MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-11 14:49:22+00:00
Eh, that might work out.

https://www.theverge.com/news/617799/elon-musk-grok-ai-donal...

> Elon Musk’s OpenAI rival, xAI, says it’s investigating why its Grok AI chatbot suggested that both President Donald Trump and Musk deserve the death penalty. xAI has already patched the issue and Grok will no longer give suggestions for who it thinks should receive capital punishment.
by miltonlost | 2025-04-11 14:49:24+00:00
Trying to put a human-face on AI annoys me to no end. Stop trying to make me empathize with a computer program. Stop trying to endear me to a company's choice to not hire humans.

I made a phone call to a cable company because I couldn't use their app or website to do what I needed. The bot that answered my call then proceeded to use fake keyboard typing sounds as they "look up my info". Let the bot be a bot. Don't try to trick me.
by crdrost | 2025-04-11 14:49:28+00:00
But surely you have seen that places which practice design reviews and code reviews and double down on building tests, tend to be slower shippers and deadline missers?

Not saying that you in your ideal company suffer this problem, just the vast majority of the people who have taken your advice...

I come to you with a major refactor, +400 lines -600 lines, so like if you printed it out it's a 25-page diff, if someone is now reviewing my design or coding, they potentially have half an hour to an hour's work trying to fully understand this and make sure that I didn't break anything in that refactor. Post-hoc ain't the way here. I sometimes feel like I'm the only person who will read through such a long diff and understand it and come up with useful feedback. Everybody else is going to lean on testing, which to be fair to you is one of your bullet points, but consider that it's one of the major points.

And why did the refactor get that big in the first place? Because of the merge latencies, because of the review process. The more resistance you place here, the more gets buffered into a feature branch, and the more you have to review later.

Some shops do well with that, I worked at one once, we actually worked ourselves out of a job by finishing everything ahead of deadlines. (We were making a game that wasn't very fun at a company that was not principally interested in making games, so we were forcing the issue to a head of whether they wanted to keep taking this risk with a dream team of programmers or cut their losses and double down on their core.) But the major thing that we were doing different, has nothing to do with your bullet points. In the abstract, it was that, we didn't have performance review hanging over our heads. And therefore we didn't have every single developer working on their own separate thing in the system, so that they could call it their own and claim it on paper at PerfTime. Which meant that we could pair program organically, “hey you mind if I look over your shoulder?”. We all merged into dev, everyday, multiple times a day, and that's how we saw that someone else was working on the same part of the code that we were working on, and then we talked about like how are we going to not step on each other's feet? We had also decided early on that we were going to have a centralized place to push out feature toggles, it was kind of janky but it was available for QA department, yes we had a separate QA department, so that they could tweak which things were going to go out versus which needed to be baked more.
by whimsicalism | 2025-04-11 14:49:30+00:00
well we need to find a way to make these programs sustainable then. frankly, medicare is extremely friggin expensive because it encourages overutilization - which raises costs a ton for everyone.

we simply cannot afford to be yeeting historically unheard of levels of money at the elderly without raising taxes significantly on the middle-class, that is the rub of our current fiscal situation.
by red_admiral | 2025-04-11 14:49:34+00:00
Isn't the Navy going back to teaching sextants and astral navigation, just in case in a conflict the enemy interferes with GPS?

On land, I always carry a paper map while hiking and have a bit of a, shall we say, opinion of people who neither take a map nor could competently use it if they needed to. Especially on multi-day mountain walks with a night in a hut along the way.
by patapong | 2025-04-11 14:49:49+00:00
I am astonished by how much less delightful software has become. Computers used to feel like a magical tool, that would respond instantly and allow me to perform complicated transformations at the press of a button.

