MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cess11 | 2025-04-24 11:53:56+00:00
At the Versailles court of the Louies there were constant parties and games, gambling and otherwise. It wasn't to bond or for fun, it was to keep the aristocracy too busy to threaten the dictatorship, as well as letting the king exert an immediate influence over them through a borderline insanity.

Infamously the first or second Versailles Louis, I forgot which, got very aggressive around the topic of toilet excretions, basically forcing aristocrats to try and handle being drunk and desperately needing both to piss and stay in his vicinity. The ceremony around the parties and the court in general over time got more and more intricate and maddening, causing the aristocracy to spend more and more resources on getting clothes and drinks and showing up at the right time and doing the right thing and being on top of the fashion of the day.

It would be weird if a late modern corporate dictator didn't apply similar tactics, since they are known to work and didn't come to an end until the guillotines rolled into town. Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
by gedy | 2025-04-24 11:54:05+00:00
> You have pretty much a minute or two (if that) to bye a sentence to a couple chats, and it's over. Done.

When remote in this situation, I've shut off wifi and hard powered down right after meeting before they try and remote wipe.

I enjoyed making them squirm while I take a few weeks to mail back equipment, while receiving increasingly urgent emails.

Pointless I know, but was fun.
by lordnacho | 2025-04-24 11:54:43+00:00
You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success.

So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.
by arjonagelhout | 2025-04-24 11:55:12+00:00
Speaking as a person who can’t see themselves stop working, I think an important factor is how one derives meaning from their life. For some it might be living amazing experiences, and for others it can be in helping others (which could qualify as work). The healthiest seems to be a combination of the two, with a different ratio depending on the person.

Here in the Netherlands it’s common to see retired people do volunteering work, as it can bring great pleasure and satisfaction to help people. There’s of course also the communal aspect of it.

It’s also common to see business owners for example in family businesses to keep working at the company after the official retirement age.

So I’d argue work does not have to be a chore and can be a source of meaning and purpose. But if it is just a means to an end, it makes sense to not want to work your entire life and good labor and retirement laws should protect people from having to work their entire life.
by ablob | 2025-04-24 11:55:44+00:00
Funny enough, I believe that there are quite a lot of tutorials and that itself is the issue. Everyone wants to make their own since they deem the others to be bad and then a new subpar tutorial is created, making it even more difficult to find the few helpful articles. This ends up becoming a vicious cycle.

In the end I find comparing vim to something like snowboarding or skateboarding intriguing. It doesn't matter how much you explain it, it won't be enough. You just have to try it out for yourself and see if you can get the hang of it. Once that initial step is done, that's when reading about all the intricacies becomes useful.
by ang_cire | 2025-04-24 11:55:51+00:00
> most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could.

I saw your objections to other comments on the basis of them seemingly not having a disdainful attitude towards coding they do for work, specifically.

I absolutely do have tasks, coding included, that I don't want to do, and find no joy in. If I can have my manager assign the task to someone else, great! But using an LLM isn't that, so I'm still on the hook for ensuring all the most boring parts of that task (bugfixing, reworks, integration, tests, etc) get done.

My experience with LLMs is that they simply shift the division of time away from coding, and towards all the other bits.

And it can't possibly just be about prompting. How many hundreds of lines of prompting would you need to get an LLM to understand your coding conventions, security baselines, documentation reqs, logging, tests, allowed libraries, OSS license restrictions (i.e. disallowed libraries), etc? Or are you just refactoring for all that afterwards?

Maybe you work somewhere that doesn't require that level of rigor, but that doesn't strike me as a good thing to be entrenching in the industry by increasing coders' reliance on LLMs.
by tuetuopay | 2025-04-24 11:56:07+00:00
Thanks for the warning!

I find it sad that a whole article can be dismissed due to where it is published. By itself, it is completely fine and blasts already open doors to the HN crowd, but I like its concise wording and how it phrases some points, like the one about GMail.

Though it is quite interesting that such a privacy stance on "I have nothing to hide" comes in an allegedly neo-nazi paper, knowing this is the mindset that led so many people to be tracked by nazis. People knowingly went to nazi census. I find it quite ironic.

EDIT: verbatim copy of https://www.ludlowinstitute.org/articles/what-i-wish-i-knew-.... @dang perhaps?
by falcor84 | 2025-04-24 11:56:07+00:00
I can't help but feel that MCP and AI in general are where the web was in the late 90s. People and companies built silly websites that sometimes weren't more than just digital billboards, and things were definitely a bit overhyped (especially on the investment side), but if anything, they were underhyped in terms of how having an effective digital presence became even more crucial than it seemed in the 90s.
by hnbad | 2025-04-24 11:56:08+00:00
A rover is expendable, a human much less so. The PR cost of having a human smash into the surface of Mars the way it happened with a rover would easily outweigh the PR boost of having a human successfully land on Mars. And even if we managed to actually land someone, they'd most likely die there before we could bring them back.

