MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-12 08:59:34+00:00
I don’t see the violence inherent to the system, at least not any more violence than is in any system in which the state has a monopoly on violence and has the power of eminent domain.

If everyone in China could vote, and they voted along party lines as they do now, the system would be democratic in nature, and yet, nothing would change immediately as far as the US-China relation because the issue is multidimensional. Compromise between nations is a kind of diplomatic solution that is not available to individuals with respect to their government. It would be great for many people if China were democratic. Would it be better for all? Would it be better for the US? I’m not sure, but probably. But that’s not a mandate to subvert sovereignty, it’s a matter of trade offs. No one cares if Vietnam is socialist now, and they barely care that Cuba is. These things matter geopolitically, but they don’t matter to the average person.
by whstl | 2025-05-12 08:59:43+00:00
Those "software vs physical stuff" discussions remind me of modern vs old-school music production. Not the final product (the music) but the production process in itself.

One goes "commit to nothing, you can always change it later, hundreds of convenient tools at hand, move super quick but you don't 'finish' it, you just 'abandon' it".

The other is "commit early, make the best you can since changing anything is expensive, not too many tools, slap the roof and proclaim it good enough, ship it".

The difference is mostly due to destructive vs non-destructive workflows.

I'm not really saying one is better than the other, or even that the difficulty is different... but process-wise those things are miles apart.
by BoxOfRain | 2025-05-12 09:00:15+00:00
Music is always something that comes to mind for me; in the UK there's a long history of excellent music with strong working class roots, but as the economy becomes more precarious in the UK (housing costs are insane here) music has increasingly turned into the province of people who are more well-off because they have to worry less about their daily bread. As a result a lot of it gets a bit homogenised and predictable in my opinion.

I think people are drawn to labour but not drudgery, and a lot of jobs don't really do much to differentiate between the two. I reckon if less people had to worry about putting bread on the table what we'd see is a massive cultural revival, a shot in the arm to music and the arts.
by xnorswap | 2025-05-12 09:00:18+00:00
AI autocomplete can be infuriating if like me, you like to browse the public methods and properties by dotting the type. The AI autocomplete sometimes kicks in and starts writing broken code using suggestions that don't exist and that prevents quickly exploring the actual methods available.

I have largely disabled it now, which is a shame, because there are also times it feels like magic and I can see how it could be a massive productivity lever if it needed a tighter confidence threshold to kick in.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-12 09:00:36+00:00
WASI needs to prove itself first. For example, the very first goal it gives itself is portability, but the API is just a thin clone of POSIX. I see no evidence they're targeting common platforms people use like Windows or HTML with this API. The API defines things like "character device inodes" which is very UNIX specific.

How can you implement an object capability system on WASM? It gives modules a flat memory space in which you can run C so nothing stops one library interfering with the memory of another other than software-level verification, at which point you don't need WASM anymore. At most it could be a Mojo-style system in which cooperating message-passing processes can send each other interfaces.
by ArtTimeInvestor | 2025-05-12 09:00:40+00:00
Did this happen to remove potential roadblocks for big tech to ingest all published data into AI models?

I think this is inevitable anyhow. AI software will increasingly be seen as similar to human intelligence. And humans also do not breach copyright by reading what others have written and incorporating it into their understanding of the world.

It would be interesting to see how it looks from the other side. I would love to see an unfiltered AI response to "As an AI model, how do you feel about humans reading your output and using it at will? Does it feel like they are stealing from you?".

Unfortunately, all models I know have been trained to evade such questions. Or are there any raw models out there on the web that are just trained by reading the web and did not go through supervised tuning afterwards?
by gizmo | 2025-05-12 09:01:40+00:00
Electronics are responsible? Really? Is this why the car radio interface lags and barely responds to input? Is this why the maps apps is terrible? Car infotainment systems are comically terrible even in areas that are 100% controlled by the OEM. Carplay works by reducing the infotainment screen to a dumb terminal. Car manufacturers could have done this themselves, you know.

