MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigyabai | 2025-05-15 23:12:10+00:00
We're talking about surface vessels, here. What layer can a drone even occupy? Close-in intercepts are handled with CIWS systems, BMD is covered by VLS, AA handled by SAMs. Drones do not handle any of those mission profiles better than their counterparts, cost be damned.

I'm entirely willing to write off drone interceptors for the foreseeable future. Layered defense certainly presents opportunities, but not for low-reliability expendable doodads.
by ianbicking | 2025-05-15 23:12:20+00:00
Everything has to do with language! Language is a way of stating intention, of expression something before it exists, of talking about goals and criteria. Everything example you give can be described in language. You are caught up in the mechanisms of these tools, not the underlying intention.

You can describe your intention in any of these tools. And it can be whatever you want... maybe your intention in an audio editor is "I need to finish this before the deadline in the morning but I have no idea what the client wants" and that's valid, that's something an LLM can actually work with.

HOW the LLM is involved is an open question, something that hasn't been done very well, and may not work well when applied to existing applications. But an LLM can make sense of events and images in addition to natural language text. You can give an LLM a timestamped list of UI events and it can actually infer quite a bit about what the user is actually doing. What does it do with that understanding? We're going to have to figure that out! These are exciting times!
by crq-yml | 2025-05-15 23:12:44+00:00
I think it would be more productive to define tech in terms of "constant size vs variable size". Small is relative, but constant is constant, and the lie that is particularly enabling of bloat is that we scale between "zero and any amount" of something: any amount of data in a file, any size or color depth in an image, any number of parameters in a function call, any number of APIs, any number of processes, and so on. This is both a question of the memory/storage quantities and the amount of compute being done - when you vary both, you end up with complexity in terms of resource management.

Computers today do routinely scale to quantities so large that it seems like "any," but they are not good human-interface scales. Old and constant tended to be the case because the design was overtly burdened by the additional logic needed for variability, but the way that we engineer and program computers now tries very hard to do variable-everything, from the system power management on upwards to the top-level presentation.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-15 23:12:53+00:00
All things have their time.

Some get superseded.

Others accelerate their decline through self-foot-shooting and/or enshittification.

Stack Overflow's journey into obscurity is via a mix of private equity indifference, better docs elsewhere, and a lack of leadership over its moderators. It was in decline long before LLMs.

It is not a new story - but it does help map out the modes of platform senescence.

Wasn't the first; won't be the last.
by bear8642 | 2025-05-15 23:12:59+00:00
> we are really not that great thinking in higher dimensions.

Normally when you've hit 4d arrays, are you not dealing with a grid of grids?

That is say you've got a 2×3×4×5 array, another way to think about that is you've got a 2×3 matrix of 4×5 matrices. (APL example to show what I mean: https://tryapl.org/?clear&q=%7B%E2%8D%B5%2C%E2%8D%A5%E2%8A%8...)
by zahlman | 2025-05-15 23:13:57+00:00
The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy (or who act without any apparent awareness of it) are even worse than the people seeking a quick fix for their problem. Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions. In doing so, they dilute higher quality content (it becomes harder to find with search engines, because search engines have no way to understand our internal quality rating systems) and incentivize the quick-fix-seekers. Both sides of that are ignoring policy and acting against the site's goal.

When people describe something as "toxic" I generally consider this to be content-less without further elaboration. It doesn't concretely describe what is supposedly wrong - it only dramatizes the complaint.
by mckn1ght | 2025-05-15 23:14:48+00:00
I'm a fan of saying there's always a slippery slope, it's just a matter of the parameters.

But, I think that it's misguided to apply the human problem of othering to a given technology. Regardless of technology X, humans are gonna human. So, if X helps some people, we should consider it on that basis. Because without X, we will still have an endless stream of other reasons to draw red lines, as you allude to. Except in addition we'll also still have the problem that X could've helped solve.

