MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-06 19:02:28+00:00
A second in command of the US military, Jim Mattis, during Trump's first term said:

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” Mattis writes. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort... I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.

If you are ideologically in the group that he used the military against on American soil, or you are in the half of the divided country that he doesn't see as his supporters, then the concept is even less ridiculous sounding, cogent even. He's effectively taken a government that represents a whole country and turned it into a government that only represents half of the country. When you realize that all he supports are American oligarchs who are international in nature the comparison starts to get more and more and more cogent.

These are two of the complaints of America's founding fathers against King George III written in the declaration of independence.

"For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:" "For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:"

The British government was the founding father's government.

As far a "acts of war" against their own citizens: Israel is Gaza's government and that blockade is so strong it is called an open air prison. Russia is fighting to be Ukraine's government. China is Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang's government.

In an authoritarian's government, it is not your government, it is only their government. Authoritarianism is in many ways a state of persistent war against people, which intuitively makes sense, because war is how you resolve disputes when negotiation doesn't work. War is the state of power alone resolving disputes, which is also what authoritarianism is.
by billyp-rva | 2025-04-06 19:02:30+00:00
> [T]here are ~basically~ no public benchmarks for security research... nothing that gets at the hard parts of application pentesting for LLMs, which are 1. Navigating a real repository of code too large to put in context, 2. Inferring a target application's security model, and 3. Understanding its implementation deeply enough to learn where that security model is broken.

A few months ago I looked at essentially this problem from a different angle (generating system diagrams from a codebase). My conclusion[0] was the same as here: LLMs really struggle to understand codebases in a holistic way, especially when it comes to the codebase's strategy and purpose. They therefore struggle to produce something meaningful from it like a security assessment or a system diagram.

[0] https://www.ilograph.com/blog/posts/diagrams-ai-can-and-cann...
by cbm-vic-20 | 2025-04-06 19:02:46+00:00
Asked for an Atari 2600 for Christmas, got a Commodore VIC-20 instead. Learned BASIC. Got the Programmer's Reference Guide and learned "machine code", learning by assembling by hand, POKEing it into memory, and SYSing to run it.

That book literally changed my life.
by sema4hacker | 2025-04-06 19:02:51+00:00
> ...whatever gains these companies are reporting to the public, they are not reflective of economic usefulness or generality.

I'm not surprised, because I don't expect pattern matching systems to grow into something more general and useful. I think LLM's are essentially running into the same limitations that the "expert systems" of the 1980's ran into.
by tekla | 2025-04-06 19:03:16+00:00
Holy shit, wow so untrue.

Special Relativity was accepted almost immediately (within 10 years) by the scientific community since it was so powerful and useful and correct when the community tested it.

General relativity took a longer time to be generally accepted since the sensitivity of the tests were mediocre for the time, but strong evidence of its correctness was already coming about within 25 years. The problem being it was hard to figure out which model was correct due to lack of accurate tests

Saying that the community rejected these theories is just ignorance.
by zamadatix | 2025-04-06 19:03:16+00:00
They do give the option in the settings for this reason but I think that's the best part about the mini specifically, it enables the daily leaderboards to work even for folks who's friend group doesn't sit down and do full Saturday level crosswords regularly. I think the midis/larges are a better balance if you're just looking for relaxing but short solo play and there I wouldn't really mind if the timer was off by default (or not, there is less competition at that point).
by cosmos0072 | 2025-04-06 19:03:20+00:00
For optimal speed, you should move as much code as possible outside the closures.

In particular, you should do the `switch op` at https://github.com/skx/simple-vm/blob/b3917aef0bd6c4178eed0c... outside the closure, and create a different, specialised closure for each case. Otherwise the "fast interpreter" may be almost as slow as a vanilla AST walker.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-04-06 19:03:29+00:00
Yup. If you had to point to the singular "bad guy" at Commodore, it was Irving. I interviewed with him when I was interviewing to be the CTO and recognized pretty quickly that he was the kind of executive that didn't like people who worked for him to be more competent than he was. Had a great discussion with a 4 star general who was friends with my Dad about people like that.
by CRConrad | 2025-04-06 19:04:06+00:00
> Improperly aligned incentives? Who gets to say what that is?

