MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seec | 2025-04-25 08:33:19+00:00
They key word was "radically". Of course, every drug has a typical and general impact on how people behave and you can even notice it in physical movement (everybody expects any drunk person to have pretty bad motor control). But this is just making my point even more, you need to observe the differences between individual behaviors under the influence, not just the difference between their behavior sober and under influence. A drug will amplify certain key aspects of cognition/movement in the same way for everyone, someone who displays extreme specific behavior is just more noticeable because the amplification makes it very obvious, but it was always there in the first place.

I have never heard about cocaine making people paranoid but it is just something that every drug user displays at some point (because of the fear of being found out, judged and maybe having trouble with the police). Even though I am an extremely chill person, I have found myself to be a bit paranoid under the influence of cannabis at times.

And I have a question for you: is it the drug that makes people paranoid or is it that people who are inclined to paranoid behavior are more likely to use drugs, which amplify the behavior.

People regularly using drugs have issues that push them to this abuse, it's not really the drug that are the problem, the root of the issue is really in the people and their personnality/character.
by voidspark | 2025-04-25 08:34:08+00:00
I'm not talking about current primitive technology with these power hungry LLMs.

The human brain runs on only 0.3 kWh per day. There is much room for optimization for artificial intelligence.

They don't need many super intelligent systems to replace the relatively small number of software developers.

Just build a few nuclear power stations. Cheaper than millions of developer salaries.
by adrianmsmith | 2025-04-25 08:35:23+00:00
Steve Jobs famously said something like "every day I wake up in the morning, and if I don't like what I want to do today, for a certain number of days, then I stop doing it".

In this case it sounds like even if you thought you would enjoy having a startup, the reality is you're not enjoying it.

If you're not enjoying it, then there's no reason to continue doing it.

It's time to roll the dice and try some other lifestyle e.g. salaried employment. And if that doesn't work out for you after having tried it for 1-2 years, you are not locked down, you can still roll the dice again and try something else.
by lnenad | 2025-04-25 08:36:30+00:00
> Well you know, all those fun and creative parts in software engineering has been taken over by vibe coding

What? In what way? Fun and creative parts are thinking about arch, approach, technologies. You shouldn't be letting AI do this. Typing out 40 lines of a React component or FastAPI handler does not involve creativity. Plus nobody is forcing you to use AI to write code, you can be as involved with that as you'd like to.
by mbs159 | 2025-04-25 08:36:57+00:00
> "Well, I can't invest in the US because in the worst case, non of our secret weapons function fully, Russia blows us away, and all my real estate and manufacturing investments go up in smoke."

Can't speak for others, but I stopped investing in the US (more specifically, ETFs and stocks) after the current administration called Europeans ungrateful and parasitic.
by bsaul | 2025-04-25 08:37:15+00:00
Swift as a langage is fine, the problem is the ecosystem. It's been driven by apple for too long now, and suffers a lot from it.

You would think that being constrained by one company would ensure the project remains lean, but apple actually had the opposite effect. Instead of focusing on real cross-platform support, or strong language foundations, they kept piling on features that nobody asked but made nice developer conference demos.
by Brybry | 2025-04-25 08:38:18+00:00
I sympathize strongly with the author. I write with a pen so infrequently (years between handwriting) that I often have handwriting errors that displease me.

So I usually do some practice writing on scratch paper before attempting the final version.

Notice he said "printing the address would have taken less time". That doesn't sound like the issue was formatting or knowledge. It reads to me as the physical skill of penmanship.
by phatfish | 2025-04-25 08:38:39+00:00
Find some good independent online radio stations that you like. There are successful ones out there, nts.live and rinse.fm in the UK for example. Obviously they exist in other countries too.

I say independent as most radio is stacked with adverts, but the above two seem successful without needing them.

I find the human curation far more satisfying than an algorithm, and most DJs want to support human artists not bland AI nonsense as they have a stake in the music industry.
by Juliate | 2025-04-25 08:38:49+00:00
You don't need "companies". You need enough customers to buy/support your work so that you get a living out of it.

