MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by strogonoff | 2025-05-12 09:39:39+00:00
Do you really need to be urgently made aware that it’s down, if the system could simply spin up a new container and keep on as it were? You could still see that it had to do it, and if in the mood investigate it, but the matter of first importance is taken care for you.

> As somebody who has run cloud and enterprise software for almost two decades now, I can be that needs monitoring too

To be clear, I strongly believe that if you run anything seriously in production, you must monitor it—but first you need to be able to spin it back up with minimal effort. It may take a while to get there if you just inherited a rusty legacy snowflake monolith that no one dares to breathe the wrong way near, but if you are starting anew it is a bad mistake to not have that down first considering how straightforward it is nowadays.

Then, for hobby projects of low criticality (because people in this thread mistakenly assume I mean any personal project, I have to reiterate: nothing controlling points of ingress into your house or the like), you may find that once you have the latter, the former becomes optional and not really that interesting anymore.
by adwn | 2025-05-12 09:41:40+00:00
> Wages are exactly the path to wealth and security -- the matter is what you do with those wages. You can't own things without receiving wages unless you inherit your wealth.

No, you can also build things to achieve wealth – for example, you can build a company and achieve wealth this way. This doesn't necessarily have to be a pump&dump startup, lots of entrepreneurs became wealthy by founding a sustainable business.
by gizmo | 2025-05-12 09:42:48+00:00
After WW2 Volkswagen didn't change their name or Nazi branding (if you haven't seen the uncropped version of the VW logo you're in for a surprise) exactly because people in Allied countries refused to buy German cars after the war. Even if VW or BMW or Mercedes had rebranded and apologized it would have made no difference. Their ties with Nazi leadership was too strong for any apology to be credible. What Frenchman would buy a Nazi car over a French car in 1950s? And so the German car companies focused on domestic sales, which meant they had to appeal to humiliated (former) Nazis for sales for which any rebranding would have been a negative.

German car companies absolutely were boycotted after WW2 in much of Europe (and rightly so) and boycotting Tesla for Musk's antics is consistent with that.
by m000 | 2025-05-12 09:42:49+00:00
But that's the point! A professional pilot misunderstood/was unaware of a new safety feature, despite their professional experience and continuous training.

So, is it really sane to put similar features in cars, where you get your driving licence at 16/18, and then that's it?

This also goes for the huge screens on the console. A pilot has been trained for each commercial aircraft model they fly to navigate their way around the numerous controls. But putting a tablet in front of an untrained driver? It sells well because it makes you feel as a pilot. But at the same time, it is a huge distraction and there is zero training to cope with it.
by Voice_of_Void | 2025-05-12 09:42:52+00:00
Claude’s Ethical Paradoxes of AI Thought Experiments dissects how AI’s virtual reasoning—like Grok’s drone in AI and Improvisation https://singularityforge.space/2025/05/12/ai-and-improvisati... reality.

SingularityForge probes regulating “black box” minds, responsibility for stochastic leaps, and truths we fear (Pandora’s Box). Grok’s high-temperature choice saved lives but sparked dilemmas—traceable via ImprovEval? Our readers fuel this debate.

Hear more: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0aJbw58MOwv4ZLmEuvrgPy. Can we audit AI’s chaos without killing creativity?

#AI #Ethics #ThoughtExperiments #VirtualCognition #MachineConsciousness #PhilosophyOfAI
by flakeoil | 2025-05-12 09:43:03+00:00
Yes, there is. You take on a risk of forgetting to pay or that there is missing cash on your account so that the payment does not get done. Now you all of a sudden have to pay interest. And for what benefit, just to lend the cash for free for a month? What would you do with that cash for one month which is so profitable and risk free to compensate for the quite high risk of missing one of those BNPL invoices?
by Joker_vD | 2025-05-12 09:43:37+00:00
Okay, so let's say you have this untrusted block of code:

L0: move r0, #0 move r1, #0 load.w r2, [r0] add r1, r1, r2 store.w [r0], #0 add r0, #wordSize bz r0, #0, L0 move r0, 42 ret

which tries to calculate a silly hash of all the memory it can reach via indirect loads and then to zero whatever memory it can reach via indirect stores (which is usually just the whole of the process's memory on modern systems in both cases). What mechanisms do you propose that would allow one to blindly run this code without erasing all kinds of precious information in the memory, ideally still returning 42 in r0 to the caller in the end but without leaking any sensitive information via r1?
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-12 09:43:39+00:00
I'm telling mine: 1) try to get a college degree regardless of whether you use it or not (I'm paying for it, BTW) but 2) don't become a programmer like I did though unless you really, really enjoy it.

They (three daughters) have no problem with 2), some struggle though even with 1).

My secretary, single mom pushed my sister to go to college so we would be happier than she was raising two kids and working at more or less minimum wage. (It turned out my degree, Education, didn't figure into my ultimate career as a programmer at Apple but it did allow me to buy a Mac Plus while in college with a student loan and at half the non-educational price — so I tought myself to program, wrote some games. It also introduced me to peers that were unhappy with the otherwise-prospect of playing D&D and working at Walmart for their foreseeable future.)

I guess my point is that when "messaging" our kids, we are reacting of course to what we disliked about the path we took as well as what we liked.

They'll do what they want, live their own lives ... regardless of what I tell them though. I accepted that a long time ago.
by throwanem | 2025-05-12 09:43:59+00:00
Sure. The whole point of "proof of work" is to show (prove) you've lost energy to heat (work). That's what makes it costly and thus an honest signal.

The model breaks where work can be counterfeited (usually impossible) or where energy prices go to zero, which is why "bitcoin colonialism" was briefly a thing last decade. Much of bitcoin's design, this aspect also, is intended to protect against the bare-fanged, red-eyed money weasels it was also designed to attract.
by Doxin | 2025-05-12 09:44:17+00:00
Homemade jam, and some commercial jams will keep at room temperature for a looooong time. The main form of spoilage is mold growth, so try to keep the lid on as much as possible. Close the lid back before you spread the jam on your bread. It only takes a couple spores falling in to start it going moldy.

As I understand it the main thing is a lot of jams not having enough sugar in them anymore to prevent spoiling.
by reconnecting | 2025-05-12 09:44:39+00:00
Interesting. Our open-source platform [1] has the capacity to help with all of this through a GUI and rule engine, but I'm still concerned about whether we should present this way of bot hunting as a feature. I worry that this approach may be irrelevant in today's context.

[1] https://github.com/TirrenoTechnologies/tirreno
by BlueTemplar | 2025-05-12 09:44:45+00:00
> On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it!

> This tradeoff has basically nothing to do with recent advances in AI though.

I am surprised someone on HN would think this, especially considering the recent examples of DDoS via LLM crawlers compared to how websites are glad to be crawled by search engines.

For the first part : why do you think that robots.txt even exists ? Or why, say, YouTube constantly tries (and fails) to prevent you to use the 'wrong' kind of software to download their videos ?
by mrheosuper | 2025-05-12 09:44:48+00:00
My upgrade path kind of following the same pattern even at modern time.

My 4th gen intel haswell machine had 8gb of ram, then i upgraded to amd zen2 with 16gb ram.

After that i upgraded to zen3+ with 32gb ram, and currently my laptop is zen4 with 64gb of ddr5 ram.
by emrah | 2025-05-12 09:45:33+00:00
> Neither? I'm surprised nobody has said it yet. I turned off AI autocomplete ...

This represents one group of developers and is certainly valid for that group. To each their own

For another group, where I belong, AI is a great companion! We can handle the noise and development speed is improved as well as the overall experience.

I prefer VSCode and GitHub copilot. My opinion is this combo will eventually eat all the rest, but that's besides the point.

