MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RajT88 | 2025-04-10 13:12:29+00:00
I've observed this weird cognitive dissonance with outdoorsmen, since I am quite fond of fishing.

They tend to be a pretty hardcore MAGA bunch, but also don't like pollution because it messes up their sport. When you ask them about stuff like this (how can you support someone who pretty openly wants to mess up your pastime?), they get mad or change the subject.

I get it - people are complicated and can care about many things at once. Nobody likes it when someone is seemingly poking at their belief systems. Still - you'd think it'd give them some kind of pause.
by diggan | 2025-04-10 13:12:32+00:00
I guess I agree with your overall point, but see things like music/tv/movies/images different from programs.

The purpose of a program (for me) is to solve a particular problem, or help me in some other way. They're usually categorized as "Works well enough" and "Not for me", and it's easy to see without using them, what category I'll file them into.

But media is different. They're not supposed to "solve" anything, just supposed to make me feel something for a duration of time, and after that they're "consumed" until I forget about them, or until I engage with it again. I usually don't know how I feel about the thing until after I've consumed it.

Personally, I've found LLMs to greatly help with creating small utility programs for myself, which I've been doing since I started programming, but now I spend maybe 20-30 minutes (mostly just refactoring stuff by hand takes time) before the utility is helpful, vs many hours which it used to take to put together the same thing.

Media that is 100% created with ML tooling tends to be very different in quality than human made media. I'm not 100% convinced it's because of the tooling itself, as much as the people who use the tooling don't have enough experience to create media from before to know what to create, or what it should be.
by fathermarz | 2025-04-10 13:12:53+00:00
My experience with Claude 3.7 with thinking has been incredible for coding tasks. I did not find the same level of success with Gemini even though the context window is nice.

Before they rolled this out, I rarely hit usage limits. Now it seems the usage limits have been lowered for Pro to add more value to Max. That is a less than ideal experience for users.

I agree with what most comments here are saying, that there should be more than just usage limits and I hope this changes (as it likely will because the state of competition is still high)
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-04-10 13:13:54+00:00
We are approaching Marky Mark and the Zucky bunch completely wrong. The rhetoric we use is as if he was running a government department (freedom of speech) and not the largest publisher in human history. On some level, I feel like our regulatory or philosophical model for how to approach Facebook is based on cable TV news, where people often argue for a return to the fairness doctrine.

Facebook is completely different from cable news. Nothing in history has encompassed marshall mcluhan's idea of the global village quite like modern social media has. The grip that Facebook has on our central nervous system is unparalleled and we talk about it in terms of "fairness" and "representing viewpoints" and not "biologically, neurologically, how is this technology fundamentally changing what it means to be a human being".

I don't know how to pass legislation to do so, but I believe it's in our best interests, as a society, if the maximum natural size of a website is like, 100k users, MAX. With the diversity of communities available, fairness of moderation will no longer be as important because you have more alternatives than the billionaire consensus factory
by ksec | 2025-04-10 13:14:07+00:00
They could have made a much better Switch 2 with better SoC had they just add $10 BOM cost to their SoC. I think Switch 2 has by far the worst hardware comparatively speaking in all of Nintendo's consoles history. Nintendo are known for using older hardware and doesn't compete with the State of art. But Switch 1 was using 3 years old tech, most other Nintendo console are similar as well.

Switch 2 is using 5 years old technology. It is not the hardware cost so much. It is not even about loss leader on console. Nintendo just decide to charge it.

Had it launch in 2023 it would have been fine.
by pc86 | 2025-04-10 13:14:07+00:00
It's an issue in grad school as well. You'll have an online discussion where someone submits 4 paragraphs of not-quite-eloquent prose with that AI "stink" on it. You can't be sure but it definitely makes your spidey sense tingle a bit.

Then they're on a video call and their vocabulary is wildly different, or they're very clearly a recent immigrant and struggle with basic sentence structure such that there is absolutely zero change their discussion forum persona is actually who they are.