Now, I feel like I am fighting against software most of the time, having to compete with someones vision for how I should be using their program, which is likely aimed at the least technically sophisticated user. Nothing wrong with allowing such users to use the software, but please retain the functionality and speed for the power users!
by ViktorRay | 2025-04-11 14:49:57+00:00
I think Neal Stephenson had it backwards. The utopian science fiction comes second and is more of a reaction against the pessimistic dystopian science fiction.

Frankenstein is considered by many to be among the first science fiction books and is essentially a Black Mirror story from the 1800's. You had HG Wells and War of the Worlds for example. The Time Machine by HG Wells also portrays a possible negative vision for humanity based on an extrapolation of the social trends of the time.

Look at Asimov's robot stories. The orignal "robot" story was not from Asimov but a pessimistic story written in the 1920's about killer robots attacking people and being violent and all that. Asimov's optimistic peaceful robot stories were actually a reaction to the pessmistic violent robot stories that had been popular previously.

I think humans generally over the past few centuries have had uneasy feelings about technological changes and then that is reflected in dystopian, negative fiction. People react to that negativity by intentionally writing bright optimistic positive science fiction stories.

Look at Star Trek the Original Series for my final example. That tv show came out during the turmoil of the late 1960's and it responded to that turmoil and feelings of nuclear holocaust with a vision of the future that was filled with optimism and idealism.
by Robotbeat | 2025-04-11 14:50:06+00:00
I wouldn’t call it contamination if it’s literally just from natural soil and minerals sourced from fairly typical rocks.

I wasn’t claiming heightened lead exposure is good, just responding to those who seem shocked that we tolerate some low level of lead in foods. Obviously leaded paint is dumb and we STILL, for some reason (well, I know the reason, but it’s not a good one imo), allow leaded aviation fuel. In fact, fully unleaded fuel was not allowed in a very large fraction of general aviation aircraft until recently because the FAA dragged their feet in approving lead free fuel mixtures for heritage general aviation aircraft (which is a large fraction of the general aviation fleet since lawsuits and the FAA have made newer aircraft just obscenely expensive), which is still very rare in small airports.

It is, ironically, the downstream effect of improper and over-regulation of general aviation.
by klooney | 2025-04-11 14:50:19+00:00
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_... they do have a bunch of hardware startups, mostly in socal.

https://a16z.com/american-dynamism-50-2025/ is their splash page, table is from https://www.construction-physics.com/p/reading-list-031525
by immibis | 2025-04-11 14:50:39+00:00
No, it's not normal. The output is almost always song lyrics annotated with markup like [Bridge], [Chorus] etc. I think they're using something from OpenAI with a system prompt and/or domain-specific training on top.

It's not a pure AI output - I generated a bunch of lyrics in text (which doesn't use credits), selected the best one (obviously), padded them out with some repetition, entered a style, generated the audio a few times, selected my favourite audio, and edited the audio (poorly) by repeating a few bars of the intro to make it longer. You don't see the times it generated lyrics about X.509 certificates (even though the prompt was for them to be a valid X.509 certificate) or the times the vocals were unintelligible.

Here's another good version of the song with a different style: https://suno.com/song/2775f188-7582-4970-ac71-5a3b82e39a04?s...

Here's are two versions that are disqualified because you can't make out the lyrics: https://suno.com/song/9cebb5b3-c336-495e-be3d-195ea338eb52?s... https://suno.com/song/c6f0e666-ce91-4494-a8b5-1232862965c1?s...

---

I think generative AI does work as a toy. You can ask for all sorts of insane nonsense and laugh at what the program spits out to fulfil your request. I was a paying customer of AI Dungeon 2 (before the incident where OpenAI and/or the Mormons broke it in a poor attempt to impose safety rules).

I didn't keep any lyrics failures, but at the time, I was playing around with requesting songs that were also valid computer files, so here's one that went well: a "religious folk song that is also a valid Cisco configuration file", with the style changed to trance after the lyrics were generated: https://suno.com/song/32aa6d33-0f9f-4d3b-ad53-46a5fe238916?s... and another: https://suno.com/song/32aa6d33-0f9f-4d3b-ad53-46a5fe238916?s...

