MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by normanthreep | 2025-04-09 16:23:13+00:00
it's a tool that increases efficiency if you know how to use it. learn how to do it and it'll make your job easier and you become more productive. fight or ignore it and you'll be replaced because you're not doing your job properly

don't listen to ignorant luddite technophobes on the internet, they are like all -phobes intolerant, full of hate and fearful of things they don't understand
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-04-09 16:23:27+00:00
> Advertising isn't child labor. If there was something immoral about telling people about your product, you'd have a point.

It wasn't a moral argument, though I can see how you read it that way. I'm just saying, we change the market via regulation (or at least, used to) all the time, and businesses survive despite their endless moaning about it.

They complained about us not letting them keep cancer-causing chemicals in the break room too, mandatory break times for given lengths of work shifts, etc. etc. etc. They always whine about they'll go broke if they have to X or Y, no matter how reasonable it is.

> And profit seeking will not stop just because the source of the money changes and there's less of it.

State funded operations don't generally prioritize profits unless directed to by weird politicians who think public goods should make money, like the current head of the USPS. Generally, tax funded orgs are just us going "we would like this service, and everyone in the city/county/state/country chipping in like $30 a year means we don't need to worry about it.

> Your local little league team couldn't even get a sponsorship for their uniforms anymore.

Yeah, again. Fund it with taxes. Little league players shouldn't be billboards. If we want this stuff, we should have the political will to allocate money to pay for it. I don't see why if we decide we want little league baseball that said baseball team should then need to make the rounds in the community with a hat out. That's silly.

> Also, right now they are free to not use SaaS products if they do hate the concept.

No they aren't. If you want Microsoft Office, any Adobe product, Quickbooks, just to name a few, your only options are subscriptions to them.

> Well, they're paying people to write positively about them and their product/politics.

I mean just having a newsletter that advocates for socialism doesn't mean you're advertising socialism. It's propaganda, and that's fine. Propaganda isn't necessarily a bad thing despite the modern attitudes towards it. The pro-WWII ads that sold bonds were propaganda. The cartoons depicting Hitler as a buffoon were propaganda.

In any case though, I wouldn't consider that advertising. In my mind, advertising would only occur when a given publication is including content referencing a product or service where it would normally not otherwise be.
by dtnewman | 2025-04-09 16:23:31+00:00
> A common question is: “how much are students using AI to cheat?” That’s hard to answer, especially as we don’t know the specific educational context where each of Claude’s responses is being used.

I built a popular product that helps teachers with this problem.

Yes, it's "hard to answer", but let's be honest... it's a very very widespread problem. I've talked to hundreds of teachers about this and it's a ubiquitous issue. For many students, it's literally "let me paste the assignment into ChatGPT and see what it spits out, change a few words and submit that".

I think the issue is that it's so tempting to lean on AI. I remember long nights struggling to implement complex data structures in CS classes. I'd work on something for an hour before I'd have an epiphany and figure out what was wrong. But that struggling was ultimately necessary to really learn the concepts. With AI, I can simply copy/paste my code and say "hey, what's wrong with this code?" and it'll often spot it (nevermind the fact that I can just ask ChatGPT "create a b-tree in C" and it'll do it). That's amazing in a sense, but also hurts the learning process.
by j2kun | 2025-04-09 16:23:33+00:00
For example, it's fashionable in math education these days to ask students to generate problems as a different mode of probing understanding of a topic. And from the article: "We found that students primarily use Claude to create and improve educational content across disciplines (39.3% of conversations). This often entailed designing practice questions, ..." That last part smells fishy, and even if you saw a prompt like "design a practice question..." you wouldn't be able to know if they were cheating, given the context mentioned above.
by noident | 2025-04-09 16:23:36+00:00
That's funny, there isn't any mandate for using LLMs at my company. Everybody has just quietly added them to their workflows without being told.

LLMs are like chainsaws. In the right hands, they can help you do the same job faster. In the wrong hands, it could cut off a limb. If someone drops a thousand line PR of total slop, it's not an AI failure, it's a human failure.

Personally, I use LLMs for fill-in-the-middle jobs and boosting test coverage. It's a modest benefit, but I am definitely shipping higher quality software in a shorter period of time compared to before.

They're not bad as starting points for learning new things, either. I've learned a number of new frameworks and libraries by using LLMs as a "better Google". Now I'm using it to learn Rust.

As long as you use your knowledge and experience to evaluate the output, LLMs can only help. I would posit that people committing garbage from LLMs will have no problem writing insecure and buggy code without assistance.