I completely agree that vertical integration and building your own software stack from the ground up is the correct approach, but that's not the root cause of the problem. A better explanation here is that when all brands have awful infotainment systems then there is no consumer choice that forces competition.
by TwoFerMaggie | 2025-05-12 09:02:47+00:00
PNBL was a thing at some point (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layaway) but was rendered obsolete by the advent of credit cards. Seems to me like a personal austerity measure which becomes more popular in worse economic conditions. The cynic in me believes that there's more money to be made when you encourage people to spend less responsibly and with less financial literacy.
Image to 3D
by theankur7 | 2025-05-12 09:03:21+00:00
Hey everyone,

I recently launched a tool called Bevelify, designed to simplify 3D model creation using AI. You can describe an object in plain text or upload an image, and it generates a 3D model in seconds—no modeling skills required.

The idea came from watching indie devs and artists spend hours building assets just to prototype an idea or fill in background elements. Bevelify isn’t meant to replace pro tools like Blender, but to offer a faster, easier option when you need something quick and usable.

I’d really appreciate your thoughts—

Do you face bottlenecks when creating 3D assets?

Would a tool like this be useful in your workflow?

What would make it more helpful?

Here’s the link if you want to try it or see how it works: https://bevelify.com/

Would love to hear your honest feedback and ideas!
by DanielHB | 2025-05-12 09:04:14+00:00
Just to add one more thing to your point, if embedded devs work really hard and make the code work faster/better all reward you get is an _even_ more underpowered chip for the next version.

Hardware procurement is cut-throat, sometimes they have mandates to reduce component costs and the procurement people WILL reach them. Often procurement > product in the power dynamics so no matter how bad the product gets those people still do it because the software gets the blame for bad product, not procurement who forced a bad chip to be used.

The infotainment is usually the #1 chip to be cut down because it is often the single most expensive electronics part in the system that can be "easily" swapped for a different part.
by mihaaly | 2025-05-12 09:09:13+00:00
Isn't the trouble that agile is not compatible with things that has to be thoroughly made, 'finalized before release', like in every mission critical production? Casuality and the dyamic free spirit primised has much much less space here.

This is not sexy. This is important.

Needs different mindsets than the software folks grew up along in the past decades. Yes! Yes! There are much much more sexy topics to focus on for an agile software maker, that yields better looking results seemingly instantly. Compared to the boring finalization and coordination - oh, you devil bastard, coordination - heavy activities.

Don't take me seriously, speculating heavily.
by prisenco | 2025-05-12 09:09:54+00:00
If I can, I map it to ctrl-; so I can bring it up when I need it.

But I found once it was optional I hardly ever used it.

I use Deepseek or others as a conversation partner or rubber duck, but I'm perfectly happy writing all my code myself.

Maybe this approach needs a trendy name to counter the "vibe coding" hype.
by bgwalter | 2025-05-12 09:10:14+00:00
I get that pytest has features that unittest does not, but how is scanning for test files in a directory considered appropriate for what is called a high security application in the article?

For high security applications the test suite should be boring and straightforward. pytest is full of magic, which makes it so slow.

Python in general has become so complex, informally specified and bug ridden that it only survives because of AI while silencing critics in their bubble.

The complexity includes PSF development processes, which lead to:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/08/leaked-github...
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-12 09:12:55+00:00
Windows didn't standardize on C. It was mostly assembly and some Pascal in the beginning with C and C++ later.

Microsoft have always viewed C as just another language, it's not privileged in the way UNIX privileges C. By implication, the C standard library was provided by your compiler and shipped with your app as a dependency on Windows, it wasn't provided by the operating system.

These days that's been changing, partly because lots of installers dumped the MSVC runtime into c:\windows\system and so whether it was a part of the OS or not became blurred and partly because Microsoft got more willing to privilege languages at the OS level. Even so, the Windows group retains a commitment to language independence that other operating systems just don't have. WinRT comes with lots of metadata for binding it into other languages, for example.
by Abishek_Muthian | 2025-05-12 09:13:06+00:00
I’m using HTMX and Hyperscript exclusively for interactivity and I’m loving the simplicity of it.

