MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by troupo | 2025-05-24 19:11:37+00:00
> That's how open source works:

Funny how in reality it's not how open source works. Packages are en masse packaged and maintained by a very small number of maintainers doing a thankless job. Not by some "community" where "a person who uses the package" suddenly wakes up nad says "you know, I'm going to package this piece of software"

This is literally the reason for my exmaple with Erlang in my original comment.

> n the open source world, most people are freeriders.

I'm getting tired of your rants and tangents

> No! No no no no! If they don't want to put efforts into that, they don't have to. They could use Ubuntu

You're deliberately missing and/or ignoring the point.

Ho many package managers and package format are there? Packaging some code for each of them is wasted/duplicated effort because it's doing the same thing (packaging) for the same code (for example, Erlang) for literally the same operating system (Linux) just because someone has a very subjective view of "the one true correct way".

So now you have someone packaging, say, Erlang, for dpkg, flatpack, nix, pacman, rpm, snap and probably a few others because "people are not freeloaders" or "non-windows-minded people" or some other stream of consciousness.

> Don't use Gentoo if you don't want to, and leave me alone! Don't try to solve my problems, you're not even a Gentoo user.

I've said all I had to say. You deliberately chose to talk only to the voices in your head. Sorry, I'm not privy to those voices.

So, adieu.
by susam | 2025-05-24 19:12:05+00:00
> To be fair, I think this feature is not built into dired either and would require an additional package[2]

It is not part of Dired but it is part of Emacs, so it works out of the box. For example, in plain vanilla Emacs, if we type C-o on a PDF file displayed in Dired, it opens up the PDF file in a split window using doc-view. Similarly, if I type C-o on a PNG file, it opens up the PNG file using image-mode in a split window. So you're right that this isn't part of Dired but it is part of Emacs, so all of this works out of the box in vanilla Emacs with zero customisations.
by K0balt | 2025-05-24 19:12:29+00:00
Yeah, I mean if you’re building them for your own amusement or in small quantities for noncritical applications, no biggie, who has time to read all 300 pages lol? But if you’re supposed to be engineering a board that will be produced in the millions, that extra six hours digesting the important notes in the data sheet becomes basic due diligence…. You never know what that board is going to end up controlling somewhere, and the contributions you make to human happiness by making the board more reliable are multiplied by millions.
by pornel | 2025-05-24 19:13:39+00:00
You're making a mistake assuming that the push for HTTPS-only Web is about protecting the content of your site.

The problem is that mere existence of HTTP is a vulnerability. Users following any insecure link to anywhere allow MITM attackers to inject any content, and redirect to any URL.

These can be targeted attacks against vulnerabilities in the browser. These can be turning browsers into a botnet like the Great Cannon. These can be redirects, popunders, or other sneaky tab manipulation for opening phishing pages for other domains (unrelated to yours) that do have important content.

Your server probably won't even be contacted during such attack. Insecure URLs to your site are the vulnerability. Don't spread URLs that disable network-level security.
by keiferski | 2025-05-24 19:14:28+00:00
A bit of a rambling essay without much depth, but it did make me wonder: if AI tools weren’t wrapped in a chatbot pretending to be a person, would all of this hullabaloo about AI and human nature go away? That seems to be the root of the unease many people have with these tools: they have the veneer of a human chatting but obviously aren’t quite there.

I tend to treat Ai tools as basically just a toolset with an annoying chat interface layered on top, which in my experience leads me to not feel any of the feelings described in the essay and elsewhere. It’s just a tool that makes certain outputs easier to generate, an idea calculator, if you will.

As a result, I’m pretty excited about AI, purely because they are such powerful creative tools - and I’m not fooled into thinking this is some sort of human replacement.
by reaperducer | 2025-05-24 19:14:50+00:00
It's been at least four years since I looked, which U.S. services do you recommend?

I only use my phone for voice calls three or four times a year, so cheap is important. But my wife will use it, so reliability is important.

If I could get something for $10/month, that would be ideal.

