MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bayindirh | 2025-04-08 20:50:07+00:00
I use Kagi exclusively and refuse to offload my brain to a thing which has no accuracy guarantee ever. The emitted answers to the queries it has given can be completely bogus, and developers of these things low key expect me to believe what their black box say? Nah, never.

Instead I use a search engine and do my own reading and filtering. This way I learn what I'm researching, too, so I don't fall into the vicious cycle of drug abu ^H^H^H^H^H laziness. Otherwise I'll inevitably rely more on more on that thing, and be a prisoner of my own doing by increasingly offloading my tasks to a black box and be dependent on it.
by nineplay | 2025-04-08 20:50:15+00:00
The 'no fruit juice' thing really got on my nerves when my kids were little since people just throw it out with no qualifications. So really, if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup I can't give it to my kid because fruit = sugar = bad? It's such a reductionist way to look at food and nutrition.

I also recently had a PT tell me that blending fruit into smoothies removes all the nutritional value, which is why no one should get nutritional advice heath professionals who are not nutritionists.
by mcphage | 2025-04-08 20:50:21+00:00
> Cyc grew to contain approximately 30 million assertions at a cost of $200 million and 2,000 person-years. Yet despite Lenat’s repeated predictions of imminent breakthrough, it never came.

That seems like pretty small potatoes compared to how much has been spent on LLMs these days.

Or to put it another way: if global funding for LLM development had been capped at $200m, how many of them would even exist?
by keybored | 2025-04-08 20:50:51+00:00
I should gather my thoughts and focus my statement now that I recalled why I made it to begin with. I was really mostly curious specifically why you were so certain about the “lifetime of propaganda” and what it can do to the mind. Being a closed society we don’t have access to North Koreans to just talk to. You have defectors who are outliers. Secondly, taking the statement about the propaganda at face value, the next problem is what it does to the mind. Because we can’t point to people praising “the dear leader” or whatever in public as proof of the inner life of someone. If they live in such an authoritarian hellhole then they will have to say that just to survive. So is it a lifetime of propaganda? Or are they just getting by?

The next point would be juxtapose the lifetime of propaganda with your complete and unwavering certainty about the state of mind in the hermit kingdom, but you don’t seem quite ready for that.

Now to your reply here. There’s too many muddied points, too many strawmen to go into in detail without boring you in turn. So I won’t. But notice that I haven’t even defended North Korea. In fact one of the points I made was how they will sheepherd tourists. My comment was 80% epistemological, as you say. And your response? Talking about “the Utopia” of the DMZ? Oh wait, that’s exactly the phrase you brought up to someone else[1] and they too never ever said that North Korea was a great place to live (only that the narrative was “racist”).

So why go into these epistemological sleep study sessions? Because as evidenced by the conversation in [2], you (but also serving as an example because this is far from unique) will dismiss people who question the narrative of the OP, namely “The FBI reported the money funds nuclear weapons and operations”. This is perfectly germane to the topic: is this a thing of concern or is it a convenient narrative? You dismiss that as a “conspiracy” in your reply and waffle on about “sure, other countries do bad things, but NK worse”. Your dismissal has got nothing to do with the topic, though. The topic is not if NK is a fantastic place to live, a “utopia” or whatever. The topic is if they did something that other countries don’t do.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43618677

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43618503
by mathgeek | 2025-04-08 20:50:58+00:00
They didn’t say what to wear, they said a vague what not to wear. Almost all interviews at that point in time expected attire a step above your intended position. I personally think it was just a silly test of whether you already know what they expect. “You are a great hire but you dressed too nicely for the interview” is certainly a thing that I chuckle at.
by wqaatwt | 2025-04-08 20:51:33+00:00
Outright lies? Perhaps but even then it’s not clear if it meets the legal definition in all cases.

Exaggerating, misinterpreting the requirements and not telling the full story with all the details? Well that’s entirely subjective.

> under false pretenses

Like if a person has only has 2 years of professional experience in tech X but the job ad required 5 and he didn’t explicitly declare that during the interview without being bc prompted?

