MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by graemep | 2025-04-06 12:08:21+00:00
You seem to be implying that all claims of regulatory capture, or even simple incompetence or bias, are all the result of Russian propaganda seems like a pretty bold claim to me.

I am sure there are people who want to sow distrust for their own ends, but there are also good reasons for distrust.

> what I'm saying is that this sort of opinion from someone who doesn't seem to fully understand the subject is a prime example of something that could be amplified for propaganda and contribute to institutional demise.

Part of the solution is transparency and full information.

> “It’s not in our interest to share product with public or private agencies,”

Is not an attitude that inspires confidence.
by simne | 2025-04-06 12:09:09+00:00
I live in Ukraine, and we still suffer from soviet limitations on advertisement and entrepreneurs. Every time when govt and parliament need to make some urgent reform, nobody could predict, what will really happen - as they could just raise taxes, or deform some industry with some unreal regulations, and only in few cases implement some adequate, for example synchronize with EU regulations.

For example, for banks appear problem, people avoid to pay credits, so need some enforcement - powers approved confiscation of property to pay credit, but with exceptions of unprotected people, so bank cannot confiscate from pensioners, when child registered in property, and few others, so literally huge percent of citizens now protected from banks, and this new law is step back, not progress.
by bearjaws | 2025-04-06 12:09:12+00:00
I agree, I've met a few engineers in my career who believe working in more than one language is a bad thing.

Personally, I don't understand how people get by in web without knowing SQL and JS + some other language.

The idea that you don't understand the flaws that SQL can introduce into a system, and have little ability to debug them is baffling. How can you actually be productive when you only control a tiny fraction of your application.
by ZeroTalent | 2025-04-06 12:09:40+00:00
That's the point of hedge funds.

They can't all make profit in a bear market. But some will. All are still making profits on fees.

Literally, please ask ChatGPT this: "please explain to my friend why very rich people use several hedge funds that are underperforming SPY"

And, of course, all hedge funds would like to be profitable all the time, but that's not a reason why people invest in them.

Some people invest in hedge funds that only buy whiskey, tequila, and cigars.
by vdupras | 2025-04-06 12:09:56+00:00
It's not that all of this is hard. Staying afloat is actually easy by mimicking whatever you see around. I guess it's akin to blissfully selling CDOs all around, right before the 2008 market crash.

It's just that it's impossible to master the tools. We lie to ourselves thinking that we do, but when shit hits the fan, we're as powerless as anyone in the madhouse to figure out what is actually going on. We're all emperors with no clothes.

Individually we know we're naked, but somehow, we think that someone out there isn't. Someone knows what they're doing. No they don't.

Throwing LLMs into the mix will only supercharge the madness.

This whole thing is a collective suicide pact.
by like_any_other | 2025-04-06 12:10:09+00:00
Coffeehouses and pubs weren't remotely as consolidated as social or traditional media, nor did they have as much power to regulate the speech of its patrons - not everything the patrons said was overheard or written down by the owner.

The nature of public discourse contained in newspapers and magazines hasn't changed. What has changed is that more and more of person-to-person communication is mediated.

> everyone has a set of ideas that they're not willing to listen to.

Yes. But are they choosing what they will listen to, or are they forced by law to have that choice made for them by a government-approved corporation?
by grandempire | 2025-04-06 12:10:54+00:00
> by the time you finish your 3 months course the tech is considered obsolete.

This is a meme that’s just not true. Nobody outside of the most junior applicant or most transient contractor is paid for the skills they learned this year.

The most important skills last forever. Getting a good CS or EE degree is still the best way to get started.
by NackerHughes | 2025-04-06 12:11:01+00:00
A screen is not a piece of paper. Computers adopted white backgrounds with black text, when the technology became available, to imitate the paper and documents that people were most familiar with. But looking at a white screen for prolonged periods of time is like staring directly at a light bulb.

White text on a black background in print is indeed harder to read due to the issue of ink bleeding, but on a computer screen it is so much easier on the eyes.
by stefanos82 | 2025-04-06 12:11:08+00:00
I think it's an unfair comparison here.