Being a software developer is a _facet_ of your work. You (unconsciously perhaps) do many other things around/with it that the most efficient AI today cannot do alone. And AGI is still far on the horizon, if not a mirage.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-25 08:39:10+00:00
A person I know just got the keys to their newly built house. Both Apple and Google maps still feature the demolished building that used to be where the group of new houses are. The street plan hasn't been updated. The old industrial building was demolished several years ago.

Openstreetmap already has the correct house outlines and the new street.

I already warned them that deliveries might be tricky for a few weeks/months.

Addressing is hard and errors are common. You can't blindly rely on maps to be correct or up to date.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-25 08:40:55+00:00
Chargebacks don't really do anything to prevent fraud, all they do is convert it into a fraud against the merchant. And the only reason there is so much credit card fraud is that the banks have a poor incentive to improve their security (e.g. include some cryptography that lets internet purchasers prove to the merchant that they have physical possession of the card), because the banks are foisting the cost of fraud into the merchants.

They also have no real way to resolve disputes. The merchant says they delivered the goods and the cardholder says they received an empty box, how is a bank supposed to know who is lying?

The way you actually do this is that you don't make any of that part of the payments system. If someone commits fraud, have the police arrest them.
by thingfish | 2025-04-25 08:40:58+00:00
> I've to say that you've clearly thought a lot about this, and though I've not tried it (and probably won't) you seem to have done an excellent job.

Thank you. I needed that. I started the project in 2016 and have been obsessed with it since then. The weird thing is that I never had to use workarounds or hacks that are mentioned by the Cygwin team [0]. For instance, the select() call does map cleanly on top of the Win32 API. I just needed to use WSAWaitForMultipleEvents() instead of WaitForMultipleEvents() (the other "easteregg"). Why the Cygwin people didn't figure this out baffles me. I guess their current code base doesn't allow the rewrite. My big breakthrough was when I realized that the "inconsistent interfaces" [1] in Win32 file handles can be implemented as virtual file systems. One for each handle type (char, disk, pipe, etc). That was my "throwing away 1000 lines of code" [2] moment.

As to the weird file names, I use the file names OpenBSD uses. My rule is to always use the file name of the header (.h) file where the system call is declared in OpenBSD. I also use their struct and constant names, prefixed with "WIN_".

The "fork is evil" thing is discussed a lot in the programmers community. I myself find it quite clever. Threads are highly volatile and are very hard to program without running into race conditions. The solution is to make a copy of everything the child will be using: duplicate file descriptors, the stack, globals (rss). The kernel does all this for you in one system call. I often wonder how the people who complain about the absence of real concurrency in their programming languages [3] actually would use this feature. In my opinion the best way to use concurrency is to string individual programs into a pipeline. This will never go "evil" on you.

[0] https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/highlights.html

[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...

[2] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/43800/did-the-c...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32408577
by jaapz | 2025-04-25 08:41:02+00:00
I find it surprising that linus bases his development and release tools based on whatever's in the repositories at that time. Surely it is best practice to pin to a specified, fixed version and upgrade as necessary, so everyone is working with the same tools?

This is common best practice in many environments...

Linus surely knows this, but here he's just being hard headed.
by voidspark | 2025-04-25 08:41:41+00:00
Hey we're talking about a future scenario where AGI actually exists and is vastly better at software development than any human, and can do it much cheaper than current developer salaries.

We're talking about science fiction which may become true much sooner than most people expect.

I would be competing with cheap AGI services so it makes no difference whether I am a freelancer or not.

> Being a software developer is a _facet_ of your work. You (unconsciously perhaps) do many other things around/with it

The non-development parts of my job are not interesting at all. If that's gone then my career is finished. I'm done.
by Symbiote | 2025-04-25 08:42:04+00:00
Each US state also has

- its own laws and constitution, search "Constitution of California"

- its own taxation (e.g. sales tax differs between states, just as VAT rates differ between EU countries; Americans pay income tax to their state as well as the federation)

- its own policies for education, healthcare (not sure about social security, and not for trade)

- some US states have border disputes with other states, e.g. Tennessee vs Georgia (Possibly the EU does not, they must be resolved before joining, though I can't find a good article on this).