Or claiming that he has experience with technology Y (but it’s non-“professional” experience since he learnt it pn his own and again.. didn’t disclose that during the interview?

Even if that person turns out to be great at his job and you somehow find out he wasn’t 100% honest about some finer points in the interview (who tracks or remembers that stuff anyway?) you’d still feel the same way?
by dijksterhuis | 2025-04-08 20:51:33+00:00
Not GP.

Alt + Tab > Ctrl + T > Type > Enter > PgDn > Click > PgDn > Alt + Left > Click > PgDn > Alt + Left > Click > PgDn > Alt + Tab > [Another 45-60 minutes coding] > GOTO Start

With these keybinds (plus clicking mouse, yuck) I can read Nx sources of information around a topic.

I'm always looking to read around the topic. I don't stop at the first result. I always want to read multiple sources to (a) confirm that's the standard approach (b) if not, are there other approaches that might be suitable (c) is there anything else that I'm not aware of yet. I don't want the first answer. I want all the answers, then I want to make my own choices about what fits with the codebase that I am writing or the problem domain that I'm working in.

Due to muscle memory, the first four/five steps i can do in like one or two seconds. Sometimes less.

Switching to the browser puts my brain into "absorb new information" mode, which is a different skill to "do what IDE tells me to do". Because, as a software engineer, my job is to learn about the problem domain and come up with appropriate solutions given known constraints -- not to blindly write whatever code I'm first exposed to by my IDE. I don't work in an "IDE context". I work in a "solving problems with software context".

==

So I agree with the GP. A lot of posts I see about people saying "why not just use LLM" seem to be driven by a motivation for convenience. Or, more accurately, unconsidered/blind laziness.

It's okay to be lazy. But be smart lazy. Think and work hard about how to be lazy effectively.
by taeric | 2025-04-08 20:51:52+00:00
I think the main difficulty is that it is a paragraph level optimization and not a line one. Right? Otherwise, it seems like you can probably get pretty far by defining a metric that looks at connected whitespace sections between lines? With higher penalty for connected space between words that has been stretched. (That is, if you have space between some words expanded to make them pretty at the edge, those will be more visible as rivers if they are stacked?)

And, yes, there are some concerns that are done at the line level that could lead to a paragraph getting reworked. Ending with a single word, is an easy example. That is still something where you can evaluate it at the line level easily.
by fngjdflmdflg | 2025-04-08 20:52:26+00:00
>The purpose of pretty, as designed by the CSS Working Group, is for each browser to do what it can to improve how text wraps. [...] There is no mandate for every browser to make the same choices. In fact, a browser team might decide in 2025 to handle some aspects of improving these qualities, and then change what their implementation does in the future. [...] Because of the way Chrome’s implementation of pretty has been taught, a lot of web developers expect this value is only supposed to prevent short last lines. But that was never the intention.

Why did they even design it like this in the first place? This seems like it is counter to much of what browsers have been doing recently like being able to customize select, the browser interop and baseline projects, web platform test etc. I would rather move away from these types of features in favor of more explicit ones. I understand that this isn't a serious issue and is unlikely to cause bugs compared to other interop issues which are true deviations from the spec. It just seems counterintuitive to do this though.
by Animats | 2025-04-08 20:52:57+00:00
Cyc is going great, according to the web site. "The Next Generation of Enterprise AI"[1]

Lenat himself died in 2023. Despite this, he is listed as the only member of the "leadership team".[2]

[1] https://cyc.com/

[2] https://cyc.com/leadership-team/
by sillywalk | 2025-04-08 20:53:49+00:00
"Originally, we were targeting NT to the Intel i860 (code-named 'N-Ten)', a RISC processor that was horribly behind schedule. Because we didn't have any i860 machines in-house to test on, we used an i860 simulator. That's why we called it NT, because it worked on the 'N-Ten.'"

-- Mark Lucovsky

Distinguished Engineer, Windows Server Architect

https://web.archive.org/web/20110720042038/http://www.winsup...
by colechristensen | 2025-04-08 20:54:50+00:00
>I also recently had a PT tell me that blending fruit into smoothies removes all the nutritional value, which is why no one should get nutritional advice heath professionals who are not nutritionists.

