MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ZephyrBlu | 2025-05-27 12:15:05+00:00
I believe this is utter fantasy. That kind of data is usually super messy. LLMs are terrible at disambiguating if something is useful vs harmful information.

It's also unlikely that context windows will become unbounded to the point where all that data can fit in context, and even if it can it's another question entirely whether the model can actually utilize all the information.

Many, many unknown unknowns would need to be overcome for this to even be in the realm of possibility. Right now it's difficult enough to get simple agents with relatively small context to be reliable and perform well, let alone something like what you're suggesting.
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-05-27 12:15:33+00:00
> I genuinely am not sure if the answer lies in sanitization of input or output in this case

(Preface: I am not an LLM expert by any measure)

Based on everything I know (so far), it's better to say "There is no answer"; viz. this is an intractable problem that does not have a general-solution; however many constrained use-cases will be satisfied with some partial solution (i.e. hack-fix): like how the undecidability of the Halting Problem doesn't stop static-analysis being incredibly useful.

As for possible practical solutions for now: implement a strict one-way flow of information from less-secure to more-secure areas by prohibiting any LLM/agent/etc with read access to nonpublic info from ever writing to a public space. And that sounds sensible to me even without knowing anything about this specific incident.

...heck, why limit it to LLMs? The same should be done to CI/CD and other systems that can read/write to public and nonpublic areas.
by uludag | 2025-05-27 12:16:44+00:00
There's the software factory hypothesis though that states that LLMs will bring down the level of skill required to produce software, reducing the skill bar required to produce the same software (i.e. automation leads to SWE being like working on factory line). In this scenario, unskilled cheap labor would be desired, making juniors more preferable.

My guess though is that the lack of hiring is simply a result of the over saturation of the market. Just looking at the growth of CS degrees awarded you have to conclude that we'd be in such a situation eventually.
by thyristan | 2025-05-27 12:17:47+00:00
Solid soap isn't any better. All of those work by making fats water-soluble. This destroys mucous membranes and skin slime layer of fish and other animals and breaks down lipid barriers of algae and bacteria.

The real takeaway is that concentration matters a lot: one person washing up for the morning won't kill a pond, but a hundred people or prolonged exposition will.
by keiferski | 2025-05-27 12:17:58+00:00
The best class I took in college was a 3-hour long 5-person discussion group on Metaphysics. It’s a shame that college costs continue to rise, because I still don’t think anything beats small class sizes and active participation.

Ironically I have used ChatGPT in similar ways to have discussions, but it still isn’t quite the same thing as having real people to bounce ideas off of.
by jorvi | 2025-05-27 12:18:54+00:00
I can virtually guarantee that the amount of people getting annoyed at being flashbanged by HN is larger than the amount of people that would complain about a dark mode.

For users without an account you just stick to prefers-color-scheme. For users with an account you add a setting 'disable dark mode'

Dark Reader has autodetection so those users won't be a problem either.

And if you really wanna keep to the identity of the site, the top bar doesn't even really need a color swap.

It really is less of a conundrum than you think.
by jmmcd | 2025-05-27 12:20:34+00:00
> The fact that AI can do your homework should tell you how much your homework is worth.

A lot of people who say this kind of thing have, frankly, a very shallow view of what homework is. A lot of homework can be easily done by AI, or by a calculator, or by Wikipedia, or by looking up the textbook. That doesn't invalidate it as homework at all. We're trying to scaffold skills in your brain. It also didn't invalidate it as assessment in the past, because (eg) small kids don't have calculators, and (eg) kids who learn to look up the textbook are learning multiple skills in addition to the knowledge they're looking up. But things have changed now.
by simoncion | 2025-05-27 12:20:48+00:00
In fairness, HN wouldn't show more than what, twenty-ish thread roots at a time, requiring you to click "more" to bring in more... which could contain the same set of thread roots you'd been looking at, depending on upvote activity.