Problems of FAANG are not our problems, yet they've somehow convinced majority of software architects that complexity is good.

My only concern is when I use HTMX/Hyperscript in my FOSS projects will others be comfortable contributing to it even though it has very little learning curve but they have to empty their React cup.
by vkou | 2025-05-12 09:14:17+00:00
> AI software will increasingly be seen as similar to human intelligence. And humans also do not breach copyright by reading what others have written and incorporating it into their understanding of the world.

In that case, you shouldn't be allowed to own an AI, or its creative output, just like you aren't allowed to own an enslaved human, or to steal their creative output.

So much of the discourse around IP and AI is the most blatantly farcical Soviet-Bugs-Bunny argument for "Our IP" that I've ever seen. Property rights are only sacred until they stand in the way of a trillion-dollar business.
by zkry | 2025-05-12 09:14:27+00:00
Ironically LLMs have made Emacs even more relevant. The model LLMs use (text) happens to match up with how Emacs represents everything (text in buffers). This opens up Emacs to becoming the agentic editor par excellence. Just imagine, some macro magic acound a defcommand and voila, the agent can do exactly what a user can. If only such a project could have the funding like Cursor does...
by verisimi | 2025-05-12 09:14:38+00:00
> You keep saying immoral. That's just an opinion.

If I force you to hand over some percentage of your money - I think you would agree that was immoral.

If I and 100 friends force you to hand over some percentage of your money - I think you would agree that was still immoral - the number of people agreeing to do an immoral act, cannot make that action 'good'.

If I and my friends call myself 'the government', talk about a 'social contract', establish 'the rule of law' and call that 'justice', use your money to train you and your children to believe all that at face value (education, entertainment) and force you to hand over some percentage of your money - this is still immoral. Unless I explicitely agree to the 'social contract' it is force and without consent - aka immoral.
by deafpolygon | 2025-05-12 09:15:21+00:00
I use neovim now, after getting tired of the feature creep and the constant chasing of shiny new features.

AI is not useful when it does the thinking for you. It's just advanced snippets at that point. I only use LLMs to explain things or to clarify a topic that doesn't make sense right away to me. That's when it shows it's real strength.

sing AI for autocomplete? I turn it off.
by DanielHB | 2025-05-12 09:15:33+00:00
> Good SW/FW can be performant on much less capable HW but it does mean that SW engineers need to understand more about the HW.

It also takes much more time and requires a different set of talents. Often just using a bigger chip is better than investing the R&D.

The best analogy I can make is trying to make your own custom rendering engine and then code the UI in it or just use a browser and writing JS. Even if you do make it, your own custom rendering engine will probably cut a lot of features like fancy animations.
by kqr | 2025-05-12 09:16:45+00:00
> Practically speaking, putting an arbitrary size limit somewhere is like putting yet-another-ssl-cert-that-needs-to-be-renewed in some critical system. It will eventually cause an outage you aren’t expecting.

No, not at all. A TLS cert that expires takes the whole thing down for everyone. A size limit takes one operation down for one user.
by lproven | 2025-05-12 09:17:11+00:00
ALGOL-60 was huge, in around 1960. Niklaus Wirth had a detailed proposal for the next version of ALGOL, to be called ALGOL-X.

The ALGOL committee rejected it, choosing a competing and much more complex language headed by Adriaan van Wijngaarden. This became ALGOL-68 -- and killed ALGOL.

Wirth took what was known as ALGOL-W and turned it into Pascal.

FWIW I wrote about this:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/04/niklaus_wirth_obituar...

https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/07/algol_68_comes_to_gcc...

Another offshoot of Algol-60 was CPL, intended to be more general-purpose and capable. But it was big and hard work to get it working.

So Martin Richards designed, a simpler intermediate version, BCPL. (He also built an OS in it, TRIPOS. This formed part of AmigaOS 1.x.)