I'd just suggest nobody get nutritional advice. Really so much of it is just nonsense and there's no good advice in my opinion outside "eat a variety of food in moderation" unless you have specific health problems. If a health professional told me that blending fruit into smoothies removes nutritional value I'd make it a point to try to get them fired. (I have gotten healthcare professionals fired, but for more serious stupid statements)
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-08 20:55:33+00:00
The straw man is yours. No claim of entitlement was made. A scenario was provided that appears to refute your unconditional assertion that using this technology actively harms creative labor.

You've presented all sorts of wild assumptions and generalizations about the people who don't share your vehement opposition to the use of this technology. I don't think it's the person you're responding to with the implicit bias.

You've conflated theft with piracy (all too common) and assumed a priori that training a model on publicly available data constitutes such. Do you really expect people to blindly adopt your ideological views if you just state them forcefully enough?

> If using AI is okay for the creative labor, why shouldn't the students also use it for the programming too?

They absolutely should! At least provided it does the job well enough.

Unless they are taking a class whose point is to learn to program yourself (ie the game is just a means to an end). Similar to how you might be forbidden to use certain advanced calculator features in a math class. If you enroll in an art class and then just prompt GPT that likely defeats the purpose.
by timcobb | 2025-04-08 20:56:01+00:00
> So really, if I cut up some oranges and squeeze the juice into a cup I can't give it to my kid because fruit = sugar = bad? It's such a reductionist way to look at food and nutrition.

Sorta? It's not bad, right? But it has not much nutritional value, and spikes their glycemic index, which is probably fine but... why? I guess it does taste good...
by keybored | 2025-04-08 20:56:12+00:00
You’re comparing politicans to regular people. Politicans have a vested interest in saying very specific things (in public) in order to maintain their myriad of alliances. Regular people that you accost in the street can say whatever they like, lie if it is convenient, if it furthers their own goals. Yes, Eastern Europeans have the ability to lie and aren’t bots programmed by Zelensky/Putin.[1]

[1] Not that they will necessarily believe or be on the same page as what the government says but we can stop here.
by rossdavidh | 2025-04-08 20:56:16+00:00
I use ChatGPT only occasionally, mostly for laughs, but primarily use Google. It's not as good as it used to be, but it is still the best available. I think there is an opening for a new search engine company now (unlike 10 years ago when Google was unbeatable), and I suppose LLM's might be a part of it. ChatGPT is not it, though.

Same with my wife (non-technical) and teenage daughter.
by hintymad | 2025-04-08 20:56:43+00:00
I like how Netflix set up its incentive systems years ago. Essentially they told the employees that all they needed to do is deliver what the company wanted. It was perfectly okay that an employee did their job and didn't move up or do more. Per their chief talent officer McCord, "a manager's job is all about setting the context" and the employees were let loose to deliver. This method puts a really high bar on the managers, as the entire report chain must know clearly what they want delivered. Their expectation must be high enough to move the company forward, but not too ridiculous to turn Netflix into a burnout factory.
by colechristensen | 2025-04-08 20:56:55+00:00
>Nobody was seriously arguing against fresh-squeezed juices (especially when served with the pulp).

Yes they are.

And when it comes down to it a little bit of fiber especially when something has been aggressively mashed up, doesn't make your orange juice all that different from a Mtn Dew. Fructose is fructose and no amount of magical extras is going to make that big of a difference on its metabolic effects.

I say that but I'm not advocating you to not drink juice. Just balance your inputs.
by mvdtnz | 2025-04-08 20:57:04+00:00
I used to work for a company called Xero that makes accounting software. We prided ourselves on making highly user-friendly "beautiful" accounting software. At the time we had a team (with the incredible name The Sniper Team) who were dedicated to hunting down and fixing small bugs, papercuts and UX issues. They had a tremendous positive effect on the codebase, the product and customer happiness.

I guess the concept wasn't paying off because the team was disbanded, as was the forum we used to communicate directly with our customers.
by timClicks | 2025-04-08 20:58:14+00:00
> The secretive nature of Cyc has multiple causes. Lenat personally did not release the source code of his PhD project or EURISKO, remained unimpressed with open source, and disliked academia as much as academia disliked him.