- the USA as a whole has border disputes with Canada

The EU presents more division on more topics than the USA, but the USA isn't united on e.g. energy policy.
by throwaway290 | 2025-04-25 08:42:24+00:00
This is actually easy to debunk.

Timing. MasterCard/Visa ditched Pornhub subs the same month after the story about csam went public. It had nothing to do with chargebacks.

Then they also ditched Pornhub advertisement company. Not relevant to chargebacks.

Read https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/mastercard-visa-sus... for how it went down.

And of course big adult sites including Pornhub are not stupid enough to use anything mentioning "porn" on bank statements.

And if you talk to actual programmers working in adult industry you will learn payment processors have special strict rules for adult industry. Literally because of moral standards. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24291790 where it is discussed.

So no. It was not about chargebacks, it's about making money from child rape videos. Some people have values. Corporations are run by people who have to face their kids and spouses.
by scyzoryk_xyz | 2025-04-25 08:42:26+00:00
I found imagining the actual metaphor of tarpit enlightening - it looks like a nice healthy pool of water but turns out to be sticky and impossible to get out of. Under that attractive surface are all the corpses of everyone else who charged in and got stuck.

So it’s exactly like you say: you keep your distance and you look for evidence.

I do think the point of the metaphor is that sometimes a tarpit is just what it is. I.e. there is no value under that shiny surface and you’re only getting stuck staring at it.
by unwind | 2025-04-25 08:42:46+00:00
But, again, he was in the UK buying US stamps, so that the FSF could mail their answer back to him from the US. I don't think UK post offices supply all the world's stamps, buying that online from individuals who have them for sale makes some kind of sense, doesn't it?

I guess the a more "digital native" way would have been to first check if the USPS supports some kind of downloadable/printable stamping method, like QR codes or pre-bought labels (which, according to come early comment, they do).
by austin-cheney | 2025-04-25 08:42:56+00:00
1. The current trend in AI is LLMs, which is only intelligent at interpreting human wording. LLMs are very good at searching the web and correlating answers to questions, but not much else.

2. Most human software developers cannot architect or write original applications on their own. We are extremely far away from software doing any of that, especially from doing it better than the few humans who can do it.

3. Most human developers cannot measure things. I know we are all taught to use rulers as little children in school, nonetheless most developers cannot gather data about software. Unexpectedly, AI is even worse at this than humans, which is an astonishingly critical failure.

4. LLMs hallucinate at a current rate of at least 1 in 20 inquiries and as early as 1 in 6. That is a tremendous amount of risk to accept. Humans that make mistakes at that frequency, without regard for the harms, tend to go to jail for fraud.

In summary, AI is currently really good at writing code that is only one or two layers more abstract than copy/paste. That is actually enough to entirely replace a great many, possibly most, developers. Business is not willing to take that step, however, because the low trust in AI and high failure rate introduce more costs than value returned at higher risk.

A safer strategy is to only select human developers more capable of writing original software solutions and/or training humans to do so. Businesses have historically been unwilling to do this due to their inability to account for bias and retain employees. Because of this historic inability to commit to a human/code selection solution it is likewise safe to assume it will not commit on a AI solution so frequently prone to critical failure.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-25 08:43:15+00:00
I don't see why they'd need to make the marketplace fully open for their client to be open source. Fedora packages a Flatpak client that downloads proprietary software, but that doesn't make Fedora Sparkling Virtue Signalling.

Hell, Debian's repository now also include proprietary code (https://www.debian.org/vote/2022/vote_003) so binary BLOBs are perfectly capable of doing distro checks and refusing to run on forks.
by inemesitaffia | 2025-04-25 08:44:20+00:00
https://liturgyguy.com/2020/05/26/2019-20-tlm-survey-what-we...