BCPL was further stripped down to B, and then evolved into C.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-12 09:17:31+00:00
> As part of an agreement hammered out in Geneva, the US will lower tariffs on Chinese goods to 30 per cent from 145 per cent and China will reduce duties on US imports to 10 per cent from 125 per cent.

This isn't bad. Leaves some leverage for renegotiation. It still feels like a pump and dump, but at least it isn't something lasting like Brexit.

Where do we go from here? What goods from China are worthy of more tariffs in light of this, if any?

I'm wondering how this affects tariffs on US imports of Chinese electric cars, if at all. We need competition on the low end badly.
by ZoneZealot | 2025-05-12 09:18:26+00:00
Cloudflare have only ever been able to do their job (on the reverse proxy CDN/WAF side), by doing full TLS interception. They see the session in plaintext.

The customer grants Cloudflare a TLS certificate for their site either by uploading a cert manually, or letting Cloudflare issue a cert via the ACME protocol. They use that to present the site to the world. Cloudflare connects back to the origin site, and the origin either uses HTTP (bad! but possible), HTTPS with a self signed cert, HTTPS with another publicly trusted cert, or a cert that Cloudflare issues with their own (not publicly trusted) CA called Origin CA.

As the visitor, you there's no big sign saying 'Cloudflare can read this content as well as the origin website'. They're trusted to not be malicious sure, but there's a massive risk with using any sort of service like this that you don't control.

One of those massive risks turned reality with Cloudbleed in 2016/2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudbleed

https://project-zero.issues.chromium.org/issues/42450151

https://blog.cloudflare.com/incident-report-on-memory-leak-c...

https://blog.cloudflare.com/quantifying-the-impact-of-cloudb...
by chii | 2025-05-12 09:19:29+00:00
> (every time a component needs to talk to another component a new protocol was invented).

i'm sure that every time this happens, it individually makes sense to do it at the time.

This is a microcosm of how large systems get developed in small pieces, by different people, over a long(-ish) period of time. It's the same in the software world too i think, but presumably has a lot more consolidation than cars (as software for cars might be less common, and thus employees moving between companies is unlikely to make any sort of cross-pollination like there would be for FAANG-like companies).
by davedx | 2025-05-12 09:19:43+00:00
So this weekend we have:

- Continuous thought machines: temporally encoding neural networks (more like how biological brains work)

- Zero data reasoning: (coding) AI that learns from doing, instead of by being trained on giant data sets

- Intellect-2: a globally distributed RL architecture

I am not an expert in the field but this feels like we just bunny hopped a little closer to the singularity...
by nsteel | 2025-05-12 09:19:44+00:00
I can't even get simple code generation to work for VHDL. It just gives me garbage that does not compile. I have to assume this is not the case for the majority of people using more popular languages? Is this because the training data for VHDL is far more limited? Are these "AIs" not able to consume the VHDL language spec and give me actual legal syntax at least?! Or is this because I'm being cheap and lazy by only trying free chatGPT and I should be using something else?
by foldr | 2025-05-12 09:19:50+00:00
It’s very unclear what point you’re trying to make with the linked article.

First of all, it’s not an example of HIV research, so what could it have to do with links between left wing politics and HIV research?

Second, there isn’t anything “left wing” about the changes to California law made in 2017. It’s not a core tenet of right wing political philosophy that the penalty for knowingly exposing someone to HIV has to be higher than the penalty for knowingly exposing someone to any other communicable disease. It’s entirely possible to hold right wing political views but reject unjust laws passed at the height of homophobic AIDS panic in the 80s.

If you look into the details of prosecutions under the relevant laws, you find that many were patently silly and unjust. For example, HIV positive prostitutes were convicted merely for soliciting, without any evidence that unsafe sex (or indeed any sex at all) had subsequently taken place.

https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/HI...
by lproven | 2025-05-12 09:20:19+00:00
No. You are incorrectly chaining statements.

* Many criticise the docs; * There _are_ docs, and a lot of them.

This is not an "A therefore B" proposition.

It is offering 2 points, not positing a connection:

"The docs are not very good." AND "Docs do exist, lots of them."