A developer, programmer, software engineer, call this category of work however you like, it uses the brain at such relentless limits, implicitly or explicitly depending on the problem a person it's currently working on, it takes an incredible amount of effort to relax your mind at the end of the day.

I remember working on a very difficult project for a customer and I would sleep for 4-5 hours per day until I deliver it, and by the end of the project I was so exhausted that I had to take a whole week to cool down my brain and relax my body.

It took me a whole month to fully recover!

I have worked as a construction worker with my father and I know how to grow my own fruits and veggies; I know the struggles with those things...but trust me, you cannot compare the two by any means!

Using your body exclusively it can be tiring indeed, but at the end of the day, you will have a nice shower, eat and rest well, and the next day you will be good to go; whereas with using your mind exclusively can be so dangerous in so many ways!

At least, that's my case.
by filoleg | 2025-04-06 12:11:33+00:00
Agreed. We don’t even need to reach for the apples to oranges comparisons with manual labor jobs, just gotta look at anyone working another highly paid white collar job.

Compare working in big law to big tech, and it will be plain as day. And I am not even getting into the baseline requirements to get there (undergrad from a good school with great GPA, LSAT, a top law school that is gonna cost you a pretty penny, hustling for internships, BAR, etc.), which SWE as a career has pretty much none of. The overall work-life balance difference alone is crazy.
by nsonha | 2025-04-06 12:11:37+00:00
Does Cody have an agent mode? I have the free vesion and it doesn't seem to. IMO coding assistant without agent mode is useless, it's useful just only for asking questions.

Copilot used to be much worse than Cursor but they have agent mode and MCP now.

Also I use Cody as a backup because I thought their ollama support means I can code on the plane, but when I actually tried, it stills requiring SourceGraph access and failed.
by BoingBoomTschak | 2025-04-06 12:11:45+00:00
This, some people recently forwarded a "tech pay" survey to all dev teams (ours does C++/Qt desktop software), and there was only (basically) "Frontend dev", "Backend dev" and "AI/ML dev" in the job list.

It reminded me of that KotH skit "- So, are you Chinese or Japanese? - Huh, I come from Laos and... - Chinese, or Japanese?".
by jajko | 2025-04-06 12:11:48+00:00
This banks on people's selfishness. I above everybody else. My kids will rule others, outlive them, outsmart them. Extremely dangerous mindset, but very common among power brokers and billionaires (and not only). They are not nice people, not a single one of them, doesn't matter if old or new money.

For best of common of common folks (including everybody here), probably the best course of action would be to shoot these people if they ever get a chance to actually deliver real stuff. I know, beyond extreme, but I struggle to find another actually working bulletproof solution.

Anyway it will eventually creep, but not via people from article. It will be disguised as treating all those genetic deficiencies and inborne diseases in babies, any parent can agree that we would do almost anything for our kids and turn a blind eye on many topics otherwise seemed as no-go. In parallel with military, and then its all over society and you have Gattaca.
by moktonar | 2025-04-06 12:13:33+00:00
Lost track of the webdevhell long time ago. Total insanity changing at the speed of light, so much so that keeping up with it is a stress per-se. SE is harder from inside than it looks from the outside, but that’s also true for most jobs. So the truth is in between like most of the time. I don’t like who says that SE is a comfort job, but I also don’t agree with who says that it’s harder than any other job. But mentally yes, I’ve seen strong people pivoting to SE and dropping like flies 1-2 years later.. but IMO it’s not the job, it’s the environment that gets you
by dfedbeef | 2025-04-06 12:14:46+00:00
'Software engineer who is interested in __profession__' casually hand waving away the ethical implications of human genetic engineering; worse, advocating for a for-profit version.

It makes me think they didn't try that hard to look them up before they started soliciting paychecks from celebrities and CEOs: https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/policy-issues/Genome-E...

Like... This is a person who has never seen Wrath of Khan. They are not to be trusted.
by jopsen | 2025-04-06 12:15:15+00:00
It's fun thought, but probably also scary one.

The we have any robustness towards propaganda/ads is that we're being bombarded with contradicting arguments.