The list you pulled from that forum is seven years old, and only one of the five boxes I tried to find is still available.
by aatd86 | 2025-05-24 19:15:58+00:00
The way I see it, effects would be implemented/assigned to the function where the error gets logged for instance. But as long as the error value remains local, a function can still be pure all else being equal.

This is not the case with exception looking code (aka panics) since it escapes normal control flow and I guess makes an error "punch" through stacks as they are unwinded.

A bit like being thrown toward global state. So if we consider panics as side effectful operations, we would have to change go to explicitly declare panics as side effects with a known function signature.

I guess one would want the list of side effects to be part of a function signature for full visibility. I wonder how that would influence backward compatibility.
by donnachangstein | 2025-05-24 19:16:23+00:00
1. People that were using the in-kernel SMB server in Solaris or Windows.

2. Samba performance sucks (by comparison) which is why people still regularly deploy Windows for file sharing in 2025.

Anybody know if this supports native Windows-style ACLs for file permissions? That is the last remaining reason to still run Solaris but I think it relies on ZFS to do so.

Samba's reliance on Unix UID/GID and the syncing as part of its security model is still stuck in the 1970s unfortunately.

The caveat is the in-kernel SMB server has been the source of at least one holy-shit-this-is-bad zero-day remote root hole in Windows (not sure about Solaris) so there are tradeoffs.
by 13years | 2025-05-24 19:17:37+00:00
> Myself I believe technology and eventually AI were our fate once we became intelligence optimizers.

Yes, everyone talks about the Singularity, but I see the instrumental point of concern to be something prior which I've called the Event Horizon. We are optimizing, but without any understanding any longer for the outcomes.

"The point where we are now blind as to where we are going. The outcomes become increasingly unpredictable, and it becomes less likely that we can find our way back as it becomes a technology trap. Our existence becomes dependent on the very technology that is broken, fragile, unpredictable, and no longer understandable. There is just as much uncertainty in attempting to retrace our steps as there is in going forward."
by zevon | 2025-05-24 19:17:40+00:00
Maybe also an option and an educational little project about electronics and (re-)using "old" devices: There are lots of used iPods around and many of the old hard drive models are pretty easy to retrofit with flash-based storage (there are also lots of options for aesthetic customization as well as more involved modifications such as adding Bluetooth, USB-C and whatnot). As others have mentioned, the software side also still works well with iTunes on Windows and Finder/Music integration on MacOS.
by djoldman | 2025-05-24 19:18:12+00:00
1. I suspect that the vast majority couldn't care less about the philosophical implications. They're just going to try to adapt as best they can and live their lives.

2. LLMs are challenging the assumption, often unvoiced, that humans are special, unique even. A good chunk of people out there are starting to feel uncomfortable because of this. That LLMs are essentially a distillation of human-generated text makes this next-level ironic: occasionally people will deride LLM output... In some ways this is just a criticism of human generated text.
by foxglacier | 2025-05-24 19:18:31+00:00
This is not even software but somehow on/off switches are a challenge. When I was a kid I remember struggling to figure out how to use a power switch on an extension cord. You'd slide it one way and it revealed the word "on", and the other way revealed "off". But did that mean it was on when it said "on" or was "on" telling you to what moving the switch would do - which is how pause/play buttons on video players work today? 30 years later I got stuck with the same problem in my iPhone. Today they have green coloring to help but back then, I think it was more confusing. Computer monitors today are worse - you never know if it's blank because it's turned off (indicated by LED being on (or off) or a certain color) or no signal (indicated by LED being off (or on) or a different color).
by AnthonBerg | 2025-05-24 19:19:17+00:00
Interesting!, thanks! NAC is all over the place; I didn’t know about this application.

And yeah I was 100% skeptical too!

Now I’m more sceptical of the kinda “nothing is known, nothing is knowable” angle, you know? There is so much knowledge, actionable, often unread, often unused.