(I assume that this update has removed that HN restriction, but haven't bothered to go look to verify this assumption.)
by rascul | 2025-05-27 12:21:13+00:00
> The historical reason is that canals were originally built to facilitate horse-drawn boats, and as such there are no fences. The modern reason is that people use the canals all day, for hopping on/off houseboats and rowing training - putting up fences just for a few cows would make many people upset.

Seems like maybe the fence could be put up some reasonable distance away from the water to leave enough usable space along the shore for people. I see that done here where I'm at sometimes.
by williamdclt | 2025-05-27 12:21:33+00:00
I was being humorous, but tbh it’s not so clear cut!

In 99% of cases, yes of course you’re right, factor this loop.

In this specific case? This is trivial code, that will likely _never_ change. If it does change, it’s extremely unlikely that the two loops would accidentally diverge (the dev would likely not miss one branch, tests would catch it, reviewers would catch it). So if you get any upside by keeping the two loops, it might be worth it.

Here you get 8 bytes back. I honestly can’t see how that would ever matter, but hey it’s _something_, and of course this is a very old program that was running on memory-constrained machines.

So it’s a trade-off of (minor) readability versus (minor) runtime optimisation. I think it’s the better choice (although it’s very minor).

Or maybe there’s a better reason they chose this pattern… can’t imagine the compiler would generate worse code, but maybe it did back in the days?
by roenxi | 2025-05-27 12:21:51+00:00
The equilibriums wouldn't quite work out that way. The companies would still hire the most capable software engineers (why not?), but the threat of being replaced by cheap juniors means that they don't have much leverage and their wages drop. It'll still be grizzled veterans and competitive hiring processes looking for people with lots of experience.

These things don't happen overnight though, it'll probably take a few years yet for the shock of whatever is going on right now to really play out.
by ljm | 2025-05-27 12:22:12+00:00
It's the same as Apple telling people they're holding their iPhone wrong, though. Do you want to train millions of people to understand your new permissions setup, or do you want to make it as easy as possible to create tokens with minimal permissions by default?

People will take the path of least resistance when it comes to UX so at some point the company has to take accountability for its own design.

Cloudflare are on the right track with their permissions UX simply by offering templates for common use-cases.
by panny | 2025-05-27 12:22:13+00:00
Look at the birth of Hollywood.

>In the early 1900s, most motion picture camera and equipment patents were held by Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company in New Jersey, which often sued filmmakers to stop their productions. To escape this, filmmakers began moving to Los Angeles

If IP is respected, the AI companies will flee to China. The problem for Meta with that is that China does not respect IP. Meta wants to have their cake and eat it too.

Software has already been gutted of almost all IP protections. It's time the other industries caught up. Why should Google be allowed to steal a Java API, but can't steal DJ Razamataz's mix tape song ordering? IP has failed and clinging to it will ensure some other country will win AI.
by jvanderbot | 2025-05-27 12:22:31+00:00
I think a ton of hidden signals of a waning economy are being obscured by AI and globalization talk. Sure, some attempts to globalize and use more AI are genuine, but those are still cost cutting measures. And we cut costs when things aren't going well. There's just no way a brand new tech has penetrated the market enough to depress every sector of tech- or language-adjacent employment.
by rep_lodsb | 2025-05-27 12:22:39+00:00
You need to specify margins for advent.pli (because the text outside them is not part of the source code), and an output file name:

./plic '-m(2,72)' -oadvent.o advent.pli

Then link with this command:

ld --oformat=elf32-i386 -melf_i386 -z muldefs -Bstatic -e main -lprf -L ./lib -o advent advent.o

That gets you a binary which will run, unfortunately something still doesn't work right when loading the advent.dat file:

Initializing... Reading section # 1 Fatal error # 0

(the one included in the zip file does work however, so it's likely another missing option rather than a problem with the compiler?)
by instagib | 2025-05-27 12:22:53+00:00
4x10 is rough. I’ve been in positions that started with 5x8 then went to 4x10, then others 8,10, or 12 with built in overtime or comp time to get to 40hrs average.

You end up trying to cheat meals for speed eating unhealthy. High amounts of caffeine, little family time, and at least the first day off is usually wasted catching up on lost sleep. If you happen to do shift work, good luck trying to get much done as you need to shift to a different schedule to be somewhere during open hours.