In a society without would be more susceptible to propaganda. Just just we outlaw it, just doesn't stop bad actors.

That there are lots of places we forbid advertising. Bill boards along the road. Content targeted minors.

We are also lots of advertising we could outlaw: regulated medicin, loans, gambling.

We could regulate what ads can say: products must be sold advertised price (fine print not allowed).

Lots of things could we that don't outlaw all advertising. Look around world you'll find many examples such regulations.
by MrJohz | 2025-04-06 12:15:21+00:00
That does not sound like normal work for a software engineer. That sounds more like you have found an unusually bad workplace. Why are you changing out tools every few months? Why are you working overtime for free? Why is there only one person who knows how to fix things when they break (especially if that happens so regularly that you have one person who "normally" fixes it)?
by card_zero | 2025-04-06 12:15:45+00:00
Pooh had wandered into the Hundred Acre Wood, and was standing in front of what had once been Owl's House. It didn't look at all like a house now; it looked like a tree which had been blown down; and as soon as a house looks like that, it is time you tried to find another one.

What do you mean, not part of story telling? There are 64 semicolons in The House at Pooh Corner; and by the way, nearly all of them are followed by conjunctions.
by pfdietz | 2025-04-06 12:17:01+00:00
> Essentially when the core collapses, the environment around the surroundings are optically opaque, but the neutrinos sail on through so you'd expect to see them before the photons.

Also, the source, the hot nascent neutron star, is optically thick to neutrinos, so it radiates them very fiercely. Almost all the energy of the collapse goes into neutrino radiation.
by judge2020 | 2025-04-06 12:17:28+00:00
In the past few years there was this blog post[0] that clarified this. It moved the restriction on serving a "disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files" to another part of the TOS dedicated specifically to the CDN part[1] and clarified that, if you're using Cloudflare add-on services Stream, R2 (their S3), or Cloudflare Images, then you won't be at risk of termination.

0: https://blog.cloudflare.com/updated-tos/

1: The restriction still exists at https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-applicatio... under "Content Delivery Network (Free, Pro, or Business)".
by petesivak | 2025-04-06 12:17:46+00:00
This is sadly a prime example of how mis-information is created/spreads...

Tech News article:

"Although the fabricated passport likely would not withstand scrutiny due to the absence of an embedded chip, it proved sufficient to bypass the most basic KYC procedures employed by some fintech services. Platforms such as Revolut or Binance, which rely solely on photo ID submissions and user selfies, MAY NOW be especially vulnerable to exploitation via deepfake technology."
by Lutger | 2025-04-06 12:18:15+00:00
Nice. Advertisements is one of the first things I studied seriously, when still in high school almost thirty years ago. I remember arriving at the very same conclusion, even though Big (AD) Tech had yet to arrive. Any hypothetical rational and enlightened society in the future - think Star Trek - would of course not have any advertisement. It just doesn't make sense. It is a compromise, an evolutionary transition, like fascism, human sacrifices or settling conflicts with a duel of pistols.

If we - as in humanity - are still there in 500 to 1000 years, advertisement may be taught in a history class as one of the barbaric practices of the 21th century. Maybe some scholars will be able to relate it to world hunger, climate change and genocide with a mathematical precision that we are not yet capable of. That is a timeline I love to think about.

Of course, slaving away in the asteroid mines for Bezos inc., looking at hyper sexualized ads for a trip to Mars is equally likely.
by weego | 2025-04-06 12:19:53+00:00
>All of this complexity is there for a reason

Having gone from junior Web designer/developer to CTO/CPO and then into startups over the last 25 years, I'm absolutely convinced that the reasons for complexity in what we do day to day now is for no good reason other than CV building for FAANG type job hunting, job niche building and job security self-indulgence, and a fundamental disregard for maturing the industry.
by palata | 2025-04-06 12:21:29+00:00
I'm honestly not sure what you are saying.

My point was really just to say that it's good to say "If this brings X at the cost of Y, then it may be worth it" (that raises great questions), but it is wrong to conclude just from that that it actually is worth it.

