MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danpalmer | 2025-05-26 00:25:05+00:00
"Dependency injection is too complicated, look at this one straight-line implementation" is not exactly a fair argument.

The whole point of DI is that when you can't just write that straight-line implementation it becomes easier, not harder. What if I've got 20 different handlers, each of which need 5-10 dependencies out of 30+, and which run in 4 different environments, using 2 different implementations. Now I've got hundreds of conditionals all of which need to line up perfectly across my codebase (and which also don't get compile time checks for branch coverage).

I work with DI at work and it's pretty much a necessity. I work without it on a medium sized hobby project at home and it's probably one of the things I'd most like to add there.
by krackers | 2025-05-26 00:25:51+00:00
You can train LLMs on the output very complex CFGs, and it successfully learns the grammar and hierarchy needed to complete any novel prefix. This is a task much more recursive and difficult than human languages, so there's no reason to believe that LLMs aren't able to parse human languages in the formal sense as well.

And of course empirically LLMs do generate valid English sentences. They may not necessarily be _correct_ sentences in a propositional truth-value sense (as seen by so-called "hallucinations), but they are semantically "well-formed" in contrast to Chomsky's famous example of the failure of probabilistic grammar models, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

I'm not a linguist but I don't think linguistics has ever cared about the truth value of a sentence, that's more under the realm of logic.
by protocolture | 2025-05-26 00:26:09+00:00
Havent read the interview, but interviews arent formal debates and I would never expect someone to hold themselves to that same standard.

The same way that reddit comments arent a formal debate.

Mocking is absolutely useful. Sometimes you debate someone like graham hancock and force him to confirm that he has no evidence for his hypotheses, then when you discuss the debate, you mock him relentlessly for having no evidence for his hypotheses.

> Yet here is Chomsky addressing a lay audience that has no linguistics background

So not a formal debate or paper where I would expect anyone to hold to debate principles.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-05-26 00:26:28+00:00
Chomsky's problem here has nothing to do with his politics, but unfortunately a lot to do with his long-held position in the Nature/Nurture debate - a position that is undermined by the ability of LLMs to learn language without hardcoded grammatical rules:

Chomsky introduced his theory of language acquisition, according to which children have an inborn quality of being biologically encoded with a universal grammar

https://psychologywriting.com/skinner-and-chomsky-on-nature-...
by quotemstr | 2025-05-26 00:26:55+00:00
> Ghostty

I bet it has a setting to set TERM. I mean, TERM is hardly a panacea, but it's better than blindly spewing terminal control control codes without configuration or control or feature discovery.

> effectively two output terminal protocols--Windows and ANSI. And there is only a single terminal input protocol (kitty) that isn't brain damaged and allows you to do something super complex like "detect when Shift Key is pressed and released".

And what, every terminal application should have its own special knob for you to tell it what kind of terminal you have?

This whole discussion is a great example of why Chesterton's fence is a thing. The terminal world is already pretty fragmented. Suggestions to ignore the only even halfway decent widely-supported app-agnostic config knob without replacing it with something better are short-sighted. In any multi-party ecosystem, you need some way for different programs, written by different people at different times, to discover each other's capabilities.
by int_19h | 2025-05-26 00:28:14+00:00
I think he'd be very likely to be elected if Trump runs as VP on the same ticket and they both publicly state that it would be a 3rd Trump term in all but name.

It's not even a new gambit. Putin did exactly this back in 2008 after doing two terms as president, swapping with his then-prime minister Medvedev for 4 years. Medvedev was also a nobody before becoming the prime minister, and there was absolutely no way he'd be elected if people didn't treat him as a figurehead for 4 more years of Putin's rule.
by RestlessMind | 2025-05-26 00:28:36+00:00
These people were outliers and they could pursue their passions and contribute to the societies because vast majority of adults were rearing a bunch of kids.

The problem is that for the last few generations in the Western societies, everyone wanted to be a George Washington or Rosalind Franklin and decided to pursue their passion. Not enough people were willing to do boring work of raising kids. That is definitely not sustainable.
by echelon | 2025-05-26 00:28:42+00:00
100%!

We're about to enter into a "post-web" era if the tech giants get their way. Smartphones were the first attempt to redefine and capture computing (and are an area where we desperately need antitrust enforcement). Now we'll see AI search and AI chat attempt to circumvent people from finding and using websites.

Mozilla has been rudderless for a decade. They're not going to fix this. The leadership is collecting paychecks being Google's monopoly sponge - distracting the DOJ from antitrust action and refusing to actually innovate in the places that matter.

Search needs to be reigned in. Mobile needs to be reigned in. The coming era of AI chat and search will probably also need a regulatory framework to prevent just a handful of tech companies from owning everything they touch.
by bsder | 2025-05-26 00:29:35+00:00
> That's a bummer to hear, I've been wanting to use Ghostty for a while but that'd be a showstopper for me. Is there a GitHub issue tracking this?