We were more inefficient going from 5x8 to 4x10. Try training on little sleep before coffee kicks in. You need to re-do it later. Try sleeping after drinking coffee all day to stay awake, it’s great for your heart and blood pressure.
Show HN: Facet.ink – New 'Essays' Feature for Impactful Writing
by matthiasstiller | 2025-05-27 12:23:21+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm part of the team behind Facet, a platform designed to make writing and publishing digital books seamless.

We've just launched a new feature: Essays.

While books are excellent for in-depth exploration, we realized that not every idea requires a full-length book. Sometimes, a concise essay is more appropriate. With this new feature, authors can now choose between publishing a comprehensive book or a focused essay, depending on the message they wish to convey.

Key aspects of Facet Essays:

- Flexible Publishing: Decide whether your content is best suited as a book or an essay. Rich Text Editor: Utilize our Notion-like editor to craft your content with images, videos, callouts, and more. - Seamless Distribution: Once published, share your work effortlessly with readers, who can access it on any device. - Community: Each Essay comes with it own community to get in touch with your readers.

We believe this addition empowers writers to better match their content with the appropriate format, enhancing both the creation and reading experience.

You can explore the new Essays feature here: https://facet.ink/publishings/surprise-surprise

https://facet.ink

We're eager to hear your thoughts and feedback!

Thanks

Matthias!
by mrweasel | 2025-05-27 12:23:34+00:00
> I have to wonder if anyone likes flat user interfaces or just user studies are broken.

My impression was that it was an attempt to get engineers to be able to do the design, rather than involving graphic artists.

I also think that we often conflate pretty with usable. There's nothing more interesting than these user interfaces that has grown organically for 20+ years. They look "bad" or at least old, but that doesn't mean that they necessarily have poor ergonomics. Some people, myself included, have tried to force that old-school, hodgepodge look, but you can't really do that either, it doesn't work. You just end up with ugly and confusing. Those interfaces has to evolve organically.
by wofo | 2025-05-27 12:23:48+00:00
Not really internet-related, but I prefer donating to local initiatives run by people I trust, usually directed to improving people's lives (health, education, etc). These projects are not "famous", but have a noticeable impact, and are IMO wiser in their spending than some huge non-profit organizations (e.g. they don't spend money in huge bonuses, or in advertising campaigns to get more money).
by miki123211 | 2025-05-27 12:23:49+00:00
Are there any other popular (>10k DAUs) sites that still use an esoteric, homegrown tech stack? If you have worked on them, what do you think, is it a legacy mess nobody wants to touch, or a pleasure to work with?

PG made an assertion once that websites (in contrast to desktop software) are free to use any stack of their choosing, as long as it can take in HTTP requests and output JSON or HTML. This intuitively seems to be true, especially so with how powerful modern machines can get, but it seems like it hasn't increased stack diversity much.

The advantages of boring technology and "resume-driven development" seem to outweigh whatever gains you may get from using something custom.
by aa-jv | 2025-05-27 12:25:10+00:00
One of the great things about Cambridge, besides its bookstores and libraries, are all the green spaces.

Every time I visit (for synth-diy, mostly) .. I take a few hours and stroll along the cam, and through the city, and just .. enjoy the space.

Even though it is a busy and industrious little town, one can find a tree to park under and read for a few hours and thoroughly enjoy the environment. And yes, occasionally get interrupted by a curious bovine or two.

Also, you haven't lived until you've fallen off a punt or so, or at least enjoyed the view of others doing it while sipping on some suds at Granta on Mill Pond.

Bonus points for bonking ones noggin on the Mathematical Bridge while you're at it.

I really get a feeling that the city was set up for idle thought by the studious and curious. No surprise that it loves its cows too.
by bilbo0s | 2025-05-27 12:25:41+00:00
If you're gonna give AI a decade of improvements, then I'll go ahead and bet on a whole lot of developers being replaced. Not just some developers being replaced.

