MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by incomingpain | 2025-05-29 12:10:26+00:00
>I'm trying to convince you that a 10x disparity in developer productivity is highly plausible, not because of rare, mythical creatures who are improbably fast, but because of disappointingly common creatures who are laughably slow.

I dont think anyone doubts that 10x engineers exist.

Imagine an aspergers programmer who types 200 words per minute with 20 years experience programming high quality code.

vs

The brand new grad who doesnt like tech, but did IT as a second career because it pays well, still hunts and pecks while looking to type. Who has only ever made 1 program before in college, but it didnt work and he failed that part of the class. Who while completing the test will be playing facebook mini games.

Of course there's going to be a disparity in performance and we say that's 10x.

>We all work remotely. My colleagues could achieve similar levels of output by skiving off for seven hours a day and only actually working for one. But I don't think that's happening. I think they are, to the extent they are capable of, doing the best they can.

Definitely wrong. I've worked for MSPs. The vast majority of people across all industries are doing as little as possible all the time.

The 40 hour work week literally doesnt need to exist, it could be a 5 hour work week. The people who legitimately work 40 hours should just have 8 jobs at 5 hours each for 8x the pay.
by eqvinox | 2025-05-29 12:10:43+00:00
> Witness the fact that MySql is still deployed more than MariaDb. The MySql brand is very strong, even if the MariaDb product is superior.

That's a sample size of one.

FRRouting forked from Quagga. Quagga is completely, utterly and unquestionably dead. So, with a sample size of two it's 50/50. What now?
by smileybarry | 2025-05-29 12:10:43+00:00
This has been making the rounds on Twitter and the story never dies despite being essentially false. (Backed by “I hit Start and got a CPU spike”)

Just the “Recommended” section - the lower frame showing M365 files & frequent apps - is built with React Native[1]. And, AFAIK, it uses Microsoft’s React Native for Windows that renders real XAML components, so it’s not just a masquerading WebView or something.

The Start Menu itself is still C++ and XAML. (And I think WinUI 2, i.e. the system-included variation of WinUI) It’s not just all a web thing or a JS-backed React Native app.

1: https://youtu.be/kMJNEFHj8b8?t=4m47s
by oneplane | 2025-05-29 12:10:50+00:00
Maybe this iteration it won't be a bolt-on, who knows. Because of the origin of C# (Microsoft Java replacement) it's all still very MSBuild/IDe-magic-ish instead of being its own thing where you can decide your own dependency resolution, your own compiler and your own linker.

It's similar to cmd.exe and conhost etc. It's all tied to decades old legacy baselines that Microsoft just won't or can't let go of.
by sgarland | 2025-05-29 12:11:20+00:00
> The dream is a single data mesh presenting an SQL userland where I can write and join data from across the business with high throughput and low latency.

That exists, and has for years: an extremely large DB loaded to the gills with RAM and local NVMe drives. Add some read replicas if you need them, similarly configured. Dedicate one for OLAP.
by rudasn | 2025-05-29 12:12:26+00:00
There was also this guy, don't remember his name, whom you could email your questions/issues etc, reply with great detail and post the discussion on his website for others to learn from. Like a one on one precursor to stackoverflow.

I remember email him and asking about why my photo gallery didn't work when I tried to save the "currently selected image" as a cookie. He replied and explained to me that cookies contain string values and that you can't save a reference to a DOM element as a cookie. So, cookie = document.getElementById('image0') will not work, but cookie = 'image0' will :)
by onli | 2025-05-29 12:12:39+00:00
The users were also different back then. It was not only about putting it all on one page, but even about putting it all above the fold, based on the today astonishing fact that many users did not scroll down. Because they did not know they could, with later experiments observing a tipping point when scrolling became normal.

Think about that, what a different environment the sites had to work in. Not only technically, but also socially. Completely normal that details like that don't carry over into today.
by gosub100 | 2025-05-29 12:13:14+00:00
Everest in particular, should be shut down to climbers. It's a giant trash heap full of human waste and dead bodies. Usable only 2 weeks per year.