(Have to mention it, if useful: Na—R-ALA (alpha lipoic acid) and ambroxol are kind of in the same vein. Ambroxol is strangely a sort of bromine counterpart to NAC and its sulfur atom. Sold as a mucolytic but is… alllll over the place. Funny how mucus, mucous membranes, the nervous system, and oxidation/redox stuff is all so adjacent it seems.

I have no idea why but after a severe period of stress, I happened to take Na-R-ALA as sometimes do and 60mg of ambroxol as mucolytic cough syrup. For a cough. And… the feeling was like in the movies where they stab someone with a giant syringe to revive them. Trainspotting or Pulp Fiction or whatever. I felt like I gasp-crawled out of a pit inside myself. It makes no sense. It was… a very distinct experience. And it didn’t seem like an airway clearance thing, more like my nervous system was refreshed.

So I hit the books. And it turns out ambroxol crosses the blood-brain barrier and is an antioxidant, and affects ion balance in neurons, and there are studies indicating it helps with… Parkinson’s and fibromyalgia (!!!). And those papers are pretty interesting and appear to be constructed on solid molecular biological premises.

idk)
by gaudystead | 2025-05-24 19:19:24+00:00
It's wild how that video came out 16 years ago and basically ends with "we'll see if Apple will make computers for business users and not just dicking around", and now in the current day, I'm working at a place where an update was sent out to our Macbook users that bricked the ones running an M1 chip, but not the M2 or M3 models.

It almost feels _impressive_ how hard macOS still is to integrate into an enterprise setting, and maybe they're okay with it just being a running joke for the past two decades that their computers don't do as well in a business context...
by jdbs_alter_ego | 2025-05-24 19:20:14+00:00
Ugh, this article smells of AI slop.

For starters the "jdb" "forum user" (with a Raspberry Pi Engineer tag - i.e. an employee) never claimed to have tested the board with any sort of Samsung camera.

The actual post referencing Samsung is here: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=99042#p6... - which has a couple of broken nested quotes.

And literally the next post has jdb's replication with a Canon compact handheld.
by benreesman | 2025-05-24 19:20:43+00:00
Intentionally or not the tractor analogy is a rich commentary on this but it might not make the point you intend. Look into all the lawsuits and shit like that with John Deere and the DRM lockouts where farmers are losing whole crops because of remote shutdown cryptography that's physically impossible to remove at a cost or in a timeframe less than a new tractor.

People on HN love to bring up farm subsidies, and its a real issue, but big agriculture has special deals and what not. They have redundancy and leverage.

The only time this stuff kicks in is when the person with the little plot needs next harvest to get solvent and the only outcome it ever achieves is to push one more family farm on the brink into receivership and directly into the hands of a conglomorate.

Software engineers commanded salaries that The Right People have found an affront to the order of things long after they had gotten doctors and lawyers and other high-skill trades largely brought to heel via the joint licensing and pick a number tuition debt load. This isn't easy in software for a variety of reasons but roughly that the history of computer science in academia is kind of a unique one: it's research oriented in universities (mostly, there are programs with an applied tilt) but almost everyone signs up, graduates, and heads to industry without a second thought, and so back when the other skilled trades were getting organized into the class system it was kind of an oddity, regarded as almost an eccentric pursuit by deans and shit.

So while CS fundamentals are critical to good SWE's, schools don't teach them well as a rule any more than a physics undergraduate is going to be an asset at CERN: its prep for theory research most never do. Applied CS is just as serious a topic, but you mostly learn that via serious self study or from coworkers at companies with chops. Even CS graduates who are legends almost always emphasize that if you're serious about hacking then undergrad CS is remedial by the time you run into it (Coders at Work is full of this sentiment).

So to bring this back to tractors and AI, this is about a stubborn nail in what remains of the upwardly mobile skilled middle class that multiple illegal wage fixing schemes have yet to pound flat.

This one will fail too, but that's another mini blog post.
by reaperducer | 2025-05-24 19:21:02+00:00
There is nothing on this planet that can provide the same experiences it can. That includes real life.