Juniper doesn't work as well because of the punctuation - it can generate lyrics with braced blocks, but they don't sound like anything: https://suno.com/song/32a0d70c-c9c9-468e-8905-67669c6b90d4?s...

Here's "a religious folk song that is also a valid COBOL program, without any English words": https://suno.com/song/b75aae68-9c1e-46e5-94d4-8bc63387640e?s...

Here are some that aren't configuration files but just sound cool. Prompt was something like "Write a song about a technological dystopia where everyone can only speak BGP." https://suno.com/song/1866516b-e133-47a5-a0ac-23ccb36f81ab?s... . This one's probably a song about "network protocols and their pros and cons": https://suno.com/song/23584394-7058-4bc1-8187-b3d286d36ec4?s...

And while I'm looking at my Suno outputs list, the reason I ever bothered to use it was to see if it could render these lyrics as a ripoff of "Pure Imagination" from Willy Wonka (it cannot because it only makes actual music): https://suno.com/song/19d1a90d-9ed6-4087-94e5-89e41363726e?s...

(I'm assuming that you can open these pages just by having the links. Some of them are set to public visibility.)
by voidUpdate | 2025-04-11 14:50:40+00:00
Just to your point on vtubers, I agree that sometimes the software is a bit clunky, but my girlfriend was able to make herself an avatar and get it responding correctly quite easily. I had to help her with a couple of things, but that was mostly because she didn't know what she needed to look for. Plus, I think the final aim of this is different. VTubers, to me at least, are all about expressing yourself as something you want to be, not just... re-animating your own face? Not entirely sure what the purpose of this is
by npn | 2025-04-11 14:50:47+00:00
If you write some script that run for 30 minutes or so then Crystal is a great choice.

before using crystal I mostly used Ruby for scripting, but there were a lot of problems - the program often crashes after running a while due to typo/nil handling, causing a lot of time wasting - it was too slow for my case, which involving with dealing with large amount of data - doing things in parallel (fetching websites, parsing multiple files) is a lot of work, you need to use external gems for the task, and it is not always the way you want it to do

there is a lot of works spent on crystal to make it enjoyable, you almost never need external libraries to do stuffs. the standard library is big and helpful.
by sksxihve | 2025-04-11 14:51:15+00:00
I'd love to see a reproducible example of these tools producing something that is exceptional. Or a clear reproducible example of using them the right way.

I've used them some (sorry I didn't make detailed notes about my usage, probably used them wrong) but pretty much there are always subtle bugs that if I didn't know better I would have overlooked.

I don't doubt people find them useful, personally I'd rather spend my time learning about things that interest me instead of spending money learning how to prompt a machine to do something I can do myself that I also enjoy doing.

I think a lot of the disagreements on hn about this tech is that both sides are mostly on the extremes of either "it doesn't work and at and is pointless" or "it's amazing and makes me 100x more productive" and not much discussion about the mid-ground of it works for some stuff and knowing what stuff it works well on makes it useful but it won't solve all your problems.
by vdupras | 2025-04-11 14:51:32+00:00
Let me know when you find the matching hardware! I'll make it my official "canonical Dusk machine" :)

Most modern hardware is way too complex. Dusk uses a fraction of it, but still has to deal with spurious complexity.

Personally, my favorite 32-bit SBC so far is PC Engine's Alix board[1]. Sure, it has the ugly BIOS legacy, but is otherwise a very nice no-frills SBC. I just wish I bought one with a VGA adapter before it closed shop.

[1]: https://pcengines.ch/alix.htm
by keybored | 2025-04-11 14:51:35+00:00
I haven’t seen what this is about since it’s a video. But Torvalds hasn’t had much involvement in the Git project itself since (random cutoff) 2010 or earlier.

