MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xtracto | 2025-05-25 15:58:21+00:00
You raise a good point. Ba k in the early 90s when i started with programming, my source of knowledge were magazines with code, a "programming with C/C++" book, and a lot of time.

Then the internet came, and it felt like 'cheating'.

Then forums came and it felt like cheating, Then SO, and so on and so forth.

Now AI is eating the [software] world, and to a lot of people, it feels like cheating. I am just amazed of what i can build.

In 10-15 years software will become a commodity, along with books/stories and maybe even music/art. I don't know how it looks like. But darn im excited to be here to experience it.
by tzs | 2025-05-25 15:58:57+00:00
> I'd like to buy a BYD Electric Car, but apparently the US Government (Biden and Trump Admins) think that is a bad thing too.

A big difference is that the Biden administration did want you to have an EV--they just wanted it to be American made. Hence the large subsidies to promote the US EV industry.

The Trump administration does not want you to have an EV. Not only does the bill they just passed in the house remove the subsidies it adds an annual $250 penalty for each EV you own.

They say that the $250 is to make up for the gas tax you aren't paying, so as to support the roads, but that is a clear lie. If it were to make up for the gas tax it would be set so that on average an EV driver pays about the same as an ICE driver. That would be about $95.

(Also, the $250 penalty is indexed to inflation whereas the gas tax is not, and has not changed since 1993, so it will be sticking it even more to EV owners as time goes on).
by euvin | 2025-05-25 15:59:09+00:00
I've used Rive in a small personal project before and I really can't imagine creating or editing web animations in any other way. Apparently they also made their own vector-based feathering technique, which is also amazing:

https://rive.app/blog/introducing-vector-feathering

I do understand the appeal for an open format though. Rive seems to have their own proprietary (documented) binary format: https://rive.app/docs/runtimes/advanced-topic/format
by throwanem | 2025-05-25 15:59:37+00:00
Oh, same, I've never touched the stuff. That was pure intuition 15 years ago; these days I think of it as a longterm investment paying major dividends in peace of mind.

Of course it would be easy to say one's never touched crypto, and not so easy to prove, as with any negative. I don't care. If I ever get bounced with a King Dick, it'll far more likely be because I said something someone didn't like - which seems to happen about as often as I open my mouth, these days. Or because I said something someone failed to comprehend and so took insult at. Brains are severely out of fashion this decade, and I can't seem to help having some, so presumably someone will seek to scatter them sooner or later. Why not? I hear it's the last argument of kings, and their time too seems coming 'round again.

In any case they better not let me hear them coming. Wiser to spin the block in a car, really. I've never been hit with a wrench before, but it did once take more than a hammer to get me off my feet.
by loufe | 2025-05-25 16:00:01+00:00
I let Jules write a PR in my codebase with very specific scaffolding, and it absolutely blew it. It took me more time to understand the ways it failed to grasp the codebase and wrote code for a fundamentally different (incorrectly understood) project. I love Gemini 2.5, but I absolutely agree with the gp (pauldix) on their quality / scope point.
Ask HN: Career Change Confusion
by tdnka | 2025-05-25 16:00:11+00:00
I feel stuck and not sure what to do with my career anymore. I’m currently a software engineer but I have never really enjoyed working professionally as a SWE, I’ve switched companies about every two years thinking that maybe if I can work on something different it would solve this problem but it never has and I am always ready to leave after about a year and a half.

I’m not great at being an engineer either, I’m good enough to do my work but it’s not fulfilling and it leaves me feeling drained at the end of the day. I’m technically a senior engineer so along with doing my mind numbing programming work for the day, I’m also supposed to be actively and passionately discussing hot topics like micro frontends, micro services, graphQL, and other things that I could not care less about. The more complicated we can make the solution, the better because there will be more work for us all to do.

All of this despite actually liking programming on personal projects makes me think this isn’t the right career choice for me, but I’m not sure what else to do. I have tried to do something less involved in engineering but still close enough that I can use my technical skills and not really enjoyed it because it turned into me making google slides explaining how to integrate x customer system with y API over and over again, then presenting that.

I would like to do more creative things like make video games or something but I also need to pay rent and I’m worried that if I make something I enjoy doing my career again I will end up in the same spot of not enjoying it anymore.
by rossdavidh | 2025-05-25 16:00:35+00:00
...and your comment communicates a much more believable idea than the one PG is attempting to communicate, which is not quite the same: " I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right."

Your comment also makes clear that this requires that the writer is attempting to make a true core point, rather than (for example) convince people of something it would be convenient for them to believe. If you are dealing with writers who are using their powers for ill purposes, then the skill of the prose may well be inversely correlated with their truth.
by treebeard901 | 2025-05-25 16:01:19+00:00
LLMs are being irresponsibly marketed as AGI to the general public and many do not seem to understand the difference. Clearly there are limits to how far current methods can be taken. They can only train on so much data and add more compute capacity before running into diminishing returns.