You should try it out for yourself first. It could be something weird in my setup since I'm running an immutable distro.

And, no, it doesn't have a Github issue because I didn't feel like tracking down all the moving pieces to replicate it when I can just resolve it with a package install.
by jjice | 2025-05-26 00:29:36+00:00
But can’t you do your DI by hand? The frameworks can really become absurd in their complexity for a lot of tasks (I’m sure they make sense in many situations). DI is a concept that can be orchestrated with normal code at the top of the execution just fine, eliminating a lot of cruft.

To be fair, the numbers you h the row out sound like a framework becomes valuable, but most places I’ve seen DI frameworks, they could be replaced with manual DI and it would be much simpler.
by dagmx | 2025-05-26 00:29:58+00:00
I think you’re viewing that era with significantly rose tinted glasses.

Yes, people were using that Flash for that but it came at a great expense. Flash was a massive battery drain, and to get better performance it required punching massive security holes in the browsers.

Flash is only really great as a content creator/developer who doesn’t care about the specifics of delivery.

But it would have phased out anyway regardless of the iPhone. HLS would have killed it for streaming video, advancing JavaScript and web standards would have killed it for more advanced websites.

The only thing we took a step back on was web game delivery.
by smeeger | 2025-05-26 00:31:40+00:00
i find it really strange that these romance novels, which contain graphic descriptions of sex and very often brutal acts of rape, not only have their own section in barnes and noble but can be found right of the register end caps at at least one target store near me. this is straight up pornography. and its being sold in tons of stores right in the open where kids can read it. its just very strange because 20 years ago im pretty sure target was not carrying graphic rape pornography. so now gambling is legal, sports betting, 10% of women are making porn and rape fantasies are being sold front and center in target. this feels like the biff future in back to the future.
by timschmidt | 2025-05-26 00:31:41+00:00
> These people were outliers

What part of 1/6 the population don't you understand? Is this ignorance willful?

> The problem is that for the last few generations in the Western societies... Not enough people were willing to do boring work of raising kids. That is definitely not sustainable.

Biology seems to have incentivized reproduction heavily enough that we're sitting at 8.2 Billion humans worldwide.

"The human population has experienced continuous growth following the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the end of the Black Death in 1350, when it was nearly 370,000,000." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

Wake me up when it actually starts shrinking.

Alternatively, if you think there's something you can do to incentivize reproduction more than sex, let me know, I'd like to be a first-round investor.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-05-26 00:32:26+00:00
> north of $200k/year

and working at startups. you're at the top of the bottom.

that's the beauty of the faith on meritocracy and not sharing salaries.

your privileged, ivy league clone, would have had lazy jobs and made that on the first couple years out of college, while learning the job core skills on company time. honestly can't understand why you chose to minimize your effort.
by RestlessMind | 2025-05-26 00:32:29+00:00
"Investing money" is insufficient. You still need kids and the newer generations at the end of the day.

Think where you are going to invest and how that investment is going to provide returns. Stocks? Those companies actually need to produce and hence need workers. There also needs to be a broad consumer class to purchase those products. Without younger generations, you have no workers and no consumers which means your stocks have no value. Same with bonds. Same with real estate.
by sothatsit | 2025-05-26 00:33:07+00:00
I also feel similarly. o3 feels quite distinct in what it is good at compared to other models.

For example, I think 2.5 Pro and Claude 4 are probably better at programming. But, for debugging, or not-super-well-defined reasoning tasks, or even just as a better search, o3 is in a league of its own. It feels like it can do a wider breadth of tasks than other models.
by dabockster | 2025-05-26 00:33:20+00:00
> It only looks effective if you remove learning from the equation.

It's effective on things that would take months/years to learn, if someone could reasonably learn it on their own at all. I tried vibe coding a Java program as if I was pair programming with an AI, and I encountered some very "Java" issues that I would not have even had the opportunity to get experience in unless I was lucky enough to work on a Fortune 500 Java codebase.

AI doesn't work in a waterfall environment. You have to be able to rapidly iterate, sometimes in a matter of hours, without bias and/or emotional attachment.
by xk_id | 2025-05-26 00:33:22+00:00
This is long, but trust me when I say, that about halfway through, it will answer your question fully.

https://www.newstatesman.com/business/economics/2024/02/the-...

This gist of it is that central banks tried to stimulate investment in the economy by purchasing bonds, which lowered their yields and made them unattractive to institutional investors. As a result, institutional investors had no choice but to use the QE printed money to invest in stocks instead. This greatly repressed the risk in the stock market, while decoupling it from profits, because for a long time “numbers would only go up”.