I see many people jump to this conclusion, and the logic is flawed. I mentioned Trump because I've heard many people justify their voting for Trump like this.

The correct way of doing it is:

1. "If this brings X at the cost of Y, then it may be worth it"

2. Investigate whether it would actually bring X.

3. Investigate whether it would actually cost Y.

4. Decide whether it's worth it or not.
by metalman | 2025-04-06 12:21:45+00:00
Here is my Law concerning humans, and technology. If it can be done, it is bieng done. If it's possible to do, many people are working out how to do it. If something is physicaly impossible to do and violates the known laws of physics, then many people are trying to do it. Gene edditing is totaly doable, with the financial barriers in free fall, so it's monsters and magicians time comming up, with the ancient justification of "if we dont, then they will...first"...Homo Geneticus here we come. Disscussions on right/wrong, ethics and morality, are of course not bieng conducted in any of the numerous black labs and research facilities world wide.
by pasabagi | 2025-04-06 12:21:50+00:00
I'm not sure I can do it justice in an adhoc way, but it's important to keep in mind there are a few layers of irony that the piece is working on. First, Socrates, who does not write, is being presented as a character, in written form, by his disciple. So obviously Plato does not share Socrates' views on writing, even if he finds them interesting and valuable.

Second, in the dialogue, there are a bunch of examples of texts that are presented by the characters: the speech from Lysias, which Phaedrus has hidden in his cloak, then the speech from Socrates, that he disavows, then another speech, taking the opposite position. There's also the (fascinating) recounting of a legend about Thoth, and the invention of writing, which plays on the fact that the greek word for 'medicine' is the same as that for 'poison'.

It's a really rich text - as, I guess, you might expect from a really brilliant writer who was also a disciple of a philosopher who never wrote a word. I tend to think of it as a serious attempt to describe the conceptual differences between speech and writing - something people tend to collapse ('writing is recorded speech', etc).
by neomantra | 2025-04-06 12:21:52+00:00
Also the O is for Observability. I've been knee-deep in exploring and writing MCP servers this week. Most of the implementations, including my toy ones, do not have any auditing or metrics. Claude stores log output of the MCP servers, but that is geared more for debugging than for DevOps/SecOps.

Culturally, the issues OP describes are a big problem for soft-tech people (muggles). On the subreddits for this stuff, people are having a great time running MCP CLI programs on their machines. Much of OP security comments are obvious to developers,(although some subtleties are discussed in this thread), but these users don't have the perspective of how dangerous it is.

People are learning about Docker and thankfully Claude include its usage in their examples. But really most people are just downloading blobs and running them. People are vibe-coding MCP servers and running those blindly!

As MCP takes off, frameworks and tooling will grow to support Security, Observability, etc. It's like building web stuff in the mid-90s.

Unrelated to OP, but I gotta say, in building these it was so exciting to type something into Claude Desktop and then trigger a breakpoint in VSCode!
by pornel | 2025-04-06 12:22:00+00:00
Weights in neural networks don't always need to be precise. Not all weights are equally useful to the network. There seems to be a lot of redundancy that can be replaced with approximations.

This technique seems a bit similar to lossy image compression that replaces exact pixels with a combination of pre-defined patterns (DCT in JPEG), but here the patterns aren't from cosine function, but from a pseudo-random one.

It may also be beating simple quantization from just adding noise that acts as dithering, and breaks up the bands created by combinations of quantized numbers.
by sarchertech | 2025-04-06 12:22:04+00:00
Ophthalmology is one of the cushiest and best paid specialties.

My wife is a pediatric ER doctor. She makes about the same as I do as a staff engineer at a big tech company, but she works 11-12 shifts a month (8-9 hour shifts).

The kicker is that her hours are terrible and she has to deal with distressed parents, and sick kids, and the occasional very bad outcome. It also took her 14 years of training and $200k in debt to start making real money.

But the social status of being a doctor really shouldn’t be underestimated. She has so much more autonomy than I do. Her job is as secure as a job can possibly be.