AGI is really something else entirely. If this was clarified, especially for Wall Street, we would see some changes in valuations.

At a certain point, it depends on how you define human reasoning capabilities. Maybe a collection of refined and specialized AI can get close. One counter argument could be that we are not far off from highly advanced robotics that have increasingly powerful reasoning abilities even without AGI.

After the automobile was created, global horse population fell dramatically. Who knows if the wealthy classes will need all these people to do the work for them in the near future.
by landl0rd | 2025-05-25 16:01:36+00:00
This looks really nice, but what's the plugin/extension story? Part of the reason PyMol is popular is bc it's easy to write plugins in Python, which ngl is much closer to what a lot of researchers are comfortable with. This looks way better and I'd love something faster for quick-and-dirty work than PyVol but extensibility is king :)

Thanks for the work on this! It's badly needed.
by thrance | 2025-05-25 16:02:39+00:00
I understand why one might take my comment that way, but I'm advocating for the exact opposite: democrats should start acting as a real left-wing party, with aggressive messaging on oligarchy, healtcare, the depravity of the right, you name it.

The democrats, as they exist now, are almost "controlled opposition". There's much to wager that if they succeeded Trump II, they wouldn't undo 10% of the damage he's done. I fully believe Harris could have done a correct job at maintaining the status quo, but that's not what the people want or need.

The democrats should stop showing weakness and trying to build bridges with fascists, and instead speak 24/7 about how vile and stupid this entire circus is. Then they should start advocating for big changes that will hype Americans: free healthcare, extra taxes on billionaires, etc.
by soraminazuki | 2025-05-25 16:02:43+00:00
> Another AFP source said that US authorities accused the French researcher of “hateful and conspiratorial messages”. He was reportedly also informed of an FBI investigation, but told that “charges were dropped” before being expelled.

You conveniently omitted the part where it says it was an accusation that was dropped. And no, exercising free speech rights, in private messages of all places, is not a crime. Especially when "hateful and conspiratorial messages" is just codeword for criticism.
by hibikir | 2025-05-25 16:03:10+00:00
This kind of works, until you have a medical issue that impairs your brain enough,an event that loses hardware keys or backups, or you care about possible inheritors when you die.

Everything you do to keep keys safe from some risks weakens your posture against other risks. Making sure most people don't know about your holdings is nice and all, but ultimately key management is a really hard problem. It's hard enough for companies, but I'd argue it's even worse for individuals.
by brookst | 2025-05-25 16:03:38+00:00
Paperclip maximizers is what you get when highly focused people with little imagination think how they would act if told to maximize paperclips.

Actual AI, even today, is too complex and nuanced to have that fairly tale level of “infinite capability, but blindly following a counter-productive directive.”

It’s just a good story to scare the public, nothing more.
by bsenftner | 2025-05-25 16:04:03+00:00
I noticed fairly early that the foundation LLMs have the source code to most FOSS, as well as the developer conversations, the user discussions trying to understand how to use that software, and the documentation too. The foundational models have a good amount of training data of each popular FOSS app, and by examining the code and the developer comments, and then adopting their language style, the LLM practically takes on the persona of the developer. So I spent some time understanding the internal communications of each app, and my 'tool calls' are structured JSON of the internal structures these applications use, and my own code receives these structured outputs and I just replace in the application's running memory. Not quite so blind as I describe, some of the insertion of these data structures is complicated.

In the end, each app is both what it was before, as well as can be driven by prompts. I've also specialized each to have 4 agents that are as I describe, but they each have a different representation of the app's internal data; for example, a word processor has the "content, the document" in HTML/CSS as well as raw text. When one wants to manipulate the text, requests use the HTML/CSS representation, and selections go through a slightly separate logic than a request to be applied to the entire document. When one wants to critically analyze the text, it is ASCII text, no need for the HTML/CSS at all. When one wants to use the document as a knowledge base, outside the editor, that's yet another variant that uses the editor to output a RAG ready representation.
by vacuity | 2025-05-25 16:04:21+00:00
The Democrat party is indeed incompetent, but GP's reasoning is part of why we've ended up with Trump again. The Democrats and Republicans are not the same, and if drastic change is needed, I know which party will be easier to change. As if inventing independent parties solves any problems. Don't pick sides; do the right thing, and the people who agree with you will be on your side.
by CTDOCodebases | 2025-05-25 16:04:22+00:00
You can do both.

I use to type on 60 key boards using layers but when I switched to using a laptop keyboard it would mess me up as I used caps lock to switch layers and I had a navigation layer that used hjkl for arrows.

