MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amluto | 2025-04-09 16:46:07+00:00
I don’t think this is quite a sufficient explanation. If I were an investor / owner of a distributor or retailer, I think I would observe that these businesses don’t scale arbitrarily and I would care about returns as a function of cost of goods sold, operating expense, and of cost of customer acquisition. In this context, cost of goods sold will include actual wholesale cost as well as associated costs that scale along with it: insurance, shrinkage, samples, etc. Cost of customer acquisition will not scale as strongly with wholesale cost — one would need to advertise a bit more to convince people to buy a more expensive shoe, but this should be less than linear. And operating expenses (retail square footage, warehouse space, cashiers, shipping and handling) are almost independent of the cost of the pair of shoes.

All that being said, tariffs drive up the cost of living, which drives up wages, which makes everything more expensive.
by mNovak | 2025-04-09 16:46:22+00:00
It looks very nice visually, but I think the input sliders are way too narrow. Point in fact, in this example they have roughly a 2:1 range, which means virtually any combination of inputs 'wins' the game (is within 1 order of magnitude). That's not particularly fun, is it.

Personally, I approach Fermi estimates as order of magnitude guesses for each factor (e.g. if guessing how many ping pong balls fit in a 747, you might say, "well the width of the jet is closer to 10ft than 100ft", rather than guess 22ft), so having such fine-grained sliders feels like it misses the point.
by taftster | 2025-04-09 16:46:29+00:00
I don't think asking "what's wrong with my code" hurts the learning process. In fact, I would argue it helps it. I don't think you learn when you have reached your frustration point and you just want the dang assignment completed. But before reaching that point, if you had a tutor or assistant that you could ask, "hey, I'm just not seeing my mistake, do you have ideas" goes a long way to foster learning. ChatGPT, used in this way, can be extremely valuable and can definitely unlock learning in new ways which we probably even haven't seen yet.

That being said, I agree with you, if you just ask ChatGPT to write a b-tree implementation from scratch, then you have not learned anything. So like all things in academia, AI can be used to foster education or cheat around it. There's been examples of these "cheats" far before ChatGPT or Google existed.
by byearthithatius | 2025-04-09 16:46:37+00:00
Saw this on LinkedIn and curious for HN senior engineers thoughts. From the LinkedIn post:

How we got our non-technical founders shipping production code at HYBRD during YC and beyond

- Our CTO Matthew Ruiters set us up (iOS simulator, test envs, etc.).

- He then gave us a “Git 101” & “Linux 101” to familiarize us with the basics (version control, terminal commands).

- He assigned us exclusively frontend tasks at first since there’s a faster feedback loop (you can see the impact of your code).

- He broke down tickets into bite-sized steps (“File 1 does X, File 2 does Y...”) so that we knew how to approach tasks.

- Every PR goes through his review before merge (Greptile is the first line of defense, but Ruiters puts eyes on everything before merge).

- Feedback from Ruiters is simplified & copy-paste ready for the non-devs to drop into AI tools like Cursor.

The result of these systems? Our non-devs are now helping to build features our users love.

More velocity. More output. More ownership.
by zdragnar | 2025-04-09 16:46:44+00:00
That justifies using common tools and standards, but not why management in particular should be doing the selection.

Everywhere mature that I've worked, management delegated the task of choosing common tools to the senior / staff engineers, as well as decisions around when to make changes or exceptions.

The places that didn't do this were engineer-founded, or were dysfunctional enough that managers could splurge on massive contracts and then force people to use the paid-for tools to justify the contract post-hoc. Every one of these were examples of what not to do.
by fudged71 | 2025-04-09 16:46:49+00:00
an interesting area potentially missed (though acknowledged as out of scope) is how students might use LLMs for tasks related to early adulthood development. Successfully navigating post-secondary education involves more than academics; it requires developing crucial life skills like resilience, independence, social integration, and well-being management, all of which are foundational to academic persistence and success. Understanding if and how students leverage AI for these non-academic, developmental challenges could offer a more holistic picture of AI's role in student life and its indirect impact on their educational journey
by ytpete | 2025-04-09 16:46:52+00:00
I agree Congress reasserting power over tariffs (or budget) is not going to give Trump any leverage like that.

