MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Where to Get the Matthew Prince College Thesis?
by max_ | 2025-04-01 06:19:18+00:00
Matthew (Founder & CEO of Cloudflare) also YC alum.

Mentioned in a post that his college thesis was about how "the internet was going to be a fad"[0].

How can I read it?

[0]: https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1906950501490741615
by jurschreuder | 2025-04-01 06:19:46+00:00
Also in my experience, but you have to take my word for it, C++ "feels" more mathematically correct than Python.

For me as an experienced developer Python has more undefined behaviour because it executes slightly different every time. The delays are different, threads work inconsistently.

It's a bit like the metaphor that our brain is so big with so many small rules that it feels like you have free will.

That's how Python feels. Somewhere in the millions of lines it generates there are bugs. I can sense it. Not enough to make it crash but they are there.
by wqaatwt | 2025-04-01 06:20:11+00:00
> fact-free, ad hominem rejoinder

At a certain point it becomes irrational to do anything else. When you know that the other side will entirely ignore all the facts that don’t fit their narrative and is inherently dishonest and hypocritical. Well.. it becomes a waste of time.

Also “fact-free, ad hominem” pretty much describes 95% of what is coming from a certain person’s mouth. Why would you have significantly higher standards for some random internet person?
by mattl | 2025-04-01 06:20:15+00:00
Because moving stuff takes time and with a small project like this who is going to setup the infrastructure for that?

Also SourceForge supports version control that isn’t git.

Pidgin has actually moved their source code to Mercurial so is using Sourceforge for binary releases.

https://docs.imfreedom.org/contributors-guide/mercurial/
by petesergeant | 2025-04-01 06:20:54+00:00
It depends what you mean by agent, first of all, but I’m going to assume you mean what I’ve called “narrow agency” here[0]: “[an LLM] that can _plan and execute_ tasks that happen outside the chat window“.

That humans make mistakes all the time is the reason we encode business logic in code and automate systems. An “if” statement is always going to be faster, more reliable, and have better observability than a human or LLM-based reasoning agent.

0: https://sgnt.ai/p/agentic-ai-bad-definitions/
by kilpikaarna | 2025-04-01 06:21:18+00:00
> Using Cursor, I felt like it was too easy to modify too many things in one go.

Same experience. It seems like it's just overloading the standard vscode UI, with no regard for what you're used to. Trying to press tab for what looks like a "normal" autocomplete will invoke the LLM autocomplete that will replace a bunch of lines somewhere else without you noticing. Terrible UX!

Modifications made by the chat interface are also hard to restrict to a specific part. Sure, you can give it context, but asking it to modify one thing (by highlighting a bunch of rows in a specific file and giving them as context) is likely to end up modifying a similar-looking thing somewhere else.

The potential is there with Cursor, but right now it's a mess for serious use. Waiting for editors that incorporate LLM-based autocomplete in a disciplined way where I'll actually feel like I'm the one in control. Maybe once the dumb hype around vibe coding dies down.
by Timon3 | 2025-04-01 06:22:33+00:00
If people cheat in a contest and you don't disqualify them, you give everyone an incentive to cheat: ideally they get away with not being found out, but even if they are found out their cheating can still have a positive RoI.

The only way to keep things fair is to exclude those who deliberately flaunt the rules, as is the case here.

But even aside from that, someone who deliberately breaks the rules isn't fit to enforce them.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-01 06:22:37+00:00
Are you prepared to give several Trump appointed judges prosecutorial discretion over who can run in the midterms and 2028?

The problem that prosecutorial discretion will have to overcome is selective enforcement, or the perception thereof. The right wing European media is claiming this was common practice across parties. Now I don't know the truth of it, but it is a hard thought to get out of ones head, and a hard negative to prove.

wrt Le Pen, I find it noteworthy that evey English news article I have read avoids describing the actual crime [1], Which does seem more substantial than 99% of the Trump cases.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2024/09/30/w...
by mcny | 2025-04-01 06:22:40+00:00
> 400 million weekly active users

I find it interesting that it doesn't say "paying" users. Also, I remember there was at least one time when the New York Times allegedly gave away newspapers to boost circulation numbers. If chat gpt does not require a log in and someone uses two different computers logged out on chat gpt at least once a month each, you could argue he is two people as far as the company is concerned?
by WhyIsItAlwaysHN | 2025-04-01 06:22:47+00:00
I worked like that for a year in uni because of RSI and it's very easy to get voice strain if you use your voice for coding like that. Many short commands is very tiring for the voice.

