MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cameldrv | 2025-05-17 07:30:31+00:00
I've personally noticed this as a big trend. For example, I had become more and more reliant on my GPS in the car. I've not really been the outer control loop of the vehicle. An automated system tells me what to do.

I recently got a running watch. It suggests workouts that will help me improve my speed (which honestly I don't even care about!). If you turn it on it will blare at you if you're going too fast or too slow.

When you use any social media, you're not really choosing what you're looking at. You just scroll and the site decides what you're going to look at next.

Anyhow recently I've been reducing my usage of these things, and it's made me feel much better. Even navigating the car without the GPS makes me feel much more engaged and alive.

Ultimately one of the core things that makes us human is making decisions for ourselves. When we cede this in the name of efficiency, we gain something but we also lose something.

Marshall Brain wrote an interesting short book about this called Manna.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-05-17 07:30:35+00:00
Comparing all programming in the 80s and 90s to current programming is going to throw up more “hits” for the multi-decade time range than the contemporary.

There are a few other comments listing them all. The uk has lots of high quality novel shows coming out every year. Our tv export market is strong, both for programming and for formats.
by jaas | 2025-05-17 07:30:39+00:00
I'm the person who is running the rav1d bounty, also involved with the Rustls project.

In many (most?) situations I think Rust is effectively as fast as C, but it's not a given. They're close enough that depending on the situation, one can be faster than the other.

If you told me I had to make a larger and more complex piece of code fast though, I'd pick Rust. Because of the rules that the Rust compiler enforces, it's easier to have confidence in the correctness of your code and that really frees you up when you're dealing with multi-threaded or algorithmic complexity. For example, you can be more confident about how little locking you can get away with, what the minimum amount of time is that you need to keep some memory around, or what exact state is possible and thus needs to be handled at any given time.

There are some things that make rav1d performance particularly challenging. For example - unlike Rustls, which was written from the start in Rust, rav1d is largely the result of C to Rust translation. This means the code is mostly not idiomatic Rust, and the Rust compiler is generally more optimized for idiomatic Rust. How much this particular issue contributes to the performance gap I don't know, but it's a suspect and to the extent that it's worth pursuing, one would probably want to figure out where being idiomatic matters most instead of blanket rewriting everything.
by russellbeattie | 2025-05-17 07:30:54+00:00
AI's profound effect on communication is something I haven't worked out yet. Usually I'm pretty good at extrapolating tech trends out to the near future in broad strokes, but there's this paradox I'm running into: Creating long form content is now easy with the help of AI, but no one is going to read that content because AI will summarize it for us.

I can't figure out what the end result of this is going to be - society is going to become both more and less verbose at the same time.
by neoden | 2025-05-17 07:34:13+00:00
Homo sapience had a long period of its history when it was crucial to have a well developed body. Today we need to perform useless exercises just to maintain our bodies in somewhat acceptable shape. This might be applied to intellect as well.

In the coming era of unnecessary intellectual power we might need to do thinking exercises as something that helps maintaining a healthful (and beautiful) mind though our core values would shift towards something else, something that is regarded as good but not mandatory for personal success today.
by Abishek_Muthian | 2025-05-17 07:34:47+00:00
For a long time I was running home automation using individual scripts and was happy with it. Then I found myself in a remote place where the ISP gave a shitty modem which hangs when there's no heavy usage ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I had to automate restarting the modem when the Internet is down by power cycling a smart plug[1], Home Assistant turned out to be extremely useful for that. Official HW integrations and Node-RED was very straightforward to solve my problem. Since then I'm managing and monitoring various hardware devices in my home through HA.

What's interesting is that there are manufacturers who are not only fine with HA but work with developers of HA integrations which enable offline usage of their IoT products even though their official apps are completely enshittified.

Nowadays I checkout HA compatibility before I buy a IoT device.