But I do think he could, and would, try to make a "Reichstag fire" over any kind of mass protest moment. During the BLM protests, he wanted to send the military in to take over Democratic-led cities. He toyed with declaring martial law if protests related to the 2020 election became violent. Any whiff of clashes with counterprotestors, or with police, or even property vandalism... any of that would be just the excuse he's looking for. The question isn't whether he'd try to use the excuse to grab more power, it's whether the people around him would push back like last term, or cave in and let him do it this time.
by kibwen | 2025-04-09 16:47:03+00:00
The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions.

Like, Socrates may have been against writing because he thought it made your memory weak, but at least I, an individual, am perfectly capable of manufacturing my own writing implements with a modest amount of manual labor and abundantly-available resources (carving into wood, burning wood into charcoal to write on stone, etc.). But I ain't perfectly capable of doing the same to manufacture an integrated circuit, let alone a digital calculator, let alone a GPU, let alone an LLM. Anyone who delegates their thought to a corporation is permanently hitching their fundamental ability to think to this wagon.
by kstrauser | 2025-04-09 16:47:07+00:00
An aside: the actual functional Nikes aren't luxury items, just really good shoes. My wife’s a foot surgeon and she won’t run in anything else because they fit her perfectly.

I've never found Nikes that work for me, but Brooks seem custom made for me personally, so that's what I get. They're about the same price as my wife’s Nikes.
by diggan | 2025-04-09 16:47:15+00:00
> forbidding inline script protect you from

What you use as an example has nothing to do with inline/"external" scripts at all, but everything to do with setting DOM contents vs text content. Most popular frameworks/libraries handle that as securely by default as one could (including React) and only when you use specific ways (like React's dangerouslySetInnerHTML or whatever it is called today) are you actually opening yourself up to a hole like that.

If you cannot rely on the escaping of whatever templating engine/library you're using, you're using someone's toy templating library and probably should switch to a proper one that you can trust, ideally after actually reviewing it lives up to whatever expectation you have.

> `<h3> {{ 'hello dear <strong>$user</strong>' | translate | unsafe }}`

This would have been the exact same hole regardless if it was put there/read by external/inline JavaScript.

I do agree with your last part that CSP does help slightly with "defense in depth", for when you do end up with vulnerabilities.
by globnomulous | 2025-04-09 16:47:27+00:00
> They were so excited to see us go from idea to execution so quickly

They're learning to expect to skip the most important part of creating something.

> they were laughing and we had a ton of fun

I'm a parent so I think I get the appeal, but this to be is like saying "they were laughing and having fun while reading and composing legal briefs." I don't see the advantage, and any momentary benefit comes at the cost of a longer-term loss.
by hx8 | 2025-04-09 16:47:46+00:00
Sure, I can see the difference.

I hope you can see how spending $75 to make $150 revenue and $75 in profit is a much better position than spending $50 to make $100 in revenue and $50 in profit, if you are limited to how many transactions you can make in a day by physical infrastructure.

I think it's understandable for the store to charge more for their shoes, and for the stores to make more than $50/profit per shoe to cover higher capital investment and increased risk of loss, but I don't understand the logical leap where the store now can make 50% more profit per shoe.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-09 16:47:48+00:00
I’ve seen the manager at a home depot make this call in real time. They had a case of umbrellas up on some racking. I heard him say “lets put those umbrellas down now its going to rain this week.” Shifting the store floor to meet demand. When our baseball team won the world series they also changed all the 5 gal buckets to team color and branding no HD logo at all. I wish I grabbed 5 at the time…
by miros_love | 2025-04-09 16:47:49+00:00
Not sure about CBP specifically, but many countries already use specialized tools to break into phones and silently install backdoors — Cellebrite comes to mind.

