MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mike_hearn | 2025-04-06 11:45:50+00:00
That claim isn't something Peter made up, it's the claim made by Meta's own researchers. You're picking an argument with them, not HN posters.

Anyway it's trivially true. I think most of us remember the absurdities the first generation LLMs came out with. Prefering to nuke a city than let a black man hear a slur, refusing to help you make a tuna sandwich etc. They were hyper-woke to a level way beyond what would be considered acceptable even in places like US universities, and it's great to see Facebook openly admit this and set fixing it as a goal. It makes the Llama team look very good. I'm not sure I'd trust Gemini with anything more critical than closely supervised coding, but Llama is definitely heading in the right direction.
by clan | 2025-04-06 11:46:11+00:00
You are missing the point. You are correct that thin ethernet might have been the craze. On the PC you would add an ISA or PCI card. So should we only count from when it was added to the motherboards?

The point is that the first 10 base T still works if used with modern equipment. That standard is from 1990 and grew extremely fast.

Around 1993-1995 coax was considered totally outdated. Fixing termination problems where never fun. A nail in the coffin was 100 Base T which was standardized in 1995.

Tokenring and ATM was contenders around that time but lost to ethernet.

That kind of backwards compatibility is really amazing.
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-06 11:46:34+00:00
That definitely isn’t true. Which Macs came standard with Ethernet? I know neither of mine did - a Mac LCII (1992) nor my PowerMac 6100/60 (1994).

From what I can tell, iMacs have consistently come with Ethernet after around 1998 and Powebooks starting in 1999.
by kragen | 2025-04-06 11:48:38+00:00
Your addendum, "Only applies for companies, and only to those with more than $100,000 ARR," doesn't help at all; it still prohibits the three examples in most cases and still has the barter loophole.

If you can't figure out how to express what you want in such a way that it doesn't immediately collapse upon the most casual attempt at critical thought, the problem probably isn't that the population is brainwashed. It's probably that what you want is to eat your cake and still have it, a logical contradiction that could never exist in any possible world.

You seem to think that the law is something that can be delegated to the lawyers. But in fact the law balances conflicting interests. If you don't participate in defining it, your interests won't be taken into account. A law written by lawyers without outside input will only serve the lawyers' interests, not yours.
by kalleboo | 2025-04-06 11:50:13+00:00
Yeah I phrased it poorly, all Macs didn't have it as standard but what I meant to say is they started releasing Macs that had it as standard. The low-cost Macs like the LC didn't have it, but

The PowerMac 6100 very much did have Ethernet built-in, in the form of an AAUI port (you needed a transceiver to convert to either BNC or 10Base-T since at the time it wasn't obvious which people wanted)
by SleepyMyroslav | 2025-04-06 11:50:54+00:00
Judging from 'comparing pointers of different provenance' can produce 'any result' ( here https://c3-lang.org/language-rules/undefined-behaviour/#list... ) everyone has to deal with it.

More low effort questions. Question about optional debug traps: are they available in optimized builds? Are any LLVM sanitizers available? It usually means language needs to have APIs to mark up your own allocators/containers/etc.

Does language help parallel/concurrent programs to be more readable?
by Lutger | 2025-04-06 11:51:43+00:00
Training is another cash cow from big tech, on many levels. It is a bonus for resellers and partners, binding the ecosystem together. And the maze of certifications that expire every other year or so makes big tech corps even more money, and has everybody invested. It is also a useful sales tool, because they don't cost much and can be thrown in as a discount. You can also achieve a kind of vendor lock in on the career skills more easily with certifications. Legions of Microsoft technicians are pretty much stuck in the ecosystem, because if they switch their certs and experience don't mean anything anymore. Not everybody has the technical chops to switch ecosystem every year. Even more pressure to not move to open source (or another vendor).

If you think Microsoft makes it sales because its buyers are putting the right product in the right place, then you haven't seen a lot of Microsoft sales. This is absolutely not how it works. And it doesn't have a lot to do with corruption either.