This has happened at least once in every class, and invariably the best classes in terms of discussion and learning from other students are the ones where the people using AI to generate their answers are failed or drop the course.
by em-bee | 2025-04-10 13:14:31+00:00
we need a society where people are required to put forth the effort to participate

we need a society where people are MOTIVATED to put forth the effort to participate. only education can provide that motivation. (education is not just school, but also parenting, etc, but school is the place where new ideas are shared with the next generation). UBI can then provide the freedom to act on that motivation.

to be greedy is not the human condition. it is a protection mechanism because everyone else is perceived to be greedy and selfish as well. change that perception and give people the means to not need to be protective and the world will change.

my own life is testimony to that. i am from a country where i know that i will get support if i need it. i am using this perception of safety to wander out into the world with my children and live in places where we can make a meaningful difference. and i do that without getting any financial aid. finances are tough. my savings have run out. life is not easy. but i keep going because it is worth it. the children are getting the education of their lifetime and i am able to take the risk because i know that if all else fails i still can go back home and get support.
by smileybarry | 2025-04-10 13:14:41+00:00
We have a(n enterprise) product that uses .NET 4.x for the UI, and I've explored moving to current .NET, however:

* Supporting some older OSes and requiring less system base updates is key

* There's a priority to keep installation size (relatively) small

* There's a (higher-up) notion of "if it works, why change it"

On top of that, some technical issues I've encountered (since resolved) and gave up on upgrading were:

* Up until relatively recently there was no "single executable" deployment

* For some part of Core's lifetime you had this weird deployment of DLL-run-by-EXE that's a dealbreaker for the software's security boundaries & requirements

* Huge executable size, until recently where trimming unused framework code was added

There was also some period of time where the .NET party line was "WPF is legacy, we don't support it on modern .NET" and our UI is already built in WPF. We couldn't move to something like WinUI due to supporting Windows <10 and even then, WinUI 3 increases your deployment executable's size by a lot. Thankfully they added WPF support in .NET 8/9.
by wpietri | 2025-04-10 13:14:46+00:00
No. Fraud and theft are concepts that are broader than whatever legal jurisdiction you happen to be in at the time. Imagine that somebody gets one of those libertarian paradises up and going. Or imagine a failed state or a post-apocalyptic scenario, where there is no longer any law. It's still possible to run a fraud, it's just that the fraud would be, de jure or de facto, legal.
by gaogao | 2025-04-10 13:14:49+00:00
> Starlark is intended to be simple. There are no user-defined types, no inheritance, no reflection, no exceptions, no explicit memory management. Execution is finite. The language does not allow recursion or unbounded loops.

That has some pretty useful properties for a config language that I'm not sure TypeScript helps much on. That said, Lean also has these properties too as an alternate language with good IDE support, and it would be pretty fun to write proofs of your build scripts.
by amluto | 2025-04-10 13:15:05+00:00
This problem is already solved by technology. A brief history:

In the old days, before water conservation efforts, toilets used around 5 gallons per flush. They flushed slowly and weakly, but they kind of make up for it with volume. Except that, when the flush failed, they would overflow quickly, at a rate of 5 gallons per flush.

Then conservation started and we got lower-flush toilets. They were awful. You might have one of these.

But now we have even lower flushing toilets, and they work better than ever, and they clog your pipes less because they flush forcefully.

See here: https://map-testing.com/

So your Falcon Heavy needs a modern toilet, not an executive order.
by tarasyarema | 2025-04-10 13:15:14+00:00
After the release yesterday, I think it's an interesting move from Google, and specially the sample code they have in the repo.

Seems like a natural move after the MCP release, and I'm curious to see how many A2A new tools will appear in the next weeks, has anyone already started working on a Python library to implement the A2A interface?

They say that MCP can be used in conjunction, but I'm not sure if this actually makes the type of interaction move from the MCP (tool) level to the agent level.