Anyone worth calling human.

> Is it "improper" to maximize profit per their own board's guidelines?

If to the exclusion of all else, then yes, wildly so.

> I have a feeling OP has some predefined notion of nobility they expect people to somehow operate under.

Having a set of values is what separates Man from (most of) the other animals.

HTH!
by flutas | 2025-04-06 19:04:24+00:00
FWIW 2.5-exp was the only one that managed to get a problem I asked it right, compared to Claude 3.7 and o1 (or any of the other free models in Cursor).

It was reverse engineering ~550MB of Hermes bytecode from a react native app, with each function split into a separate file for grep-ability and LLM compatibility.

The others would all start off right then quickly default to just greping randomly what they expected it to be, which failed quickly. 2.5 traced the function all the way back to the networking call and provided the expected response payload.

All the others hallucinated the networking response I was trying to figure out. 2.5 Provided it exactly enough for me to intercept the request and using the response it provided to get what I wanted to show up.
by swalling | 2025-04-06 19:04:26+00:00
These cuts are particularly nasty because federal spending on public trail maintenance is already razor thin. A ton of the Pacific Crest Trail and other scenic trails are already primarily maintained by volunteer groups doing work like log clearing, brush removal, and tread work. Trail users ourselves—hikers, mountain bikers, or trail runners—already put in hundreds of volunteer hours every season doing the basic trail work, and that's just regular seasonal maintenance. Significant work rebuilding parts of the Appalachian Trail and PCT after wildfires or hurricanes will likely not happen this year, or for years to come, unless volunteers fill in more gaps.
by karaterobot | 2025-04-06 19:05:16+00:00
We bought a 386 SX, and I figured out how to change directories and run random programs. No documentation, no internet of course, just randomly typing in commands to see what happened. That led me to QBASIC, which led me to modifying GORILLAS.BAS. Then one day I was exploring a file called TELIX.EXE, and realized it had something to do with dialing phone numbers. I asked the guy at the counter of Radio Shack (!) what it could be, and he gave me vague instructions about what to do next. I plugged a phone cord into the back of the computer and started using BBSs, which led to MUDs, which led to scripting, drawing in ANSI graphics, and ultimately to programming and design, which have been my careers.
by mikrl | 2025-04-06 19:06:06+00:00
>it shouldn’t be surprising

The current flavour of politics is not pragmatic. It’s a luxury belief system.

The left wing excesses of the 2010s were luxury beliefs, the current thing is all just luxury beliefs too.

Basically, when people are economically comfortable and have no real problems, they’ll blow something out of proportion or just plain invent issues in order to feel something.

I have luxury beliefs of my own, many people do. We are free to hold them in North America. But there’s a cost, and that cost shouldn’t be surprising.
by georgemcbay | 2025-04-06 19:06:56+00:00
Haven't experienced it myself as I haven't been looking to move jobs, but anecdotally from others I know who have, finding any software dev job in 2025 (and a large part of 2024) has been rather bleak for most and the job market has been effectively "frozen" (not shedding a lot of jobs -- yet -- but also not really looking to hire).
by Cpoll | 2025-04-06 19:07:20+00:00
Tobacco advertisement is banned or heavily regulated in most of the world (including the U.S.).

Free speech has a couple dozen exceptions like libel, incitement to violence, etc. And besides, it's not clear how it applies to corporations.

"Free" gifts for influencers typically need to be disclosed. Otherwise it's just payola.

Arguments like "policing the boundaries" can be applied to a lot of existing laws, so it's not particularly useful.

> In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.