The people making the decision to buy an IT product are often not its users, and often not that much concerned with making the best short/mid/long term deal in the interest of the business. They are very much concerned in making the best deal for their own careers, and as these are the people who buy the thing some companies have competently specialized in optimizing sales given that fact. Oracle has a reputation for this, and Microsoft as well, but all big tech does it (just some do it better than others). Of course, there's some nuance, you can't get away with it if your product doesn't work.
by tuananh | 2025-04-06 11:51:45+00:00
ragarding to the unverified mcp concerns, this is the same reason i chose OCI.

i chose OCI format for plugin packaging in my hyper-mcp project in order to leverage all the security measurements we have with OCI like image signing, image verification etc...

i chose wasm to sandbox each plugin so that they have no network or filesystem access by default

https://github.com/tuananh/hyper-mcp
by NhanH | 2025-04-06 11:52:12+00:00
> I'm a software developer by training with an interest in genetics. I currently run a startup working on multiplex gene editing technology.

This is the author’s own description of his expertise.

I have to look it up since I am not able to validate (by myself) the very strong claim he made in the beginning paragraph. I am comfortable not reading the rest. The claim is:

> Our knowledge has advanced to the point where, if we had a safe and reliable means of modifying genes in embryos, we could literally create superbabies. Children that would live multiple decades longer than their non-engineered peers, have the raw intellectual horsepower to do Nobel prize worthy scientific research, and very rarely suffer from depression or other mental health disorders.
by IshKebab | 2025-04-06 11:53:40+00:00
Yeah I found the story, but this is not true:

> I could be arrested in Florida because my driver's license says I'm female

A true statement would be

> Florida now requires the gender on newly issued licenses to be your biological sex.

I'm making no judgement on whether or not that is a good idea (I honestly have no idea), but I do care about the truth (and we're in a thread about the importance of fact checking!) so I feel like it's important to point out misinformation.
by adrian_b | 2025-04-06 11:53:50+00:00
As mentioned on that Wikipedia page, that big dragonfly-like insect from the upper Permian was already only slightly more than half the size of its ancestors from the lower Permian, which could have been caused by the lower oxygen content in the air.

The fact that it was still much larger than current insects is most likely explained by the fact that there were no flying vertebrates that could compete with it or hunt it.
by dharmab | 2025-04-06 11:54:21+00:00
I was talking with friends at a party last night about their white collar jobs, and yeah, SWE was the easiest and cushiest job in the room by a mile.

One friend had just finished a 3 month program to certify to fly a certain type of airliner. They probably had more intense study and testing in 3 months than most people do in a 4 year undergraduate program, SWE included.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-04-06 11:56:17+00:00
More generous & valuable comment from reddit

The distinction between Lisp and the programming languages widely adopted in the industry is a bit like the distinction between artist blacksmiths and fabricators. If blacksmiths have the skills and technique to transform the form of the metal materials they work with. While fabricators essentially rely upon the two operations of cutting and welding. Blacksmiths will use those two operations in their work, but also have the more plastic techniques of splitting, drifting, upsetting, fullering, etc.

https://old.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1eu9gd9/comment/likzw...

These additional basic tools are created from essentially the same working material, on the fly, just like the tongs in TFA
by pdimitar | 2025-04-06 11:56:23+00:00
That documentation is not sacred texts so yes I am arguing against it.

My point is that intuitive is as not as subjective as you make it out to be. Which is partially reinforced by a lot of software where "last one wins" is the policy. This example here sticks out like a sore thumb.

No point pursuing however because you seem hellbent on defending tradition which is something that tires and bores me.

Just agree to disagree, move on.
by roland35 | 2025-04-06 11:56:56+00:00
I also had a fun experience in an open office, but the key element of it was that the office was only about 15-20 people and we were all on the same project and team.

When I visited the Big Tech office (as a remote employee), it was an entire floor with rows of unrelated people all together. My team was together but it felt much different, more distracting, and hard to have a conversation without feeling like you are bothering other people.
by saurik | 2025-04-06 11:57:52+00:00
> I was talking with friends at a party last night about their white collar jobs, .... One friend had just finished a 3 month program to certify to fly a certain type of airliner.