There are plenty of places on this planet where you can rent a real sports car and race around a real track against real people for real.

Until your VR headset emits the smell of burning fuel, rumbles your body so hard that you feel it for hours afterward, deafens you with engine and tire noise, throws so much mud on the screen that your pit crew uses tear-off sheets of plastic to clear it because wipers are useless, and provides a non-zero chance of actually being hurt or dying, your video game is just game.

IRL > VR
by _wire_ | 2025-05-24 19:21:13+00:00
Why do people call businessmen "suits"? Or say that "planes fly" but not that "submarines swim"? When and where does an aircraft carrier "set sail"?

What exactly is "pre-boarding" at an airport?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vdPy5Ikn7dw&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5t...
by lowbloodsugar | 2025-05-24 19:21:14+00:00
I would say that the difference is taking an engineering approach to the process itself. Iterating on the context, putting the system into various states, etc. Treating the AI like a very knowledgeable intern who also has a very fixed short term memory and can’t form new long term memories but can be taught to write things down like in Memento. The thing is, though, it has a much much larger short term memory than me.
by diggan | 2025-05-24 19:22:00+00:00
> Peer Programming with LLMs, For Senior+ Engineers

> [...] a collection of blog posts written by other senior or staff+ engineers exploring the use of LLM in their work

It seems to be by senior engineers if anything, I don't see anything in the linked articles indicating they're for senior engineers, seems programmers of all seniority could find them useful, if they find LLMs useful.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-24 19:22:07+00:00
The Unites States just approved what, 20 billion, to build infrastructure for a new national police people identification unit? Just like the patriot act after 9/11, the giant new 'ICE' budget is going to transform America, and not in a good way. And that 20 billion additional for internal policing is never going away, just look at the TSA. And mission creep will set in, just look at FISA courts and 'parallel reconstruction' now being the norm and no one cares.

I tell my kids this isn't normal, this isn't what the US used to be like, but they don't know any different, so to them giving up just a little bit of this (like we did with the Patriot Act) isn't a big deal.
by akomtu | 2025-05-24 19:22:09+00:00
This made me think that the near future will be LLMs trained specifically on Linux or another large project. The source code is a small part of the dataset fed to LLMs. The more interesting is runtime data flow, similar to what we observe in a debugger. Looking at the codebase alone is like trying to understand a waterfall by looking at equations that describe the water flow.
by opdahl | 2025-05-24 19:22:11+00:00
I think it really depends on the use case. It is well known that most users really only look and engage with the top few (1-3) results in a search. If you can get the most relevant result from position, let’s say 7 to 2, that can have a big impact on the user experience. And I know they market this for RAG, but I think that’s just marketing and this is as relevant for traditional search.
by Reasoning | 2025-05-24 19:22:28+00:00
Spotify just made the 'brilliant' decision to remove the "Add this song to the playlist" button. Now to add songs that Spotify itself recommends based on the playlist you're listening to you have to, right-click the name, select "Add to playlist", scroll to find the playlist you're currently listening to and select it. Before there was a single button to do this.

But at least I got more whitespace on my screen now...
by herrington_d | 2025-05-24 19:23:12+00:00
One thing AE provides but not coroutines is type safety. More concretely AE can specify what a function can do and cannot do lexically in code. A generator/coroutine cannot.

For example, a function annotated with say `query_db(): User can Datebase` means the function can call database and the caller must provide a `Database` handler to call the `query_db`.

The constraint of what can do and not is pretty popular in other programming fields, most notably, NextJS. A server component CANNOT use client feature and a client component CANNOt access server db.
by Animats | 2025-05-24 19:23:32+00:00
It's less about the look than the state. The article shows the complexity of Blender menus. But that's not the big problem. For an object to be visible, four things must be turned on. It's hard to figure out which setting is set wrong. Especially when a new release adds something new that has to be turned on.

This is a generic problem in Blender. You can't do something because you're in the wrong state, but nothing tells you that you're in the wrong state.