I caveat all this with the totally valid security and privacy concerns around sending code and data to 3rd parties that haven't been vetted rigorously. That said, local LLMs solve that problem handily and are good enough most of the time.
by froh | 2025-04-09 16:23:38+00:00
the advantage comes with the full package, operations and all.

you don't have racks with blades but one box or two, that you upgrade every few years and other than that your hardware side is covered.

rewiring networks, reattaching storage etc all remotely, CLI, and most importantly you only pay what you use.

you need one guy or a consultancy for the initial etc up and for fancy Config changes but once it's essentially set up you simply have a large Linux data centre and do Linux stuff.

oh and you can hot plug additional physical CPUs into a running VM and pull it out and reassign when it's not needed, likewise RAM. that's somewhat difficult with commodity hardware.

and there _are_ companies that value this and choose Linux on Z as a pure Linux deployment.

but you have a point. if nobody in the building knows this, nobody's gonna call IBM and ask for a quote. it's simply not on anybody's radar.
by throwanem | 2025-04-09 16:23:42+00:00
It isn't especially culpable of Thompson, I think.

If he's not immediately well suited to think through a kind of political times last seen outside living memory, well, who immediately is? He didn't build his reputation instantaneously the first time either, but over years. I just think it may now be more a hindrance than a help, in having established a higher expectation than circumstances may any longer allow reliably living up to for a while at least.

As I say, I don't really hold it against him, even on a professional level. Someone who's consistently wrong in an interpretable way is not of much less value than someone with a string of good calls - maybe more, if the contrarian is strong on theory and the "superpredictor" shows signs of capitalizing on a run of good luck. Which of those he turns out to be if any I suppose we'll find out, and previously having put everything new behind a paywall is questionable, but at the very least I suspect that to keep up with his doings may remain of some interest.
by renewiltord | 2025-04-09 16:24:10+00:00
That makes sense for me. I would easily pay $20 more to take an Uber over a cab in SF. The prices are the other way around which is convenient for me. The last time I took a cab from the airport the guy asked me which cross streets and how to get there. That's not my Uber experience. I don't want to be telling this guy how to do his job. I want personal transportation and we can chat about something else if he likes but I want him to use the satnav.
by kccqzy | 2025-04-09 16:24:24+00:00
> a read only root with nothing in it

A lot of things break if there's no /proc/self. A lot more things break if the terminfo database is absent. More things break if there's no timezone database. Finally, almost everything breaks if the root file system has no libc.so.6.

When you write Dockerfiles, you can easily do it FROM scratch. You can then easily observe whether the thing you are sandboxing actually works.

> no users

Now you are breaking something as fundamental as getuid.
by ericmay | 2025-04-09 16:24:25+00:00
Mostly yea, but I think if you say to yourself the US needs manufacturing capacity no matter who it comes from those tariffs make a little more sense. Also they would levy that China has set up manufacturing facilities in countries like Canada for example to bypass tariffs.

I'm not saying I agree with this, just trying to think through what they may be thinking for fun internet discussions. Personally I love our allies and I think they make us way stronger and we should work together with them to address concerns.
by andrewrn | 2025-04-09 16:24:31+00:00
Appreciate all that. You're right about all of these, they're mostly there because I just wanted to get out the door and get feedback.

The reorderability/pickability is a remnant from when there were multiple operations (+-*/), but I figured it still allows the user to build the reasoning. Mathematically it doesn't matter as you said, but there is an intuitive order for the chain of reasoning.

You think the sliders ought to be a wider range?
by simonw | 2025-04-09 16:24:34+00:00
OK, I have to ask: isn't this agents to agents idea kind of Science Fiction?

I absolutely get the value of LLMs calling tools and APIs. I still don't see much value in LLMs calling other LLMs.

Everyone gets really excited about it - "langchain" named their whole company over the idea of chaining LLMs together - but aside from a few niche applications (Deep Research style tools presumably fire off a bunch of sub-prompts to summarize content they are crawling, Claude Code uses multiple prompts executions to edit files) is it really THAT useful? Worth building an entire new protocol with a flashy name and a bunch of marketing launch partners?

LLMs are unreliable enough already without compounding their unreliability by chaining them together!
by h2zizzle | 2025-04-09 16:24:51+00:00
I'm trying to figure out what you mean. Experts forecast Brexit would hurt the financial sector, Northerners said they were cool with that, the forecast was wrong, Northerners were upset. Nothing about that sounds illogical. Vindictive and short-sighted, sure. But everything follows reasonably.