A rover runs mostly on solar power. Humans need breathable air, food, potable water, medical supplies, stable temperatures, radiation shielding, etc etc just to survive, let alone actually do anything. Unlike sunshine, Mars has none of those things. And if any of them fail, your human rover would quickly go kaput.

It seems far more reasonable to use automation to build a livable outpost before sending a human there - especially because a human is going to need that outpost to survive anyway. So even if we want to send people to Mars eventually, automation would be step one.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-24 11:56:27+00:00
> "I can't wait until I'm 50 and I can finally start doing all those things".

I had an uncle pass last year and he was only 30 years older than me. He had already retired and a multi-millionaire in assets. Yet my aunt refused to retire because of a high paying job with little actual work. She kept working.

When he passed, the family asked me to put together a montage video and shared their photos with me spanning his lifetime. The moments when he was the happiest seemed to be when they were traveling together. As students, as parents, as a couple after my cousins had graduated and started their own lives.

In those last years, he was "waiting" for my aunt to be ready and it felt sad that he didn't get to travel more because my aunt thought more about the money than the short lifetime they had left. His passing was like a wake up call of sorts; a reminder that life is shorter than anyone can expect. It's very hard to convey this in words until one experiences this first hand and feels the shock.

More recently in my own travels, I've realized the same as you: that traveling in your youth makes much more sense than traveling in your "golden" years. You have greater mobility, more energy, less ailments. 20's and 30's are prime for exploring the world. Work will always be there!
by agubelu | 2025-04-24 11:57:06+00:00
I dislike the word "loyalty" when talking about employment. Loyalty is for your spouse, friends and family. Your relationship with your employer is a contractual one.

When it comes to my job, I believe in doing your best possible work, being professional and acting in good faith. I expect to be paid fairly and treated with respect. If this relationship is mutually beneficial, it can go on for a long while. But it's important to remember that, as soon as it stops being beneficial to one party, it will be unilaterally rescinded.
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by pdimitar | 2025-04-24 11:57:41+00:00
Ah, I absolutely don't verify code in the mathematical sense of the word. More like utilize strong static typing (or hints / linters in weaker typed languages) and write a lot of tests.

Nothing is truly 100% safe or free of bugs. What I meant with my comment up-thread was that I have enough experience to have a fairly quick and critical eye of code, and that has saved my skin many times.
by benterix | 2025-04-24 11:58:13+00:00
I had a conversation with one of these types. He honestly told me, "I really feel I am superior to most people". He was very frank with me. (And, in the things he did, he was actually much better than most people - he did have great talent but also spend almost all of his time on that.)

So my pet peeve theory is when they feel they are not superior and other people are better than them in activities that involve logical thinking for example, they feel extremely uncomfortable as their perception of themselves gets weaker, hence these strange behaviors.
by Apocryphon | 2025-04-24 11:59:24+00:00
idk, while trite, the bulleted list is full of common sense that’s all too easily forgotten:

> * Do not sacrifice your relationship with family and friends to appease your employer.

* Do not sacrifice your mental wellbeing to appease your employer.

* Do not sacrifice your dignity, values, and ethics to appease your employer.

* Do not buy into the bullshit hype of “hustle” to appease your employer.
by sam-cop-vimes | 2025-04-24 11:59:40+00:00
This is a disappointing take on the state of affairs. The book is trying to say the execs couldn't care less about the harm their platform was causing. This is not about "screwing up" inadvertently. This is about prioritising money over everything else.

Yes, individuals have the power to change the world. Some of them in positive ways and some in horrific ways. By all accounts, Zuck and the top execs at FB firmly belong in the latter category.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-04-24 12:00:10+00:00
I don't want a "European Microsoft", or to build an equivalent of Google, but in the EU. The whole idea of "one huge organisation to meet all your IT needs" is exactly what I dislike about that model. In fact, replacing these US organisations with EU-based equivalents is no more than nationalism without any realistic change.

I want to see an ecosystem where small businesses and organisations can thrive in the IT space, just like they do in the offline space.