What information are you getting from a clip of a polar bear drinking a coke?
by dghlsakjg | 2025-04-06 19:07:29+00:00
I'm not sure if I'm able to do more of the hard stuff, but a lot of the easy but time consuming stuff is now easily done by LLMs.

Example: I frequently get requests for data from Customer Support that used to require 15 minutes of my time noodling around writing SQL queries. I can cut that down to less than a minute now.
by twoodfin | 2025-04-06 19:07:34+00:00
The argument that “the middle class is being hollowed out” is (IMO) pure dogma, there’s very little evidence to support it.

Take the median US household by gross income in 2003 & compare it to that same household in 2025. The 2025 household will utterly destroy it across any economic or hedonic metric.

If you control for household demographics and generational immigration history the gap becomes even more dramatic.
by halfcat | 2025-04-06 19:07:54+00:00
Notifications need to be off if you’re doing focused work, and good managers will not only know this, but support you in it, or even expect you to set this boundary in order to do your best work.

Simplest version is to have agreed upon avenues of escalation, which can be ”if someone doesn’t respond in the timeframe you need, pick up the phone and call them, and if they still don’t respond, pick up the phone and call their boss”.

Then from your end, you just need to make sure your boss is set as a favorite contact or whatever is required for them to be allowed through your do-not-disturb settings.

You can also set other routines like weekly check in meetings with certain groups. Often times people don’t need you right now, but they think blowing you up on slack is the only way to get what they need. By setting aside a couple hours one morning and having several “office hours” style meetings, you give people the comfort of knowing they have a time they can get your attention, and that often cuts down on 50-80% of the ad-hoc interruptions.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-06 19:10:43+00:00
If I go play chess against a rando at a park and lose, I lost.

If I go play chess against someone who spent 150,000 human years studying how to beat me, to say 'well, it was all up to your mental strength, same as it's always been forever, and you just weren't strong enough' is BS.

In the last 40 years (which equate to 80 billion human years of output) there has been hundreds of thousands if not millions of human years of effort put into tearing down peoples' barriers, implanting ideas, etc. This isn't 1960 madmen advertising, this is something different from all of human history. Never before have hundreds of thousands to millions of human years been dedicated to manipulating humans in such a continuous, scientifically approached way and on such ever present/connected platforms with the synchronization of message/manipulation across contexts/mediums.

Edit: Changed from using 'man years' to 'human years'.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-04-06 19:11:34+00:00
So, the goals are noble, the intentions are good, but the road to hell is the only realistic one?

Retaliatory tariffs aren't a risk, they are the present reality, see the market performance on Friday when China announced them. The relative lack of exports isn't the disease, it's just a symptom. Hoping to revive the American economy by means of exports and "negotiations" is a pipe dream, the numbers aren't there.

The stated policies and goals are meant to trigger and provoke, just like your post. They are designed for that purpose and no other. Trump may not be aware of it because he is in the business of sound bites and provocations which impair thinking. The real goals aren't hard to guess, they're printed on the price labels.
by CPLX | 2025-04-06 19:11:46+00:00
You have cause and effect backwards. Cars aren’t some static thing that you grow on trees and sell, where like American trees grow bigger cars.

The question you should be asking is why American manufacturers don’t target the EU market more aggressively and make cars that fit the formats Europeans buy.

It’s not the only reason but an absolutely crucial factor is that EU states protect their domestic auto industry via tariffs and industrial policies/subsidies.
by maccard | 2025-04-06 19:12:00+00:00
My experience as someone who uses LLMs and a coding assist plugin (sometimes), but is somewhat bearish on AI is that GPT/Claude and friends have gotten worse in the last 12 months or so, and local LLMs have gone from useless to borderline functional but still not really usable for day to day.

