 pg. 4 [2]

> Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and Music and Entertainment Rights Licensing Independent Network (“Merlin”), makes up the majority of music consumed on our Service. pg. 15 [3]

At the end, the money will directly flow to the major labels and american artists/producers.

[1] - https://europeanalternatives.online/apple-music-european-alt....

[2] - https://s29.q4cdn.com/175625835/files/doc_financials/2024/q4....

[3] - https://s29.q4cdn.com/175625835/files/doc_financials/2024/q4...
by kashunstva | 2025-04-16 08:27:43+00:00
> …shocking…

Having read Ms. Wynn-Williams’ book, her testimony was not surprising. But even on first hearing, it wasn’t shocking. The amorality and lawlessness of the extremely wealthy is rarely, if ever shocking.

It’s rather clear that Zuckerberg lied to Congress; but whether this, or actions at the SEC, or the current FTC v. Meta Platforms Inc. case result in damage to him or the company seems to hinge on the support of the current administration, as Zuckerberg has mused aloud. His growing obsequiousness toward the U.S. president may in the end save him; but counting on anything, against the arbitrariness of that one seems iffy.
by strogonoff | 2025-04-16 08:28:07+00:00
First, “no politics” is not a political statement to me, more of an implicitly adopted political position.

Personally, if I have a personal political position and my colleague has an opposite one, I don’t see why we can’t talk about it. If you have a workplace rule about no politics during working hours, you better have this rule for all non-work discussions at work, or I personally would feel uncomfortable.

— If politics talk happens at work too much and affects productivity, then it is a problem, but then it is a problem with any non-work topic.

— If it causes heated debate, ruins morale, and makes people dislike each other, then it is a problem, but then it is a problem with any topic that causes heated debate. For some people it’s golf, for some philosophy, for some music. How many topics should be banned?
by j0_0lian | 2025-04-16 08:29:19+00:00
I spent some time trying to “reverse engineer” the technical stack behind ChatGPT’s Updated Memory:

ChatGPT’s memory uses editable user facts, auto-generated topic summaries, and a retrieval mechanism that can rehydrate past context based on triggers but lacks any transparency and metadata.

Happy if someone with more technical knowledge took a look at the plausibility of what I found.
by jmaker | 2025-04-16 08:30:19+00:00
Even the iOS and macOS typing correction engine has been getting worse for me over the past few OS updates. I’m now typing this on iOS, and it’s really annoying how it injects completely unrelated words, replaces minor typos with completely irrelevant words. Same in Safari on macOS. The previous release felt better than now, but still worse than a couple years ago.
by ryao | 2025-04-16 08:30:28+00:00
Thanks for the explanations.

As for the last one, I would probably bzero() that structure, as it is faster than setting just 1 field to zero in a loop, which presumably is what you would do until you have some need to “allocate” a value. That would avoid the problem entirely.

I know bzero() was removed from POSIX, but “bzero()” is nicer to write than “memset() it to zero”.
by benatkin | 2025-04-16 08:31:24+00:00
I had argued for a less pedantic take, but I guess by replying to you I'm being pedantic. It seems to me that my example not only is bikeshedding by the definitions I find but also that to me it fits your definition of it. It's easier to talk about what framework you think is best than it is to talk meaningfully about process, which is more relevant place to look to prevent serious bugs, assuming both frameworks are capable. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding
by bitstreamshaman | 2025-04-16 08:31:25+00:00
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Demo Plan: In Q2 2025 (May), we’ll launch a sandbox where you can test prompts and export outputs, no signup required. An open-source CLI will follow for local workflows. What Makes Us Different: End-to-End Automation: Unlike others, Infraware delivers code, diagrams, docs, from one prompt. Non-Expert Friendly: No need to know Terraform or cloud jargon—ideal for startups and agencies. Current Stage & Limitations: We’re pre-launch, with a working prototype but no public demo yet. Alpha testing focused on AWS and HCL support is in progress. Feedback We Need: Does our vision resonate with your DevOps pain points? What cloud services or integrations matter most to you? Any concerns about using AI for infrastructure code? Waitlist & Next Steps: Join our waitlist at infraware.dev to get early access to the demo. We’ll share updates on our progress and invite beta testers. No previous HN threads exist for Infraware—this is our first community post. Contact: I’m here to discuss! Email me at nick@infraware.dev or comment below. Thanks for your time, and we’re excited to build something the HN community finds valuable.