To provide an analogy for this: a lot of areas in the US have only a huge Walmart where people do ALL their shopping. In NL we don't have a "Dutch Walmart"; instead each neighbourhood has a bakery, a fish shop, a cheese shop, etc. Cities are full or small restaurants and bars. Many of all these shops are operated by their owners.

I want to see the same in the IT space.
by cess11 | 2025-04-24 12:00:23+00:00
There is no separation. Nordic Times is owned and run by the same corporation, Aeon Media Group AB. You'll find that Isac Boman on the board is also the editor of Nya Dagbladet.

Why the Ludlow Institute has decided to cooperate with neo-fascists is something you'd have to ask them about, but these people have decades of experience in masquerading as press when they're really not. Here's an example of green party student activists falling for it:

https://tidningensyre.se/2022/14-oktober-2022/grona-studente...

The contents of the article aren't interesting. You don't invite fascists in because they happen to have a point or act politely occasionally.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-24 12:00:50+00:00
"Work" here I would define as exchanging time for money.

Volunteering is not work.

For me personally, I make a distinction between "working" and "creating". I will always want to create (a very broad term), but I will not always want to work. In fact, I don't want to work now; I only want to create. The best is when I can exchange my creation for money -- then it is no longer work.
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-24 12:01:01+00:00
> People will say they only want content from friends

I actually don't want content from friends, at least not in the way Facebook presented it before becoming another TikTok.

Facebook showed me the worst of my friends: polarizing political opinions, viral marketing, etc... These come from really nice people in real life, but it looks like Facebook is trying its best to make me hate my friends, it almost succeeded at one point. Thankfully, we met some time later, didn't talk about all the crap he posted on Facebook, it and was all fine.

I'd rather hate on public personalities and other "influencers", at least, no friendship is harmed doing that.

The only thing I miss about Facebook is the "event" part. If you want to invite some friends for a party, you could just create an event and because almost everyone was on Facebook, it made knowing who came and who didn't, who brings what, etc...
by diggan | 2025-04-24 12:02:06+00:00
> No. You need a research lab, compute time and talent to train LLMs.

Right, but even if you had those, could you actually train a Llama model from scratch? You'd still have a lot of work in front of you, compared to a "regular" open source project where you have everything available already, download the source and hit "compile" and you have it done.
by nottorp | 2025-04-24 12:02:13+00:00
Missed it, but I think you're thinking of something easy like separate credit card bills by bank and all into their own parent folder.

I've had multiple times email exchanges discussing status and needs of multiple projects in the same email. Tiny organization, everyone does everything.

Headers are useless. Keywords are also probably useless by themselves, I've even been involved in simultaneous projects involving linux builds for the same SoC but on different boards.

I want an "AI" that i can use to distinguish stuff like that.
by hermitcrab | 2025-04-24 12:02:14+00:00
>Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.

That sounds more like a cult than a company.

I don't understand why anyone would put up with that, if they had any other alternative. And most people do have alternatives.
by klabb3 | 2025-04-24 12:02:46+00:00
It’s part of the pathology. So much so it’s violating otherwise core tenets of their culture and customs:

Look, today meritocracy and brutal honesty are absolutes, they’re considered critical, exactly to overcome biases that stand in your way. The Zuck types are 100% believers in this (heck they accelerated it), yet they still need positive affirmations like winning board games.

Most people (especially smart and opportunistic ones) fold because they know winning a private board game means nothing.
by hnbad | 2025-04-24 12:02:50+00:00
Remember that the quote is coming from the same guy who has been promising FSD for years and hasn't come any closer to delivering it because it turns out that the devil is in the details. Elon Musk allegedly has a photographic memory that allows him to commit entire science books to memory but he apparently fails to appreciate real-world complexity. Even if you would want to give him credit for being a hype man, ideas guy, visionary, whatever, it's pretty obvious that he doesn't concern himself with the nitty gritty of every step of the way and he also doesn't seem to actually conceptualize them.

It's very much like the reasoning problem many of us software developers face: because we're used to working in extremely complex business domains without having actual real-world domain expertise, we overestimate our understanding of those domains and thus underestimate the complexity of various domains in general. We look at problems, recognize patterns we're familiar with and think the problem is trivial to solve. Hence "second system syndrome" and all that - even when looking at software we underestimate the complexity because we see the general structure and mistake the complexity for cruft.
by rottc0dd | 2025-04-24 12:03:13+00:00
Excuse me for generalizing the point. That's not fair to do just based on these anecdotes. But, I can also understand their perspective.