It's also hard to dictate code without a lot of these commands because it's very dense in information.

I hope something else will be the solution. Maybe LLMs being smart enough to guess the code out of a very short description and then a set of corrections.
by gloosx | 2025-04-01 06:22:50+00:00
I was trying to say that LLMs will not become more than what they are, especially since they are tools for profit in the modern system. It’s like an iPhone — the latest iPhone 16 Pro is, of course, better than the iPhone 3G, but conceptually, there is nothing new. The same goes for LLMs. In 15 years, we will probably have the same hallucinating LLM, just 10% thinner and 20% faster.

The tech industry, especially big corporations, doesn’t chase innovation; it chases repeatable, predictable profit.
by DeathArrow | 2025-04-01 06:22:57+00:00
>Prosecutors said Javice ended up paying a college friend $18,000 to create millions of fake names with pedigree information. The results were sent to JPMorgan’s third-party data provider, but testimony showed that firm never checked to ensure the people were real.

If someone tries to sell me something and I ask for proof, I would be very stupid not to check that evidence.

Why do big banks hire stupid people and let them lead large deals?
by spiderfarmer | 2025-04-01 06:23:38+00:00
I know there are a lot of Trump fans on this platform. Way more, or way more vocal, than during his first term.

How do they defend this clear abuse of power? Do they really think this policy is so bad it’s worth threatening foreign companies over? Why is this so important?

Is this what you voted for?

I won’t go on about the other news in the past 100 days, I just hope someone can explain this one to me.
by rdtsc | 2025-04-01 06:23:45+00:00
Danube delta the second largest river delta in Europe after Volga's delta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danube_Delta

Another interesting thing about it is there are villages of Russian Old Believers (Lipovans) there. A famous Romanian canoe racing Olympic medalist and coach, Ivan Patzaichin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Patzaichin is from there. He passed away just a few years ago.
by arkh | 2025-04-01 06:24:20+00:00
> fuzzy search

> I do NOT want search to become any fuzzier than it already is.

For a specialized shop site you may want it. Search term: "something 150", the client is looking for a 1.5m something, if you're doing an exact text search your search engine will give you a lot of noise. Or you'll have to fiddle with synonyms, dictionaries and how you index your products with a huge chance to break other types of search queries.
by mirzap | 2025-04-01 06:25:18+00:00
> 150,000 records — far past where JavaScript (and React) would crash with a stack overflow error

I think react-virtualized and stack tables can easily handle 1 million rows client-side without a problem (I saw the demo somewhere).

Web development is about convenience, and the speed of development is far more important than ultra optimizations. People simply don't care about super optimizations because servers are so fast these days, and bandwidth is cheap, almost free.

But it's an interesting project. Good luck.
by jiggawatts | 2025-04-01 06:25:31+00:00
> luckily avoided the issues you speak of

That may be a bit of an assumption. I've been perpetually surprised by expectation-versus-reality, especially in the database world where very few people publish comparative benchmarks because of the "DeWitt clause": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt

Additionally, a lot of modern DevOps abstractions are most decidedly not zero cost! Containers, Envoys, Ingress, API Management, etc... all add up rapidly, to the point where most applications can't utilise even 1/10th of one CPU core for a single user. The other 90% of the time is lost to networking overheads.

Similarly, the typical developers' concept of "fast" doesn't align with mine. My notion of "fast" is being able to pump nine billion bits per second through a 10 Gbps Ethernet link. I've had people argue until they're blue in the face that that is unrealistic.
by cess11 | 2025-04-01 06:26:20+00:00
This is such a weird and ahistorical view.