I think you hit on something with finance as well. Give Microsoft a decade of improving AI's understanding of Excel and I'm thinking a whole lot of business analyst types would be unnecessary. Today, in an organization of 25 or 50 thousand employees, you may have dozens to hundreds depending on the industry. Ten years from now? Well, let's just say no one is gonna willingly carry hundreds of business analysts salaries on their books while paying the Microsoft 365AI license anyway. Only the best of those analysts will remain. And not many of them.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-05-27 12:26:01+00:00
Actually, in Trump Brain; misguided, naive and downright foolish policy must still be justified somehow --- even after being proven as such.

Cutting off military aid before peace negotiations was clearly upside down and backwards policy and obviously an ineffective and feckless approach to dealing with Putin.

As much pure fantasy as calling Ukraine the aggressor, predicting an immediate end to the conflict, claiming to "know Putin well" and expecting him to respect anyone but himself.
by muzani | 2025-05-27 12:26:47+00:00
Iterating quickly. Basically you want to get something out there for people to comment on and play around with. But the engineering structure to get something out is not necessarily the structure to modify quickly.

I once launched a recipe app. People wanted diet recipes, so I added calorie data. Turns out diet was low carb and specifically they wanted a list of things below 5g carbs or so.

Then they hated the categorization UI. They were used to FB's style of having a wall, so they wanted cards and not a list.

They would add things to cart, but before making a purchase, they wanted to talk to a human on WhatsApp or something they could trace the number to. So I need to design the purchase flow with this in mind.

They wanted a community to support each other for dieting, so I gave them a single chat room lol. But massive public chat rooms are not a community, so we had to segment this into rooms.

You get the picture. AI is just great for these kinds of things but I feel like it's an incomplete solution.
by mrweasel | 2025-05-27 12:27:17+00:00
> Aesthetics are essentially worthless for a user interface and should always be a secondary concern.

That is one of my random thoughts: Windows could have kept the Windows 95 look and been perfectly usable. Sure there might have been a need for certain UI tweaks, but for most office/home use there was no reason to change it.

The whole "let's make it friendly" is annoying. If it's a tool make it practical. If you need to write a manual because of that, then please, go right a head and do that.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-27 12:27:22+00:00
Special in a bad way.

They are prone to be lost to automation eventually.

They dont reliably stay in any 1 place, whoever is cheapest to produce will get it temporarily.

They typically are dangerous or otherwise crap jobs nobody wants.

GDP is greater to be in a high tech or high education job.

All that said, Trump is brilliant to try to force manufacturing back to the USA. In the near future when robots replace the workers. It's going to be able electricity costs and access to recycling or resources. Who has the factories at that moment will be who generates a ton of GDP and minimal risk for loss.
by immibis | 2025-05-27 12:28:09+00:00
ChatGPT is correct in this case.

IMO it's all unsustainable. Users will not pay enough transaction fees to match the current block reward, and while mining will continue, if more than 50% of mining power becomes unused, a bad actor can buy it up and anyone with more than 50% of mining power has the ability to completely destroy the network. Tail emission is a better model.
by yusina | 2025-05-27 12:28:17+00:00
> Running "sudo dpkg -i somepackage.deb" is literally just as dangerous.

And it's just as bad an idea if it comes from some random untrusted place on the internet.

As you say, it's about trust and risk management. A distro repo is less likely to be compromised. It's not impossible, but more work is required to get me to run your malicious code via that attack vector.
by carefulfungi | 2025-05-27 12:28:30+00:00
As a manager, code review has two benefits that typically matter to me: (a) cost: it's cheaper to fix a defect that hasn't shipped (reading tests for missing cases is a useful review, in my experience); (b) bus-factor: make sure someone else has a passing familiarity with the code. And some ancillary (and somewhat performative benefits) like compliance: your iso-27001, soc-2 change control processes likely require a review.

It's hard, though, to keep code reviews from turning into style and architecture reviews. Code reviewing for style is subjective. (And if someone on the team regularly produces very poor quality code, code review isn't the vehicle for fixing that.) Code reviewing for architecture is expensive; settle on a design before producing production-ready code.