They should install a cable car or furnicular and let people go straight to the top any time of year. Tax it and give the money to the locals. Put a nice restaurant up there too. That would be cleaner and more practical than what we have now.
by croemer | 2025-05-29 12:13:45+00:00
This claim is talking out of proportion, LLMs do push back:

> Input Risk. An LLM does not challenge a prompt which is leading or whose assumptions are flawed or context is incomplete. Example: An engineer prompts, "Provide a thread-safe list implementation in C#" and receives 200 lines of flawless, correct code. It's still the wrong answer, because the question should have been, "How can I make this code thread-safe?" and whose answer is "Use System.Collections.Concurrent" and 1 line of code. The LLM is not able to recognize an instance of the XY problem because it was not asked to.

When I prompt Gemini 2.5 Pro with "Provide a thread-safe list implementation in C#" it _does_ push back and suggest using the standard library instead (in addition to providing the code of course). First paragraph of the LLM response:

> You can achieve a thread-safe list in C# by using the lock statement to synchronize access to a standard List<T>. Alternatively, you can use concurrent collection classes provided by .NET, such as ConcurrentBag<T> or ConcurrentQueue<T>, depending on the specific access patterns you need.

https://g.co/gemini/share/7ac7b9238b28
by seaourfreed | 2025-05-29 12:14:21+00:00
Replacing Google with open source. Imaging this: 1) An open-source competitor to Google Search exists 2) It exists in "Front-end nodes". This is the website user interface. Search query entered here. It then searches cached indexes. 3) Searches fall in two patterns. a) Frequent searches (top 20m search query phrases), b) long-tail rare (beyond top 20m) 4) Here is how "Frequent Searches" results are built. * They are built before. Updated once a month * There are LLM prompts on how to assess web pages against a search query. This is about taking the top 5,000 website contenders, and ranking those exactly * There can be contention on these LLM. This is how that is solved. * Stake holders. Each is a company or an owner of a website with human content. They have the ability to vote. This is towards "fair" LLMs to reason on finding the best match for a term. * They vote away LLM prompts that skew or overly focused on one area. 5) Long-tail searches may be redirected to a DuckDuckGo like solution. Bing / Google / DuckDuckGo compete to be fair to win the traffic 6) The search front-end gets add revenue for Frequent searches. Their job is to do advertising to get customers to switch from Google search 7) The Frequent Search final results of voting are saved in the blockchain. From the once a month LLM compute. 8) LLM compute may happen with different LLM vendors, to weed out bias. 9) The LLM prompt runs (once a month), may happen at ~200 (or 2,000) different open source servers. Run by different people. What wins, is consensus on what most matches. This weeds out bad actors and bias. 10) Big non-tech companies may pay for this, in order to get SEO to work again, for their revevnue. Organic traffic. Ford, GM, Home Depot, AT&T, SalesForce, Oracle, J&J, P&E, GE, Colgate-Palmolive, General Mills, Kraft, etc.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-05-29 12:14:55+00:00
It depends. I've found o3 exceptional at finding things off the beaten path. I told it "I will be in city A, B and C in [month]" and would love to find out what to do. I have a car, am willing to drive and generally care most about gastronomy, food and culture. There's also flexibility in terms of timing and stays."

It read things like websites of municipalities of surrounding towns and found local food festivals in towns I never would've found out about otherwise. It's exactly the kind of stuff I'd previously read the experienced person's blog for.
by blinding-streak | 2025-05-29 12:14:59+00:00
> As one Google executive recently explained: “Organizing information is clearly a trillion-dollar opportunity, but a trillion dollars is not cool anymore. What’s cool is a quadrillion dollars.”

This uncited, anonymous quote sounds very made up. Cursory search couldn't find anything like this.