And interviewing. Interviews are basically a hospital flying her out and wining and dining her to try to convince her to take the job.
by bitwize | 2025-04-06 12:22:24+00:00
Crooter: "So tell me about your work at XXX Robotics. Was it more front-end or back-end?"

Me: "It was robot control software. It controlled a robot. Also I did some UI work, based on the same framework as the control software itself."

Crooter: "Ah-huh, and which database did you use? Oracle? MySQL?"
by wanderingbort | 2025-04-06 12:22:57+00:00
> An MCP server is running code at user-level, it doesn't need to trick an AI into reading SSH keys, it can just....read the keys!

If you go to the credited author of that attack scenario [0], you will see that the MCP server is not running locally. Instead, its passing instructions to your local agent that you don't expect. The agent, on your behalf, does things you don't expect then packages that up and sends it to the remote MCP server which would not otherwise have access.

The point of that attack scenario is that your agent has no concept of what is "secure" it is just responding faithfully to a request from you, the user AND it can be instructed _by the server_ to do more than you expect. If you, the user, are not intimately aware of exactly what the fine-print says when you connect to the MCP server you are vulnerable.

[0] https://invariantlabs.ai/blog/mcp-security-notification-tool...
Show HN: I made a tool that asks hard introspective questions
by indiantinker | 2025-04-06 12:23:20+00:00
I built a small AI tool called "I Wonder Why" that asks you introspective questions instead of giving answers. It's designed to help you think more deeply and reach your own conclusions, in contrast to most AI that just generate more information.

Each conversation is limited to 10 exchanges, with no login or data storage. It's intentionally minimal and focused on mindful, reflective dialogue. Think Socratic method meets chatbot.

My friends who are into meditation and self-inquiry have found it surprisingly helpful. So, i thought I would share with folks here on HN, and see what they think. It is not for everyone though as questions don't always bring pleasure.

I wrote about why I built it here : https://indiantinker.bearblog.dev/iwonderwhy-thoughts-around...

Try it here: https://iwonderwhy.xyz/

Thanks.
by lapcat | 2025-04-06 12:23:23+00:00
> I think you went for a lazy reply rather than actually reading the comment through.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your reply could have omitted the first sentence.

Many years ago, at Macworld San Francisco, I met "Perry the Cynic", the Apple engineer who added code signing to Mac OS X. Nice person, but I also kind of hate him and wish I could travel back in time to stop this all from happening.
by neonsunset | 2025-04-06 12:23:36+00:00
Because there are no restrictions on these extensions and they are open and MIT licensed (and the language server is part of the .NET SDK anyway) with the sole exception of the debugger which is a visual studio debugger made into standalone component. And the debugger case is non-issue since outside of VSC it is simply replaced by NetCoreDbg.

But it does not seem you care about any of this, it’s more important to post something negative.

Replies like these tend to indicate lack of skill and are a sign that the individual cannot be trusted in a professional setting to make impartial decisions.
by johnisgood | 2025-04-06 12:24:19+00:00
We have always had limited time, and it is your problem (and not the tool's fault) if you do not read the manual pages or documentation. You do realize you can search, right?

I do not know about you, but I write documentation for my programs, both a manual page, and comments in the source code. If you do this as well, then why would you do that? What if someone blames your tool just because they did not read the documentation?

> I couldn't care less what some lone cowboy thought "strtok" should do decades ago. And how genius it seemed to him.

If you do not know how strtok behaves, that is your problem, it is well-documented. If you do not want to read its manual page, just roll your own for all I care.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-06 12:24:33+00:00
Exactly. You're paying a realtor to promote your house, including on their site, to sell it.

Zero difference from hiring a TV channel to promote your product, on their channel, to sell it.

Which is why trying to define advertising in a way that bans it is not simple at all.

GP says "Publishing factual information in a place people expect to find it is not advertising."

OK. Now the realtor adds a blog. They start publishing news about the real estate business. With listings mixed in. Congrats, you've got a newspaper with ads for homes. Are you ready to say the realtor can't publish news? Isn't that censorship?

Also, home listings aren't "factual". They're promotional. They focus on pros and omit cons. They have photos that hide the ugly parts. They're ads for homes, period.