Paul continued to be a guitar player all his life and hosted jamming sessions in his home. I started with piano very late in my life and not very regular, but I am just happy to join the fun party.
Show HN: An AI agent in Obsidian that can (sort of) write plugins
by iansinnott | 2025-04-24 12:03:22+00:00
This is a plugin for Obsidian [1] that can extend Obsidian with custom functionality.

There's a demo video in the readme.

Why?

Obsidian is a note taking app with tons of extensions. Even so, there must be hyper-niche use cases that aren't being served by any existing extension. LLMs are decent at coding though, so maybe an LLM can write custom functionality on demand.

That's the experiment, to see if you can customize your notes app simply by asking the LLM.

The obvious caveat is that the plugin is only as good as the LLM driving it. I've been very pleasantly surprised by how capable Sonnet 3.7 is at writing Obsidian code (without examples). However, even so, it is far from perfect.

Is this useful?

It's _interesting_, but I'm not sure yet how useful it is. The AI doesn't always succeed, and the combination of prompt + model will make or break the experience.

I'm looking to get feedback.

Broadly speaking I'd love to see more software that could be customized to meet extremely specific user needs.

[1]: https://obsidian.md/
by diggan | 2025-04-24 12:03:57+00:00
I think you've kind of answered a different question. Yes, more LLM models could be created. But specifically Llama? Since it's an open source model, the assumption is that we could (given access to the same compute of course) train one from scratch ourselves, just like we can build our own binaries of open source software.

But this obviously isn't true for Llama, hence the uncertainty if Llama even is open source in the first place. If we cannot create something ourselves (again, given access to compute), how could it possibly be considered open source by anyone?
by paulcole | 2025-04-24 12:03:59+00:00
Maybe the person just doesn’t care about swimming with whales or having friends? Does everybody really think the dense Amazon jungle is neat?

You’re projecting what you think makes life worth living onto someone else.

Can you really not imagine that for another person working is what they love as much as you seem to love climbing snowy mountains?

> Life is too short

I agree with this. It’s too short to think about how someone else is spending theirs.
by exceptione | 2025-04-24 12:04:33+00:00
Maybe it was the US that wanted it under their own control, and could enforce that via the soft-power it had. :)

Anyways, I have to agree with the others: this is not the real issue. If you wanted to change the governance on that point, you can transition these things orderly.

Like Doge, the messaging is to hide the real intentions. It doesn't take much effort to see that the actions do not really match with the messages, but if the media would not even do that bit of analysis and would not bring the disconnect front and center, then yeah, it is a winning strategy.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-04-24 12:04:52+00:00
I'm fairly certain the rate of increase has been higher, whether you mean in percentage or absolute terms.

It could be a decade long blip but since we've peaked per capita and various large nations have peaked and we have extensive research on what the causes are and active programs to mitigate those it's probably more reasonable to say that CO2 (and Greenhouse gasses generally) are growing but at a slower rate with some credible hope to reverse that growth.

Don't get me wrong it is fucked up that we partly squandered a few decades and let it get this far and things could still go badly wrong but we have enough data that we can stick to the scary facts.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-04-24 12:04:59+00:00
> that their structure and ownership posed a threat to US interests.

This is pretty much as vague as it gets "they're doing _something_ wrong".

The exact behaviour that is prohibited needs to be codified into law. Then you can go after organisations what break such law.

In this case, they've just been found guilty of an unwritten crime.

> If anything the surprising thing is how lenient western governments tend to be towards foreign corporations

Corporations in general rather. I do agree that we should be stricter of foreign corporations, and on non-foreign ones equally so.
by alex1138 | 2025-04-24 12:05:38+00:00
The fact that the old system would ban people for completely absurd reasons (including covid "misinformation" that all turned out to be true, but not exclusively that) and one thing Musk did do is put a stop to some of that

I'm fully willing to listen to all the arguments that he's actually a horrible person but I don't see how people feel that part of it wasn't necessary to fix
by xtiansimon | 2025-04-24 12:05:52+00:00
> “It used to be a peaceful, well presented, personally curated stream of still photos.”

Ha! This is the opposite of my experience. I feel Tumblr was superior platform for images and art on small phone for no other reason than you can easily pinch and zoom. I still prefer still images on the Tumblr platform, and my feed is filled with artists, designers, photographers and comic book covers.

I never liked the experience of viewing stills on Instagram and only when my friend started producing small videos and another friend started sending me fishing meme videos, did I start engaging. Now I do spend some time each week in Instagram (same as YouTube shorts). The platform is perfect for sharing small instructional videos. My feed is full of motorcycle mechanics hacks, fly fishing lessons, fitness instructions, and camping knots—all to my recreational interests—I’d rather be fishing.