Regardless, while the article makes some good points, it is also dripping with entitlement. Google gave you incredible monetizable traffic for two+ decades. At some point you need to capture your audience and make a real connection with them so they don't need Google to interact with you. Give them a value prop.
by mhw | 2025-05-29 12:15:24+00:00
A related tool that I've found useful over the years is Unison [1]. Think of it as rsync where you can interactively adjust the reconciliation algorithm between the two sides of the sync connection. It stores a hash of the file contents from the previous run for each file, so it can work out whether each side has changed since the last run. It then presents you with a GUI (or TUI) to review and adjust the reconciliation.

For the periods of my career where I've lived the two computer life (desktop and laptop), I've used Unison to keep substantial parts of my home directory in sync between the two machines.

[1]: https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison
by arrowsmith | 2025-05-29 12:15:51+00:00
It's a trade-off. AI gives you speed but lower quality. Blog posts are higher quality but take longer to find/curate.

For hiking routes, I ask AI for a list of suggested hiking routes in [area] based on my criteria (e.g. dog friendly, accessible by public transport, whatever) Then I google the specific suggested routes to fact-check the AI and get more detailed/reliable info.
by thedevilslawyer | 2025-05-29 12:16:42+00:00
Factual data mostly came from sources like wikipedia, news and social forums. I see these as continuing.

Opinion data - from all other SEO sites. These were low signal mostly, and AI seems to have got the general gist of how to structure content for consumption. So rather information reaching our mind through a SEO writer, it's now being AI written, which is atleast more standardized, and can be grounded more easily, and personalized to boot.
by rxtexit | 2025-05-29 12:17:18+00:00
I completely understand what you are saying but ip does make an interesting point.

Why would chain of thought work at all if the model wasn't gaining something by additional abstraction away from binary?

Maybe things even go in the other direction and the models evolve a language more abstract than English that we also can't understand.

The models will still need to interface though with humans using human language until we become some kind of language model pet dog.
by traceroute66 | 2025-05-29 12:17:35+00:00
I am not going to repeat the existing comments, instead I will point out something obvious.

Parcel lockers are only really good for small and light items.

The moment you get into heavy or bulky or both then parcel lockers are a waste of time.

Who wants to go to a parcel locker and haul a 16kg package back home ?

Or if you have multiple deliveries, who wants to go to a parcel locker and haul 10 boxes home ?

I think this new Japanese "follow-me" system is genuinely a much better idea. Parcel lockers are yesteday's technology in comparison.
by mjburgess | 2025-05-29 12:18:05+00:00
> On the observation that most of the failure modes of LLMs also happen to human

That's assuming that LLMs operate according to how we read their text. What you're doing is reading llm chain-of-thought as-if said by a human, and imparting the implied capacities that would be implied if a human said it. But this is almost certainly not how LLMs work.

LLMs are replaying "linguisitc behaivour" which we take, often accurately, to be dispositive of mental states in people. They are not evidence of mental capacities and states in LLMs, for seemingly obvious reasons. When a person says, "I am hungry" it is, in verdical cases, caused by their hunger. When an LLM says it the cause is something like, "responding appropriately, accoring to a history of appropriate use of such words, on the occasion of a prompt which would, in ordinary historical cases, give this response".

The reason an LLM generates a text prima fascie never involves any associated capacities which would have been required for that text to have been written in the first place. Overcoming this leap of logic requires vastly more than "it seems to me".

> On how embeddings work

The space of necessary capacities is no exhausted by "embedding", by which you mean a (weakly) continuous mapping of historical exemplars into a space. Eg., logical relationships, composition, recursion, etc. are not mental capacities which can be implemented this way.

> We don't know what drives our own mental processes either.

Sure we do. At the level of enumerating mental capacities, their operation and so on, we can give very exhaustive lists. We do not know how even the most basic of these is implemented biologically, save I believe, we can say quite a lot about how properties of complex biological systems generically enable this.

But we have a lot of extremely carefully designed experiments to show the existence of relevant capacities in other animals. None of these experiments can be used on an LLM, because by design, any experiment we would run would immediately reveal the facade: any measurement of the GPU running the LLM and its environmental behaviour shows a total empirical lack of anything which could be experimentally measured.