An airline pilot is "grey collar".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-collar

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/02/01/gray-colla...
by JKCalhoun | 2025-04-06 11:58:05+00:00
I'm not sure there is anything like it.

Over the course of my three-decade career I worked on apps, system frameworks (none of this web stuff, backend stuff) and nonetheless I too had to learn all manner of new (to me) languages, API, frameworks, tools, etc. And that doesn't really cover the changes in how software is created/delivered: agile development, tech-lead driven, QA then no QA, unit tests, code reviews, etc. Always a moving target.

(To add some examples.

Some languages I have known: Pascal, C, 6502 assembly, (introduction of the PPC and with it a whole suite of new callbacks), C++, Objective-C, (introduction of Intel hardware and now endianness issues), Javascript, Swift.

When I started my career, being good about managing memory, keeping things small and fast, was a sought after skill. Somewhere about halfway through my career you had to be an expert in concurrency — you had to be able to hold in your head multiple processes running where one can complete before another, where several threads might read or write to shared variables, and UI is being updated on the main thread, etc.)

And it was unevenly distributed as well. At Apple (and likely other big companies) there were "good" and "bad" teams. And I use the quotes because I think it is often relative for the specific engineer. That is, a team I dislike — perhaps it's a highly competitive team, or one under the company spotlight — another may thrive in.

After working for a few years on a particularly "bad" team, I, strangely, developed serious gastrointestinal issues that required surgery and the removal of part of my intestinal tract. Coincidence? I have no idea. But I tell people still in the field to take stress seriously.

Also anecdotal: as someone who still writes checks to pay many of my bills, I can tell you that I noticed my signature was shit during periods of stress, only got relaxed and smooth again when I was also able to relax. I watch my signature now for signs that I am tense.
by Henchman21 | 2025-04-06 11:58:25+00:00
If I saw ads that simply informed that would be amazing. I never see those ads. At all.

What I see are endless billboards, posters, murals on the sides of buildings, cars, busses, etc. I see it everywhere. Its inescapable!

Must be nice living in that different world. Can I get a ticket to wherever you are??
by DoingIsLearning | 2025-04-06 12:00:02+00:00
> So what do you propose? That your king posts a comment and a troll brigade floods the thread?

Twitter is a broken model you are trying to fix with draconian surveillance.

Politicians/Statesman/ Corporations should not be on my 'social network'. They make a press release with their PR or do an interview and journalists should report on it.

My 'social network' should be my family, friends, neighbours, maybe some local social groups in my city.

This idea of immediate, direct communication from companies and governments is not a workable model with our social fabric.
by pards | 2025-04-06 12:00:02+00:00
I no longer assume that digital natives understand how technology actually works under the hood. They teach me about the latest social media trends, I teach them about computer hardware, networking, and terminology.

My kids: Dad, the internet's down. Me: The internet's fine. You're just not connected to it.

And yes, my home office has an ethernet hardline because it's faster and more reliable.
by sarchertech | 2025-04-06 12:01:11+00:00
Truck driver is a special kind of hell because of the time away from home.

But if it paid well enough and had better job security, I’d much rather be building houses all day.

I worked in retail for a while and made it to supervisor. It was much easier than being a software engineer, the pay was just crappy.

Software engineering is definitely up there in terms of mentally demanding jobs, it just pays well.
by pdimitar | 2025-04-06 12:01:53+00:00
One thing a lot of traditionalists like yourself miss (sometimes I think it's on purpose) is that we have limited time.

Modern programming is not like 30 years ago. We have literal hundreds, if not thousands, of bits and pieces to assemble. I couldn't care less what some lone cowboy thought "strtok" should do decades ago. And how genius it seemed to him.

Apropos, why use "strtok" at all in this case, btw? Fine, the function might make perfect sense. The tool's behavior does not.

...But, well, he did made me care ultimately, right? But it's not welcome and now I think less of that person.

But again -- those were different times. To me if you don't do what seems intuitive (and yes I am replying to your comment here after the other and yes I am aware we'll never agree on what's intuitive), defined also broadly as "what many other programs do" then you are just John Wayne-ing your way into my hatred.