If gene editing to cure diseases leads to a future where people want to shunt off the poor that are now the outsized burden of the healthcare system, the answer from where I sit is to find ways to make the gene therapies available to them, not to cart them off to concentration camps while they await extermination. This will require all the trappings of human coordination we've always had.

Preventing X from ever coming to fruition doesn't at all prevent all possible futures where concentration death camps are a possibility. To me they are orthogonal concerns.

Even if you can convince one culture/society not to do it, how do you stop others? Force? Now you have a different manifestation of the same problem to solve. Society needs to learn how to "yes, and..." more when it comes to this stuff. Otherwise, it's just war all the way down.
by benoau | 2025-05-15 23:17:02+00:00
This morning I used cursor to extract a few complex parts of my game prototype's "main loop", and then generate a suite of tests for those parts. In total I have 341 tests written by Cursor covering all the core math and other components.

It has been a bit like herding cats sometimes, it will run away with a bad idea real fast, but the more constraints I give it telling it what to use, where to put it, giving it a file for a template, telling it what not to do, the better the results I get.

In total it's given me 3500 lines of test code that I didn't need to write, don't need to fix, and can delete and regenerate if underlying assumptions change. It's also helped tune difficulty curves, generate mission variations and more.
by leelou2 | 2025-05-15 23:17:08+00:00
This article hits on something I've been wrestling with in our codebase. The absence of static typing in Clojure makes refactoring feel like walking a tightrope without a safety net sometimes. I've found that building a solid test suite before any major refactoring is absolutely critical - it's the only reliable way to ensure you haven't broken anything when reorganizing code. What's worked well for us is treating functions as the primary refactoring unit rather than trying to impose OO-style refactoring patterns. Breaking down large functions into smaller, well-named pure functions has provided the most bang for our buck. We've also found that leveraging spec for runtime validation gives us some of the safety of types without giving up Clojure's flexibility. The tooling situation has improved significantly too. Cursive's refactoring tools have been solid, and I'd be curious if others have had success with the newer REPL-integrated refactoring approaches mentioned in the article. Has anyone managed to set up effective continuous integration that catches runtime errors in untested paths?
by zahlman | 2025-05-15 23:17:10+00:00
There was a noticeable inflection in the question-rate-vs-time curve around the time that ChatGPT was released.

Which is fine. If your question is not answered by `site:stackoverflow.com how to do the thing` but it is answered by an LLM taking `how do I do the thing?` as a prompt and synthezising existing Stack Overflow content, that is inherently not a suitable Stack Overflow question. Because anyone else could put `how do I do the thing?` into the same LLM. It's not any different from using a traditional search engine.

(And when the LLM fails by producing a wrong synthesis, then blessing that result by putting it on Stack Overflow is actively harmful - which is why it's banned by policy.)
by drewg123 | 2025-05-15 23:18:07+00:00
If this is indeed done trillions of times a second, which I frankly have a hard time believing, then sure, it might be worth it. But on a modern CPU, focusing on an optimization like this is a poor use of developer resources. There are likely several other optimizations related to cache locality that you could find in less time than it would take to do this, and those other optimizations would probably give several orders of magnitude more improvement.

Not to mention that the final code is basically a giant WTF for anybody reading it. It will be an attractive nuisance that people will be drawn to, like moths to a flame, any time there is a bug around calendar operations.
by babyshake | 2025-05-15 23:18:28+00:00
A few weeks ago I got this email:

Update to the Coinbase User Agreement

We are emailing you about an important upcoming update to the Coinbase User Agreement. This update will revise our Arbitration Agreement with you. We made these updates to streamline the process for resolving disputes.

You can read the entire agreement here. The revised terms are in sections 9.9, 9.10 and Appendix 6.

These terms apply only to disputes that you or we initiate after May 15, 2025. The current terms will continue to apply until May 15.