So what I changed to a TKL 80 key keyboard for QWERTY and then use Colemak Mod-DH on my split (Cantor Remix).

The result is I can type on both due to the context switch. So if I need to use a QWERTY board I am fine.

Also my golden rule with split keyboards is I only use open source designs. I don't want to invest time into a layout if the keyboard isn't going to be available in the future.
by nchmy | 2025-05-25 16:04:26+00:00
I see nothing wrong at all with asking people for feedback on an essay that will be broadly published and read. That just seems prudent.

What is more concerning is that I don't think many people who have read widely would consider Paul Graham to be a good writer, and yet people who care about him let him publish this article... He's definitely not a bad writer, and he generally communicates good ideas clearly, which is surely sufficient - and perhaps even appropriate - for his purposes. But he's not a Good Writer.

I've read many (perhaps even most) of his essays and there isn't a single one of them that I can actually remember, let alone any particular line or phrase that stands out. Though surely some of the ideas remain an influence in my general thought.

Conversely, there's plenty of writers who have seared many lines - and entire concepts - into my mind forever. I come back to them endlessly, even without pulling up the actual writing.
by isthatafact | 2025-05-25 16:04:35+00:00
> What kind of new discoveries are available to backyard astronomers versus using JWST data?

There are lots of projects a backyard "citizen scientist" can get involved with, some even using a backyard telescope, but also covering a range of fields (for example, counting butterflies, providing computing power). Many of the ones in astronomy involve data from JWST or other telescopes, so you do not need to compete with JWST: https://science.nasa.gov/citizen-science/
by mrbombastic | 2025-05-25 16:04:36+00:00
You seem to be ignoring the very deliberate anti immigrant/foreigner shift in the political landscape, as well as deliberate intimidation tactics to silence opposition on certain topics. Sure in a vacuum it doesn’t make sense for a big organization to turn on a dime no but when the current admin is deliberately engaging in intimidation tactics against immigrants and visa holders having the CBP be more aggressive in enforcement makes perfect sense.

And you don’t need high numbers to produce a chilling effect you just target the right people and let others see: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/us/politics/hasan-piker-t...
by eGQjxkKF6fif | 2025-05-25 16:05:02+00:00
It'd run in to all sorts of issues. Although AI companies losing money on user kindness is not our problem; it's theirs. The more they want to make these 'AIs' personable the more they'll get of it.

I'm tired of the AIs saying 'SO sorry! I apologize, let me refactor that for you the proper way' -- no, you're not sorry. You aren't alive.
by enragedcacti | 2025-05-25 16:05:02+00:00
This piece is in dire need of treating persuasiveness as a concept separate from 'good' and 'right'. Persuasive writing considers its audience and identifies avenues to create a train of thought that feels natural and true to them. What PG is describing is essentially the process of writing something that you yourself find persuasive. That can be a useful technique if your audience is people like you, but it can also amplify your biases and isolate your work from other perspectives that could provide value (increase 'right'ness per PG's definition).

Writing to convince yourself can help to refine your ideas, but writing to convince your detractors can point out blind spots and encourage finding strong evidentiary support for your argument. Equating "good" with "I would find it convincing" decimates the value that PG rightly identifies in using writing to enhance your ideas rather than just convey them.
by Hilift | 2025-05-25 16:05:07+00:00
The sentence is unfinished. They are abandoned, and unlike nearly everywhere else, left and not collected. There's probably a daily ferry and/or barge designed in part for this. Some of the vehicles could be sold to at least 10 vendors that would happily collect them. There's only 2,000 people, so maybe a handful of municipal employees. And there's probably four hours of paperwork to dispose of a vehicle. They probably want the original businesses to appear and collect them and pay like 10 years of fines.
Show HN: DaedalOS – Desktop Environment in the Browser
by DustinBrett | 2025-05-25 16:06:12+00:00
Demo: https://dustinbrett.com

Hey HN!

I've been building my passion project daedalOS for over 4 years now.

The original idea was to give visitors to my website the experience as if they had remotely connected to my personal machine. To do this I decided I would attempt to recreate as much of the functionality as possible.

My hope is to keep working on this project for the rest of my life and continue to evolve it's capabilities as technologies progress.

Thanks for checking it out!
by Spooky23 | 2025-05-25 16:06:22+00:00
Of course. It’s pretty reliable barometer that if the “All In” crew is pontificating about something, it’s either stupid, odious corruption, self-serving dreck, or all of the above.

In this scenario, the Saudis have limitless wealth and own the valley tech money bros. When you hear them speak, you’re listening to a proxy for MBS. Everything that the supposed new American nationalists say about China and trade imbalance has already happened with the Gulf States.