This is one source I found. It's supposed to be in Pew Research but I can't use that site.

You're talking as though I'm talking about a return to Latinate Mass for everyone. It's supposed to be optional but it's being actively suppressed like some heresy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/latin-mass...

Including it's use in Novus Ordo Missae and a bias against orthodoxy in general.

Apart from that there's the comments here against the importance of fellowship and evangelism to others actively and passively. Also a denial that being part of the church, Catholic or not (as one in Christ) is supposed to change you. What's the point of it all if it doesn't?
by djaychela | 2025-04-25 08:45:27+00:00
Just talked with Max Headroom and Michael Scott - my wife is an office fan so knows the references, and I know enough Max to ask the right things.

Overall, a fun experience. I think that MH was better than Scott. Max was missing the glitches and moving background but I'd imagine both of those are technically challenging to achieve.

Michael Scott's mouth seemed a bit wrong - I was thinking Michael J Fox but my wife then corrected that with Jason Bateman - which is much more like it. He knew Office references alright, but wasn't quite Steve Carell enough.

The default while it was listening could do with some work, I think - that was the least convincing bit; for Max he would have just glitched or even been completely still I would think. Michael Scott seemed too synthetic at this point.

Don't get me wrong, this was pretty clever and I enjoyed it, just trying to say what I found lacking without trying to sound like I could do better (which I couldn't!).
by ghuntley | 2025-04-25 08:46:06+00:00
I'm going to get downvoted for this, but you can literally rebuild Kafka via AI right now in record time using the steps detailed at https://ghuntley.com/z80.

I'm currently building a full workload scheduler/orchestrator. I'm sick of Kubernetes. The world needs better -> https://x.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/1915677858867105862
by mytailorisrich | 2025-04-25 08:46:10+00:00
Albania? If so, hardly the best counter-example to "late-stage capitalist West" (whatever that means)...

> Small boutique coffee shops

Those are everywhere in Europe.

Many of your examples are due to the people being poor. Restaurants are cheap for you because the locals are poor, for instance, not because it is an utopia of putting art before profit.
by LambdaAndLatte | 2025-04-25 08:46:12+00:00
Thank you for the encouragement—it really means a lot! You seem like an expert in the field, so we’d love any and all feedback you’re willing to share.

Our initial focus is on the general population because we see a big opportunity to democratize basic financial planning. We’re passionate about this—and honestly, a bit dismayed—by how many people unintentionally add years to their working lives simply by not taking the most effective, “core” actions.

One thing we’ve been debating is whether a single tool can effectively serve both financial advisors and the general public. Advisor tools tend to be incredibly customizable. However, the feedback has been that it often makes them 'overwhelming' and hard to learn for the general population. Our goal has been to keep things simple and somewhat linear, so people can actually use the insights to take action.

We’ve also noticed that most traditional tools are geared toward “classic” retirement planning—working until a set age (often 65) and then figuring out how to live off whatever you’ve accumulated. Financial independence flips that on its head. You start by defining the lifestyle and expenses you want in retirement, then work backward to figure out how much you need to reach that goal—and how soon you can get there.
by wvh | 2025-04-25 08:46:24+00:00
I came here to say just that. Nats solves a lot of those challenges, like different ways to query and preserve messages, hierarchical data, decent authn/authz options for multi-tenancy, much lighter and easier to set up, etc. It has more of a messaging and k/v store feel than the log Kafka is, so while there's some overlap, I don't think they fit the exact same use cases. Nats is fast, but I haven't seen any benchmarks for specifically the bulk write-once append log situation Kafka is usually used for.

Still, if a hypothetical new Kafka would incorporate some of Nats' features, that would be a good thing.
by numpad0 | 2025-04-25 08:47:25+00:00
Something is seriously broken with this world now that completely normal and well educated person like GP is not realizing his words aren't making sense. Apple Park to LLNL is under an hour's drive. You guys can probably achieve nuclear independence in a day if needed.