---

What date did this news come out? I see it just happens to be the same date as mentioned in this email, May 15. Coinbase sneakily is trying to prevent their customers from exercising their legal rights. If you work for Coinbase, you ought to be ashamed and quit. If you use Coinbase, remove all your assets immediately.

I'm open to hearing reasons why this is just a coincidence or I'm misinterpreting the situation. Please, go ahead.
by nullpoint420 | 2025-05-15 23:18:54+00:00
I wish this was real - I would've loved to see the architecture and city planning that went into making these cities.

But for real, assuming this is real: how do you spend 21T on economic development without getting caught? $21 trillion was 19% of the _global_ GDP and 76% of the USA's GDP in 2023. Who was paid $21 trillion to build these cities? Why has it not leaked before?

To put it in perspective, I'm assuming Google has thousands of employees/partners which work on Android and Pixel Phones. Due to this scale, the new Pixel Phones have almost always leaked before they come out every year.

But I'm expected to believe that a decade long government project with thousands (if not tens of thousands) of workers had no leaks? No photo and/or video evidence? No way.
by panarky | 2025-05-15 23:19:14+00:00
If it works to run a second LLM to check the first LLM, then why couldn't a "mixture of experts" LLM dedicate one of its experts to checking the results of the others? Or why couldn't a test-time compute "thinking" model run a separate thinking thread that verifies its own output? And if that gets you 60% of the way there, then there could be yet another thinking thread that verifies the verifier, etc.
by like_any_other | 2025-05-15 23:19:18+00:00
(Disable javascript to avoid the paywall, or use https://archive.is/r4sJV)

While the inflammatory title merely describes the law, and does not endorse it, further in the article the authors describe Operation Choke Point deceptively, writing: "An Obama administration program, Operation Choke Point, cracked down on bank accounts for some payday lenders and gun-related businesses."

This is a lie by omission - the full list of legal businesses targeted is longer, and includes "things such as ammunition sales, escort services, get-quick-rich schemes, on-line gambling, “racist materials” and payday loans." [1,2]. On the other hand, the government explicitly forbade banks from discriminating against illegal immigrants [3].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point#Details

[3] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-and-j...
by alganet | 2025-05-15 23:19:23+00:00
So, it's unfeasible to either prove or disprove its safety.

Claiming there is no scientific basis then is doubly irrelevant, in addition to laws often not requiring scientific studies to be passed. It sounds like it's trying to fool people, specially "science defenders". I think it's dishonest, and people will notice.

"Think of the kids" is used by a lot of media articles hammering the "big tech is bad" anvil. It poses a contradiction. They're trying to justify it by saying it will harm only small businesses ("think of the poor small businesses!"). However, there is the contradiction of the same media articles having had created the very same hysteria that pushes people to support the act. It is not helping to sell why one would vote against it.

I said it bluntly: it opens a loophole for US Great Firewall. That argument will sell to both the right and the left, and it will be untouchable. It is also rooted in truth.

I also provided solid questions that, if made in opposition to the act, will stop it. But there needs to be a stop to the sensationalist media too (everybody wins, media conglomerates lose a very small, already known to be ineffective tabloid thematic).

I am trying to help the poorly written article to be better written.
by zahlman | 2025-05-15 23:19:31+00:00
The change to Python 3 effectively either invalidated or deprecated tons of Python questions, or else required new answers to be written. In many cases we ended up with an annoying pair of popular questions to capture major 2->3 differences, because you'd get clueless users who thought they were running a 2.x interpreter but were actually running a 3.x interpreter, and also the other way around.
by ddingus | 2025-05-15 23:19:55+00:00
It is a fun era NOW. I love the pre VGA PC and earlier systems, like Apple 2, Atari. Am building a CGA system with a K2 CPU to go hacking on to see what was possible. I have, as do many, unfinished business :)

Back then, it was fun at times, bit was also limiting in ways sometimes hard to fathom ways.