The jews in Egypt didn't have much problems with their neighbours until nazism and zionism arrived.

'The bad muslims mistreated the jews when they came under influence of german thought, typical muslims, a european would never'.

Jews lived in Morocco since the first century AD, with the exception of the Fez massacre in 1033, mainly in peace. It's where jews could find immediate refuge when the christians drove them out of al-Andalus. 1948 onwards there were anti-jewish riots in Morocco, in response to jews leaving to presumably take part in the zionist atrocities in Palestine and the state of Israel.

Today anti-jewish and anti-zionist sentiment in Morocco is typically tied into anti-monarchist views, the king is perceived to be a traitor and possibly controlled by some supposed jewish conspiracy. You'll find a rather clear expression of this in e.g. Ahmed Rami, the infamous exiled antisemite, who combines distinctly nazi antisemitism with a moroccan muslim nationalism.
by eszed | 2025-04-01 06:26:28+00:00
I was thinking of a maul, yeah. What I've spotted is NFL guys pushing with their hands on a teammate's back, instead of (like in rugby, or what the Eagles do) getting their shoulders against his ass or upper thighs, which gives more power and better leverage.

Good point about using different players, and I even think I've seen that a time or two. As for why not always do it, I'm only guessing, but there may be an inherent advantage in preserving the possibility that it won't be a "tush push" play (I mean, maybe not for the Eagles, because they're so good at it, but for other teams who aren't). Like, maybe it keeps the linebackers a step or two deeper and increases the likelihood of success; or, if they provoke a "tush push" defense that opens up a more-promising play then the QB is best placed to run the counter. I don't really know, though.
by kreetx | 2025-04-01 06:27:37+00:00
Stock bubbles pretty much are due to a promise for the future, i.e, innovation, what else do you think people would be buying?

Who are the many others succeeding at this scale? And it's not really mythologizing, it's just that the naysayers seem to not count his achievements to their proper size, yet they themselves probably have little to nothing to show for on that scale.
by pests | 2025-04-01 06:28:58+00:00
I do agree with you. This is an issue that I need to think more on before I decide my stance. My initial comment was my immediate reaction but I do agree this is a difficult and nuanced decision. Even reading the quotes you provided gave me a feeling of the amount of time and decision making that went into the law and the various guidelines.

On one hand, content creators need to be paid. On the other, users should be able to protect their privacy. In the case of news, all should be welcome to participate in their society.

Is there a limit in where providing data in compensation opposed to money makes sense? I wouldn't trade my data for the weather, they can get a zip code. On the other hand, I do trade my data to my financial institutions so they can do fraud checks. So we do exist on a spectrum of data intrusion and getting our needs met.

Is trading data for news closer to checking the weather or doing banking? In todays world, I would say access to news is important and if you can't pay with money, its okay to pay with data in order to be informed about the news.
by m463 | 2025-04-01 06:29:14+00:00
"the case against"

You know, doesn't matter what you say. If businesses want something, they'll do it to you whether it's the best interface or not.

Amazon forces "the rabble" into their chatbot customer service system, and hides access to people.

People get touchscreens in their car and fumble to turn on their fog lights or defrost in bad weather. They get voice assistant phone trees and angrily yell "operator and agent".

I really wish there were true competition that would let people choose what works for them.
by photonthug | 2025-04-01 06:29:52+00:00
It's not about what I believe, it's about what we already know. Computing is old enough now that you don't need to be some kind of mad prophet to know things about the future, because you can just look at how things have played out already.

More to the point though.. at the beginning at least, Stallman was a respected hacker and not just some random person pushing politics on a community he was barely involved with. It's gotta be that way I think, anyone who's not a respected AI/ML insider won't get far
by Certhas | 2025-04-01 06:31:13+00:00
Seriously, that's good to hear. I really often encounter arguments that seem heavily ideology driven.

Do you have some sources for operational requirements not making things safer? And as far as I know there are plenty of fusion concepts in the lab, but very few that have actually been explored at the full reactor scale. If you have any pointers on recent developments in that direction I would also be curious to take a look.