Also, the auto-discovery with the well-known/agent.json I think it's something that is missing on the MCP world (?).

What do you think about it?
by woodruffw | 2025-04-10 13:15:44+00:00
To be clear, I agree that this is why expert systems fail. My point was only that non-monotonic logics and probability have equal explanatory power when it comes to unpredictability: the latter models with probability, and the former models with relations and defeasible defaults.

This is why I say the meta-cognitive explanation is important: I don’t think most people assign actual probabilities to events in their lives, and certainly not rigorous ones in any case. Instead, when people use words like “likely” and “unlikely,” they’re typically expressing a defeasible statement (“typically, a stranger who approaches me on the street is going to ask me for money, but if they’re wearing a suit they’re typically a Jehovah’s Witness instead”).
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-04-10 13:15:57+00:00
>> You're not harming anyone

I refer you to the below lines in the post to which you replied:

> Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.

> We're explicitly discussing someone lying about their abilities and experience, and thus not able to deliver what they said they can in their resume and/or interview.

----

>> Everyone deserves exactly what they manage get for themselves. That's exactly how meritocracy works. You're not entitled to deserve a job from the start, out of of some holy moral principle. There's no such thing as "I deserve", there's only "I competed, and I won/lost".

In other words, might makes right. If you manage to scam an old lady out of her retirement savings, you deserve to have it! There's no such thing as "she deserves", only "she competed and she lost", etc etc etc.

It's a good thing there are people in this world that don't subscribe to this "fark you, anything goes, as long as I got mine" style of "ethics".
by mathieuh | 2025-04-10 13:16:18+00:00
One argument which I find profoundly stupid is the "well it doesn't matter what we do, look at China". In reality doing things more cleanly can make a huge difference to your local environment. Do you want to live right next to a coal-fired power plant just because that's what they do in China? Do you want to walk past roads clogged with dirty, polluting cars?
by neonsunset | 2025-04-10 13:16:26+00:00
But you will only be able to hire the employees willing to tolerate working with it. Especially the condition of not planning any form of modernization.

And as phillipcarter noted, increasingly more libraries drop 'netstandard2.0' target, depending on the workload the performance difference is going to be anything between 50% and multiple orders of magnitude (e.g. Regex engine has gotten tens of thousands of percents faster for some patterns).

Working with .NET Framework from non-Windows environment requires using Parallels / UTM on macOS or QEMU or any other VM env. on Linux - there's Mono but it's not a replacement, and I don't think Visual Studio will work under Wine.

There are all sorts of hidden costs that you don't plan for, that come with using .NET Framework.
by toss1 | 2025-04-10 13:16:30+00:00
Fine. You are free to obfuscate and/or lie about your identity and location, and they are free to hire or not hire you.

Who said anything about install? They give you a company phone.

And you really think it is unreasonable for a person/company paying you money to do a task to know where on the planet you are located, emergency contacts, etc.? What happens when you get hit by a bus in Bangkok or have a scuba incident in Bali and are in the hospital for a week or worse? You just go dark and they have no way to send aid or even get status on the work you are now suddenly not doing, or obtain the current files so someone else can make progress?

Of course there are many inconsequential gigs/jobs for which it doesn't matter if you disappear, or lie about your identity or location, or are a North Korean spy trying to destroy the company, and you're welcome to work for those.

But I'm 100% in favor of remote work, and I would not remotely consider hiring someone for any consequential project or position without knowing they are who they say they are and they are where they say they are located.

And from a Corporate and National Security perspective, while I consider Return To Office largely outrageous, it seems quite reasonable for simple physical security measures to verify an employee is who and where they say they are.

Even more so considering the massive amounts of both nation-state-level corporate espionage and remote work fraud going on.
by stevoski | 2025-04-10 13:16:43+00:00
Java has an almost unbroken history of hassle-free version updates, all the way back to Java 1.0. (Okay, okay, I know you have a specific anecdote of a broken version update. I said “almost”.)

