MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw_m239339 | 2025-04-27 23:21:46+00:00
I used to be a designer back in the days with no formal education, I learned to code via Action Script 2 and it was fantastic, to be able to add interactivity to design, we created really crazy stuff. So I was already manipulating objects without understanding them.

Yet the biggest hurdle for me was actually trying to grasp OOP. I understood what function is, a loop, an condition a variable, a record, but I had very hard time to understand why I needed to write classes, instantiate them, make property private... Now I get it: polymorphism, encapsulation. But still. These are not easy concepts for people with no formal compsci education.

SVN, I got it, MYSQL I got it, but OO? fast forward 10 years and I was all about Symfony 2, design patterns, IoC, ...

My point being that anybody can learn to code and write programs. I just feel like higher abstraction like OO, while they are certainly elegant and useful for maintaining huge codebases, are not necessarily something people wanting to learn programming should be obsessed about (though obviously, all most successful modern languages tend to be OO now, so they have no choice). I don't think PHP would have been that much of success if it forced OOP everywhere when it started.

I mean people programmed without OO for decades before it became really mainstream, therefore most programmers did not have to understand the concepts it carried to work.
by bradly | 2025-04-27 23:22:58+00:00
Even when talking about themselves in the article they mostly focus on some hardware server business.

In software outdated dependencies are vulnerabilities. The tech leadership knew this tradeoff and closed their eyes and hoped they'd get to it before someone else did. They did not and you shouldn't expect to be able to either.

If you do not have the resources to support the continual, ongoing updating of a dep, you do not the resources to add said dep.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-27 23:23:13+00:00
The despair that was palpable among a few of my physician friends was rooted in a terrible and intractable truth: that patients mostly didn't take care of themselves or care for their own health, and then approached the doctor to "fix them up".

So the physicians are typically faced with a thankless job. It is not their job to cure or heal diseases, but to treat them. And there have been multiple times I myself have confronted a problem with my PCP, and do you know what I hoped to hear? "Rest a while" or "here's a diet I suggest" or "avoid <xyz> if you can" -- just pragmatic advice in the form of "doctor's orders" because I am the type of guy who likes to be told what to do by authority figures, you know?

But physicians are not in that business either. And so people come into the office, obese, with developing chronic disorders that will never get any better; they are stuck in their ways and can't follow good advice anyway; they're ignorant and poor, and their main sources of food are 7-Eleven and Burger King.

So if a person goes into medicine with the goal of "helping people" then they can really become disillusioned by the process itself. There are no miracles worked except by showing compassion, exercising patience, and sharing wisdom.
by xnx | 2025-04-27 23:23:25+00:00
It's nice that the author was kind enough to make his obviously wrong thesis righ in the title.

If you write code professionally, you're really doing yourself a disservice if you aren't evaluating and incorporating AI coding tools into your process.

If you've tried them before, try them again. The difference between Gemini 2.5 Pro and what came before is as different as between GPT 3.5 and 4.

If you're a hobbyist, do whatever you want: use a handsaw, type code in notepad, mill your own flour, etc.
by fennecbutt | 2025-04-27 23:25:23+00:00
Lmao yes it does. Wtf.

I'm a furry, I commission a decent bit of art and furry artists (unless they're super popular) tend to actually be much cheaper than normies.

Commissioning a comic is >$100 for a page, from a popular artist at least several hundred.

And that's also for personal use with no commercial rights whatsoever - it's actually an impasse because they technically still own the art, you technically own the character in the art, so it's in licensing purgatory, which is fine for conbadges, smut, icons and whatnot.

I used to work at an agency that shared a floor with an art studio, commercial rights for art, especially something as complex as a comic page can easily run into $1-10k or more.

Don't get me wrong, artists deserve the money they get, but as with everything that gets automated, there's a financial incentive to do so. Inb4 someone drops all the etsy links of sellers doing AI art as well or (as has been done for a loooong time) using a non-ml based filter to achieve the same thing.

There are definitely cheap-er options available from Brazil, China, Venezuela etc (same as fursuit commissions) but that's also another interesting topic in relation to ai; we already outsource heavily.
by frenchmajesty | 2025-04-27 23:25:55+00:00
This is true! I argue here that the right business co-founder who drives long term financial success to the company is super rare and super valuable. The problem is the average one you'll run into at a networking event cannot deliver on that.

They are much more "I give the ideas and I want to keep 90% equity and you shut up and listen to me because I'm the CEO" guys.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-27 23:26:07+00:00
I don't agree at all. Not even with the premise that "there are significantly more business guys looking for tech guys than the reverse".

There are a lot of business and tech guys and most of all of them are pretty clueless when you randomly meet them in "gatherings".

But a valuable business co-founder brings extensive domain expertise, a network of people, sales skills, management skills, and fund-raising talent.

