MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kernal | 2025-04-24 17:54:35+00:00
The lengths people go to for a horrible Ui/UX and app experience is bewildering. I guess they justify it by not caving into Google or Apple. Of course, all of their privacy concerns and safeguards go away when the credit cards, utilities and services they use all circumvent their precious Linux phone. But hey, at least you’re running Linux on your phone, right?
by strongpigeon | 2025-04-24 17:54:42+00:00
Thanks for that and yeah that fits with what I've found, mostly continuation of legacy, critical systems that were built on mainframes. It just seems shocking to me the amount of investments IBM still puts on developing those machines given that no one seems to want to use them anymore?

It feels like I must be missing something, or maybe just underestimating how much money is involved in this legacy business.
by yason | 2025-04-24 17:55:20+00:00
Many have said that it's useful to delegate writing boilerplate code to an AI so that you can focus on the interesting bits that you do want to write yourself, for the sake of enjoying writing code.

I recognize that and I kind of agree, but I think I don't entirely. Writing the "boring" boilerplate gives me time to think about the hard stuff while still tinkering with something. I think the effect is similar to sleeping on it or taking a walk, but without interrupting the mental cruncing that's going in my brain during a good flow. I piece together something mundane that is as uninteresting as it is mandatory, but at the same time my subconscious is thinking about the real stuff. It's easier that way because the boilerplate does actually, besides being boring, still connect to the real stuff, ultimately.

So, you're kind of working on the same problem even if you're just letting your fingers keep typing something easy. That generates nice waves of intensity for my work. My experience regarding AI tends to break this sea of subconsciousness: you need to focus on getting the AI to do the right thing which, unlike typing it yourself, is ancillary to the original problem. Maybe it's just a matter of practise and at some point I can keep my mind on the domain in question eventhough I'm working an AI instead of typing boilerplate myself.
by mystraline | 2025-04-24 17:55:27+00:00
I applied to a job in the 'Who's Hiring' thread this month.

Had an interview. I'm a professional good at my craft, with tenure at hard positions.

I get hit with "we don't just want someone who checks in does work and leaves, 9 to 5". Like, are you wanting 60h/week and pay 40h/week? Or is this you're not wanting a slacker?

Or better yet, since you want skin in the game on my side, what's my equity as a partner?

My understanding is that I shop up and work well, and you pay me. And I'm in an at-will employment state, so it really is 1 day at a time.

Loyalty is bought at 1 day increments, since that is all the loyalty is afforded to me.

However, I will definitely lie, since no recruiter or HR wants to admit that their candidate is here because you pay. Its the verboten secret everyone dances around.
by outlore | 2025-04-24 17:55:40+00:00
Helix and Kakoune motions seem to make more intuitive sense to me, but it's unfortunate that editor support in VSCode and Zed is quite poor. I am waiting on adopting Helix as my terminal editor until the motions become more universal.

I also try LunarVim and quite liked it, but for some reason the motions didn't click, perhaps it is just a matter of practice..
by const_cast | 2025-04-24 17:56:03+00:00
Neither talent nor hard work have anything to do with helping humanity.

The reality is that our measurements of success don’t correlate with “goodness”, they correlate with getting stuff done. And you can do lots of evil stuff pretty easily.

The reason so many rich people seem evil is because they are. You don’t become rich via charity. You become rich by exploiting others and siphoning their success to yourself.

It’s just plainly evident in every sector of our economy. You don’t have to pay for the bad shit you do. Look at tobacco. Tobacco is a zero-value or negative-value industry. The sheer existence of tobacco actively makes the world a worse place.

But guess what? They don’t pay for your COPD medicine. They don’t pay for your congestive heart failure. But they will happily take your money for a carton.

All bad costs are externalizer, and all profit is kept. The end result is obvious. The more good you do, the stupider you are. The more evil you do, the more money you make.
by gilbetron | 2025-04-24 17:57:19+00:00
Broadcast social media is so odd to me now. It feels like walking to the center of town and shouting about your life to everyone.