But then I also have to ask why nuclear? Why not methanation (or hydrogen if storage becomes feasible) and gas power plants or some more sophisticated version of that? That has much better complementarity to solar. And it typically is preferred to nuclear by energy system models wherever seasonality is strong.

Also I haven't really seen any proposals discussing long term waste storage. Again do you have any sources that discuss this?
by pndy | 2025-04-01 06:31:15+00:00
They rolled same thing for 18.4 on phones and tablet - I don't recall seeing post-update modal for enabling updates before.

Considering how Microsoft smuggled telemetry for W7 and W10 upgrade, its nagging modals under random KB patches and how Apple enabled "enhanced visual search" scanning photos not so long ago, this one should raise some concerns.
by mychael | 2025-04-01 06:31:46+00:00
> Mexico, Greenland, Canada

Nice try. We are not at war with these countries and not even close to it either. Trump is the most non-interventionist president of the last few decades. This is an empirical and historical fact.

> That doesn't make it align with classical liberal principles - especially when they discard the rule of law and do it as a dictator. Cutting government is an act of Congress, not the executive.

Obama in Executive Order 13576: "By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to cut waste, streamline Government operations, and reinforce the performance and management reform gains my Administration has achieved, it is hereby ordered as follows..."

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

> He is forcing them to abandon DEI and ESG;

Yes which is great - this is an example of reducing the size and scope of government. This amounted to less rules, smaller gov and undoing gov overreach. Again this is measurable and empirical action that proves a reduction in government power.

> extremes never before seen (freedom of speech)

There is a literally an EO on preventing online censorship. I'm not sure if you were in a Coma during Covid, but social media companies were censoring voices that have now shown to be entirely true.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/rest...
by DeathArrow | 2025-04-01 06:32:56+00:00
>I really like the idea of everyone having a permanent, fee-free bank account with the federal reserve. It can be zero interest as far as I'm concerned but it should be accessible to everyone regardless of criminal history.

This might be a great business ideas, starting a bank that caters to criminals. Of course, the fees should be pretty high to offset the risks.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-04-01 06:33:07+00:00
No, a pattern does not refer to changing the key of the scale.

A pattern is a way of playing a scale across the strings without having to move your hand. To play the same scale in the same key at a different position on the neck, the pattern of notes is different.

You have to learn 5 different patterns to be able to play a single pentatonic scale anywhere on the neck.

Obviously they all start at a different position if you want to use a different key - that is easy. Still 5 patterns to learn though just for that one scale.
by uecker | 2025-04-01 06:33:43+00:00
Clang now has "frozen poison" is because the original poison was essentially a flawed concept that lead to incorrect optimizations. I certainly do no think we should import this into the C standard.

I similar to the Microsoft guys inventing time-travel UB which lead to their compiler being broken. As a standard committee we need to push back against such nonsense instead of endorsing it. I am all for formalizing this stuff precisely though.
by incognito124 | 2025-04-01 06:33:49+00:00
> This also means we can do things aurally while still maintaining focus/attention on what we're doing visually, allowing a kind of multitasking.

Maybe you, but I most definitely cannot focus on different things aurally and visually. I never successfully listened to something in the background while doing something else. I can't even talk properly if I'm typing something on a computer.
by szszrk | 2025-04-01 06:34:28+00:00
Oh wow. That video is 12 years old. Early in the presentation Travis reveals he used Dragon back then.

Do you recall Swype keyboard for Android? The one that popularized swyping to write on touch screens? It had Dragon at some point.

IT WAS AMAZING.

Around 12-14 years ago (Android 2.3? Maybe 3?) I was able to easily dictate full long text messages and emails, in my native tongue, including punctuation and occasional slang or even word formation. I could dictate a decent long paragraph of text on the first try and not have to fix a single character.

It's 2025 and the closest I can find is a dictation app on my newest phone that uses online AI service, yet it's still not that great when it comes to punctuation and requires me to spit the whole paragraph at once, without taking a breath.