[1] https://abishekmuthian.com/restart-modem-automatically-when-...
by whyage | 2025-05-17 07:34:49+00:00
> The aim of our creation is communication and mutual-transformation

That's a myopic point of view. Personal transformation is as significant, if not more. Production-oriented pastimes like painting, gardening, or organizing your stamp collection can do wonders for the mind. Their goals can be remaining sane in this crazy world, not producing the best painting ever, growing conversation-starting plants, or showing off your stamp collection. It's about doing for the sake of being.
by junto | 2025-05-17 07:34:51+00:00
My assumption with bugs like this is that they are “geographically based edge cases” that have been poorly tested due to engineers not being in the right location to test it, but affects a large number of users without throwing a error that can be logged.

GDPR banner only to be used in EU, with conditional of only accepting non-essential cookies, and the engineer or QA is based in the U.S.

As a side note, as someone that lives in the EU my pattern of usage here is:

- choose only non-essential, but if not a presented option then

- reject all cookies, but if no reject all available then

- switch the reader mode (or hide distracting items), or if not possible then

- close tab

I’m getting much more aggressive when dealing with cookie banners dark patterns. I will not a third third party advertising cookies as much as possible and support websites that allow me an easy way to opt out of them.
by throwaway290 | 2025-05-17 07:35:16+00:00
just checking, so you think selling software is broken, do you actually sell software?

if you are an indie dev on app store, do you think apple allowing alt stores and basically unlocking piracy is how selling will become less broken for you?

there are only two categories of people winning this: people who like to pirate things when they can, and shady corps like epic who are invulnerable to piracy even if alt stores are allowed (because they run their own billing servers) and who want to make a penny more on every predatory microtransaction in their games.
by permo-w | 2025-05-17 07:38:00+00:00
>Wolf Hall ...

you're nitpicking. it's a high class, well-produced, well-acted, British-made TV show, by the BBC, of a very high quality that would be well-regarded in any era (if you ignore the weird racial thing they did in S2)

>Line of Duty

your opinion is absolutely in the minority, which isn't to say it's wrong, but it's a very well regarded, high class show that's widely seen as well above "decent procedural"

>Adolescence

whether it's liberal or paid for by Netflix is irrelevant to whether it's a high quality British-made tv show

>you haven't watched the others

then you're going to struggle to give a useful opinion on this matter, aren't you?

>Hardly in the class of historical Beeb

every historical BBC show you can name will have myriad minor subjective criticisms of the like you've just produced

>let alone contemporary US brilliance.

if you think US TV is even remotely comparable with UK TV, you're not paying attention. the US is long since out of its golden era, which pretty much died with Game of Thrones. US media has an order of magnitude more financial means than that of the UK, and yet what have they created of any real quality in the last few years besides White Lotus? they repeatedly fail to even remotely approach the class and quality of our TV. on the rare occasions they do get close, it's on the back of British actors or British production
by jbverschoor | 2025-05-17 07:38:35+00:00
No. A symbol is basically a constant such as for example HTTP_NOT_FOUND. The difference is that you don’t assign it a number, which means less decisions during development. Another difference is that it will be printed as the string, so no to_string boilerplate.

The other colon path: is used for named parameters/keyword args.

It’s the same syntax as a hash/dict, but as a parameter it does not have a default value in this case.

The old syntax, but still supported for hash/dict was “key => value”

Rust’s string slices are the equivalent of Ruby’s slices of an array: myarr[5..18]
by gsf_emergency | 2025-05-17 07:39:53+00:00
<corningresearch.com>

Detailed (meta)science-based reporting here from another person who guessed Corning: https://thebsdetector.substack.com/p/ai-materials-and-fraud-...

>It looks eerily similar to the distribution in this [pharma] preprint. This distribution might make sense for drugs, but makes very little intuitive sense for a broad range of materials, with the figure of merit derived directly from the atomic positions in the crystal structure. This is the kind of mistake that someone with no domain expertise in materials science might make.
by Asmod4n | 2025-05-17 07:41:08+00:00
thread and matter will, in my opinion, never matter for consumers. Why? It’s basically a walled garden.