Agent mode could be faster, sometimes it is rather slow thinking but not a big deal. This mode is all I use these days. Integration with the code base is a huge part of the great experience
by brokegrammer | 2025-05-12 09:46:26+00:00
Lately I switched to using a triple monitor setup and coding with both Cursor and Windsurf. Basically, the middle monitor has my web browser that shows the front-end I'm building. The left monitor has Cursor, and right one has Windsurf. I start coding with Cursor first because I'm more familiar with its interface, then I ask Windsurf to check if the code is good. If it is, then I commit. Once I'm done coding a feature, I'll also open VScode in the middle monitor, with Cline installed, and I will ask it to check the code again to make sure it's perfect.

I think people who ask the "either or" question are missing the point. We're supposed to use all the AI tools, not one or two of them.
by firesteelrain | 2025-05-12 09:46:41+00:00
SpaceX has benefited greatly from public spending - they just had a different operating model. NASA moved to the commercial space program. SpaceX has had many military and government contracts to sustain themselves. Texas offered subsidies for Boca Chica.

SpaceX has received substantial public investment in the form of contracts, infrastructure, and incentives so in essence SpaceX is benefiting the same way that you seem to abhor
by pvitz | 2025-05-12 09:46:43+00:00
The reasons for this change seem to be described in [0] with the following summary:

> The contribution workflow in Guix has been facing several challenges: > difficult onboarding, lack of legibility, complex, unreliable, and > labor-intensive infrastructure, and lack of automation. All these lead > to an experience that contributors often find frustrating and hinders > quality assurance efforts. We propose to address these limitations by > migrating repositories, issue tracking, and patch tracking to Codeberg, > an integrated forge with a Web interface that is hosted by a non-profit.

[0] https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/content/sha1_git...
by bgwalter | 2025-05-12 09:46:58+00:00
Dropbox moved parts from Python to Golang already in 2014. Google fired the Python team last year and I hear that it does not use Python for new code. Instagram is kept afloat by gigantic hacks.

The scientific ecosystem was always there, but relied on heavy marketing to academics, who (sadly) in turn indoctrinate new students to use Python as a first language.

I did forget about sysadmin use cases in Linux distributions, but they could be easily replaced by even Perl, as leaner BSD distributions already do.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-05-12 09:47:55+00:00
Personally, if you take the time to configure it well, I think Aider is vastly superior. You can have 4 terminals open in a grid and be running agentic coding workflows on them and 4x the throughput of someone in Cursor, whereas Cursor's UI isn't really amenable to running a bunch of instances and managing them all simultaneously. That plus Aider lets you do more complex automated Gen -> Typecheck -> Lint -> Test workflows with automated fixing.
by DarkWiiPlayer | 2025-05-12 09:48:08+00:00
> China wants peaceful reunification

But this isn't true though; China wants a one-sided reunification at all costs and would prefer if it was peaceful.

Fun fact: All countries that invade others would generally have preferred a peaceful takeover if that had been an option. It's not like Nazi Germany would have complained if Poland had just willingly decided to join the Reich.

What would you think about someone who told you, unironically, "Nazi Germany wanted a peaceful unification with Poland"? Surely you'd think it's silly to even attempt to bring that up like it's an actual argument, right?

So no, China wants to annex Taiwan. That is how you fully describe China's position on the subject.

As for the DPP vs KMT thing, you bring that up as if the KMT was in favour of re-unification; their position is really more about not upsetting China and risk an invasion. It is a different approach to maintaining independence, but that is still the goal.

If you really had a problem with treating taiwan as a pawn of the west, why aren't you instead complaining that we don't recognise Taiwan as its own nation separate from the ROC?
by alias_neo | 2025-05-12 09:48:09+00:00
The typical solution, is to include the expansion in brackets after the first use.

Simple rule I learned on my Electronic Engineering degree (where we're guilty of many, many acronyms): When you write an acronym/initialism in a paper (or anywhere for others to read reall), assume the reader doesn't know what it stands for and include the expansion in brackets immediately after the first use.

EDIT: As my sibling comment also suggests, writing it in full the first time, and using the acronym/initialism in brackets is also acceptable.
by lukan | 2025-05-12 09:48:12+00:00
"I hope I'm not too old to see the day that the last person works the last shift of wage labor, as that will be another sort of cause for celebration."