We are, by the charaltan's design, only supposed to use token-in/token-out as "measuremnt". But this isn't a valid measure, becuase LLMs are constructed on historical cases of linguistic behaviour in people. We know, prior to any experiment, that the one thing designed to be a false measure, is the lingustic behaviour of the LLM.

Its as if we have constructed a digital thermometer to always replay historical temperature readings -- we know, by design, that these "readings" are therefore never indicative of any actual capacity of the device to measure temperature.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-29 12:18:06+00:00
> don't want to read an article on travel advice when AI gives us

A bit of a tangential anecdote, on the subject of "human written" stuff pre AI.

Circa 99-2000 I knew a US company that would hire students from CEE to write travel content for their many .com properties. The students were instructed to write "as if they'd travelled there", or "as if you're living there", or "in an official tour-guide style", and so on. Judging by how spread the content of my friend's writing was, and how "stereotypical" the other pieces were on those properties (that we found after searching for known content), it was pretty clear that nothing on those sites was genuine. Everything was fake! Since then I take everything with a bit of cynicism, knowing how much of the "natural, organic content" is in fact faked with low-paid contributors. But hey, during those times the gig was pretty good for my friend doing it.
by rchaud | 2025-05-29 12:19:12+00:00
I liked Zeldman's designs and writing style the best of these 3 guys. Imagine my shock a few years ago when I visited his site again and saw a hideous Wordpress default theme on it. The article mentions that there'll be a new design coming soon, but I can't help but feel Automattic forced him to use their in-house design when he started working there.
by dmckeon | 2025-05-29 12:19:16+00:00
> hypoxic tents, which lower oxygen levels in the air

I wonder if the shorter time at altitude also reduced the chances of slower-to-develop high-altitude cerebral edema and pulmonary edema (HACE, HAPE). Some climbers have been sleeping in camp in small tubular pressurized tents to reduce daily apparent density altitude.
by sebstefan | 2025-05-29 12:19:23+00:00
>Oh, and of course, ethical considerations of technology are important too. I’d like to have better discussions about that as well.

That's the entire reason for the polarization. There's no point writing a blog post about the state of the discourse if you leapfrog over the crux of the debate.

There's a reason the detractors are ignoring the facts

If you're upset that they are acting like this, then you can't do the reverse

Talk about the environment, the good parts of life it's trying to automate away, the effect it's having on the internet and what happens to the adoption curve of new techs when Stack overflow is dead.
by basilgohar | 2025-05-29 12:20:05+00:00
Each step and subsequent revelation makes a stronger and stronger case that companies like Alphabet (nee Google) wield too much power across their products and should be broken up to ensure competitiveness and user choice remain. Otherwise, we'll face a monopolistic monoculture that caters to the powers that be and cements existing power structures more firmly.

You'd think Google would see this, but instead they're doubling down instead of eking out a sustainable evolution of their technology.
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-05-29 12:20:13+00:00
very interesting. thank you for your report on your experiences made, sir. I would like to do similar, but don't know how to start and what to do. I assume, starting with an idea and discussing it into the deep firstly, then taking a new conversation, copy-pasting the results of the discussion and asking for prompt creation, is the start.

But, how does it maintain and adhere to file structure, dependecies, code, the external libs and and and... I can't imagine. By chance, do you have a memo of all the steps you've done?
by mort96 | 2025-05-29 12:20:23+00:00
Electron doesn't automatically exit when the last window is closed, and the Electron getting started guide (https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/tutorial-fir...) recommends this code:

app.on('window-all-closed', () => { if (process.platform !== 'darwin') app.quit() })

Most Electron apps probably do exactly that. It would feel extremely out of place for a macOS app to quit just because you closed a window.
by Bender | 2025-05-29 12:20:36+00:00
Nice. It would be nifty if this could also front-end LFTP. Using the mirror subsystem LFTP can replicate the behavior of rsync in a chroot sftp-only environment which I use heavily when I do not wish to give people a shell. If there was a UI it would be easier to help less technical people to use LFTP.
by Kuinox | 2025-05-29 12:21:04+00:00
What command do you use ?