The lazy way to see when these arguments break down is to listen to Elon babble about Mars when he’s talking about it.
by throwanem | 2025-05-25 16:06:30+00:00
Imagine mistaking courtesy for procrastination. But to see this writer focus obsessively on the inessential is hardly novel. What in any case may one expect of someone who doesn't even bother introducing his topic until two-thirds of the way through the piece? Even in my forties I barely remember there was ever an argument about this. Are there still enough crusties left alive who care to sustain the discussion?
by CaptainFever | 2025-05-25 16:06:44+00:00
This article was not convincing.

The first half of a article seems to be the author rebutting their own meme, which I've never heard of.

The main point of the second article is:

> What sounds more effective for pulling the player to the exit of a non-linear level?...

> (a) scripting, pacing, combat, economy: have an NPC brief the player on how to find the level exit, then place a ranged enemy turret, valuable item, and side-quest destination near the level exit

> (b) the raw power of architecture: rotate a rock, pray the player approaches that rock from a direction that coincidentally forms a secret imaginary invisible line that mind controls them into hallucinating a path toward one of three skybox mountains in the far distance

Which then concludes that one ought to prioritize the former over the latter.

Which isn't really convincing; it's attacking a strawman. From what I learnt, it's more of using things like lighting, motion, frames, and sometimes literal signs. Not really "magic rocks and mind control".

I think the author goes too far in the other direction. Both methods are useful; architectural hints (used IRL too), as well as game-specific hints (e.g. side quest destinations, valuable items).
by horhay | 2025-05-25 16:08:12+00:00
I'm not underselling it. I'm reminding people who get swept up by headlines to actually use the products and be an objective judge of quality when it comes to these things. Because when you lose that objectivity, you start saying things like what you just said. Veo 3 level tech is basically Kling 2/Veo 2 fidelity with native sound generation, so was it that the last generation of these things were already decimating production houses? Be for real. With the tech they had 6 months ago, all they needed to do was add sound manually, which they could have pretty much also generated. A new layer of abstraction isn't "decimating" anything. I'd really take it easy from professing things like that. These things are great for what they are, but let's be actual objective consumers and not fall for these talking points of "oh industries are gonna change in x-months".
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-05-25 16:08:14+00:00
> Everyone is extremely sensitive to their reputation. That is just human nature

I don't really agree with that, but let's say I do. Middle management is a unique position where their sensitivity is a bigger liability to everyone else. They have some power, but not a lot. They ironically have higher visibility in the company than upper management. And the job requires 0 technical understanding of what they manage.

So that puts them in an awkward position that is often abused. If they feel someone is going to get in trouble, they will make sure that's not them, which is a terribly common instinct. When a developer tells the company there is a problem to address that could threaten the product, that's a good thing that should be welcomed. Instead, many middle managers see that developer as the problem.

> Someone who can't factor that into their actions and communications is frankly lacking basic social skills.

No argument there.
by dp-hackernews | 2025-05-25 16:09:24+00:00
Confusingly... no mention of narcissism.

> "Dr. Jocelyn Sze is a clinical psychologist who specializes in evidence-based treatment of PTSD and anxiety. She is an assistant clinical professor at University of California, Berkeley. She serves on the board of Bay Area Trauma Recovery Clinical Services, a nonprofit advancing trauma-focused training, research, and treatment, as well as the McCune Foundation, which supports grassroots organizations that empower and mobilize historically excluded populations. The expressed views are solely those of the author and do not represent those of her affiliations."
by TheAmazingRace | 2025-05-25 16:09:27+00:00
You are correct about key management being hard. I’ve been telling folks that absolutely insist on getting into Bitcoin that it’s best to leave out any notions of convenience at all, as convenience is the enemy of security. If you absolutely must have the stuff, stick to a cold wallet using pen and paper. It still has its own downsides, but it’s arguably one of the most simple ways to handle the keys problem.
by brookst | 2025-05-25 16:10:37+00:00
If you’re not aware, Trump has had a vendetta against Obama since forever. He claimed to have the “real” birth certificate providing Obama was born in Africa, but the dog ate it or something. Trump’s been fixated on Obama forever.

And Obama graduated with prestige from Harvard. And Barron Trump was not admitted to Harvard.

History says this man is driven by vengeance at perceived slights. It’s very plausible to me that Harvard has become the enemy here.
by landl0rd | 2025-05-25 16:10:43+00:00
Objectively a lack of bot-resistance can make the service unusable for everyone. Good examples include twitter, where interesting stuff gets flooded by spam DMs and indian payout farmers, and the mentioned ticketing example, where objectively a lack of resistance leads to rent-seeking middlemen scalping tickets.

Similarly a lack of privacy hurts everyone.

The question is basically "would you rather have an equally-shitty service for everyone in the name of egalitarianism or a good service for most?" This seems a really easy choice for me because I don't see egalitarianism/accessibility as a moral imperative.