One example of a recent feature was `--date=human`. That patch was in fact taken across the finish line by another person, Stephen P. Smith. It doesn’t look like it links to where Torvalds posted it originally.

https://lore.kernel.org/git/20181231003150.8031-1-ischis2@co...
by numbsafari | 2025-04-11 14:51:48+00:00
I have completely soured on Dockerfiles. I view them as anathema.

The supposed "caching" of layers really doesn't work in practice unless you add a bunch of other infrastructure and third-party tooling to your build process. Getting truly incremental and reproducible layers into your build process is non-trivial, and the Dockerfile approach fails to take advantage of that work once you've done it.
by munificent | 2025-04-11 14:51:48+00:00
It's about two things:

1. Cutting costs on the other side.

Studios don't want to license content to Netflix now that they are direct competitors, so Netflix has fewer and fewer movies and shows that they didn't produce themselves. And they want to spend as little as possible on producing their own content.

That way they make as much profit from the subscriptions as they can.

2. Reducing the value of competitors.

They are competing for user time. They want you to spend as many minutes as possible on Netflix because any minute not spent their is a minute you might be spending on Hulu or Apple TV. At the end of the month when you decide that you can't afford that many streaming services and decide to cut one, you'll pick based on which one you use the most. They don't want that to be the other guy.
by Robotbeat | 2025-04-11 14:51:51+00:00
That’s fully consistent with the idea that there has to be some threshold for lead in food because it’s literally naturally occurring in the soil.

In fact, to fully avoid lead, you’d basically have to carefully grow food hydroponically. Certified Organic mineral fertilizers like basalt rock dust (which provide calcium, phosphorus, and potassium, etc) would obviously not be okay if you wanted to eliminate all lead, as basalt contains 7.5ppm lead, comparable to the average in the Earth’s crust.
by jodrellblank | 2025-04-11 14:52:09+00:00
> "I too long for different ways of interacting with a computer."

Like what?

People built chording/pen/handwriting/gesture/Kinect/Wiimotes/multitouch/mouse gesture/swipe gesture/joysticks/Griffin Powermate/3Dconnextion Spacemouse/motion tracking/eye tracking/voice recognition/etc. on current operating systems, what do you want in the way of interaction that couldn't be built with a current OS?
by lanfeust6 | 2025-04-11 14:52:19+00:00
The only context for my weakness being a strength is running operations or my own business, or high-level architecture. My preference is for not being detail-oriented, but I rally to do that when I have to, which is often when troubleshooting code. I have to break down the problem and simplify it, not just to be effective but to keep motivated.
by immibis | 2025-04-11 14:52:44+00:00
nginx supports four backend protocols out of the box: HTTP, FastCGI, SCGI, and static files.

Of these, if you get to pick one and the request isn't for a static file, SCGI is the obvious best choice.

You can also load extra plugin modules into nginx itself, of course, including one that puts a Lua interpreter inside nginx (mod_php-style).
by muzani | 2025-04-11 14:52:44+00:00
It was like the search engine era. Everyone threw money at everything and Google won. Looks like Cursor might be the next Google at this rate. But there's still other things to win at in the AI arena, so there's probably some FOMO.

I do believe there's room for segmentation on agents as well. Manus and ChatGPT Deep Research are fairly different and they likely access different sources. Grok seems to play mostly on social media and so on. I think companies need the kind of depth that Cursor has. GitHub tried to do a bit of everything and failed despite their resources.
by panki27 | 2025-04-11 14:52:47+00:00
Interesting thought, but highly dependant on the actual program. Let's assume it doesn't touch any files on disk (no opening sockets either). You would need to at least

1. Halt the process (SIGSTOP comes to mind)

2. Create a copy of the running program and /proc/$pid - which will also include memory and mmap details

3. Transfer everything to the other machine

4. Load memory, somehow spawn a spawn a new process with the info from /proc/$pid we saved, mmap the loaded memory into it

5. Continue the process on the new machine (SIGCONT)

Let me admit that I do not have the slightest clue how to achieve step 4. I wonder if a systemd namespace could make things easier.
by gruez | 2025-04-11 14:53:05+00:00
That's for determining whether someone can be naturalized, not whatever Trump's doing.