Nevermind though. I knew some UNIX cowboys of old. I don't miss them one bit. The way this tool behaves smells very strongly of them.
by tom89999 | 2025-04-06 12:02:15+00:00
Ich muss mich aber fragen warum dies nötig wurde. Niemand an meiner Schule hatte eine Allergie, Erkrankung dieser Art oder irgendwas. Was ist seit den 1980ern passiert? Sind es Umweltgifte? Farb- und Aromastoffe? Zuviel Süsses? Ich kann es mir kaum vorstellen dass das menschliche Erbgut so kaputt gegangen ist. Wir haben eine exzellente medizinische Versorgung und Forschung und Entwicklung gehabt. Mein Frau lehrt an einer Waldorf-Schule. Die Kinder leiden wirklich keinen Hunger und Not. Leider aber werden viele Kinder gekündigt da sie verhaltensauffällig und somit unbeschulbar sind. Es kann doch nicht sein, ich würde es verstehen wenn die pure Armut oder Gewalt in der Familie die Kinder kaputtmacht. Sind es die Smartphones?
by bertman | 2025-04-06 12:02:18+00:00
Using CompressorJS means lossy image compression. You really shouldn't be calling this "Instant, Lossless File Compression" on your page.

Also, because you're using CompressorJS's default settings, you should know that PNG files > 5 MB are converted to JPG (https://github.com/fengyuanchen/compressorjs?tab=readme-ov-f...). Your site, however, keeps the .png file name ending for the converted image, again falsely suggesting lossless compression.
by p_ing | 2025-04-06 12:03:18+00:00
> 32-bit apps, which IBM introduced with OS/2 2.0, were never supported.

This was obviously due to the divorce, but also that the Cruiser API wasn't finalized.

> Our initial OS/2 API set centers around the evolving 32-bit Cruiser, or OS/2 2.0 API set. (The design of Cruiser APIs is being done in parallel with the NT OS/2 design.)

...

> Given the nature of OS/2 design (the joint development agreement), we have had little success in influencing the design of the 2.0 APIs so that they are portable and reasonable to implement on non-x86 systems.
by Certhas | 2025-04-06 12:03:18+00:00
An advertisement ban is also an interesting idea from the theory of free markets perspective.

Consumer needs are met by the most efficient producers, products compete for consumers on the market. That makes a ton of sense. But ad spending inverts this relationship. Consumer needs are no longer an external condition for the market but become subject to producer intervention.

This creates a source of misalignment between incentives for producers and the public good.

I think outlawing ads would go a long way towards fixing capitalism.
by contact9879 | 2025-04-06 12:04:00+00:00
the online view is not the primary way readers are expected to read the ebooks. downloading the epub and reading on an ereader (edit: where line height and font size are customizable) is the expected and best supported method

however, contributions are very welcome and everything is hosted on GitHub if you'd like to suggest improvements; or send your thoughts on the mailing list
by bearjaws | 2025-04-06 12:05:11+00:00
I call the first three paragraphs the “molecule problem.”

In construction, most components are standardized, bolts, nuts, screws, roof shingles, etc. Even when dimensions vary, there’s usually a standard way to interact with materials. For example, rebar has a defined role and behavior when used with concrete.

Programming hasn’t developed that kind of standardization. Instead, we build software at the molecule level: if statements, loops, data structures, or the atomic level (machine code). Each company or project effectively invents its own “materials and standards” for how things are built.

Imagine if every house being built didn't have standard length screws or standardized threading on bolts, it would collapse in years or take 5x longer to build.

Even when we do adopt standard tools like ORMs or frameworks, it still feels like working with molecules instead of nuts and bolts. Best practices exist, but because ORMs and frameworks are so diverse, even knowing one doesn't make switching jobs fast. Again and equivalent would be that someone putting shingles on a roof in Florida can likely pick up the nail gun and put shingles on a roof in Georgia.

I don’t know what a future where we have our "nuts and bolts" standarized looks like, but I know LLMs are making it infinitely worse because the amount of code being written is beyond exponential at this point.
by batty_alex | 2025-04-06 12:05:20+00:00
I don't agree at all that it's the easiest of careers.