Separately, the repressed borrowing costs (another intended effect of QE) enabled big tech to consolidate their monopolies, creating the attention harvesting platforms of today. Alongside inequality also being amplified by QE, those platforms started to favour rage baiting.

The combination of high risk appetite + algorithmic promotion of outrage enabled a kind of business model which is based on nothing except ridiculous dreams. Elon and his Tesla are therefore the quintessential creatures of the era.
by kragen | 2025-05-26 00:34:16+00:00
Often, though evidently not in this case, people use RS422, which is differential, so you can get megabits per second or kilometers, though not both. Shared-bus RS422 is RS485, like LocalTalk or DMX512. The voltages are actually lower than the ±12V normally used by RS232. Converting back and forth between RS232 and RS422 is easy and cheap. https://www.ti.com/lit/an/slla070d/slla070d.pdf is a TI appnote with an overview.
by roy3838 | 2025-05-26 00:35:34+00:00
Hi guys!

I made this easy to use agent framework called ObserverAI. It is 100% Open Source, and the models run locally on your computer (with ollama, vllm or llama.cpp)! so all your information stays private and doesn't leave your computer. It runs on your browser so no download is needed!

Some local agents that i've implemented are:

Focus Assistant: Monitors screen activity and provides gentle notification nudges if potentially distracting sites are detected based on a configurable list.

Code Documenter: Observes code on screen, incrementally builds markdown documentation using ADD commands, and uses REWRITE commands to correct or refine the documentation.

German Flashcard Agent (i'm learning german): Identifies and logs new German-English word pairs for flashcard creation.

Activity Tracking Agent: This agent tracks your activity.

Day Summary Agent: Reads the Activity Tracking Agent's log at the end of the day and provides a concise summary.

Really anything that requires watching your screen and a bit of "thinking" but not too much, these local LLM's are perfect to log/react to things! Give it a try!
by threeseed | 2025-05-26 00:35:35+00:00
> if they're going to go into consumer hardware that's going to need to be an all-consuming strategic pivot

You have to build a phone.

There is no other way to get the data you need to make XR glasses, AI pebble, Rabbit etc work the way people expect without it. Because Apple and Google are well within the rights to deny the siphoning of your private data to a company like OpenAI who only exists because of large scale trademark abuse.
by cornfieldlabs | 2025-05-26 00:35:43+00:00
I had built a social network for my friends which is working great so now I am building it for the world.

A place to dump all my thoughts in text to people I already know.

No photos, no clout-chasing, ego boosts, infinite scrolling, findable profiles etc.

I created a waitlist page (code only) using Gemini 2.5 and hosted it in cloudflare pages using D1 for database.

Waitlist page is here: https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev

Here's the full feature list for the initial version I am building where you can leave comments anonymously:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wkxk01C8ePEQ2jkwwt6p5Z7V...

Any feedback is appreciated.
by dabockster | 2025-05-26 00:35:51+00:00
> that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub

That hits hard from my youth (and I'm only in my early 30s). Can we all please actively communicate to people that open source is not a business model, and any large firms promoting it are likely just looking for free work? Like communicate that in an empowering way?

Yeah, it would probably decimate open source contributions in the short term. But honestly, our field would be so much healthier overall in the long term.
by creakingstairs | 2025-05-26 00:37:04+00:00
An open-source, self-hostable app for sending out newsletter to your friends and families. I'm mostly making it for myself because I want to share what I've been up to and family photos, without uploading it to Facebook or whatnot.

At the moment, the flow goes like this:

1. During the week, write posts for things that have happened.

2. Posts can be assigned to groups. (family, friends etc).

3. At the end of the week (or month), the app automatically creates a newsletter for each group by pulling posts assigned to each group. Add some final touches yourself and send it off!

4. Every newsletter will come with a link to download all images.

I'm trying to design it to be as old people friendly as possible which meant making the experience as simple as it can get. This made me settle on email newsletters. Emails are ubiquitous, have been around and will be around for a while. It's easy to sign up and things are just pushed to you instead of having to go to another app.

Another thing I want is multilingual support as my family is Korean my in-laws are not.

I'm hoping to get an MVP working this week and get some testing done with my own parents and in-laws.
by furyofantares | 2025-05-26 00:37:31+00:00
> However, to be an honest descriptivist, you must acknowledge that words are used in certain ways more frequently than others. Definitions attempt to capture the canonical usage of a word.

True. And that's generally how they order the definitions in the dictionary, in order of usage.

For example, "an unfounded or mistaken impression or notion" is indeed the 2nd definition in M-W for "hallucination", not the first.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-05-26 00:37:34+00:00
Non-founder (i.e. external hire) CEOs and other corporate executives also have to work for their money, therefore they are working class. The definition may be technically correct (the best kind of correct) but it is useless.

