MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-11 22:24:10+00:00
> without ever admitting its weaknesses

I don't think this part is necessary

"To hype something is to provide a dishonest impression of how great it is" is accurate.

Marketing hype is all about "provide a dishonest impression of how great it is". Putting the weaknesses in fine print doesn't change the hype

Anyways I don't mean to pile on but I agree with some of the other posters here. An awful lot of extremely pro-AI posts that I've noticed have your name on them

I don't think you are as critical of the tech as you think you are.

Take that for what you will
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-04-11 22:24:16+00:00
>"Shoving content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase" maximizes eyeball time which maximizes ad dollars. Netflix's financials are a bit more opaque but I think that's the key driver of the carcinisation story here,

Non sequitur. For the longest time, Netflix had no advertisements. Do they even now? (I don't subscribe... all their shows end up on my Plex anyway.)
by mtndew4brkfst | 2025-04-11 22:24:16+00:00
For creation, yes, because of the provenance of the training data that got us here. It was acquired unethically in the overwhelming majority of cases. Using models derived from that training is laundering and anonymizing the existing creativity of other humans and then still staking the claim "I made this", like the stick figure comic. It's ghoulish.
by onecommentman | 2025-04-11 22:25:42+00:00
I’m tired of the huckster hype, personally observed lackluster performance and annoying externalities of AI developments that justify and explain the bias. If the financial hype machine wasn’t distorting the reporting, it would be following a more rational evolving trajectory. It might still bubble, but bubble gracefully and naturally. Some AI is amazing and fun, but “electrostatic generator/science fair/look at my hair stand on end” amazing, not “my life will fundamentally change for the better” amazing. And remember, this is the second time around for an AI hype cycle…no one is more cynical than a reformed idealist who got burned once.
by sumonoahid | 2025-04-11 22:26:23+00:00
Ever since I started making web apps, I had to redo the same things over and over again. Luckily, I eventually created a base structure with all the essential setup -like authentication, payment collection, email verification, password resets, confirmation emails, in-app notifications, and a bunch of other boring stuff.

Then I thought, if I'm facing this problem, other developers probably are too. So, I built a boilerplate using the MERN stack with all those tedious parts already implemented. Now, anyone can kickstart their project without having to build everything from scratch.

If you work with the MERN stack, check it out- you'll thank me later.
by chongli | 2025-04-11 22:26:43+00:00
Do note that enemies can also pick up that old equipment and use it against you. I lost a promising character during the last November NetHack Tournament [1] because a gnome picked up a wand of fire from someone’s grave and blasted me with it.

Yeah that’s another difference. When you play NetHack online [2] [3] you run into the ghosts and graves of other players, not just your own previous characters. I have run into levels online with the ghosts of 3 different people who were all killed by various dangerous monsters that kept accumulating more powerful equipment from each victim. It can be quite ridiculous!

[1] https://tnnt.org/

[2] https://alt.org/nethack/

[3] https://www.hardfought.org/
by dijit | 2025-04-11 22:27:16+00:00
Dev and Ops are natural enemies because they are focusing in pulling in opposite directions, a fact thats repeated ad infinitum in the course material surrounding devops - yet people still hold the belief that one person can fiercely hold two diametrically opposed positions at once and succeed.

With that mentality, why have lawyers for a prosecution and defence? Just have a judge decide.. right?
by FloorEgg | 2025-04-11 22:27:39+00:00
In this video Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger talk about how the US system is heading towards a cliff, and the video was recorded in 2005. They articulate it well, although the video has a couple glitches in it.

If you are actually interested in what's going on, I think what they are talking about is a big important piece of the puzzle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCgHj1_GBuY
by vintagedave | 2025-04-11 22:27:44+00:00
Thing is, we do. As a kid I devoured our encyclopedia, dictionary, and many random books of non-fiction on my parents’ shelf. I did as best I could to devour the library.

I see AIs today who have done that. I am sympathetic to them because I wish I could have been them and achieved what they have. Don’t demean human learning just because we have systems that can learn like us.
by pansa2 | 2025-04-11 22:28:11+00:00
> Readability counts

Almost all Python programmers should be familiar with list comprehensions - this should be easy to understand:

parts = [... if isinstance(item, Interpolation) else ... for item in template]

Instead the example uses an explicit loop, coupled with the quirks of the `match` statement. This is much less readable IMO:

parts = [] for item in template: match item: case str() as s: parts.append(...) case Interpolation(value, _, conversion, format_spec): parts.append(...)

> [Ruby] is awful to read

I think for someone with a basic knowledge of Ruby, it's more understandable than the Python. It's a combination of basic Ruby features, nothing advanced.