My $0.02 from the other side of the manager/programmer fence.
by sph | 2025-05-27 12:28:30+00:00
> making tools for more convenient work with C/C++ projects on Rust (as Python) is a more useful thing than trying to replace an already working dav1d solution (or any FOSS infrastructure) that has been tested by time, many contributors and most vulnerabilities have been closed. New projects will also have performance and vulnerability issues. No need to waste your time writing another bike, there are much more useful things.

This is their rationale, which you might disagree with, but I can’t notice any “vitriol” you’re talking about. Other people might have different opinions than yours about their favourite language, and that’s fine.
by netruk44 | 2025-05-27 12:28:37+00:00
My favorite memory of playing Doom on a not-PC was when I jailbroke my iPod video and installed Rockbox on it, which could run Doom.

I used it to kill some time on a long-haul school trip from New England to Disney in Florida, a ~24 hour bus ride. Not for very long though, Rockbox and especially Doom wasn’t very kind to the battery.
by simoncion | 2025-05-27 12:28:49+00:00
> Firefox automatically scales it up to 12px...

Only if you've told it to. My Firefox settings have "Minimum Font Size" set to "None". Perhaps scaling up to 12px is a default? (Edit: Also, are you sure you're not thinking of 12pt? IIRC, points are DPI-independent units and (AIUI) the traditional way of specifying font sizes in computerized typography.)

Despite my age, I still have eyes that are good enough to easily read the font sizes you're complaining about. A hugely important part of a User Agent is that it provide overrides for site design choices that the Agent's user has decided will benefit them. It's a good thing that UAs let folks like you choose a minimum-possible font size. It's an equally good thing that UAs let folks like me choose to see the choices that designer made that others criticize.
by mcv | 2025-05-27 12:29:20+00:00
If everybody suddenly stopped having kids, I think a lack of retirement would be the least of our problems. But you seem to feel as if only people who have kids are entitled to retirement, while people without kids don't have that right. And that's very much an opinion, not a fact.

It was the case in the distant past when your kids were your retirement, and even then people tended to work until they died, but that time is now in the distant past. At least in the industrialised world. There may be poor countries where this is still very much the case.
by jorvi | 2025-05-27 12:29:26+00:00
> what would be in it for a potential monopolist to tank the value of bitcoin in that way?

Shorting BTC. But you'd have to gather a humongous mining farm / pool in secret, wait until right after the recalibration and then turn on everything at once, mining those 2016 faster. People would panic, enabling you to close your short positions.

After those 2016 blocks you can just keep mining for a regular return, although I'd just sell the farm to an organisation interested in doing so.

It's a fun theoretical attack, if capital intensive. And aside from the short positions (which you can cover instead of going naked), your capital isn't at risk because the worst result is that you'll own a crypto mining farm.
by rhubarbtree | 2025-05-27 12:31:23+00:00
If we were in the boom times, less hiring would be a convincing signal. But the global economist is toast right now. There are very very good reasons not to hire engineers, and it’s plausible AI has nothing to do with it.

Anecdotally there’s no way AI has enabled me to replace a junior hire.

AI has major problems, although it’s a fantastic tool, right now I’m seeing a boost similar to the emergence of stack overflow. That might increase but even then we may just see higher productivity.
by acidburnNSA | 2025-05-27 12:31:27+00:00
It's a huge topic. The UAE is probably the biggest most recent example of what has to be done to set up the legal and regulatory pathway and then move into good technical execution. I think they did it really well; bringing in experts to help, choosing a well-understood tried-and-true design rather than a cutting edge Gen IV never-before-tried technology, building 4 in a row rather than just one. Of course that all takes an absurd amount of capital.

I think the most neglected thing in the nuclear industry is the ABWR design. It's a good-enough boiling water reactor that Hitachi was able to construct with record-breaking speed.

The IAEA is the best place to start. They have workshops and publications on getting going, e.g. https://www.iaea.org/bulletin/developing-nuclear-power-infra...