As my favorite blogger puts it: "If the data is important, it's not stored in only one place. If there's no backup, it wasn't important." With that in mind, wiping the device and filling the gallery with high-resolution images of genitals covered in excrement remains one of the more effective passive defense strategies.

Jokes aside, it's depressing that crossing borders often means giving up fundamental digital privacy — and that we've largely normalized this. The idea that any government agent can dig through your phone without a warrant just because you're crossing a line on a map is dystopian at best.
by pmags | 2025-04-09 16:47:59+00:00
The paper itself (open access):

Iwasaki K, Neuhauser C, Stokes C, Rayshubskiy A. The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, as a microrobotics platform. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2025 Apr 15;122(15):e2426180122. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2426180122. Epub 2025 Apr 8. PMID: 40198707.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2426180122
by bko | 2025-04-09 16:48:12+00:00
Maybe 40 years ago there were programmers that would not work with anyone that use IDEs or automated memory management. When presented with a programming task that requires these things and you're WITHOUT your IDE or whatever, they will fall apart.

Look, I agree with you, I'm just trying to articulate to someone why they should learn X if they believe an LLM could help them and "an LLM won't always be around" isn't a good argument, because lets be honest, it likely will. This is the same thing as "you won't walk around all day with a calculator in your pocket so you need to learn math"
by matchagaucho | 2025-04-09 16:48:15+00:00
If robots.txt is an exclusion file, I can't help but wonder if we just need an agents.json inclusion file in the root to get a "standard" started.

A2A looks like a typical enterprise, authenticated, strict DTD style spec.

Agents acting on behalf of consumers need a simple file that describes: 1) What services are provided 2) What tools are available and how to use them

Agent behavior and actions should happen in latent space. The format of any spec is almost meaningless, as long as it's self describing and conveys those 2 points.
by mistrial9 | 2025-04-09 16:48:23+00:00
I see a future where there are things like US law firms, which can be big or small, but include tight rules for their members, and market power through hard negotiations. Due to the nature of tech stacks (versus The Law) I doubt that there will be very many of these firms, relatively speaking. Certainly race to the bottom cheap and exploitative coding shops will continue, sometimes based around gambling districts in various places.
by erikerikson | 2025-04-09 16:48:58+00:00
TL;DR: I recommend it as a workplace and service provider.

In balance, I have absolutely nothing negative to say; I loved working there and felt great about the work we did for others. Consultancies and their clients can be messy but it was a wonderful place to overwork (relative to my personal capacities). The technologists were top notch, people cared to do good work and deliver real business value, and the ambient emotional intelligence was soothingly glorious.
by cperkins | 2025-04-09 16:49:25+00:00
I think we are careless in how we use terms. We often say "intelligence" where me mean "sentience". We have studied intelligence for a long time and we have IQ tests that can measure it. The various LLMs (like Chat GPT and Gemini) are scoring pretty well on the IQ tests. So given that, I think we can conclude that they are intelligent, as we can measure it.

But while we have measurements for "intelligence" we don't for "sentience", "agency", "consciousness" or these other things. And I'd argue that there are lots of intelligent life on earth (take crows as an example) that are sentient to a degree that the LLMs are not. My guess is this is because of their "agency" - their drive for survival. The LLMs we have now are clearly smarter than crows and cats but not sentient in the way those animals are. So I think it's safe to say that "sentience" (whatever that is) is not an emergent property of neural net/training data size. If it were, it'd be evident already.

So Gemini/Chat GPT seem to be "intelligence", but in tool form. Very unexpected. Something I would not have believed possible 5 or 10 years ago, but there it is.