I don't particularly love Ruby's syntax either, though - I think the ideal implementation would be something like:

fn stringify(item) => item.is_a(Interpolation) then item.value.convert(item.conversion).format(item.format_spec) else item.to_string() fn f(template) => template.map(stringify).join()
by sadeshmukh | 2025-04-11 22:28:17+00:00
Having to clarify satire ruins its point. In a case against a man who creatd a fake Facebook page of his police department and was subsequently raided, the Onion submitted this amicus brief: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/2022...

It's really quite interesting to read at some point, but I believe that nobody should have to "clarify it was doctored". Because that image was also very obviously fake - it's literally a meme template, and nobody should be prosecuted for that. I do have to question your judgement if you believe that is real.
by janalsncm | 2025-04-11 22:28:47+00:00
> something we have ample evidence for

Can you share some of that evidence? My impression from the SCOTUS case is that the government only alleged it could happen, not that it was happening. So I’m a bit surprised to see someone so confidently assert it is happening.

> more likely than not find evidence of algorithm manipulation

I think a lot of people have been looking. For years. Yet you admit there is no smoking gun. Perhaps if we look in the right place we will find Russell’s teapot orbiting Jupiter as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot
by btilly | 2025-04-11 22:28:56+00:00
On performance, you're acknowledging my point without recognizing how important it was for switching back in 2008. Using the web, particularly JavaScript heavy parts of the web like Google's business suite, Chrome was a significantly better experience than Firefox. It was a real reason to switch. (I'll return to V8 shortly.)

On the sandbox, I think that you are confusing the Chrome Sandbox (released in 2008) with the Privacy Sandbox (released in 2019). At the release of Chrome, it was a significant security improvement over existing browsers. You might not call their process isolation a sandbox, but they certainly did. See https://blog.chromium.org/2008/10/new-approach-to-browser-se... to verify.

True, security and sandboxing have improved greatly in the decades since. But the current quality of Firefox is irrelevant to people's reasons to switch back then.

Now let's go back to why Chrome was developed. As articles like https://www.computerworld.com/article/1501244/the-real-reaso... demonstrate, Google's reasoning was widely understood at the time. Google wanted complex web applications to run better. And Google also wanted people to not fear for the security of their web applications. So they focused on performance and security.

What Google didn't care about was creating a monopoly. Sure, they could have released V8 without a browser attached. But that wouldn't have changed the consumer experience in the way that Google cared about. That said, they had every reason to pull V8 out of Chrome and release it independently. They were as surprised as anyone when someone chose to create node.js out of it. Their actual goal was to hope that other browsers would use a better JS engine after one was shown to them. Or, if they failed to use it directly, they'd study it and copy its good tricks.

Now you claim that the fact that V8 could have been shipped on its own was part of some larger point. I have absolutely no idea what larger point that might be. But there was a significant period of time where Chrome had V8 and everything else was comparatively slow. Which speaks directly to my point that consumers had very good technical reasons to switch to Chrome.
by airforce1 | 2025-04-11 22:28:57+00:00
Then why is everyone fleeing to escape the high taxes and crime? California is losing house seats at the present.

Also, I don't know if you can really credit the left's supermajority for the success of SV... CA's politics have pivoted over the years. Look at an election map of CA in 1980 and you'll see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidentia...
by HeavyRain266 | 2025-04-11 22:29:15+00:00
Before you ask, we're not going to ever fully adopt Elixir (or Gleam) as its ecosystem is built around Phoenix framework and external services/databases. We would have to maintain internal bindings/implementations of things that are unmaintained on Elixir's side. Also worth to mention that it has a large amount of syntax sugar and its users have that weird fetish for abstracting stuff into DSL interfaces.
by BoorishBears | 2025-04-11 22:29:26+00:00
Unsolicited feedback (or I guess solicited reading the post again): Juypter Notebook experience got me to click because I thought this might be like a Deepnote alternative

But the only screenshot on the Github page was decidedly not that. It wasn't showing something very appealing visually, or immediately obvious in terms of necessity for a tool calling its competitors ugly and bloated

I don't use any of the ones you listed so maybe they're even uglier, but I would maybe tweak the pitch and make it clearer who this is for
by dkersten | 2025-04-11 22:29:38+00:00
Naughty Dog’s late PS3 era code was very similar to modern task/job based parallel code. That really was the start of the modern era of multitasking.

Compared to today, the Cell really isn’t so complex — we have just as many or more cores, we have GPU programming (and low level APIs with manual data moving and what not). It’s just that the cell came out in a world where dual core had just became the norm and people hadn’t really accustomed to it yet. It was ahead of its time. And a new architecture meant immature tooling.
by DanielVZ | 2025-04-11 22:29:48+00:00
One common mantra about most roguelites is that every run can be a successful run if you play your cards right. Some will be harder, in others you’ll become unstoppable, but the general idea is that once you get good enough you should be able to win runs. I’m not sure if this holds and is extremely dependent on how balanced the game is, but I think it’s a sane way to approach the genre since it pushes you to improve and generally becomes a rule once you become good enough at some of the games.
by Alupis | 2025-04-11 22:30:13+00:00
Come try out Fedora, or whatever flavor of Linux you want.