>One of the general requirements for naturalization is good moral character (GMC). GMC means character which measures up to the standards of average citizens of the community in which the applicant resides.[1] In general, an applicant must show that he or she has been and continues to be a person of GMC during the statutory period prior to filing and up to the time of the Oath of Allegiance.[2]

>The applicable naturalization provision under which the applicant files determines the period during which the applicant must demonstrate GMC.[3] The applicant’s conduct outside the GMC period may also impact whether he or she meets the GMC requirement.[4]
by DaanDeMeyer | 2025-04-11 14:53:07+00:00
Building the next update locally is slow because erofs has to compress the entirety of /usr on my rather old laptop and that takes a while.

Aside from that, I'm using flatpak for firefox and for some reason it takes absolutely forever (like > 15s) to start firefox on my machine, still need to look into why that happens.

Aside from those it's very usable. But of course it's running systemd from source so I'm not going to actually recommend anyone to run this who is not a systemd maintainer until we iron out the kinks.
by stormfather | 2025-04-11 14:53:20+00:00
Yeah but if you need features like Cloud Functions or SMS auth you have to give your credit card... with no spending limit... and the standard practice is to expose your firebase creds on the client... and their stated stance is its better to let you get attacked and then maybe waive the charges than to interrupt service to your site for a few hours... lol. Your recourse is to go viral on social media and get them to forgive the debt.

As a small dev firebase is horrifying.
by nottorp | 2025-04-11 14:53:53+00:00
How old? I'm old enough that my first Linux experience included a stack of floppy disks and recompiling a 0.9x kernel in late high school, and my first c++ program was done with Borland C++ 3.1. It never occured to me to look for a localized UI for either of them.

Older than that?
by whatnow37373 | 2025-04-11 14:53:55+00:00
When I see this list all I can think of is how all these things are just generic, abstract rules and have nothing to do with programming. This, of course, is my problem. I have a strange mental model of things.

I can't shake off the feeling we should be defining some clean sort of "business algebra" that can be used to describe these kind of notions in a proper closed form and can then be used to derive or generate the actual code in whatever paradigm you need. What we call code feels like a distraction.

I am wrong and strange. But thanks for the list, it's helpful and I see FP's points.
by stanisouce2 | 2025-04-11 14:54:10+00:00
That quote is more about the blunders of asking people what they want and expecting deep and innovative insights.

Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.

I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't mind.
by hedora | 2025-04-11 14:54:16+00:00
I don't understand the draw of Spotify. There's no network effect that I can see (even if it is built into your car, the other services have good experiences in your car too), everyone complains about it, they pay less per stream to artists than their competitors, and their library isn't any bigger than the competition. (It was smaller the last time I compared.)

On top of that, their recommendation algorithms are (were?) terrible compared to the other services (since then, they added more payola), and they're actively trying to burn down the last open corner of the internet (podcasts).

Also, the pricing is comparable, even if the other options feel more premium.

What am I missing?
by stanisouce2025 | 2025-04-11 14:54:22+00:00
That quote is more about the blunders of asking people what they want and expecting deep and innovative insights.

Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.

I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't mind.
by stanisouce2bag | 2025-04-11 14:55:03+00:00
That quote is more about the blunders of asking people what they want and expecting deep and innovative insights.

Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.

I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't mind.
by rtkwe | 2025-04-11 14:55:13+00:00
> And to what end, aren't many of these people already extremely wealthy?

When's the last time you heard a billionaire say, "I've got enough money I don't need to get any more" before they're very old and looking to burnish their image with charity work?! If they were the kind of person to be ok with more money than they could spend in 10 lifetimes they wouldn't be billionaires in the first place, at least not multibillionaires.