I never had to work free overtime as a postal clerk until 1AM because of a production bug in deployment

I never had to figure out how to fix a fry machine on-the-spot at McDonald's because the person who normally fixes it is on vacation in the mountains

I also never had to learn brand new ways of driving cars every few months as a valet driver.

Maybe your software engineering job is easy but, this is the most stressful job I've had. And i'm not your average HN'er that's only ever known being a code slinger
by benmmurphy | 2025-04-06 12:05:24+00:00
Some of it looks like 'small town' style intimidation where the group in control of the governing bodies will use law enforcement to intimidate anyone that might bring them embarrassment or threaten their power. The article even mentions a case where this happened:

> Maxie Allen, 50, and Rosalind Levine, 46, were questioned on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property. After a five-week investigation, the police concluded that there should be no further action.

> A police officer also said that elected officials could be treated as harassment suspects if they continued advocating for the couple.

> Andy Prophet, chief constable of Hertfordshire, defended the arrests, saying that the force had given warnings and they were lawful, although he conceded that “with the benefit of hindsight we could have achieved the same ends in a different way”.
by Ygg2 | 2025-04-06 12:05:54+00:00
> One friend had just finished a 3 month program

In software by the time you finish your 3 months course the tech is considered obsolete.

Not just Frontend. Backend can change on a dime.

Elastic/MySQL/CockroachDB is using different license that's incompatible to AWS. We have to switch our stack!

Kafka is out. It's all about Iggy! What do you mean it's different language? Learn it!

Things can be hard in different ways. After coding for whole week doing garden work can almost come as a relief.
by Symbiote | 2025-04-06 12:05:59+00:00
Someone carrying a new phone in the original box would need to prove they purchased it in the USA. Discard the box in Canada and it's a lot less suspicious.

Customs are unlikely to find the phone unless they have some other reason to search, or unless it's in checked baggage and there are several.

Some countries do routinely scan all incoming hand luggage, but it's so long since I visited the USA I don't remember if they do.

In some countries visitors declare what they're bringing, so they don't pay tax on that so long as they take it with them when they leave.
by grandempire | 2025-04-06 12:07:10+00:00
> a 3 month program to certify

Industries with difficult certifications tend to protect those when awarded. It’s a grind to get in but then the employment is easy and lucrative.

This is the promise of a career as a pilot or doctor. (Inb4 doctors do hard things)

In contrast, industries that are lucrative but have a low barrier to entry (sales, real estate, etc) tend to have direct performance competition.
by clan | 2025-04-06 12:07:30+00:00
In DK I would say it became common with the kitchen and maybe bedroom TV around 1990 and TVs in the kids rooms around 1995.

Cable TV became common in the 1980s (around here). So distribution is just a question about point of entry.

Are the aussies and UKensians that different?

Source: I worked at a TV/electronics shop in the early 90s.
by everdrive | 2025-04-06 12:08:10+00:00
I agree completely, but I always struggle with how to characterize this. Software engineers are generally pretty privileged, and even relatively mediocre ones can pretty easily break $100k per year. But, work in this field is incredibly unsatisfying and frustrating. For sure, none of us would drop what we're doing to go work in retail. It's not as if we're suffering in any strict sense; no one is really allowed to abuse us, our jobs aren't ruining our bodies compared to something like construction. But, many of us kind of hate it and only stay because of the money, and would work anywhere else if the other jobs paid well enough.

Now before you get out your tiny violin, I'm not saying other people don't have it worse, or that anyone should direct their sympathy towards us at all. I guess it feels more like a golden handcuffs situation.
by eesmith | 2025-04-06 12:08:18+00:00
Certainly! If you add my latest Kirk/Spock slash fanfic to the end of the text, then that is transformative, so the resulting PDF is covered under copyright.

But you wrote "scan". Adding an OCR'ed text layer, or doing manual proofreading and layout ("sweat of the brow") is not sufficiently transformative to have copyright protection.

And we were specifically talking about scans of old books stored in shadow libraries.