("A CEO is nowadays paid 339 the salary of their average worker" you say? If we are nitpicking, that's obviously false; only a tiny, tiny fraction of CEOs are paid that well.)

Aside from that, I'd wager a rather large fraction of HN can easily afford never to work again. This place is crawling with millionaires and they're definitely not embarrassed about it, temporarily or otherwise. Good luck convincing them.
by godelski | 2025-05-26 00:38:54+00:00
> The fact that we have figured out how to translate language into something a computer can "understand" should thrill linguists.

I think they are really excited by this. There seems no deficiency of linguists using these machines.

But I think it is important to distinguish the ability to understand language and translate it. Enough that you yourself put quotes around "understanding". This can often be a challenge for many translators, not knowing how to properly translate something because of underlying context.

Our communication runs far deeper than the words we speak or write on a page. This is much of what linguistics is about, this depth. (Or at least that's what they've told me, since I'm not a linguist) This seems to be the distinction Chomsky is trying to make.

> The main debate now is over the semantics of words like "understanding" and whether or not an LLM is conscious in the same way as a human being (it isn't).

Exactly. Here, I'm on the side of Chomsky and I don't think there's much of a debate to be had. We have a long history of being able to make accurate predictions while erroneously understanding the underlying causal nature.

My background is physics, and I moved into CS (degrees in both), working on ML. I see my peers at the top like Hinton[0] and Sutskever[1] making absurd claims. I call them absurd, because it is a mistake we've made over and over in the field of physics[2,3]. One of those lessons you learn again and again, because it is so easy to make the mistake. Hinton and Sutskever say that this is a feature, not a bug. Yet we know it is not enough to fit the data. Fitting the data allows you to make accurate, testable predictions. But it is not enough to model the underlying causal structure. Science has a long history demonstrating accurate predictions with incorrect models. Not just in the way of the Relativity of Wrong[4], but more directly. Did we forget that the Geocentric Model could still be used to make good predictions? Copernicus did not just face resistance from religious authorities, but also academics. The same is true for Galileo, Boltzmann, Einstein and many more. People didn't reject their claims because they were unreasonable. They rejected the claims because there were good reasons to. Just... not enough to make them right.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1dhlvzh/geoffr...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf1o0TQzry8&t=449s

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV41QEKiMlM

[3] Think about what Fermi said in order to understand the relevance of this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...

[4] https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
by fnordpiglet | 2025-05-26 00:39:26+00:00
A protocol defines a set of primitives and their interactions, along with prescriptions where necessary, but is otherwise pretty loose generally. Especially in a Postels law world. APIs tend to be highly prescriptive with a highly specific interface and a lot of black box.

Think of the difference between an IETF RFC on say SMTP vs an email API - the RFC describes how clients and servers for mail routing interact through an almost dialog, while a typical email API has highly structured interfaces. Another wat to cut it is an API can be tested as it has inputs and return values dependent on those, while a protocol you can generally only assert compliance with the specification of the protocol.

People often assert protocols have something to so with RPC of some sort but that’s not true. Many language support protocols, which can be very similar to interfaces, but don’t have anything to do with OOP, etc. In language protocols it’s slightly different than network/IPC protocols but the intent is similar.
by Obscurity4340 | 2025-05-26 00:39:34+00:00
I think you could actually just play the audiobook and screen capture video the whole time and you'd have a decent clear video with audio you could just rip the audio from. Only problem is you would have to have it running the whole amount of time without any hiccup in that process but I got a great, rare piece of audio I couldnt find anywhere that way
by throwaway20174 | 2025-05-26 00:39:48+00:00
There is something that I find very often gets lost, not in this comment but in the general conversations.

There are reasons to study CompSci that have nothing to do with trying to get a job, or make yourself a better worker. Namely, it's fun!

You can be a lifetime student of it and can be very rewarding. Both the practical side (programming) and delving into the mathematical underpinnings (theory) and history of computation.

News articles where people tell young people, "don't study computer science" don't get it.
by czhu12 | 2025-05-26 00:39:59+00:00
I've been able to have the privilege of working at a company that is cool with me open sourcing everything we build along the way -- its a nice perk and it also makes me motivated to work on stuff outside of work :)

The two things I've open sourced that I've been moonlighting after hours for:

https://canine.sh/ - An open source Heroku alternative, 10x cheaper. Got sick of paying those prices

https://hellocsv.github.io/HelloCSV/ a free open source flatfile alternative
by shagie | 2025-05-26 00:40:00+00:00
My read on it is that it doesn't require that degree.

Working in a job that requires a college degree (but doesn't care what it is) would be underemployed for anyone with a degree... even though it requires a degree.

The "does it require a degree" is likely based on the BLS definition for the job... even if people say that you can get it without.

Developer - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

Computer support - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

Food server - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/food-preparation-and-serving/food-an...