There's little point in arguing who is "more" valuable -- the business side or the tech side. They're both critical to have.

For some reason, this post equates the "business side" to the person with the "idea". But that's a strawman. Having an idea doesn't make you a "business" co-founder. Being a business cofounder means having a experience and talent on the business side of things. And a good business co-founder generally doesn't have a lot of trouble finding good tech people, because that's one of those business skills that they're good at...
by Macha | 2025-04-27 23:26:32+00:00
A lot of why people didn't build Stripe before was that to enter the payments space you needed connections to get the banks and payment processors to work with you. In comparison, you don't need anyone's permission to make uber for dry cleaners or something in line with other trends of the time. I doubt the Collison brothers would have been as successful getting Stripe off the ground if it had been their first company.
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-04-27 23:26:43+00:00
A violinist shouldn't get stage fright during a Vivaldi concert. A truck driver should know what to do if the brakes fail. A doctor shouldn't get flustered and try to leave the room when the emergency alert monitors are going off and people are yelling.

I don't know why you're attacking me on those lines. Do you really think I believe "fatigue" is the same as "battle-hardening"? Like, considering that I actually wrote "shifts that are best described as absolutely insane" and "way too much fire in the trial-by-fire".
by matheusmoreira | 2025-04-27 23:27:49+00:00
Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix Corp.

> The object code of a program may be copyrighted as expression, 17 U.S.C. § 102(a), but it also contains ideas and performs functions that are not entitled to copyright protection. See 17 U.S.C. § 102(b).

> Object code cannot, however, be read by humans.

> The unprotected ideas and functions of the code therefore are frequently undiscoverable in the absence of investigation and translation that may require copying the copyrighted material.

> We conclude that, under the facts of this case and our precedent, Connectix's intermediate copying and use of Sony's copyrighted BIOS was a fair use for the purpose of gaining access to the unprotected elements of Sony's software.

Not only are the methods of operation which underlie the code completely unprotected by copyright, the copying of and the application of tools to the code for the purpose of exercising your right to discover those unprotected elements is fair use.
by zdragnar | 2025-04-27 23:27:51+00:00
I don't think this is a conflict of interest.

Every feature, design decision, and iota of technical debt are money and time. Either that's raised and spent up front, eating at equity, or it is deferred until a point where revenue pays for it, it is redundant due to a pivot, or becomes so essential that new funding is raised (possibly from a pool that doesn't dilute so much value).

Presenting an accurate and fair cost / benefit analysis of these tradeoffs (at least on the technical side) is the main purpose of a technical lead. Non-technical business people can't get that information on their own. They should have a say in the decision if it materially affects the product's launch, but that's the normal give and take.
by novaleaf | 2025-04-27 23:28:00+00:00
how timely. a few days ago I had a meeting with two non-technical founders wanting to make some cloud based finance software.

The double whammy, is that with the powers of ChatGPT on their side, they honestly thought they figured out the big architecture problems and were very unhappy at me pushing back at their design decisions. They wanted me to validate their ideas, not ask what the core user scenarios were (to figure out what tech was needed for an MVP)
by consumer451 | 2025-04-27 23:28:45+00:00
A really interesting side effect of 4o becoming a yes man:

> 4o updated thinks I am truly a prophet sent by God in less than 6 messages. This is dangerous [0]

There are other examples in the thread of this type of thing happening even more quickly. [1]

This is indeed dangerous.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1k95sgl/4o_updated...

[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/680e6988-0824-8005-8808-831dc0c100...
by d0liver | 2025-04-27 23:29:03+00:00
> Observer bias is the tendency of observers to not see what is there, but instead to see what they expect or want to see.

Unfortunately, people enjoying a thing and thinking that it works well doesn't actually mean much on its own.

But, more than that I suspect that AI is making more people realize that they don't need to write everything themselves, but they never needed to to begin with, and they'd be better off to do the code reuse thing in a different way.
by santoshalper | 2025-04-27 23:29:20+00:00
As a long time ACLU financial supporter, I could not disagree more. 4chan is not and never was a bastion of free speech. Comparing 4chan to the ACLU is like comparing a toddler smearing shit on a wall to art. To practice free speech requires an intent to express a point of view. 4chan had to point of view and was just a shithole.
by afiori | 2025-04-27 23:29:36+00:00
Nope, there is no need for this.

Think of it like an attacker (the app) would breach a cryptographic target (you and every other user of the app). The attacker starts to send random messages or try to mess around with signatures/tokens/APIs and listens for errors, timeouts, spam filters, possible side channels until it learns enough to figure out how to predict how the system will behave and maybe even to influence it.

Both in the analogy and with the timeline out does not matter if you mix a few random messages between a test and another as long as you comprehensively keep track of how the target behaves.

Every interaction is a data point, some data points are more useful than others but none is useless
by RIMR | 2025-04-27 23:29:47+00:00
>One slow but much beloved board, /f/ - Flash, will not be returning however, as there is no realistic way to prevent similar exploits using .swf files.