Think HomeKit but a tiny bit more open, the open bit is, that a vendor can allow it to communicate with devices of other vendors. But they don’t have to.

Thread also needs more expensive SOCs, with Zigbee you only need a tiny micro controller with a few MHz of clock speed and a few KB of RAM. Thread and matter on the other hand can require megabytes of RAM.

Vendors which nowadays sell HomeKit devices can reuse their SOCs for thread matter, keeping their 3-4 times higher prices compared to devices with the same functionality from Zigbee vendors.
by zoudong376 | 2025-05-17 07:42:24+00:00
OpenAI Codex is an advanced AI technology that generates code from natural language prompts. Learn about its capabilities, recent developments, and applications in software development. OpenAI Codex is an AI technology developed by OpenAI that helps generate code from simple language prompts. It's mainly known for powering GitHub Copilot, a tool that suggests code as you type in coding software.

Recently, OpenAI has expanded Codex to include a new AI coding agent within ChatGPT and a terminal-based tool called Codex CLI, both aimed at making coding faster and easier.
by thih9 | 2025-05-17 07:42:52+00:00
> return { error: "User declined to execute the command" }

I wonder if AIs that receive this information within their prompt might try to change the user’s mind as part of reaching their objective. Perhaps even in a dishonest way.

To be safe I’d write “error: Command cannot be executed at the time”, or “error: Authentication failure”. Unless you control the training set; or don’t care about the result.

Interesting times.
by jaas | 2025-05-17 07:43:00+00:00
In Rustls, TLS is implemented entirely in Rust. It uses aws-lc-rs [1] for cryptography, and aws-lc-rs uses assembly for core cryptographic routines, which are wrapped in some C code, which then exposes a Rust API which Rustls uses.

It's not practical right now to write high performance cryptographic code in a secure way (e.g. without side channels) in anything other than assembly.

[1] https://github.com/aws/aws-lc-rs
by lwouis | 2025-05-17 07:43:39+00:00
This tool says "Xcode replacement" and "Xcode-free development". I thought there is no way they can build apps without Xcode. How would they replicate the libraries, compilers, etc.

I dug more and of course they don't: "Though we don’t rely on the Xcode build system, you still need to install Xcode for the iOS SDK and toolchain"

I think they should clarify their messaging. This is not a replacement or an alternative. It's a layer on top designed for what they think is a better experience.
by sabakhoj | 2025-05-17 07:45:49+00:00
We need to distinctly think about what tasks are actually suitable for LLMs. Used poorly, they'll gut our abilities to think thoughtfully. The push, IMO, should be for using them for verification and clarification, but not for replacements in understanding and creativity.

Example: Do the problem sets yourself. If you're getting questions wrong, dig deeper with an AI assistant to find gaps in your knowledge. Do NOT let the AI do the problem sets first.

I think it was similar to how we used calculators in school in the 2010s at least. We learned the principles behind the formulae and how to do them manually, before introducing the calculators to abstract the usage of the tools.

I've let that core principle shape some of how we're designing our paper-reading assistant, but still thinking through the UX patterns -- https://openpaper.ai/blog/manifesto.
by creshal | 2025-05-17 07:45:51+00:00
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, content farms have been a thing for a long time, and many a spam website used crappy markov chains to generate even more "content". Anything that could be marketed by company had its search results drowned in hand-crafted bland marketing slop, and even before ChatGPT got popular searching for things like recipes (or, god forbid, generic windows error messages) was a nightmare. And a lot of that garbage is in LLMs' training data.
by curiouscoding | 2025-05-17 07:48:21+00:00
I'd love to see some benchmarks/comparison on variable length strings. For strings with random length between 10 and 30, gxhash was significantly faster than xxhash for me. I would assume because it processes chunks of up to 32 chars at a time, avoiding branch misses.