Is there anything equally effective for any of you nowadays? That actually works across the whole device?
by ChuckMcM | 2025-04-01 06:35:06+00:00
This clearly elucidated a number of things I've tried to explain to people who are so excited about "conversations" with computers. The example I've used (with varying levels of effectiveness) was to get someone to think about driving their car by only talking to it. Not a self driving car that does the driving for you, but telling it things like: turn, accelerate, stop, slow down, speed up, put on the blinker, turn off the blinker, etc. It would be annoying and painful and you couldn't talk to your passenger while you were "driving" because that might make the car do something weird. My point, and I think it was the author's as well, is that you aren't "conversing" with your computer, you are making it do what you want. There are simpler, faster, and more effective ways to do that then to talk at it with natural language.
by mirzap | 2025-04-01 06:36:20+00:00
It's American exceptionalism at its best. They believe America is subsidizing the world when, in fact, it is the other way around. The world is subsidizing the American lifestyle.

That's why you see China jumping onto the global stage and following exactly the same playbook that the USA did after World War II—building connections and trading partners, investing in other countries, and subsidizing them because they see it as a long-term investment that will benefit China far more in the future than what they invest now.
by DidYaWipe | 2025-04-01 06:37:04+00:00
Home runs are not "balls in play," though. So are we to go to a binary game, which amounts to whiffs or homers?

Also I don't think your assertion that batters have "fallen behind" pitchers holds up. Shohei Ohtani just became the first player to have 50 homers and 50 stolen bases.
by nmgycombinator | 2025-04-01 06:37:08+00:00
Fascinating perspective. I understand your point, and agree with it generally. I will point out though that this doesn't really have anything to do with Continuity or any "feature" per-se. It doesn't really have anything to do with "parental controls", that was just the daemon that was exploited. You don't have to have a "child" user account to be vulnerable to this. Every user account is vulnerable to it.
by anonzzzies | 2025-04-01 06:38:06+00:00
Seems not really or only partially anyway; I cannot see, with disasters like Fauna, that anyone would trust their core stuff with something not open source. But maybe it's just me. I need to be able to switch and sure, I can switch to the open source fork libSQL (open core I think, so nope) (which they are rewriting to Rust for some bizarre reason; sqlite is one of the most readable, robust and well tested codebases in the business so it looks like burning vc money, but whatever), but once my business depends on their offline / replication / etc, then I cannot switch to anything, so never going to happen.

Again, opinion. It's core infra, in my opinion at least that should never depend on others or, if the others inevitably screw you over for a few $, you need to be able to move without possibly bankrupting your company.
by BeetleB | 2025-04-01 06:38:20+00:00
Anything people ask a human to do instead of a computer.

Humans are not the most reliable. If you're ok giving the task to a human then you're ok with a lower level of relisbility than a traditional computer program gives.

Simple example: Notify me when a web page meaningfully changes and specify what the change is in big picture terms.

We have programs to do the first part: Detecting visual changes. But filtering out only meaningful changes and providing a verbal description? Takes a ton of expertise.

With MCP I expect that by the end of this year a nonprogrammer will be able to have an LLM do it using just plugins in a SW.
by SerCe | 2025-04-01 06:38:24+00:00
> Why is that quote in the piece? I don't get the analogy.

I liked the quote because what it conveys is that you can't control everything. You can't control the way people freak out about things on Twitter. You can't control an influx of new tools. But what you can control is the way you react to them – not giving in to the chaos, but instead approaching the changes with a cool head. And the Netflix show it's from, Midnight Gospel, is pretty good. I do agree that the house analogy could be better though.
by NicoJuicy | 2025-04-01 06:40:05+00:00
France and the UK have it despite the US not wanting it too.

Luckily!

> And Europe has an obligation to spend on its own defense

Yes, since the US wants to pivot to Asia. That's fairly recent on the timescale :)

> which they have not fulfilled in some time

Did you know the US, unlike the others, includes pensions as "military spending"? But yeah, now ... They will raise it to the required 2 % (which a lot already do)