As to whether we could create a "sentient" AI, an AGI, I don't see any reason we shouldn't be able to. But it's clear to me that something else is needed, besides intelligence. Maybe it's agency, maybe it's something else (the experience of times passage?). We probably need to ways of measuring and evaluating these other things before we can progress further.
by latchkey | 2025-04-09 16:49:30+00:00
Cerebras (and Groq) has the problem of using too much die for compute and not enough for memory. Their method of scaling is to fan out the compute across more physical space. This takes more dc space, power and cooling, which is a huge issue. Funny enough, when I talked to Cerebras at SC24, they told me their largest customers are for training, not inference. They just market it as an inference product, which is even more confusing to me.

I wish I could say more about what AMD is doing in this space, but keep an eye on their MI4xx line.
by anon84873628 | 2025-04-09 16:49:31+00:00
The confusing part is that the actions don't seem logically consistent with any of the possible goals.

>The tariffs are targeted based on trade imbalance

Ok, I buy that based on the stupid formula they showed. Is "not ruin everything else" not also part of his goals? Can you explain what I'm missing?

I think people just keep underestimating exactly how stupid and ignorant Trump is. That's why nothing makes sense. He does not understand the law of comparative advantage and thus doesn't understand that trade is the engine of growth. He only sees fixed size pies and win-lose deals, so he's not capable of finding real solutions.
by fsckboy | 2025-04-09 16:49:40+00:00
any example token can have value, but will every example? no.

does the paper money of the US confederate rebel states have value? "any failed historical state's currency could have value to the people of Botswana" is not a useful idea.

Yes, I know, POWs used packages of cigarettes for currency, even those that had been passed around so many times that they were mush inside. I took econ too.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-04-09 16:49:44+00:00
LLMs require comparatively little training to use, and in fact training (like how to optimize prompts etc.) is probably a waste of time because the model behavior and interfaces change so frequently.

This puts them in the class of tools where the benefit is obvious once there is actually a real benefit (and not, say, the foreshadowing of some future benefit). This sort of tool doesn't require a mandate to gain adoption.

So, in the subdomains of software development where the LLMs are already useful, developers will naturally pick them up, assuming the business has secured the policy support and funding. In the areas where they aren't useful, businesses should trust developers and not waste their time with mandates.

And I say this as someone who uses LLMs all day every day for Python, Go, Bash, C/C++, pretty much everything. But as an active user I see the limitations constantly and wouldn't mandate their use upon anyone.
by diggan | 2025-04-09 16:49:58+00:00
> although I guess there could be a script that was not allowed to do CORS that then instead created an inline script and did its CORS stuff in that script

Wouldn't even matter, as it's the origin of wherever it ends up being executed that matters, not where the code was loaded from. So JS code loaded from cdn.jquery.com on mywebsite.com would have the origin mywebsite.com, even if loaded with a typical <script> tag.

In short, CORS applies to network requests made by scripts, not to the scripts themselves
by arcanemachiner | 2025-04-09 16:50:03+00:00
LOL I don't know actually, but I will definitely give your project a go when I have to mock up my next DB schemas.

It seems like your project is more grassroots than theirs, so hopefully you can use it to make some money... Not sure how your platform works, but do you provide (paid) storage, syncing, multi-user collaboration, etc.? That seems like the predictable monetization strategy.
by SoftTalker | 2025-04-09 16:50:26+00:00
No I think the struggle is essential. If you can just ask a tutor (real or electronic) what is wrong with your code, you stop thinking and become dependent on that. Learning to think your way through a roadblock that seems like a showstopper is huge.

It's sort of the mental analog of weight training. The only way to get better at weightlifting is to actually lift weight.
by hobo_in_library | 2025-04-09 16:50:35+00:00
The challenge is that while LLMs do not know everything, they are likely to know everything that's needed for your undergraduate education.

So if you use them at that level you may learn the concepts at hand, but you won't learn _how to struggle_ to come up with novel answers. Then later in life when you actually hit problem domains that the LLM wasn't trained in, you'll not have learned the thinking patterns needed to persist and solve those problems.

Is that necessarily a bad thing? It's mixed: - You lower the bar for entry for a certain class of roles, making labor cheaper and problems easier to solve at that level. - For more senior roles that are intrinsically solving problems without answers written in a book or a blog post somewhere, you need to be selective about how you evaluate the people who are ready to take on that role.