Generally my feeling is that at these speeds, designing for branch-predictability for short strings might be more important than absolute throughput.
by lemontheme | 2025-05-17 07:48:22+00:00
That sadly makes sense. I’m in a position lately to influence hiring decisions and I’m noticing a similar bias in myself.

As a job hopper myself, I can’t fault others for doing it though. I never hopped for the money. I just got bored or felt isolated in my role. But a nice consequence is that my salary actually appreciably increased, as opposed to colleagues/friends who stuck with the same company.
by londons_explore | 2025-05-17 07:50:23+00:00
> throughout matters but latency doesn’t

Governments who think this set speed limits on roads to 45 mph, since that's the speed where most cars pass per second on a busy road.

Those same governments then act all surprised when it turns out their whole population is depressed and overworked when they work a 9 hour workday, commute 1.5 hours each way, and have no free time for life, relationships, hobbies, etc.
by parodysbird | 2025-05-17 07:51:15+00:00
Oh yeah this is exactly how my group chats went. We still can post some good (in our context) memes and have fun, but not like an avalanche of poorly filtered slop. A joke for a group can still be crafted via an LLM when used judiciously and as intentionally as part of the bit. But by judicious it's important that the human is the one doing the sending and in the right moment, and so the human is still the one communicating.

When WhatsApp originally inserted their AI bot in the chats, it got very annoying very quickly and we agreed to all never invoke it again. It's just a generative spam machine without the curation.
by skatanski | 2025-05-17 07:51:40+00:00
I’m curious about other aspects of this: - leverage of countries who can host such AI over countries who can’t, will there be a point when countries can’t allow themselves not to have access to „emergency” talent in case they can’t use AI? Recent „choose european”, tariffs show that much of the high end stuff is concentrated in US and China. - outages happen, does the company stop because the cloud is not working? - highly regulated companies still can’t use copilot to its fullest because of „can’t show answer because it’s matching public code” - is replacing all talent safe - in terms of operational or national safety?
by TheChaplain | 2025-05-17 07:51:51+00:00
I love IC cards. They had them on all transport where I live, but a few years ago they changed to QR codes..

Now it's a fiddle with an app, then try to get the right angle on a smudgy reader. Getting onboard takes much longer and it feels like technology sent us 2 steps back instead of forward.

IC cards are better, and if they could be integrated in the phone then it would be even better and faster for everyone.
by cyberax | 2025-05-17 07:53:02+00:00
> I really do think it will be Thread+Wifi routers that eventually get a built-in Thread antenna that win (at least wining me over).

That actually had been the case for a while. A lot of WiFi routers had a built-in Thread (ZigBee) radio, but then nobody actually used them and the manufacturers stopped bothering with them. So now pretty much only Eero access points still have it.

> Also TIL KNX.

My dream is to have _actuated_ switches, that have full tactile feedback. So that the paddle will physically flip when switched remotely.

I commissioned an engineering company to look into that, but apparently this is not feasible at all with the NEC and UL requirements in the US. The only way is to use low voltage wiring to the switches and then use them to control line-voltage relays. This kind of system is popular in Europe, so you might as well just go with something like KNX.
by sensanaty | 2025-05-17 07:54:40+00:00
Yeah it's my favourite argument. Apparently this magical tool that can replace engineers and can do and write anything needs you to write prompts so detailed that you could have just written the damn code yourself, and probably had an easier time with it to boot.

The whole thing feels like we're in a collective delusion because idiotic managers and C-suites are blindly lapping up the advertising slop coming from the AI companies.
by radanskoric | 2025-05-17 07:55:20+00:00
It would work with most other Tool enabled LLMs. RubyLLM abstracts away the format. Some will work better than the others, depending on the provider, but almost all have tool support.

Claude is just an example. I pulled the actual payloads by looking at what is actually being sent to Claude and what it is responding. It might vary slightly for other providers. I used Clause because I already had a key ready from trying it out before.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-05-17 07:56:26+00:00
> thread and matter will, in my opinion, never matter for consumers. Why? It’s basically a walled garden.