I go to Facebook once a week or so, scroll for about a minute, then close it. It was a novel experience reconnecting with people from my past, but in the end, I just found out too much about people, realized it may be best to let people in your past stay there, and that comparison is truly the thief of joy.

Now, I just like watching interesting people talk about interesting things. I get that here, somewhat, reddit but lately only in a very narrow way, tik tok as long as I carefully maintain the algorithm, and youtube. All of them I have to be careful with, otherwise I can get pulled into hellholes of outrage bait. And I'm really, really wary of engaging in dicussions anymore. HN is about the only place, and even then I often regret it.

One time, on reddit, there was a discussion about dishwashers, and how people needed to clean food off dishes, otherwise it would fill up the filters. I posted a link to a user manual showing that it was common to hook up the dishwasher to the garbage disposal to take care of that. I was downvoted into deep negatives, and I think one or more negative replies for just posting something simple and factual.

Even here, half the time I post, I feel I will end up regretting it.
by 01100011 | 2025-04-24 17:57:27+00:00
Facebook and instagram: less and less posts by real people.

Reddit and other discussion sites: Controlled by "basement dwellers"(i.e. doomers w/ too much free time), trolls and, soon, AI bots. Dominated by groupthink and devoid of friendly discussion.

I think the only exception is my local community page on Facebook. People do seem to be civil(real names and close physical proximity help) and it's all real content.
by reaperducer | 2025-04-24 17:57:28+00:00
From what I've read, 70% of the Fortune 500 do.

Here's a brochure that might be useful to read:

https://www.ibm.com/downloads/documents/us-en/107a02e95d48f8...

It's an IBM brochure, so naturally it's pumping mainframes, but it still has lots of interesting facts in it.
by gwern | 2025-04-24 17:57:30+00:00
I hadn't thought about mangoes but now that you mention it, it does feel like they showed up in the USA at some point since the 1990s.

> - sugar free sodas

I am not convinced this was actually a good thing. After all these decades of studies in ever more obese human populations, it should not be this hard to find any benefits at all, and there should not be so many warning signs. You certainly can't see it in any obesity rates or soda tax results (or my relatives...), the experimental weight loss results have always been oddly unimpressive, and there are lots of concerning results about the effects on microbiomes (https://gwern.net/doc/genetics/microbiome/2022-suez.pdf) or on cardiovascular health (https://gwern.net/doc/biology/2024-witkowski.pdf https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10334259/), which is all very weird if they are 0 calories and don't affect insulin metabolism, as you would expect unambiguous, immediate, large benefits (contrast this with, say, GIP/G1P). So, maybe sugar-free will finally wind up being a wash or slightly beneficial, but it's not going into my list either way.

(Also, I eat mangoes and frozen vegetables and a little reluctantly eat nü brussel sprouts, but I don't drink soda, so it's against the spirit of my personal list to begin with.)
by toast0 | 2025-04-24 17:57:47+00:00
Doom is a fine milestone for an OS that intends to have graphical capabilities. Maybe Doom in text mode for other OSes :P

It's a known quantity, and doom has been ported to everything, so it shouldn't be too hard to make work either (he says, not having done it).

An OS that can run Doom is clearly capable of graphical interfaces with user interactivity, and maybe sound (although sound would be easy to leave out).
by dismalaf | 2025-04-24 17:57:52+00:00
Not going to lie, Mint is a buggy POS and the fact anyone recommends it at all is a travesty. It's so bad it makes me think it's sponsored by Microsoft to sabotage new users.

Mint basically takes a years old Ubuntu, then an even older fork of a DE, uses an abandoned protocol then rolls it together and adds even more bugs to it. It's honestly one of the worst distros that exists.

Ubuntu, Fedora and (open)Suse are the only ones worth using if you want a smooth experience (ie. the corporate ones).

Edit - also needing to install Windows first to dual boot is a result of Windows installation wiping existing bootloaders.
by cameronh90 | 2025-04-24 17:58:11+00:00
Most of the time I have to send parcels now, I use those drop off lockers where you just put it in the right cubbyhole and - I guess - they label it when they pick it up. Otherwise, most couriers will do label on pickup, or the return label is included with the delivery in the first place. Very occasionally there's no other option but to find some way of printing it myself.