It's like taking the college weed out classes and shifting those to people in the middle of their career.

Individuals who can't make the cut will find themselves stagnating in their roles (but it'll also be easier for them to switch fields). Those who can meet the bar might struggle but can do well.

Business will also have to come up with better ways to evaluate candidates. A resume that says "Graduated with a degree in X" will provide less of a signal than it did in the past
by unethical_ban | 2025-04-09 16:50:59+00:00
I really want to respond to the dead comment under this.

Setting a duress password is not tedious.

AFAIK the justification for them to say "don't rely on adblockers for security/privacy" is that you can be more easily fingerprinted and those adblock lists are a moving target, vs. having better sandbox capabilities in the browser.

The rest is conjecture I don't have the motivation to debate at the moment.

As for the rest of the article... just get a second phone if this is a major concern, or wipe the phone and have it be perfectly clean when you go through customs. The only thing you need to remember is the password + a single TOTP backup code (write that one down maybe) to restore your cloud password safe (which you should have) then you can get access to all your other data from there.
by myrmidon | 2025-04-09 16:51:01+00:00
If you can make $5k/year by investing $100k into shoe-selling, then those profits have to rise at the same rate as base costs, otherwise, people will just invest into eggplant-selling, instead.

Another perspective is that Footlocker would sell you those $25 Nikes for $300 if they could-- but if they tried, someone else would get active in the retail business and invest into a slightly less profitable operation (with lower margins) to eat into their market share.

But if the costs for everyone rise, raising the prices proportionally (instead of by fixed amount) makes total sense because it is not really gonna cost you market share (only decrease total market volume depending on consumer price sensitivity).

Note: We just observed those exact dynamics with Covid/Ukraine driven price increases, where retailers and other middlemen actually came out really good instead of sacrificing their margins to keep consumer costs down.
by gorgoiler | 2025-04-09 16:51:28+00:00
You’re right, but also I know I have enough backed up to survive a catastrophe. What I don’t want to do is to test my backup in a non catastrophe situation and invalidate all my TOTP, WhatsApp history, mail settings etc. just because I wanted to test disaster recovery.

It feels like buying a fire safe (phone and app backups) without any kind of understanding if it works then burning your house down to see if it works. I want a fire safe (phone and app backups) that is up-front with guarantees it works!

I should have said this by the way: for a long time I did wipe my phone when crossing borders, learning the hard way all the little details that don’t quite work properly when doing a restore from backups.
by psygn89 | 2025-04-09 16:51:32+00:00
Agreed, the struggle often leads us to poke and prod an issue from many angles until things finally click. It lets us think critically. In that journey you might've learned other related concepts which further solidifies your understanding.

But when the answer flows out of thin air right in front of you with AI, you get the "oh duh" or "that makes sense" moments and not the "a-ha" moment that ultimately sticks with you.

Now does everything need an "a-ha" moment? No.

However, I think core concepts and fundamentals need those "a-ha" moments to build a solid and in-depth foundation of understanding to build upon.
by aeturnum | 2025-04-09 16:51:46+00:00
Like, if you decide to do your backend in rust or python you can choose async or synchronous approaches - but Node locks you into async. I'm not a node developer so I can't sing the praises of what you get, but being locked into JavaScript's process model, VM, and type system is certainly a downside (for which you get the whole JS world). It's another example of...if you are architecting your service and you pick this you are picking some built in trade-offs.
by koliber | 2025-04-09 16:52:48+00:00
I had 4 instances where a sketchy Asian guy showed up to an interview. Something was always off. Twice it was the same guy under two different names. In the final case I called the candidate out that the they are from North Korea. They were frazzled and when they began talking the connection dropped mid-word.

It’s as if someone else disconnected us.

I am sure they are North Koreans. Next time I will have a picture of fat leader printed out and I am asking the candidate what they think of Kim.