> But that’s the thing. It’s a JIT, running a VM. Swift emits native code. Big difference.

It's not only a JIT, you can preJIT with R2R if you need, or precompile with NativeAOT, or i think you can fully interpret with Mono.

Edit: it looks like the issue with the dotnet cli itself, which until now was not on a 'hot path'. `dotnet help` also take half a second to show up. When running a dll directly, I think it doesn't load the cli app and just run the code necessary to start the dll.
by 6stringmerc | 2025-05-29 12:21:08+00:00
Citation needed. Who are these “most people” and do they actually have money to spend?

AI frequently cites references based on human generated content. Often it does a terrible job of it in my experience. I searched for a very specific name and the Google AI returned a “profile” and the link to the person’s social media account was displayed the name that I’d searched for but the AI directed me to a completely different person WITH A DIFFERENT NAME as the link destination. Why the hell would I trust it with travel plans if it get such basic, easily validated challenges so very wrong?

So unless you have a citation for your claim, and even then one that meets some basic credentials of rigor, then you’re flat out wrong.

The purpose of a search engine is to direct organic traffic, not function as fucking bait.
by rvz | 2025-05-29 12:21:15+00:00
> There's something beautifully absurd, almost tragically bureaucratic, about the whole grotesque Rube Goldberg-esque setup we have here. We've created a system where natural language gets translated into JSON RPC requests, which get routed through edge networks to serverless functions across the globe, which spin up Linux hypervisors to isolate the runtime, which execute Python code that dispatches enormous attention matrix multiplications on 5nm etched silicon GPUs performing billions of floating point operations per second, which return results that get packaged into JSON responses that get translated back into natural language just to add two integers, which is otherwise a single CPU instruction. It's like using a symphony orchestra, three circus troupes, six carrier pigeons, and a nuclear reactor to butter a single piece of toast.

He's not wrong.
by getnormality | 2025-05-29 12:21:20+00:00
See also Wedderburn's little theorem, which shows that any finite division ring is commutative and therefore a field. This is a pretty amazing result because rings were created partly to study algebra in a non-commutative setting, and many of the most important rings, such as n x n real matrices with n > 1, are non-commutative. The quaternions in particular are a non-commutative division algebra, not subject to the theorem because infinite.

The proof of Wedderburn's little theorem is relatively simple by the standards of professional math, but it's beyond me to even imagine ever coming up with it.
by AndrewStephens | 2025-05-29 12:21:42+00:00
I think the days of Google driving traffic to sites then splitting the advertising revenue (or missing out entirely) are largely over. From Google's point of view, they are just closing the loop.

It is a shame because the mutually beneficial relationship between Google and sites has driven a huge amount of the tech economy. Sometimes this has been bad (and advertising is a scourge for many reasons, I can't believe I am defending it) but in general the web would be a lot less useful if people couldn't make money of advertising.

I think long-term sites will stop relying on advertising and go with payments or memberships for information. This will hurt everyone but be disastrous for Google if they cannot spider up-to-date information. It will also hurt the free flow of information that we now enjoy.

What is really galling is that with all the impressive AI summaries, the search results themselves seem to be getting a lot worse[0]. Many times I have used Google and the AI summary is pretty good but the actual page the summary is from is buried well down in the search results. Is this something they are doing deliberately to make the AI summary seem more useful?

[0] An example I blogged about: https://sheep.horse/2025/4/yo_google%2C_thanks_for_the_ai_ov...
by empath75 | 2025-05-29 12:21:59+00:00
An interesting thought I had while reading the section on how larger brains allow more complicated language to represent context:

Why are we crushing down the latent space of an LLM to the text representation when doing llm-to-llm communication. What if you skipped decoding the vector to text and just feed the vectors directly into the next agent. It's so much richer with information.