I did have a small inkjet printer at one point, but the ink kept drying up, so in the end it was costing me £10 and a trip to Tesco every time I needed to print something. Thought about getting a laser, but it's quite a lot of space to waste on something I use so rarely. I might get one of those little thermal printers that are small enough to keep in a drawer.
by arjie | 2025-04-24 17:58:21+00:00
I don't like most of these commands because they just execute. This one is nice because it will be in your history. The current trick I use is to use copilot.vim at the command line. It naturally fits into my flow.

Recently some of my friends reported that it just wants to do comments and I've noticed that it actually biases towards that nowadays, so I start it with something to get it kicked off.

I've been managing to try to figure out what in the prompt makes it like that, but for the moment that little workaround gives me both the comment and the command in my history so it's easier to r-i-search for it.

https://x.com/arjie/status/1575201117595926530

You just set up copilot for neovim normally and set it as your EDITOR. https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/index.php/AI_Completion_In_The...
by strongpigeon | 2025-04-24 17:59:36+00:00
By that, do you mean banks, payment networks or both? And I guess I'd be curious as to why mainframes versus the rest. It seems like the answer for "why" is mainly because it started on mainframes and the cost of switching is really high, but I wonder if there isn't more to it.

Edit: Oh yeah, just saw MasterCard has some job posting for IBM Mainframe/COBOL positions. Fascinating.
by CopyOnWrite | 2025-04-24 18:00:00+00:00
Could you point me to a youtube video or a blog post which demonstrates how LLMs help writing code which outperforms a proficient human?

My only conditions:

- It must be demonstrated by adding a feature on a bigger code base (>= 20 LOC)

- The added feature cannot be a leaf feature (means it must integrate with the rest of the system at multiple points)

- The prompting has to be less effort/faster than to type the solution in the programming language

You can chose any programming language/framework that you want. I don't care if it is Java, JavaScript, Typescript, C, Python, ... hell, I am fine with any language with or w/o a framework.
by reaperducer | 2025-04-24 18:00:18+00:00
given that no one seems to want to use them anymore

According to a 2024 Forrester Research report, mainframe use is as large as it's ever been, and expected to continue to grow.

Reasons include (not from the report) hardware reliability and scalability, and the ability to churn through crypto-style math in a fraction of the time/cost of cloud computing.

Report is paywalled, but someone on HN might have a free link.
by huijzer | 2025-04-24 18:00:33+00:00
> Reddit and other discussion sites: Controlled by "basement dwellers"(i.e. doomers w/ too much free time), trolls and, soon, AI bots. Dominated by groupthink and devoid of friendly discussion.

I sometimes have the feeling that most HN commenters are also unemployed or in academia and most non-commenting readers are employed.
by sudobash1 | 2025-04-24 18:00:33+00:00
> I think the UK sender didn't need to include _two_ global forevers.

It would be hard to know that ahead of time though. The global forever stamp is good for letters up to 1oz which can be as little as 4 US letter pages. It took the FSF 5 double-sided pages. Granted, it looks like lightweight paper & the post office doesn't seem to be very picky about this. But I think sending two forever stamps was being on the safe side.
by fwip | 2025-04-24 18:01:01+00:00
Sure there is. If you want to know if students understand the material, you don't hand out the answers to the test ahead of time.

Collecting a bunch of "Hard questions for LLMs" in one place will invariably result in Goodhart's law (When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure). You'll have no idea if the next round of LLMs is better because they're generally smarter, or because they were trained specifically on these questions.
by LeonardoTolstoy | 2025-04-24 18:01:13+00:00
Something about an obscure movie.

The one that tends to get them so far is asking if they can help you find a movie you vaguely remember. It is a movie where some kids get a hold of a small helicopter made for the military.

The movie I'm concerned with is called Defense Play from 1988. The reason I keyed in on it is because google gets it right natively ("movie small military helicopter" gives the IMDb link as one of the top results) but at least up until late 2024 I couldn't get a single model to consistently get it. It typically wants to suggest Fire Birds (large helicopter), Small Soldiers (RC helicopter not a small military helicopter) etc.