Personally, I think the models are “good enough” that we need to start seeing the improvements in tooling and applications that come with them now. I think MCP is a good step in the right direction, but I’m sceptical on the whole thing (and have been since the beginning, despite being a user of the tech).
by slavik81 | 2025-04-06 19:12:10+00:00
This was almost my experience when my dishwasher died last year. When looking for reviews and advice, everyone recommended Bosch. However, when I saw it had WiFi, I baulked. After a lot of humming and hawwing, I decided against the Bosch 500 solely because I didn't want a dishwasher with WiFi. The saleslady thought I was crazy.

Instead, I got an equivalently priced KitchenAid KDFM404KPS1 and am quite happy with it, with only minor quibbles. One of the wheels on the bottom rack is attached to a movable row of prongs, and if you push the row too hard in the wrong direction, you can knock the wheel off. You can just pop the wheel back on, but it's an occasional mild annoyance. Aside from that, I have no complaints.
by gruez | 2025-04-06 19:12:13+00:00
>At the very least adding sensors I don't have access to will give me assurance the car won't drive into a wall with a road painted on it.

This is as relevant as self driving cars not being able to detect anti-tank mines. If you want to intentionally cause harm, there are far easier ways than erecting a wall in the middle of a roadway and then painting a mural on it. If you're worried about it accidentally occurring, the fact that there's no incidents suggests it's at least unlikely enough to not worry about.

>Aggregate statistics about safety aren't going to make me feel emotionally stable when I am familiar with how jerky and skittish the driving is under visually confusing driving conditions.

Sounds like this is less about the tech used (ie. cameras vs lidar) and how "smooth" the car appears to behave.
by freen | 2025-04-06 19:12:20+00:00
This (cost/benefit analysis of non-profits, mutual fund type investment vehicles for non-profits, etc. take a look at social impact bonds, Robin Hood Foundation, etc. ) has existed for ages, and they vastly underperform us govt agencies in terms of $/outcomes for reasons that should be obvious: economies of scale.

There are very few ngo agencies that outperform the us government, and usually they operate in fields/domains that the government can’t because of political risk aversion: the voting public doesn’t like drug addicts treated like humans, and vote out politicians who do.

The single most effective non-profit dollar for dollar in terms of saving lives is UNICEF.

It is extremely easy to say the government is mismanaged/inefficient. It’s been basically the consistent drumbeat for centuries. Yet, once “reformers/efficiency/deficit hawks” take power, they discover quite quickly (if they are keen on retaining their positions) that the current state of affairs is deeply imperfect, but perfection is impossible.

What folks fail to realize is that government operates under EXTREMELY DIFFERENT CONSTRAINTS and extremely different capabilities than businesses or individuals.

They have totally different goals! Turns out, predictability > efficiency. Because people can make long term investments against predictability. Inefficiency, below a certain threshold of course, gets priced in as a fixed cost, and business routes around it/operates around it.
by hansvm | 2025-04-06 19:12:42+00:00
Try-things have the benefit of accurately representing the thing you're describing. Leave it to the caller to decide whether to panic or resize the data structure or whatever.

That's also not the only choice in the design space for correct array accesses. Instead of indices being raw integers, you can use tagged types (in Rust, probably using lifetimes as the mechanism if you had to piggy back on existing features, but that's an implementation detail) and generate safe, tagged indices which allow safe access without having to bounds check on access.

However you do it, the point is to not lie about what you're actually doing and invoke a panic-handler-something as a cludgy way of working around the language.
by fodkodrasz | 2025-04-06 19:12:54+00:00
Unfortunately having disabled all devices as wake sources does not help in my case (actually a HP and a Dell machine are also affected in the household). It doesn't matter if I click through the device manager or the powercfg (they are equivalent). S0 is disappointing for me so far.

My Mac (M1 Air) does this a bit better indeed, but I hear colleagues also cursing it for heating up in the backpack, and such (M2 CPU). Still I think most of the copied stuff made windows worse (lots of UI/UX stepbacks also).
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-04-06 19:13:29+00:00
Which in practice is an irrelevantly low number of people.