The one major exception was from Java 8 to Java 9. There’s some good reasons why Java 8 to Java 9 wasn’t a smooth upgrade for all. But that’s a story for another day.

For slow-moving enterprise IT departments, that would involve a major “update Java” project. Which involves budgets and people and not doing other things in the meantime.

Hence why Java 8 is still so prevalent in enterprise world.
by jerf | 2025-04-10 13:16:55+00:00
The default setup I've been using for years is to dedicate a desktop to emacs, break it into 3 windows horizontally, and then each of them fluidly switches between being full-frame in its bit and being cut in half. That gives me up to six contexts to operate in at once, though it's certainly some sort of code smell to need that many for some particular task! But 2, 3, and occasional dips into 4 are pretty common, as well as having something open for other reasons.

This is also part of why I try to mostly, but not super pendantically, maintain the discipline of keeping lines under 80ish characters most of the time. Occasional spill is no big deal but constant spill gets hard to read in this context.

Partially this is just out of habit of many years, but lately it's becoming an actual advantage. My most recent project has me diving through multiple codebases, none of them in the same language; I've followed some interactions through Perl, Java, PHP, and Typescript codebases in quick succession. Both having the multiple contexts, that I have years of muscle memory using, and not needing to load up separate IDEs for each of them has turned out to be really advantageous. Emacs may not be the "best" at handling any one language but I don't think there's much better at trying to handle all of them simultaneously.
by bbkane | 2025-04-10 13:17:06+00:00
It's not Rust, it's not production ready, and I haven't actually used it (only read the README and blog posts), but I really enjoy the ideas behind https://github.com/256lights/zb - see https://www.zombiezen.com/blog/2024/09/zb-early-stage-build-... for a list of these ideas.
by amazingamazing | 2025-04-10 13:17:13+00:00
I’ve observed that generalizations are usually wrong. There are plenty of MAGA people who care about the environment, and there are indeed MAGA people who couldn’t care less too.

It’s also strange to single out MAGA on cognitive dissonance- everyone, regardless of political affiliation has it.

At the end of the day blame the two party system. There are hundreds of thousands of people who voted for Obama and Trump, Biden and then Trump again. Let that sink in.
by lesostep | 2025-04-10 13:17:22+00:00
Can't speak for the person, who brought topic up, but I can't detect AI music from any human music. That's to say music rules aren't that hard, you can learn a basic structure, a few popular scales and a write a completely soulless peace yourself. Google "Minor Scale", choose any note as a starter, and here you go. You can even add any popular drum pattern. Soulless music written by humans is dime a dozen. It's out there, people just choose to listen to a better music. Scratch human written, there are algorithms based on music theory that could generate light music endlessly.

But the completely original peaces, written by professionals, aiming to express a feeling, are easily distinguishable from any AI song. AI songs doesn't leave you hanging or waiting, it doesn't know the value of breaking a pattern.

It's Mozart vs Salieri all over again.
by 418tpot | 2025-04-10 13:18:34+00:00
Interesting, are you saying that instead of reaching for `let foo = bar; in expr` you usually use something like `with { foo = bar; }; expr`?

> Since it uses attrsets, we can use their existing functionality, like `rec` and `inherit`; rather than duplicating it.

`let` supports `inherit`, and is always `rec`. Or is that your point, that it is needlessly duplicated functionality?
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-04-10 13:18:43+00:00
I think this sentiment is actually incredibly sad and more or less the crux of the matter.

AI is a tool intended on increasing efficiency. The way you describe the act of making art/crafting things seems to come through the lens of efficiency, where you're wasting your time in the struggle of improvement.

The time spent struggling is not time wasted. The struggle is the single most important aspect of learning and improving. Its how lessons learned reach the deep subconscious as if you're walking or writing with a pen. No good musician, painter, sculptor, systems engineer, etc became that way without that deep struggle. If someone says they never struggled, be wary of them.