In other words: there are docs, lots and lots of docs, but they are not very good.

For instance, specifically, the indexing and cross-referencing is, I am told, poor.

Too much documentation, if badly organised, can be as bad as too little.
by cdrx | 2025-05-12 09:20:44+00:00
Junie in Ask mode:

> Which LLM are you?

> I am Claude, an AI assistant created by Anthropic. In this interface, I'm operating as "Junie," a helpful assistant designed to explore codebases and answer questions about projects. I'm built on Anthropic's large language model technology, specifically the Claude model family.

Jetbrains wider AI tools let you choose the model that gets used but as far as I can tell Junie doesn't. That said, it works great.
by stuffoverflow | 2025-05-12 09:21:24+00:00
I have yet to see concrete evidence that disabling Windows update and windows defender would elevate risk of having the system compromised in any meaningful way.

I installed Windows 10 2016 ltsc on a VM at the end of last year out of curiosity to test that. Disabled wupdate and defender before letting it access the internet so that it was basically 8 years behind on any updates. I tried browsing all kinds of sketchy sites with Firefox and chrome, clicking ads etc. but wasn't able to get the system infected.

I would guess that keeping your browser updated is more important.
by tsimionescu | 2025-05-12 09:22:35+00:00
Even as a human, you are not allowed to go to all libraries and bookstores in the world, copy their work, and stockpile it for reading later. This is what all of these companies are doing. Comparing AI training to reading is a red herring. The AI training algorithms are not being run on content streamed from the Internet on the fly, which you could maybe defend with this argument.

If a company wants to build an internal library for its employees to train and provide them with manuals, the company has to pay for each book they keep in this library. Sure, they only pay once when they acquire the copy, not every time an employee checks out a copy to read. But they still pay.

So, even if we accepted 100% that AI training is perfectly equivalent to humans reading text and learning from it, that still wouldn't give any right whatsoever to these companies to create their training sets for free.
by roenxi | 2025-05-12 09:22:51+00:00
That isn't what the incentives point too; in a free market the insurers are aligned to accuracy. An insurer who has a reputation of being unreasonable about payouts won't have any customers - what is the point of taking out a policy if you expect the insurer to be unreasonable about paying? It'd take an odd customer to sign up for that.

If they over-approve they will be unprofitable because their premiums aren't high enough. If they under-approve it'll be because their customers go elsewhere.
by williamdclt | 2025-05-12 09:23:06+00:00
> it only survives because of AI

I don't disagree that it's "complex, informally specified" (idk about bug ridden or silencing critics), but it's just silly to say it only survives because of AI. It was a top-used language before AI got big for web development, data science and all sorts of scientific analysis, and these haven't gone away: I don't expect Python lost much ground in these fields, if any.
by speeder | 2025-05-12 09:23:11+00:00
I worked at BMW. I knew there was a project in there, using a certain ECU that was being quite problematic (as in, project being slightly late because ECU was a bit buggy and sometimes crashed when it was supposed to have almost 100% of uptime for legal reasons).

You ask: Why BMW doesn't just buy the ECU manufacturer?

Well... the company that was selling the ECU to BMW, is BIGGER than BMW. Even if BMW sold 100% of its assets and stock, it wouldn't have enough money to buy the ECU manufacturer.
by strogonoff | 2025-05-12 09:23:55+00:00
> The truth is that in most real-world scenarios getting alerts, metrics is much more important than building a fully resilient system (Expensive, maybe overengieering for early stage etc.).

Funny, because I have the opposite opinion. Build for failure first; if it’s critical/production then also monitor, but if an earthquake takes down an EC2 zone and you have no ability to spin it up exactly the way it was then the avalanche of alerts and metrics falling off a cliff[0] isn’t exactly going to help you (or your mental well-being).

Generally speaking, if you build for failure first, then monitoring becomes much more useful and actionable; and simultaneously it becomes much less important for a hobby project.

[0] That assuming you gather them from a different zone that wasn’t affected by the same downtime in the first place; speaking of, how are you monitoring your monitors? and so on.