It's surprisingly fantastic for almost all modern computing tasks. Yes, it's true, some software won't work, such as Adobe Photoshop, but most people aren't using software like that anyway. For gaming, I'd say we're close to 99% of games supporting Linux out of the box on Steam. The few left that still don't choose not to via kernel-level anti-cheat or forgetting to toggle a checkbox for Linux support (EasyAntiCheat and friends).

The point is, it "Just Works" for darn near everything these days and is a very pleasant experience. Try it out!
by Animats | 2025-04-11 22:30:26+00:00
Agreed. Windows Server 2000 through Windows 7 were peak Microsoft operating system.

By Windows 2000 Server, they finally had the architecture right, and had flushed out most of the 16 bit legacy.

The big win with Windows 7 was that they finally figured out how to make it stop crashing. There were two big fixes. First, the Static Driver Verifier. This verified that kernel drivers couldn't crash the rest of the kernel. First large scale application of proof of correctness technology. Drivers could still fail, but not overwrite other parts of the kernel. This put a huge dent into driver-induced crashes.

Second was a dump classifier. Early machine learning. When the system crashed, a dump was sent to Microsoft. The classifier tried to bring similar dumps together, so one developer got a big collection of similar crashes. When you have hundreds of dumps of the same bug, locating the bug gets much easier.

Between both of those, the Blue Screen of Death mostly disappeared.
by paulryanrogers | 2025-04-11 22:31:49+00:00
Stop! You're giving me flashbacks of developing for Hypercom point of sale devices! Never again will I work with alpha software so buggy it only worked from bundled samples! One had to remove their widgets from a sample, one at a time, testing at each step, then adding your own one at a time. Otherwise it would break something and you'd have to start over.
by krishpavuluri | 2025-04-11 22:32:00+00:00
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It’s fully self-built (React, Node.js, Appium, Selenium Grid 4, java, swift and more), and I’m looking for feedback on how to improve it – especially in terms of developer experience and scaling.
by evil-olive | 2025-04-11 22:32:35+00:00
> If you can't see the value of LLMs at all at this point, you're holding it wrong.

> Sure, LLMs hallucinate. Said cynically, they "lie." You need to add lots of context, or enable Web Search to ground the answers in external sources, or connect MCP servers, or or or... You can't just ask ChatGPT to "make me a fitness program," you need to enable Deep Research and give it links to existing workout programs, articles from Men's Health, detail your current workout plan, goals, previous injuries, and and and and...

right...you can claim "everyone knows" about hallucinations. everyone knows they need to do prompt engineering. everyone knows how important hooking up an MCP server is. and if you use an LLM without knowing that, it's your fault for using the tool wrong.

but we know empirically that just isn't true. back in 2023, lawyers were sanctioned for filing LLM-generated legal briefs with hallucinated case citations [0]. then more than a year later, it happened again at a different law firm [1].

and does anyone think, realistically, that's the very last time we've seen a lawyer get sanctioned for LLM-hallucinated case citations?

the "dismissive" attitude towards LLMs that I find most compelling is that the benefits have been hugely oversold, and the caveats downplayed. LLMs have been rolled out in way too many places where they weren't ready for prime-time yet, and to users who weren't aware of the pitfalls.

Google has LLM-generated "overviews" at the top of every search result page. it famously said you could put glue on your pizza [2] and that it was safe to eat one rock per day [3].

you can say "everyone who uses an LLM should know such-and-such caveats" if you want. but Google's rollout of AI overviews mean that every single person who uses Google Search is suddenly an "LLM user". expecting all of those people to learn overnight how to use an LLM "properly" is simply not realistic.

0: https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-us...

1: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/25/fine_sought_ai_filing...

2: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/23/24162896/google-ai-overvi...

3: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o
by metalman | 2025-04-11 22:33:32+00:00
I like where they say "a sheet that is only a bit over a single atom thick, due to the angles between its chemical bonds" it's funny that material science has achived ultimate precision, but it can only be talked about in general terms Is there any exact way to describe the thickness of molebdium disulfide sheets?, beyond "a bit over one atom thick" clearly they are etching parts of the sheet, and somehow attaching leads, but is it done strictly in two dimensions, ie: litteral, flat land?
by ang_cire | 2025-04-11 22:34:14+00:00
> the capacity to combine concepts in an infinitely recursive manner to represent an infinity of concepts and ideas. On top of that, we also posses the ability to communicate (verbally, through sign, or more recently through writing) those combined concepts in such a way that other humans can then recreate that concept in their own mind.