One thing that's not mentioned here, but something that I took away from Wolfram's obituary of Lenat (https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/09/remembering-doug...) was that Lenat was very easily distracted ("Could we somehow usefully connect [Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language] to CYC? ... But when I was at SXSW the next year Doug had something else he wanted to show me. It was a math education game.").

My armchair diagnosis is untreated ADHD. He might have had had discussing the internals of CYC on his todo list since its first prototype, but the draft was never ready.
by wqaatwt | 2025-04-08 20:58:20+00:00
> critical component of both medicine and rocket science

Do you know a lot people who ended up having to write software for rockets or medical devices after applying for a generic web development job?

> from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified

That’s all very nice. Unless you end up being that someone yourself.

> and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.

That’s highly debatable. It’s possible a lot of them did the same thing and unless you outright lied (instead of exaggerating etc.) and are still able to do the job is it really “deception”?

Anyway.. there is a lot of nuance and lying vs not lying is not even remotely a binary thing.
by rikthevik | 2025-04-08 20:58:37+00:00
I got a few months of free Kagi with a Pragmatic Engineer newsletter subscription and I'm enjoying it. It reminds me of old Google before it got polluted. Kagi can't do anything about the web itself being polluted, but the search experience is good. I use Gemini a lot as well.

I'm very disappointed in Apple that changing the default browser in Safari requires you to install a Safari extension. Super lame stuff.
by Venkatasurya | 2025-04-08 20:58:58+00:00
Location: Overland Park, Kansas, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Java, JavaScript,Spring, Spring Boot, React, Angular,HTML,CSS,UI/UX Design Principles,Microservices Architecture ,RESTful API,Docker, Kubernetes, AWS,PostgreSQL, SQL Server,MongoDB,Apache Kafka,JUnit, Selenium, Cucumber, TestNG, Test Automation, TDD, BDD,Git, IntelliJ, Maven,MS Office,Microsoft Teams,Windows, Linux.

Résumé/CV:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vfi7JY9KaKoCy15FVxSeB_y3WIc...

Email: kishorejambala@gmail.com

LinkedIn :https://www.linkedin.com/in/manikanta-kishore

I’m a Software Engineer with experience in Java, Spring Boot, Microservices, UI/UX Design, and API Development. Skilled in developing scalable applications, designing intuitive user interfaces, and deploying cloud-based solutions using Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS. Passionate about problem-solving, collaboration, and continuous learning in emerging technologies, I’m now seeking a Java Developer role where I can leverage my technical skills and contribute to the growth of the organization while advancing my career.
by Sharlin | 2025-04-08 20:59:09+00:00
Well, before desktop publishing, by phototypesetting [1], before that by hot-metal typesetting [2], before that, by hand. Nowadays, with software like Adobe InDesign, of if you happen to be a CS/math/physics nerd, with LaTeX, which has a famously high-quality layouting engine that utilizes the Knuth–Plass line-breaking algorithm [3]. Indeed it's fairly well known that Donald Knuth created TeX because he wasn't happy with the phototypeset proofs he received in 1977 for the second edition of The Art of Computer Programming, finding them inferior compared to the hot-metal typeset first edition.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototypesetting

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_metal_typesetting

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%E2%80%93Plass_line-break...
by Hikikomori | 2025-04-08 20:59:28+00:00
Because vanilla flowlogs that you get from VPC/TGW are nearly useless outside the most basic use cases. All you get is how many bytes and which tcp flags were seen per connection per 10 minutes. Then you need to attribute ip addresses to actual resources yourself separately, which isn't simple when you have containers or k8s service networking.

Doing it with eBPF on end hosts you can get the same data, but you can attribute it directly as you know which container it originates from, snoop dns, then you can get extremely useful metrics like per tcp connection ack delay and retransmissions, etc.