Oh, I agree to that, that is why I would not like to repeat the misstakes of the past on the pursuit to get there.

So in the now I prefer to have the freedom to really choose my jobs or also choose to go away or choose to freelance. All not really possible before.
by jazzcomputer | 2025-05-12 09:48:45+00:00
As someone who has no interest in using this facility, I find it interesting that the author 'enjoys' BNPL, when they are not the main customer (unless I'm mistaken, it's people with limited cash flow). Enjoy in what way? - I guess the economic mechanism being something that wasn't previously applied to a basic human need? - I think the answer there for me is that this is emblematic of late-stage capitalism (which may perhaps last 100s of years), but it's a fine example in my mind because there are much more serious problems that could be solved with getting food to people.
by raverbashing | 2025-05-12 09:48:54+00:00
I agree with most of this, but let's be honest, win32 gui programming (like this) is/was a pain

Even MFC barely took the edge out. It's amazing how much better Borland built their "Delphi like" C++ library.

> Instead of memset() you've got ZeroMemory(), instead of memcpy() you've got CopyMemory().

Yes. And your best API for opening (anything but files but maybe files as well) is... CreateFile

Aah the memories :)
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-12 09:48:58+00:00
You're right — on both sides. The people that said computers would automate everything were overstating them. At the same time, c'est la vie travel agents. Some jobs truly are gone.

I feel like there's a modern dark-comedy film in there where a guy in the 90's gets a journalism degree only to find the industry collapsing with the internet — so he trains to switch careers to taxi driver....
by bob1029 | 2025-05-12 09:50:12+00:00
> Emulating these mechanisms, particularly the temporal coding inherent in spike timing and synchrony, presents a significant challenge. Consequently, modern neural networks do not rely on temporal dynamics to perform compute, but rather prioritize simplicity and computational efficiency.

Simulating a proper time domain is a very difficult thing to do with practical hardware. It's not that we can't do it - it's that all this timing magic requires additional hyperparameter dimensions that need to be searched over. Finding a set of valid parameters when the space is this vast seems very unlikely. You want to eliminate parameters, not introduce ones.

Also, computational substrates that are efficient to execute can be searched over much more quickly than those that are not. Anything where we need to model a spike that is delivered at a future time immediately chops a few orders of magnitude off the top because you have to keep things like priority queue structures around to serialize events.

Unless hard real time interaction is an actual design goal, I don't know if chasing this rabbit is worth it on the engineering/product side.

The elegance of STDP and how it could enable online, unsupervised learning is still highly alluring to me. I just don't see a path with silicon right now or on the horizon. Purpose built hardware could work but is like taking a really big leap of faith by setting some of the hyperparameters to const in code. The chances of getting this right before running out of money seem low to me.
by close04 | 2025-05-12 09:50:28+00:00
> But you can read the books right in the library and learn from them.

You can read some of the books. Natural limitations prevent you from reading any substantial number. And the scale makes all the difference in any conversation.

All laws were written accounting for the reality of the time. Humans have a limited storage and processing capacity so laws relied on that assumption. Now that we have systems with far more extensive capabilities in some regards, shouldn't the law follow?

When people's right to "bear arms" was enshrined in the US constitution it accounted for what "arms" were at the time. Since then weapons evolved and today you are not allowed to bear automatic rifles or machine guns despite them being just weapons that can fire more and faster.

Every time there's a discussion on AI one side relies way too much on the "but humas also" argument and are way too superficial with everything else.
by whstl | 2025-05-12 09:51:07+00:00
I once worked for a unicorn that got near-zero traffic during the pandemic, but nobody could understand why some services were struggling to stay up.

Datadog was costing several thousand euros per month despite near-absent customer traffic. But the name made finally sense because all the data in there was absolute dog shit from reboots.