I'd counter with the fact that walled gardens are incredibly popular, and in particular to consumers. Consumers don't care if the gate is locked or not, they care if the flowers are pretty and the tea at the garden party is nice.

> Thread also needs more expensive SOCs, with Zigbee you only need a tiny micro controller with a few MHz of clock speed and a few KB of RAM. Thread and matter on the other hand can require megabytes of RAM.

IMO prices of SOCs are going to zero. ESP32s are a great example of this. Once RISCV is more widely used and capable things will accelerate even faster.

> Vendors which nowadays sell HomeKit devices can reuse their SOCs for thread matter, keeping their 3-4 times higher prices compared to devices with the same functionality from Zigbee vendors.

I think we agree here...? I think that HomeKit device that is just a bit more open is going to win. But I think that HomeKit device gets adopted faster if it's just a router -- I can understand updating a router to get a smart home. What I don't want is confusion around whether I need a hub or not, or whether devices work together or not.

Buying a single router that acts as a hub + Wifi "repeaters" (IIRC that's what they're called) that can "extend" the signal (and along the way give other devices a point to connect to) makes perfect sense to me as a consumer. I already know what WiFi is, and I want better coverage, not worse. The smart home stuff just falls out of tech I am already familiar with, efficiency by damned.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-05-17 07:57:18+00:00
I think you are confusing your wishes with reality.

It is in no way like insurance today, and never has been. It has always paid out independent of circumstance. It was never about equity either - The poor get less, and the very poorest get none. Again, this is the way it has been since conception.

It is a state mandated pension with low returns and a progressive fee. Noting more.
by permo-w | 2025-05-17 07:57:49+00:00
I completely agree with and understand this reaction to people like Huw Edwards being paid stupid amounts of money to read words off a screen while managing the colossal task of simultaneously looking concerned, doing a serious voice, and not vomiting or getting their nipples out. I personally think that BBC News should just be disbanded or spun off into a separate entity, because otherwise one day it will bring the whole institution down with it. reading the news is a genuinely low-skill job that could be done by literally anyone with a few weeks of training

however, I think you're very wrong to include the presenting of entertainment and educational shows with that. presenting these shows well is something that requires a genuine art. if news presenters wages were capped, nothing significant would change. if entertainment presenters wages were capped, there'd be a huge talent drain and shows would become worse in quality, giving a massive advantage to the generally awfully produced commercial channels that make lower quality content interspersed with brainrot fucking adverts and phone in quiz competitions
by zimpenfish | 2025-05-17 07:58:38+00:00
> Footballers make 300k a week and no one complains

To be fair, plenty of fans (and the occasional pundit) complain (and have been complaining for years) but unless the authorities get involved (FA, UEFA, FIFA, etc.) and implement proper financial controls (there's some coming in 2025/26 around player salaries but we also need controls on money coming from TV rights, self-sponsorships, etc.) with actual transparent penalties (they're still soft-pedalling City whilst kicking Everton and Forest), nothing will happen.
by rockbruno | 2025-05-17 07:58:49+00:00
I think you are mixing some different concepts here. It's not that this is a layer on top of Xcode/xcodebuild, it's just that Apple today happens to package everything iOS/Swift-related together with Xcode releases. So even if you couldn't care less about the Xcode IDE itself or the xcodebuild build system, you still need to have it because this is the only way for you to download / install those toolchains. Apple could provide these separately, but they just don't.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-05-17 07:58:59+00:00
I don't understand why this is being discussed rationally. The motivation to remove social security isn't economic or rational, it's political and psychological.

A small group of people considers itself superior to the rest of the population. As a group it is convinced it deserves every break, benefit, privilege, and handout, while the second group is only worthy of intrusive oversight, abuse, exploitation, and punishment.

This isn't hyperbole. This is the political belief system that drives the rhetoric about the government spending and debt.

The proof is simple - government debt always increases when the first group is in power.

Always.

This wouldn't happen if it was really about the deficit.