Wow, this is a pretty incredible level of incompetence. Server-side SWF exploits are easily mitigated, unless they are using some sort of server-side SWF interpreter, which is absolutely not needed if you implement client-side Ruffle (or just require people to install the browser extension).

They can complain all they want that advertisers and payment processors refuse to work with them, but it's clear that no competent engineers want to work with them either if they're saying stuff like this.
by frenchmajesty | 2025-04-27 23:30:32+00:00
The point I maybe did not stress enough on is the relationship aspect is two folds:

- Have ability to gain hard-to-obtain relationships in the beginning

- Have ability to grow the pace at which you gain those over time

It the beginning it will give you the money to play the game long enough (ie: customers and angel investors). In the short term it help tremendously in deal-making, fundraising, enterprise sales, hiring superstar employee. In the long term, you can broker insane deals like OpenAI convincing Microsoft to invest $10B and bet their AI future on you or get acquired.

PS: Microsoft is now backtracking out of that situation, but Altman convincing them to get in bed in the first place is very impressive.
by aaron695 | 2025-04-27 23:31:10+00:00
Internet in a Box DOES NOT WORK

I don't know how many more times this needs to be proven.

You do not understand data, you do not understand the reality around you, you do not understand 80:20 style engineering rules, you can't look at previous implementations of the Internet in a Box and see it didn't work.

Worse, you now live in a Starlink era where you can give them a real "Internet in a Box" and there is no solution people can just roll out. Talking a proper Linux setup, real hacker and nerd stuff, but because it's not Data Hording 101 no one will tackle it.

Internet in a Box is a great example of why Western foreign aid is failing and China is moving in. The West no longer builds infrastructure for the poor (like a Linux build) and feeds them wishy washy stuff. Facebook does more for the poor in this area.
by fennecbutt | 2025-04-27 23:31:15+00:00
As a gay dude I don't fall for the "but they have a family" thing, it reminds me that I'm worth less in many eyes for that reason.

Anyway, the problem isn't with automation, as per usual it's with animalistic, selfish human beings who would rather hate each other while the rich get richer, rather than vote to implement a well needed framework to set up UBI, proper taxation of corpos, etc.

But nah, that person has a different skin colour than mine, that person has different sexual preferences to mine.

I do hope the machines take the reigns at some point.
by praetis | 2025-04-27 23:31:22+00:00
That is a very nice tool! I might use it.

In case it's useful to anyone in here, I wrote a little app at erdraw.com which is specifically designed to be a way to draw a data model in the notation of "Mastering Data Modeling" by Professor John Carlis. It serves somewhat different goals than these other tools. It prioritizes user understandability to be useful in conversations non-engineers. So it excludes technical details like data types and SQL.

https://erdraw.com
by SllX | 2025-04-27 23:32:17+00:00
If you’re going to do HSR you have to think smaller than coast-to-coast. Think of that as the final stretch goal from a well laid out network spanning the places that it makes sense because past a certain distance you’re never going to outcompete airplanes and we have an extensive array of airports all across the country. Even Los Angeles to San Francisco should have been the stretch goal rather than the original goal, with the original goal to build Los Angeles to San Diego, Los Angeles to Las Vegas, then Los Angeles to Santa Barbara and Los Angeles to Bakersfield.

Maybe in parallel you could also: improve the trackways between San Francisco and San Jose, maybe build Sacramento to San Francisco, Sacramento to Stockton (and maybe extend that to San Jose and Fresno, with a San Jose to Santa Cruz stretch goal). Other stretch goals: Sacramento to Redding, Fresno to Bakersfield.

Instead we’re building the Central Valley segment first, in part due to the insistence of the Obama administration when Los Angeles to San Diego would have made way more sense and been up and running and in revenue service sooner.
by RIMR | 2025-04-27 23:33:17+00:00
Keeping a website that has openly catered to pedophiles and nazis online is hardly "good news", unless you are a pedophile or a nazi.

It won't matter for long though. The userbase has had its trust shattered, and this blogpost makes it clear that 4chan has no ability to defend itself from future attacks, which are absolutely coming.
by runarberg | 2025-04-27 23:33:20+00:00
> I mean you acting on your own ethical code. You hold yourself and your peers accountable

Industry wide self regulation is a poor substitute for actual regulation, especially in this capitalistic environment which rewards profitable behavior regardless of morality or ethics. In this environment the best an engineer can do is resign in protest (and I applaud any engineer which does that in fact), however that won’t stop the company from hiring new engineers who value their salary more than their ethical behavior—or have different ethical standards.

> And in the case here of LLMs, the potential harm has been well known and well discussed for decades.