Nowadays, unless you are serving developing markets, supporting legacy technology, or your website is truly just some basic static pages, it’s a buzzword programmers use to flex on each other. That’s about it.

I personally find it annoying because I grew up as a junior right at the inflection point, when all the tutorials were still saying it was the right thing to do. That’s a lot of work to do for something nobody - and I mean literally nobody - in the real world cares about anymore. I would sooner brag about how my blog still works on Safari bundled with Snow Leopard.
by nofalsescotsman | 2025-04-06 19:14:09+00:00
Agreed. About 12 years ago, when I was starting up a company, I went through a few different interviews with VCs. In addition to being severely unimpressed with them, it just didn't seem worth the effort. The amount of money they were willing to put in, in ratio to the effort that their growth requirements would take seemed borderline abusive.

I suppose if you are creating something that requires massive amounts of capital to get started, it may be a viable choice. But anything else that can grow on its own and be profitable, your odds of succeeding are higher without VC money.
by bruce511 | 2025-04-06 19:14:27+00:00
I work on a product that has been built over 25 years. Lots of the work I did years ago is to ensure the product longevity.

Lots of the work I do now is to ensure it lasts another 25 years. Thats good, but its only the start of "my work".

It's up to me to "sell" that benefit to upper management. There's no point in assuming they'll figure it out by accident. Part of my job is enumerating the value I add.

By all means work on technical debt. But be sure to make a compelling case as to how the eradication of that debt will impact the project over the next decade. Try and throw in immediate results as well (faster, more reliable, reduced support) but more importantly translate that into terms that measure the improvement in cold hard cash.
by h2zizzle | 2025-04-06 19:14:31+00:00
If Biden is anything to go by, it's not really a given that a Dem president will necessarily undo Trump's international policy. He didn't get back in the negotiation room with Iran, he didn't back out of the Afghanistan pull-out, he made zero progress on climate change, he didn't undo much of the immigration policy changes that occurred... One of the few things that he DID pull back on were Trump's first-term tariffs (EDIT: Wait, he did pull back, didn't in he? I thought he did, I might be wrong.), and come 2028, if there's been substantial domestic change taken with the assumption of their longevity, I personally don't trust Democrats to back off on them.
by smj-edison | 2025-04-06 19:15:34+00:00
My start was a mix of Khan Academy and a laptop with a broken screen.

My mom's computer screen broke when it got dropped on the ground, but it still had a working VGA port. So, she reached out to someone in our congregation who did sysadmin work who installed Ubuntu 12.04 on it. He also helped get a LAMP stack installed locally, and set up a server that I could deploy code to. It was funny since there was little 10 year old me lugging around a chunky monitor with this laptop everywhere I went.

I was homeschooled, so I got an hour of computer time every day as long as I was doing something productive. The Khan Academy CS course had just been released, so my dad helped me get started, and I consumed those tutorials! I also got to check out other people's projects and tweak random numbers to see what happened. The KA community is incredible, since you can comment on others' programs and they're pretty responsive.

Another fun thing was doing Minecraft modding (shout out to bedrock miners' tutorials!). To this day I'm shocked that my 12 year old self was writing java code like that, but I suppose I was mainly just copying and pasting code, lol.

There's so many little projects in various languages I did (tried and failed to make an android app, tried to make a couple JS games but was bad at finishing stuff, made SVN for Khan Academy, read some random books on clojure and elixir, started but never completed an inventory management system for my aunt). But, when I think back, Khan Academy on that old laptop really kicked it off.
by zamadatix | 2025-04-06 19:15:49+00:00
Or it's something fun for a hacker to blog about polishing progressive enhancement on. You're free to choose your own takeaway of course. Part of the experience of being a junior is learning when which type of approach makes sense rather than expecting anything one reads to directly apply to how their next project should best be done, regardless if it's popular or unpopular. Not everything needs to be practical for most people to be worth writing about!