We don't know that animals can't. We know that some animals can convey detailed information very extensively, but we don't know the structure of the communication well enough as to claim that it isn't via something equivalent to human language. Crows, for instance, can inform other crows about specific people, or characteristics of people, without those things being present. That would generally require descriptive communication to do, which inherently implies an abstraction. Where's the line between that and human language?
by csdvrx | 2025-04-11 22:35:13+00:00
If you find that interesting, read about the African Humid Period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period

The present day situation is fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period#Present-d... : there is an ongoing "greening" which seems caused by global warming and CO2 increases!

However, a 2003 study estimated only 45% of the Sahara could be covered by vegetation, and a 2022 study found that it may not be sufficient to start another AHP: it just "lowers the threshold for orbital changes to induce Sahara greening"
by madphilosopher | 2025-04-11 22:36:14+00:00
Back when I worked an office IT job, one year I asked my boss if I could come in an hour earlier in the winter (and leave an hour earlier after work). I had evening chores to do with my animals on the farm, and I needed the daylight after work.

What no one knew was that I just kept my watch on Daylight Savings Time and lived happily ever after. It was glorious. I saw my coworkers struggle with "jetlag" when the switch to Standard Time occurred, and when it went forward again. But I never switched. I kept that up for three years, and I highly recommend it. (I also got a tonne of work done in the hour before everyone else arrived to work.)
by airforce1 | 2025-04-11 22:36:17+00:00
Well, years later the website is still operational and the company still seems functional after Musk cut 80+% of the staff, which to me is pretty mind blowing. I'd call that pretty successful. If I, as the end user, can't tell the difference between pre-80% and post-80% cut twitter then what value was that 80% bringing to the organization, exactly?
by lll-o-lll | 2025-04-11 22:36:38+00:00
I think this also happens at the company level. You get good at delivering a certain type of solution using a set of technologies. You build excellent infrastructure and expertise using these, which is a strength!

However, without active effort to build capability in strategically important areas, your weaknesses can ruin you.

It works at the personal and company level. I’m the deep thinker/researcher type. At my age, that’s all for the good because you go up through the ranks until that’s a very valuable attribute. When I was younger though, I had to work hard on time-boxing and delivering the “good enough”; skills that are still vital when planning at the large scale.

The strengths and weaknesses are indeed two sides of the same coin.
by joshuamorton | 2025-04-11 22:36:47+00:00
I asked this because I've used bazel some, and blaze fairly extensively, and despite having done some deeply cursed things to blaze at times, I've never had issues with it as a daemon, to the point where I'd never consider needing to run it in non-daemonized mode as part of a debug process. It just works.

Second, "startup-time" is probably the least relevant complaint here in terms of why to daemonize. Running `help` without a daemon set up does take a few seconds (and yeah that's gross), but constructing the action graph cold for $arbitrary_expensive_thing takes a minute or two the first time I do it, and then around 1 second the next time.

Caching the build graph across builds is valuable, and persisting it in memory makes a lot more sense than on disk, in this case. The article we're discussing even argues in favor of making this even more extreme and moving action graph calculation entirely into a service on another machine because it prevents the situation where the daemon dies and you lose your (extremely valuable!) cached analysis graph:

> Bonanza performs analysis remotely. When traditional Bazel is configured to execute all actions remotely, the Bazel server process is essentially a driver that constructs and walks a graph of nodes. This in-memory graph is known as Skyframe and is used to represent and execute a Bazel build. Bonanza lifts the same graph theory from the Bazel server process, puts it into a remote cluster, and relies on a distributed persistent cache to store the graph’s nodes. The consequence of storing the graph in a distributed storage system is that, all of a sudden, all builds become incremental. There is no more “cold build” effect like the one you see with Bazel when you lose the analysis cache.

If you're worried about cache invalidation and correctness issues due to daemonization, I think you'd want to be even more concerned about moving them entirely off machine.

(I'm also not sure how their proposal intends to manage e.g. me and Phil on another machine trying to build conflicting changes that both significantly impact how the analysis graph is calculated and thrash each other, either you have to namespace so they don't thrash and then you've moved the daemon to the cloud, or you do some very very fancy partial graph invalidation approach, but that isn't discussed and it feels like it would be white paper worthy)
by hosh | 2025-04-11 22:36:59+00:00
That is not true, especially with Section 174 (for the US). Right now, if you want to hire an Elixir engineer, you're better off finding a generalist willing to learn and use Elixir, and you would probably get someone who is very capable.

With Section 174 in play in the US, it tends to drive companies hiring specialists and attempting to use AI for the rest of it.

My own experience is that ... I don't really want to draw from the most plentiful and cheapest pool of workers. I've seen the kind of tech that produces. You basically have a small handful of software engineers carrying the rest.

Elixir itself is a kind of secret, unfair advantage for tech startups that uses it.