GNU GIMP has always been much worse than Photoshop in this way. When inserting text, the text is in a default size. If you change the size, and then click on a new insert point, it goes back to the default size. Whether or not the last change has been committed is not obvious, and until it has been committed, many menus and icons do nothing, silently. Selection vs. layers vs. commits are very confusing. Just keeping the dockable menus visible is tough.
by diggan | 2025-05-24 19:24:02+00:00
> What are some of the differences between Peer Programming with LLMs and Vibe Coding?

"Vibe Coding" is specifically using the LLM instead of programming anything, barely caring about the output. If something is wrong, don't even open the file, just ask the LLM. Basically "prompting while blindfolded" I guess you could say.

Peer programming with an LLM would be to use it as another tool in the toolbox. You still own your program and your code. Edit away, let the LLM do some parts that are either too tricky, or too trite to implement, or anything in-between. Prompts usually are more specific, like "Seems X is broken, look into Y and figure out if Z could be the reason".
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-24 19:24:16+00:00
BTW: I don't "owe" anything more to anyone. I wrote something entertaining. It happened to be based on my life, but it really stands alone.

Just because someone is curious, and feels they are entitled to more information, doesn't mean they are actually "entitled," and that they will get it.

I am grateful, when folks share intimate stuff with me. I have been in that position for decades, and I've learned not to pry for more. There's usually a good reason they don't go further. I may not think it's a "good" reason, but they do, so what I think means diddly squat.

The Internet has done weird things to personal boundaries and propriety. Kinda sad, really.
by K0balt | 2025-05-24 19:24:35+00:00
Sure, but I’m having a hard time understanding how developing nations the world over can afford to do this, but the USA cannot lol. I’ve used the healthcare systems in many developing nations, and while it’s not really fun, it is adequate and free for 80 percent of the issues that a person encounters.

For the other 20 percent, it’s best to go to a private clinic, where the care is as good if not better than many US clinics but at 10-20 percent of the cost.

And the private clinics are not subsidized.

My wife just got an MRI at a private, fully for profit imaging clinic. The total cost was $217 USD for a study with and without contrast on a 2023 Siemens scanner. Labs for the contrast approval were $6.

What people pay in the USA is in no way justified by equipment or facility costs. Runaway liability and profiteering, perhaps. But not because of the “quality” of the healthcare or the equipment.
by cubano | 2025-05-24 19:25:30+00:00
Spoken like a man who has never had to write a payroll check in his life.

Of course human ownership is preferable, but it's also crazy expensive and since the point of all corporations is to "increase shareholder value" (not "gainfully employ workers"), well then all your talk of responsibility-here-and-there is quite touching but absolutely misses the point.

Economics is driving this bus, not quality and most certainly not responsibility.
by BandButcher | 2025-05-24 19:26:23+00:00
Maybe I'm just a bad dev but I'm baffled how they charge $46k for "29 features" and $56k for "43 features"... Straight up guestimations and magic numbers

but then again they also highlight how you don't have to know anything about tech to use them, so I'm sure setting "fixed pricing" for a fixed number of "features" is a great way to snake oil salesman potential customers
by thinkxl | 2025-05-24 19:26:44+00:00
I agree. You describe how it happens; however, I still don't find a justification for these:

- rely on competent people directly under the executive to guess what that means

- after-meetings in which everyone tries to interpret the executive’s feedback

- the executives are busy and hard to get access to

Imagine having a riddle as feedback in which people from different backgrounds and cultures gather to decipher a meaningful direction.
by pglevy | 2025-05-24 19:27:03+00:00
Just happened to read Heidegger's Memorial Address this morning. Delivered to a general audience in 1955, it is shorter and more accessible. Certainly not as complex as his later works but related.

> Yet it is not that the world is becoming entirely technical which is really uncanny. Far more uncanny is our being unprepared for this transformation, our inability to confront meditatively what is really dawning in this age.

https://www.beyng.com/pages/en/DiscourseOnThinking/MemorialA... (p43)