Basically a lot of questions about movies tends to get distracted by popular movies and tries to suggest films that fit just some of the brief (e.g. this one has a helicopter could that be it?)

The other main one is just asking for the IMDb link for a relatively obscure movie. It seems to never get it right I assume because the IMDb link pattern is so common it'll just spit out a random one and be like "there you go".

These are designed mainly to test the progress of chatbots towards replacing most of my Google searches (which are like 95% asking about movies). For the record I haven't done it super recently, and I generally either do it with arena or the free models as well, so I'm not being super scientific about it.
by camel-cdr | 2025-04-24 18:01:32+00:00
BLAS, specifically gemm, is one of the rare things where you naturally need to specialize on vector register width.

Most problems don't require this: E.g. your basic penalizable math stuff, unicode conversion, base64 de/encode, json parsing, set intersection, quicksort*, bigint, run length encoding, chacha20, ...

And if you run into a problem that benefits from knowing the SIMD width, then just specialize on it. You can totally use variable-length SIMD ISA's in a fixed-length way when required. But most of the time it isn't required, and you have code that easily scales between vector lengths.

*quicksort: most time is spent partitioning, which is vector length agnostic, you can handle the leafs in a vector length agnostic way, but you'll get more efficient code if you specialize (idk how big the impact is, in vreg bitonic sort is quite efficient).
by suninsight | 2025-04-24 18:01:35+00:00
No we dont use QEMU - never heard of them till now. We built our own software from scratch - using Ubuntu - for AI. We are completely on the cloud. Every user gets a full Ubuntu Cloud VM for his NonBioS AI Engineer to work on.

We covered this a fair bit on our blogs: - https://www.nonbios.ai/post/why-nonbios-chose-cloud-vms-for-... - https://www.nonbios.ai/post/private-linux-vms-for-every-nonb...
by duped | 2025-04-24 18:02:05+00:00
My understanding from some of these articles is that oil isn't literally transported in barrels the vast majority of the time, it's in tanker trucks/rail cars/ships moving from source to refinery to retail the whole way. Part of what makes it fun to "buy a barrel of oil" is that you can't go many places and ask for a barrel, you need to bring the thing to put it in (like a tanker truck or rail car).
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-24 18:02:07+00:00
If someone's frame of reference is that most people are awful, I think that is the definition of misanthropy.

I think what started as edgy realism and critical analysis shot well past its utility and has become toxic and destructive.

Skeptical counternarratives are useful as a counterpoint to keep people honest and realistic. When they become the dominant narrative, they are destructive and self fulfilling. People are awful, they deserve to suffer. The deck is stacked, don't try. Life is pointless, why bother. Good deeds don't matter because they are insignificant at global scale.

A society or individual that hates itself will not fulfill any of the virtues it holds dear.
by pajko | 2025-04-24 18:02:29+00:00
Out of the question, it has no definition which is only related to physics. Well, there's the "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom" definition, but this was chosen to match the celestial-based unit related to the Earth's rotation (which does not tell anything to extraterrestrials).
by davedx | 2025-04-24 18:02:30+00:00
...extensive setup?

Last year I went hiking in Switzerland, so I mailed a couple of different maps of where I was going and picked them up from the print shop in town, which took me...... 30 minutes?

The times I've used my phone for hiking I've always regretted it for one reason or another. Maps are so much better, and it's not extensive setup getting your hands on one, one way or another. Come on.
by rachofsunshine | 2025-04-24 18:02:31+00:00
This is basically how I approach it with my employees.

I'm very clear with anyone who works for me that our interests won't always align. I'm also clear with them that I'm not going to screw them over and that I won't take any offense if they negotiate with me or ask for things. I lay out what my lines are: I will not knowingly lie to them, and I will usually provide complete information except when I have a good reason to. I ask the same of them. Beyond that, we're adults who can negotiate like adults.