AWS recently released Cloudwatch Network Monitoring that also uses an agent with eBPF, but its almost like a children's toy compared to something like Datadog NPM. I was working on a solution similar to Netflix's when NPM was released, was no point after that.
by JaggedJax | 2025-04-08 20:59:33+00:00
I feel like your game could fit into a similar bracket format where everything is displayed on one page. I don't know how the UI of selecting emojis would work there though.

It took me longer than it should have to realize the last puzzle was made up of all my previous answers.

Spoiler: I also failed miserably at the last puzzle since I was thinking watergun and not gun so I thought it was a firefighter. I also couldn't tell that one emoji was a jail so just sort of ignored it. So that's mostly on me for having trouble understanding some of the emojis.
by Flozzin | 2025-04-08 20:59:45+00:00
It's also about what you are avoiding. Its clearly a trade off, as you lay out. But then you are opening up another set of problems you will have to tackle. For the interviewer in the article, they prefer cameras.

It's not much different than choosing to interview people who will come into the office. Of course you are limiting yourself to people in the area. But employers know this.

Also, this idea that there is a single best candidate is rubbish. There are multiple candidates that are just as good as the next. And every person has their ups and downs, as well as trade offs. I also find it hard to believe that most employers are going to be able to tell the difference on such a fine scale as to not be able to choose certain limiting factors.
by abtinf | 2025-04-08 20:59:54+00:00
Pre-observable, I used d3 to develop a very complex visualization with real-time updates. It was difficult because d3 has a lot well-thought-out-but-complex concepts, but the docs and examples helped me fully understand how it worked, and the result turned out spectacular.

A few years later, I needed to build a simple novel visualization. A major new version of d3 had come out, and all the examples and documentation got Observable-ified.

Enough time had passed that I could only vaguely recall some of the original concepts, so I set out to re-learn. YMMV but, for me, it was impenetrable. With the limited time I had, I just couldn’t figure out how to untangle d3 from observable. I gave up. Very sad.
A Platform for Falsifiable Ideas and Rational Refutations
by petrusnonius | 2025-04-08 20:59:57+00:00
I’m building a small web app where users post falsifiable conjectures and others respond with refutations, inspired by Karl Popper’s idea that knowledge grows through bold claims and critical testing.

How it works (MVP): • Users submit a conjecture (e.g. “UBI reduces non-violent crime”). • Each conjecture must include clear falsification criteria — what would prove it wrong. • Others post refutations: counterexamples, critiques, or better hypotheses. • Conjectures can be revised in response to valid criticism. • Future features: prediction markets, citation formats, version histories.

Why I’m experimenting with this: • Most online platforms reward persuasion, not falsifiability. • Forecasting platforms (like Metaculus or Manifold) focus on probabilities, not explanations. • This is meant to support idea evolution, not just outcome prediction.

Early stage: Built with Rails 8 and TailwindCSS. Still private, just validating whether this concept is useful or pointless.

Looking for feedback on: • Would you use something like this? Why or why not? • Is this meaningfully different from a smart blog comment section? • What is the smallest useful version of this? • What would make this fail completely?

If you’re interested in trying it or think it’s a terrible idea, I’d genuinely appreciate your thoughts.
by infecto | 2025-04-08 21:00:04+00:00
You write a novel to say “we can’t really know,” then act like that’s some brave intellectual stance. It’s not. It’s just a way to dodge moral clarity.

Defectors are “outliers”? Of course they are—it’s a police state. That’s how tyranny works. You don’t get a representative sample when dissent gets you killed.

You’re not offering insight. You’re drowning basic truths in a flood of words to avoid saying anything with weight. At some point, skepticism becomes cowardice.

Say less. Mean more.
by Balgair | 2025-04-08 21:00:08+00:00
Pedantry Alert:

> The mantra is "nuclear" or "regional" organization in birds rather than layers in mammals, but the anatomy [0, Fig 4] and electrophysiology [1] abstract this out in similar patterns.

Marsupials too! Sort of.

Generally, marsupials are mostly close to other mammals in brain structure, but they do have a fair bit less layers and some nuclear structures.

Comparative neuroanatomy in vertebrates is, like, super interesting (to me at least). It really goes to show off evolution and how her pressure is really towards more babies - however that needs to be accomplished.