If we round off every corner in the name of efficiency and the bottom line, all we're left with is toil. We don't benefit from that toil, the people who push for greater and greater efficiency do. No matter how efficient we get, the excesses produced by the efficiencies will be guarded. Food thrown away, excess milk dumped in the dirt, crops burned, profits stowed away.

The AI can only exist via previous struggle. The music produced by AI will only ever be a shadow of Human struggle. It will never truly exceed that struggle. A series of vectors in memory on a graphics card can't know the feeling of a beat as it resounds in ones chest, or the resolution of a chord as the bridge turns around. It can't know the sympathetic emotions of a story told in lyrics. It can't know the nostalgia evoked by a shadow in a painting, or the familiarity of an expression in a face.

Only we as humans can create this, and its sad and disgusting to see these tools used to degrade the human experience for an ounce of profit by people who refuse to allow themselves to understand the struggle of creating art.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-04-10 13:19:21+00:00
I think some of this is down to the inability of some folk (that to be clear, I think is stoked by the parties for marketing purposes) to differentiate between the beliefs of their party and their own personal beliefs. In this way, parties are not a matter of beliefs really as much as they're a matter of identity. I've witnessed this with my own family: my parents are and have always been Republican, and even though they hate Trump and virtually every policy he stands for, they still voted for him. When questioned why, you get various somewhat incoherent notions of hating Democrats. And... fair, as a Leftist, I also hate Democrats, haha. But I still voted Harris because as distasteful as I find the Dem establishment, they're closer to anything I want to see in the world than anything on offer on the other side.
by brummm | 2025-04-10 13:19:38+00:00
How can anybody trust the US ever again? Trump completely ignored an existing free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico that he himself signed.

You have to assume that the US is sane a maximum of four years in a row and in four years another Trump 2.0 will again be completely ignoring all their agreements.

In my opinion, the US cannot be trusted with any treaties ever again the way they currently are.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-04-10 13:20:19+00:00
> projected would, in that year alone, prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 800,000 cases of asthma, reaping up to $46 billion in health benefits.

That's the even crazier part - the savings in health benefits. Not sure what it takes to motivate even the most selfish out there.
by wpietri | 2025-04-10 13:20:21+00:00
I wouldn't say that LLMs have "ignited". I think they've gotten steadily better at autocomplete, but I don't think they've crossed any important threshold on the way to the sort of autonomous intelligence that Lenat was after.

I also don't think it was Lenat's original point to have an inconsistent ontology, as evidenced by his early projects. I agree that he eventually had to admit that. What I'm saying is that when he admitted that he should have recognized that it cut at the heart of what he was up to. Something I think borne out by the fact that he spent his whole life on something that didn't succeed on its own terms.
by pc86 | 2025-04-10 13:20:23+00:00
To me this is the bigger problem. Using LLMs is going to happen and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. So it's important to make people understand how to use them, and to find ways to test that students still understand the underlying concepts.

I'm in a 100%-online grad school but they proctor major exams through local testing centers, and every class is at least 50% based on one or more major exams. It's a good way to let people use LLMs, because they're available, and trying to stop it is a fool's errand, while requiring people to understand the underlying concepts in order to pass.
by theryan | 2025-04-10 13:20:26+00:00
Having just done that on a massive monolith (10y+ codebase continuously developed) I would recommend biting the bullet and doing upgrading all of your projects at once to either .NET Standard or .NET 9 where applicable. Pause development of new features or just do minimal changes on the main branch. We had a ton of footguns (EF6 -> EF Core, WPF, WCF, file serialization, multiple web services) and we were able to complete the migration in 6 months.
by a-french-anon | 2025-04-10 13:20:58+00:00
More than two is a bit painful, in my experience, as I don't think Emacs has directional focus like the usual X11 WMs (e.g. i3, bspwm) and C-o works well with only two.

Magit and sly/SLIME work much better with a second window, I'd say.