The harms posed by LLMs are the very same which are caused by any company in the pursue of profits without regulation. In the past the only proven methods to force company to behave ethically has be industry wide regulation, especially consumer protection regulations.
by idontwantthis | 2025-04-27 23:33:44+00:00
For me, the hard part of programming is figuring out what I want to do. Sometimes talking with an AI helps with that, but with bugs like “1 out of 100 times a user follows this path, a message gets lost somewhere in our pipeline”, which are the type of bugs that really require knowledge and skill, AIs are completely worthless.
by ahartmetz | 2025-04-27 23:34:56+00:00
I have seen the results of other people. Code LLMs seem to do some annoying stuff more quickly than manually and are sometimes able to improve prose in comments and such. But they also mess up when it gets moderately difficult, especially when there are "long distance" connections between pieces. That and the probably seductive (to some) ability to crank out working, but repetitive or partially nonsensical code, is what I call shoveling crap faster.
by d0liver | 2025-04-27 23:35:04+00:00
More like, "We had a nice forklift, but the boss got rid of it replaced it with a pack of rabid sled dogs which work sometimes? And sometimes they can also sniff out expiration dates on the food (although the boxes were already labeled?). And, I'm pretty sure one of them, George, understands me when I talk to him because the other day I asked him if he wanted a hotdog and he barked (of course, I was holding a hotdog at the time). But, anyway, we're using the dogs, so they must work? And I used to have to drive the forklift, but the dogs just do stuff without me needing to drive that old forklift"
by kace91 | 2025-04-27 23:35:12+00:00
Does 4chan contain anything worth checking nowadays?

I remember visiting the site as a teenager to check rage comics, and even for the abrasion of the internet of the time it was too shocking for anything beyond an occasional look - random gore, pictures of underage girls, racist tirades and the like.

I know some people enjoy that Wild West, lack of rules environment for some reason, but is there any content that’s worth it for those who don’t?
by division_by_0 | 2025-04-27 23:35:19+00:00
I'm working on a correlation matrix with Svelte 5.

It has hierarchical clustering, rolling correlation charts, a minimap, time series data detrending, and 2D matrix virtualization (to render only visible cells to the DOM).

It has up to 130K matrix cells and correlates up to 23.5M time series data points.

https://covary.xyz
by farkanoid | 2025-04-27 23:35:20+00:00
Schematic and PCB design relating to Lighting and Control Systems for my main job. Schematics and PCB Design after hours as a contractor too, because I have a daughter now, my wife can't work, and life has become /very/ expensive in Sydney.

What I'd love to be working on: Try to initiate a high voltage arc through the air to a target device, and modulate it to send "Data over Lightning", like Alyx does in Half-Life 2. It won't work the way it does in the game, but I'd it's an idea I've had for a long time and I'd love to prototype it some day.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-04-27 23:36:00+00:00
Secrets and moats were supposed to be for internal morale.

Secrets and moats are mainly for entrenched internal interests at the expense of upstarts.

These promote in-fighting --- they don't really work toward global competitiveness --- unless you can convince others to be like US and handicap themselves too.

For the most part, China avoids playing this game. And unless we've got some better response than "tariffs", they're going to own world markets.

Make America poorer, dumber and less relevant --- this is where we are headed now.
by skydhash | 2025-04-27 23:36:47+00:00
I think my currently average code writing speed is 1 keyword per hour or something as nearly all my time coding is spent either reading the doc (to check my assumptions) or copy-pasting another block of code I have. The very short bust of writing code like I would write prose is done so rarely I don't even bother remembering them.

I've never written boilerplate. I copy them from old projects (the first time was not boilerplate, it was learning the technology) or other files, and do some fast editing (vim is great for this).
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-04-27 23:37:04+00:00
Assuming that your reading comprehension skills aren't letting you down here, I can only read this as a highly disingenuous comment. I made a serious argument, politely, and you've ignored the entire thrust of it, and instead you pick five words to quote back at me and willfully misinterpret.

You know very well that when I said "because of... history, or something" I was alluding to the fact that you had not in fact specified your historical reference at all. You did not state anything about the Soviet Union in 1917, you alluded vaguely and noncommitally to the redistribution of wealth being bad, maybe - it's unsure because, as I've said, there's no specifics.

If you don't make your point, we can't assume what it is. Or do you think that the Soviet Union in 1917 is the only moment in history where wealth/poperty was redistributed? If so, that would be a display of a pretty serious level of historical ignorance on your part.

In any case, now that you've deigned to share your point with us - the choice isn't one between a. what we have now, unchanged, and b. the Soviet Union in 1917. This false dichotomy is a common favourite of people heavily invested in maintaining the status quo, often people who are monetarily invested.

On the off-chance that you're not one of those types and are simply ignorant of the richness and complexity of human social organisation, I warmly invite you to read some anthropology to discover the myriad of ways human societies function and have functioned throughout history. You could be in for a very eye-opening experience.