There's nothing wrong with a transactional relationship, and it doesn't mean you can't be human. Things only get unfair when the relationship is only expected to be transactional in one direction, where employees are supposed to have undying loyalty to a company that will lay them off as soon as it becomes convenient to do so.
by genewitch | 2025-04-24 18:02:33+00:00
sorry, my comment didn't convey my desired inflection. You don't need your google account. you just need a google account. As in, you can use a throw-away "google account". Or, one could, a year ago, at least.

I get that there's still a google profile on your usage of the device, and i'm sure they have a way to link it to your other profile(s).
by rich_sasha | 2025-04-24 18:02:46+00:00
"Loyalty" is also worth something to self - to the loyal employee. It is a signal on CV that given the right environment, you commit to projects and people value your input. That's not to say, stay at all cost, but that when you leave, you pay a price too, and sometimes it's not worth it.

In my line of work, it can easily take 6-12 months until people are really productive, I'm reluctant to hire someone who will be a time sink for all this time then leave 3 months later.
by gwern | 2025-04-24 18:03:02+00:00
I guess I misremembered all those playdates I had as a kid in the 90s, where the other kids didn't live close enough to simply walk or bike to (which, as a '90s kid, I was still able to do, although American parents apparently slammed the window firmly shut on that starting in the '00s), and we had to rope the adults in for car transport. After all, varjag knows better than I do, and knows they were actually in the 1980s.
by mrandish | 2025-04-24 18:03:17+00:00
> Meta made the conscious decision to kill it.

No, it wasn't conscious, they just incrementally and iteratively optimized the site to maximize page views and ad revenue. Turns out that ends up eventually killing it - without ever having the intention of doing so. But you can rest assured that every decision on that long, slippery slope optimized some metric toward a local maxima.

It's been 8 years since my last post on Facebook and I visit less than 10 mins a year (only because I have one friend who uses FB messenger to communicate with me when he's traveling).
by sho_hn | 2025-04-24 18:03:17+00:00
> I don't mean this in a condescending way at all, but really out of sheer curiosity: Who uses mainframes nowadays and what for?

There's probably some minor strategic relevance here. E.g. for the government which has some workloads (research labs, etc.) that suit these systems, it's probably a decent idea not to try and migrate over to differently-shaped compute just to keep this CPU IP and its dev teams alive at IBM, to make sure that the US stays capable of whipping up high-performance CPU core designs even if Intel/AMD/Apple falter.
by carlosjobim | 2025-04-24 18:03:53+00:00
Travel has always been something people do. People are unaware of historic travel, because it was called "pilgrimage" and not "tourism", but in many ways the same. Discounting for all forms of migration, voluntary or involuntary, and discounting for all forms of trade travel, fishing expeditions and nomadic life.

So while maybe most people through history stayed put, travel has never been just a luxury thing.

Maybe you should find a reason for travel that interests you, and it will be more enjoyable? Instead of taking the tourist wholesale perspective?
by vel0city | 2025-04-24 18:04:09+00:00
> But now we can imagine a bright future where you can lose both, and your normal way to try and get help, all at once!

Still a possibility with cut keys, paper currency, and dumb cell phones. Ever have all of those things in a bag and have that bag stolen?

At least with the PaaK car I have, there's a backup passphrase as well.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I'll trade the slightly worse day maybe once a decade+ (or quite possibly never!) for the convenience every single other day. If I'm smashing my phone every few days I'll probably rethink that strategy. But I'll probably want to change whatever is causing me to smash my phone every few days.
by bschwindHN | 2025-04-24 18:04:15+00:00
> and then gone back only to see Facebook do its ADHD reload and bury the question

Does anyone know why facebook does this? It's the most infuriating thing, like it's assuming the poor user doesn't know how to "refresh" a page so it does it for them, because clearly they got stuck on an old crusty piece of content.
Ask HN: Is it a good idea to make a tiny AI for fixing form input formats?
by kuberwastaken | 2025-04-24 18:04:25+00:00
Why not have a very tiny LLM (or something similar) for fixing inputs in forms?

If I put in my address in 2 lines and it required 3, it makes it 3 automatically If I put my dates in the non US format and it required US format, it "corrects" it automatically

Something designed to be light weight enough that even the most basic sites can run them inside

Do you think this is something companies would pay for? Or making this a subscription based browser extension?