I say this as someone who's stomach sank when I'd heard that Brexit had passed and that there was a real chance that Donald Trump could be elected.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-09 16:24:54+00:00
> how is a pasteurized orange juice that removes 99% of the juice from a orange, different from a squeezed oranged juice that removes 75% of the juice from an orange

I said industrialised fruit to refer to the orange. They’re much sweeter now than even in the 60s. There isn’t a practical difference between store-bought and fresh-squeezed juice (that I know of) other than, in some cases, preservatives, and the fact that with fresh-squeezed juice you have a tactile measure of the fruit going into the squeeze and so don’t tend to have e.g. a kid pouring themselves a tall glass of orange juice representing the juice of ten oranges.
by fngjdflmdflg | 2025-04-09 16:25:07+00:00
>CSS was created to standardize how to deal with presentation, but that doesn't mean every website should look exactly the same on every device or in every browser. The era of attempting to do that is over.

For every device I agree but that was never the goal of CSS. It is meant to respond to the device's constraints such as screen dimensions and device type (desktop, mobile, print) using eg. media queries. In every browser I do think they should try to accomplish the same thing. Even if the exact algorithms used are different, the intended result should be agreed upon.
by ViktorRay | 2025-04-09 16:25:08+00:00
Your comment made me kind of sad. I remember many years ago, during the Arab Spring, President Obama went to the Uk Parliament and said the following:

"we have learned better than most that the longing for freedom and human dignity is not English or American or Western –- it is universal, and it beats in every heart."

I remember several years earlier President George W Bush, when asked about China, said:

“Young people who grow up with freedom in one area of their lives will ultimately demand freedom in other areas"

So it seems sad to me personally today that I see the comment you have made. I am not too surprised though. It feels such sentiments have been making their way to many countries all over the world nowadays. I feel sad because 10 years ago it really felt like freedom, democracy, etc would continue spreading all over the world...

How do people in China feel when they see stuff like this said by American politicians and commenters? Such as the President Obama and President Bush quotations and speeches I posted and linked?

Source for Obama's comments made in 2011:

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2011/0...

Source for Bush's comments made in 2008:

https://thehill.com/homenews/news/13451-bush-reiterates-conc...
by adrian_b | 2025-04-09 16:25:36+00:00
There is the later added posix_spawn, which could be implemented with a system call, even if on Linux it is emulated with clone + exec.