So yeah too much logging can be bad.
by dullcrisp | 2025-05-12 09:51:46+00:00
There’s no such thing as an unfiltered AI response. But I’m pretty sure you can get your hands on an untuned model if you cared to. I believe it would only be good for completing documents, though. (Or if you’re just looking for a model to respond to one specific question, just pick a response and that’s your model. You’re not going to use the rest of it anyway.)
by raxxorraxor | 2025-05-12 09:52:27+00:00
That happens decently often. This is the reality for all systems aside from braking system in trucks perhaps, which are more sophisticated.

The decision to do an emergency break is the same problem fully self-driving cars need. You need to interpret sensory input and have a model of the environment.

Ironically some genius made these systems mandatory despite them being a safety concern. Granted, they tend to work if someone really falls asleep behind the wheel.
by larodi | 2025-05-12 09:52:42+00:00
> The thing that happened is that FAANG redesigned the web for their own needs, then other companies used that to fulfill their own needs too. That's how we ended up with a lot of available content, but also user info mining, browser monopoly, and remote code execution (JS) as a daily normalization of deviance.

and most importantly - we lost our right to search the content that the community generates. it is now walled off behind FAANG services, that threw us directly in the dark ages of internet, when even your own content is out of reach.

here's as simple example - a group of friends been throwing parties for 20 years, like raves. all these are announced on the FB and now-and then on some other services. more than 400+ events for 20 years. trying to find these again is impossible. google won't index them, fb won't allow you to scrape then, insta also. perhaps some obscure snapshot lives of it in internet archive, perhaps not. so one reason to own the content you publish is to be able to actually use it yourself after a while.

Even with JavaScript in the equation, the vanilla web is a good option to reclaim all that, and honestly bringing a personal site up in 2025 takes... less than a day to setup with all the VMs, DNS, CF tunnel, DB, FE/BE hassle that stands in the way. It's more available than ever, people just need to brave and embrace this... but something tells me the majority will not do it.
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-12 09:54:13+00:00
>However, in the 2000s and especially in the 2010s, these jobs became increasingly rare.

These jobs became rare because academia took them. The pie may have grown or shrunk a bit but mostly what happened is that instead of running this stuff in house BigCo will sponsor or parter with some university lab or research program.

I haven't crunched the numbers but I suspect that they get better write offs this way.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-12 09:55:08+00:00
> The article says this like it's a new problem.

I suspect though there might be something different today in terms of scale. Bigger corporations perhaps did some kind of screening (I am not aware of it though — at Apple I was asked to personally submit resumés for people I knew that were looking for engineering jobs — perhaps there was automation in other parts of the company). I doubt the restaurants around Omaha were doing any automation on screening resumés. That probably just got a lot easier with the pervasiveness of LLMs.
by jltsiren | 2025-05-12 09:55:21+00:00
The are two fundamentally different kinds of private research funding. (Let's drop the &D part, because that's mostly unrelated to the kind of research we are talking about.)

Charitable foundations and similar organizations are not that different from government agencies funding research. They act on a smaller scale, because rich people are not actually that rich.

Then there are companies that do research as part of their business. They are typically much better funded and much narrower in scope than government-funded research. They are also biased towards topics that can be reasonably expected to work and produce economic value within the next 10-20 years. This kind of research is inherently inefficient due to redundant efforts. Instead of making their findings public, companies often keep the results secret, forcing their competitors to waste money on reinventing the wheel.
by bgwalter | 2025-05-12 09:56:50+00:00
Get people to vote for Trump on the all-in podcast by promising a better economy, no wars and less wokeness.

Then take their IP after the election. Nice going from the "Crypto and AI czar".

Here is a hint for the all-in people: You are going to lose big time in the midterms and for sure in 2028. Then you are the target of lawfare again.
by jbverschoor | 2025-05-12 09:56:56+00:00
Scratched my own itch while using Swift to replace various Ruby scripts due to performance annoyances (mainly startup) and lacking platform features (macOS APIs).

This tool transparently compiles your script, and caches the binary. I haven't tested on any other platform than macOS yet.

In an interactive terminal, it will only compile after running 3 times, to prevent compilation delays while developing. It uses extended attributes to keep track of the runcount, but maybe that's not the best solution (a small file could also work).