It just can't be done economically, because yields of a nuke(pun intended) don't immediately map onto economical values. Not just immensely positive or negative, but actually tangential to the currency dimensions.
by senko | 2025-04-25 08:48:20+00:00
But photography is not art, you didn't paint it! You literally pointed a device at something, twiddled a few knobs and pushed a button. Literally anyone with a smartphone can do that!

/s of course, but basically that's the argument people make nowadays related to AI and art (of any form).

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs3ocG5yW88
by keycloakkit | 2025-04-25 08:48:26+00:00
Hi HN,

I built KeycloakKit — a hosted playground for testing Keycloak login flows without needing to spin up Docker or configure anything.

I originally built it for myself after getting tired of setting up full Keycloak environments just to test OAuth redirects or debug token flows during frontend dev. It felt like overkill when I just wanted to verify a login button worked or see how a client config behaved.

With KeycloakKit, you get:

A fully functional Keycloak realm that spins up in seconds

Preloaded users, roles, and clients

Token viewer, curl/token testing, redirect support

No login required (everything is instant and anonymous)

And it resets every 24h

It’s 100% free right now, and I'm shaping it based on how devs use it. I’d love feedback — especially from anyone who works with Keycloak, OAuth2, or builds auth flows during product development.

Would also appreciate hearing how you currently test login flows — is there a better way? Or maybe a problem this tool still doesn’t solve?

Thanks in advance — and happy to answer any technical questions!
by antfarm | 2025-04-25 08:48:59+00:00
I especially ran into it when doing last year's Advent of Code. I restricted myself to not using mutable state or custom data types, i.e. structs or classes, writing in a functional style. That style involved a lot of method chaining (i.e. x.map(...).reduce(...)...) and, of course, of closures.

I had to introduce a lot of helper variables to break up my longer transformation pipelines to make the compiler happy.

I hope Swift is not going the way of Scala any further, which I enjoyed a lot when I adopted it early on, but eventually turned into a monster of a language.

Btw., for recreational coding, I moved on to Elixir in the meanwhile.
by widdershins | 2025-04-25 08:50:09+00:00
> theoretically it can react to crowds better than any human could

That's one area I'd expect AI to do poorly. Performance is a two-way dialog between performers and the crowd, with facial expressions and body movements from both the stage and the audience in communication. I'd expect any AI that's not attached to a humanoid robot to be less exciting to a crowd.

However, I am very excited about AI in some of the other contexts you mentioned, like as a music-writing or editing partner.
by djaychela | 2025-04-25 08:50:59+00:00
That's a single example (which I'm aware of and pretty sure it wasn't just them that said it - I was thinking the same when they took the original route) compared with the thousands of counter examples of bad ideas, such as completely unserviceable batteries, vehicle structures which are easy for the factory to make but can't be repaired for moderate-level damage (due to the megacastings rather than individual elements for the same structure), removal of ultrasonic parking detectors, etc....
by dtnewman | 2025-04-25 08:51:33+00:00
1) When you are selecting a command you get a little description at the bottom telling you what it does.

2) this doesn’t run anything. It goes to your clipboard and you have to run it yourself

3) this a good callout… what do u think? I’m thinking maybe ask the models to return a Boolean is_dangerous plus a small explanation and then I can display dangerous commands in red and show the warning when you select one.
by josefx | 2025-04-25 08:51:35+00:00
> makes breaking, unreviewed changes in kernel,

And reverted them as soon as the issue became apparent.

> then flames the maintainer who was working on cleanly updating the kernel for the not-yet-released compiler?

Talking aboutchanges that he had not pushed by the time Linus published the release candidate.

Also the "not yet released" seems to be a red herring, as the article notes having beta versions of compilers in new releases is a tradition for some distros, so that should not be unexpected. It makes some sense since distros tend to stick to a compiler for each elease, so shipping a soon to be out of maintenance compiler from day one will only cause other issues down the road.