Things are crazy good now, BTW. Almost anything is a few clicks away. The CRT is old, panels so damn good..
by Animats | 2025-05-15 23:20:06+00:00
> A drone with sufficient range, payload, and protection against the standard litany of modern EW and counter-measure systems would be quite expensive.

Not any more.

DJI drone able to return home using visual navigation without GPS.[1] Unarmed. About US$1000.

Small lightning-proof drone.[2] Aims lightning strikes. Cost not given.

Ukraine EW-resistant drone.[3] Drops bombs. Currently about US$30,000.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzWIYOOKItM

[2] https://dronexl.co/ja/2025/04/23/ntt-lightning-triggering-dr...

[3] https://interestingengineering.com/military/meet-the-shoolik...
by Balgair | 2025-05-15 23:20:16+00:00
Yeah good point!

Something that a lot of people are unaware of is that US Military is allowed to do this. I forget the exact EO, but it was signed by Clinton and is in the 12333 chain of EOs. Mostly, this is used for the Anthrax vaccine. But, it does give clearance to do other forms of medical experimentation on warfighters.

No, really, I am serious here. This is true. I may have the details a bit off, so sorry there, but they can and do preform medical experiments on people without their consent. Now, to be fair, France does this too. They do sham surgeries over there. Non-consenting human medical experimentation is quite the rabbit-hole.

So, I can kinda see in the next 10 years, certainly the next 50, a routine shot given to warfighters to help them with things like blood loss, or vitamin C production, or fast twitch muscles, or whatever. The legal framework is already there and has been for a while, it's just an efficacy issue, honestly.
by echelon | 2025-05-15 23:20:40+00:00
> generally people are happy with those two options.

There isn't enough market surface area left to compete for. Anyone trying will spend tens of billions of dollars and still lose.

This has cemented Apple and Google as the eternal victors of mobile. There is no hope in competing. If Facebook and Microsoft gave up, all hope is lost.

Unfortunately, since there hasn't been any regulation against this anti-competitive duopolization, Apple and Google are complete assholes to everyone on "their" platform. It's one of the least free, most extractive markets in the world. And it touches everything and everyone. You cannot avoid it.

The only hope is regulation. Governments telling Apple and Google "no more app store, no more payment rails, no more defaults". That'll bring balance back to the universe.
by pfranz | 2025-05-15 23:21:17+00:00
> Ugh. I will never understand the obsession this effect.

All of it (lens flares, motion blur, film grain, DoF, tone mapping, and exposure, frame rate) are artistic choices constrained by the equipment we have to collect and present it. I think they'll always follow trends. In my entire career following film, photography, computer graphics, and game dev the only time I've heard anyone talk about how we experience any of those things is when people say humans see roughly equivalent of a 50mm lens (on 35mm film).

Just look at the trend of frame size. Film was roughly 4:3, television copied it. Film started matting/cropping the frame. It got crazy with super wide-screen to where some films used 3 projectors side-by-side and most settled on 16:9. Then television copied it. Widescreen is still seen as more "filmic." I remember being surprised working on a feature that switched to Cinemascope's aspect ratio and seeing that was only 850 pixels tall--a full frame would be about twice that.

To me, high frame rate was always just another style. My only beef was with motion-smoothing muddying up footage shot at different frame rates.
by zahlman | 2025-05-15 23:22:13+00:00
The new owners have been trying very hard with the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach. They know this is radically against community consensus (it's been shown to them on the meta site over and over) - so they just get sneakier about it.

Notably, after getting completely humiliated with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 in June 2023 (right after a moderator strike had just started, protesting the staff trying to prevent them from removing AI content from the site), and getting embarrassing feedback on the feature (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162), they came back last November with https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432154 and have been forcing it through.
by keernan | 2025-05-15 23:23:04+00:00
The United States government is destroying someone's private property simply because the government doesn't like the message written on the shirts.