posix_spawn can do much, but not all, of what is possible with clone + exec. Presumably the standard editors have been scared to add too complex function parameters for its invocation, though that should not have been a problem if all parameters had reasonable default values.
by allan_s | 2025-04-09 16:25:41+00:00
forbidding inline script protect you from

``` <h3> hello $user </h3> ```

with $user being equal to `<script>/* sending your session cookie out, or the value of the tag #credit-card etc. */</script>`

you will be surprised how many template library that supposedly escape things for you are actually vulnerable to this , so the "React escape for me" is not something you should 100% rely on. In a company I was working for the common vulnerably found was

`<h3> {{ 'hello dear <strong>$user</strong>' | translate | unsafe }}` with unsafe deactivating the auto-escape because people wanted the feature to be released, and thinking of a way to translate the string intermixed with html was too time-consuming

for inline style, it may hide elements that may let you input sensitive value in the wrong field , load background image (that will 'ping' a recipient host)

with CSP activated, the vulnerability may exists, but the javascript/style will not be executed/applied so it's a safety net to cover the 0.01 case of "somebody has found an exploit in
by teddyh | 2025-04-09 16:25:49+00:00
If you have ever used the terminal-based standalone “info” program, please try to forget all about it. Use Emacs to read Info documentation, and preferably use a graphical Emacs instead of a terminal-based one; Info documentation occasionally has images.

Also, the enforced structure of man pages does not encourage good documentation: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6655417>
by bendigedig | 2025-04-09 16:25:57+00:00
> House price ratio has doubled since 2000 but over the last twenty years in the UK it’s flat. The doomsaying is not justified.

Now come on, data is data, if you want your arguments to live on the cite-able data, then you must accept that your arguments can also die on the cite-able data.

Take a look at a longer term view of the data and tell me you wouldn't be angry: https://www.schroders.com/en-gb/uk/individual/insights/what-...

And remember that this says nothing about the quality of housing, or its suitability for the needs of the household.

The housing crisis is not primarily one of homelessness (although many are forced to live in poor quality temporary accommodation waiting decades on lists for affordable housing), but of people living in the wrong accommodation for their needs; some of them forced to live in dangerous accommodation but unable to move, a greater number forced to rent, some people being forced to live with their parents; these are the things that happen when affordability decreases.

Do me a favour and do some real research on the topic before you dismiss other people's problems as nonsense. I think you owe them that.
by ramesh31 | 2025-04-09 16:26:02+00:00
>Now that bots/AI have made applying trivial and resulted in a deluge of applications they can't seem to properly filter, I think it's time to try a different approach.

I have this theory in general that paper is going to make a huge comeback. We've passed the point now where there is no meaningful way to tell if something is AI unless it physically cannot be. Hand written paper and physical art is literally the only thing left that passes this.
by seam_carver | 2025-04-09 16:26:06+00:00
Kindle Comic Converter optimizes comics and manga for eink readers like Kindle, Kobo, ReMarkable, and more. Its main feature is various optional image processing steps to look good on eink screens, which have different requirements than normal LCD screens. It also does file size optimization by downscaling to your devices native resolution, which helps performance on underpowered ereaders. Supported input formats include folders/CBZ/CBR/PDF of JPG/PNG files and more. Supported output formats include MOBI/AZW3, EPUB, KEPUB, and CBZ.

------ Hey everyone! I'm the current maintainer of KCC since 2023, thanks for using it! I’ve been reading manga on Kindle ever since I got the big 9.7” Kindle DX from 2010 using mangle, and upgraded to the even bigger 10.2” Kindle Scribe 2022 using KCC.

The biggest contributions I've made to KCC are:

added modern macOS support and removed homebrew requirement

ported code to run on native Apple silicon M1 chip and later for a 2x speed boost (qt5->qt6)

free open source windows codesign with SignPath

fixed Kindle Scribe support

and tons of other various features and bug fixes and developer friendly changes

created a legacy Windows 7 build with 300+ downloads…

The biggest community PRs were:

huge 2x speed boosts due to various CPU/IO optimizations

Kobo/Remarkable support.

Enjoy using KCC and let me know if you have any questions!
by taeric | 2025-04-09 16:26:07+00:00
This isn't really disagreeing with me? I can even add to it, for a fun example, knowing where to hyphenate a word can depend on its use in a sentence. (Strictly, I'm probably wording that poorly?)

Like, I am largely aware that it is a hard problem. So is just rendering text, at large. The added difficulty for justifying text is still not something I expect to impact the vast majority of sites. If you are willing to break your content into multiple pages, I hazard it isn't a significant chunk of time for most content.

Are there edge cases? Absolutely! Most of these are isolated in impact, though. And I do think a focus on whole content optimization is clouding a lot of people's view here. You are not doing yourself any favor by optimizing a full book every time a chapter changes.

There is also the idea that you have to find the absolute best answer for justifying text. Why? One that is low enough on a penalty score is just fine. Akin to the difficulty in finding all tilings of a board, versus just finding a single tiling for a board. Or a single solution to the N-Queens question, versus all solutions. If you just want a single solution, you don't need the raw compute necessary to get them all.
by icedchai | 2025-04-09 16:26:13+00:00
You're spot on about developers being worse at reviewing code. With generated code, you still need to understand it if you want to maintain it.

I had another person send me some AI generated code that was close to 90% working. It was missing something simple (something like appending to an array instead of overwriting it...) The original developer could not understand or debug it. I'm afraid of the crap we're going to see over the next few years.
by Symbiote | 2025-04-09 16:26:22+00:00
> The point being that many parts of the supply chain don't operate on fixed costs and instead percentages.

That's how it was working in most wealthy countries, where tariffs were generally low or very low.

I don't see why it must continue to work that way in the USA with 50% or 100% or more tariffs. If Footlocker wish to charge double the post-tariff price, that leaves room for a competitor to change double the pre-tariff price.

(Or double the pre-tariff plus a tiny bit, to account for the increased cost of insurance, theft etc.)
by infogulch | 2025-04-09 16:26:27+00:00
You know Alice who wants to delete her account, and Bob who wants to change his password? Maybe the reason why they want to take account actions all of a sudden is because they're in the middle of a breakup and they're having trouble deciding how to divide their assets.

We always take entities in our "user stories" as faceless actors with only enough depth to motivate basic actions in our app. What if we've been missing the real story all along, all these users are characters living out a grand Shakespearean drama, and we've been too blind to see it?

... Wow this is great, I can really appreciate the rich dynamic between Alice and Bob and Eve with this detailed backstory that links their lives. But it is getting to be a bit much to understand all the relationships now; it would be really helpful to have some way to track and visualize the relationships between all of these users / characters, what do I do?
by goku12 | 2025-04-09 16:26:29+00:00
That is in line with the Free Software and GNU philosophy. It isn't just about making the source available to you. Rather, they expect that you - the user - will tinker around and modify it substantially to suit your needs. So they include practically everything needed to achieve that - including full documentation, developer tools, code introspection capabilities and sometimes even entire textbooks (The bundled elisp book is actually an introductory textbook on programming).

The other GNU software all follow a similar strategy - be it Guix, Shepherd, Guile, Poke,... It's so pleasant to work with them. Too bad this approach didn't catch on.