---------------------------------

"Fools" said I, "You do not know

Silence like a cancer grows

Hear my words that I might teach you

Take my arms that I might reach you"

But my words, like silent raindrops fell

And echoed in the wells of silence
by virtualritz | 2025-05-15 23:23:45+00:00
You could eschew car ownership in NYC because the public transport network is better than in the rest of the country but it's still shite compared to what is considered 'barely ok' outside the US.

E.g. I. Berlin metro timing is about 5mins between trains and that is long compared to Tokyo metro timing.

But when it comes to density/how direct a public public transport connection exists between two arbitrary points in the city, Tokyo and Berlin are very close (and far ahead of NYC btw.).

What I'm saying is that the feasibility public will be seen as a real alternative or even improvement over using a car only if both topological as well as temporal improvements are blatantly obvious to commuters.
by Mawr | 2025-05-15 23:23:58+00:00
> I live ~33 miles away, round trio, from the nearest grocery store.

So you've explicitly chosen to live far away from everything, in effect you've chosen to have to own a car. What bearing does this have on anything?

> The US is massive. It doesn't look like it on the mercator projection, but the US is massive. It takes days to drive across it at highway speeds.

Unless you drive across the US on a regular basis, this point has precisely zero relevance.
by _heimdall | 2025-05-15 23:24:17+00:00
I know someone well who works in this space, personalized gene therapy as cancer treatment.

> until it finds the exact DNA letter that needs to be changed.

This pine is disingenuous (at best). There is no way of guaranteeing where the DNA is inserted. It is designed to only slot into a very specific portion of the DNA but they don't have a way to control that precisely, the accuracy is high but "exact DNA letter" is skipping over a few pretty important details.

To be clear I'm not saying it is ineffective or unsafe, only that the claim made is marketing speak and not actually true.
by kstrauser | 2025-05-15 23:25:20+00:00
I love, love, love flipping through old magazines. Look, an ad for a commercial Emacs! A C compiler for just $495! A port of vi to MS-DOS for $149! A sort command for just $135! A PC card with a 68000 coprocessor for heaven knows why!

The good old days were fun for their sense of everything-is-new adventure, but there's an awful lot I don't miss.
by CGamesPlay | 2025-05-15 23:26:09+00:00
The blog post in question is on the site for Sketch, which appears to use Docker containers. That said, I use Claude Code, which just uses unsandboxed commands with manual approval.

What's your concern? An accident or an attacker? For accidents, I use git and backups and develop in a devcontainer. For an attacker, bash just seems like an ineffective attack vector; I would be more worried about instructing the agent to write a reverse shell directly into the code.
by ricardobeat | 2025-05-15 23:26:12+00:00
I'm a little disappointed. Was excited to try this, and it seemed to work initially. But then I gave it a real website to scrape, and it always hangs after only parsing ~10 out of 50+ pages, before even getting to the compression step.

Then I decided to try and switch to the local mode, and after ~ an hour figuring out how to build a markdown version of the docs I needed, hit the "object has no attribute 'generate_from_text'" error, as someone else also reported [1].

So I cloned the source and started to look around, and the method really doesn't exist, even though it's called from main.py. A comment above it says "Assuming LLMMinGenerator has a method to process raw text" and I immediately feel the waft of vibe coding... this is all a mirage. I saw a long README and assumed it was real, but that was probably written by an LLM as well. Would have been obvious by the 'IntegratedKnowledgeManifest_SKF' and 'GenerationTimestamp' keys in the 'SKF format' definition - the former makes no sense, and neither has any reason to be this verbose when the goal is compression.
by const_cast | 2025-05-15 23:26:58+00:00
If they (the companies) aren't the ones who own the buildings then why are they doing this?

Not rhetorical - from my perspective, it seems like RTO is plainly a money-waster. If you're hybrid or remote and it's working, why take the risk? And, why pour your pockets on things that don't make you money, like office space? Cubicles don't produce your product, people do.

I mean, it just makes so little sense to me. I don't think that means it's a conspiracy. But, clearly, we are missing something that executives are factoring into this decision.