MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by personjerry | 2025-05-26 17:49:09+00:00
> The reason they get used a lot for tasks along the lines of "rewrite this so it sounds smarter" is that that's what they're best at.

I disagree. The reason is that that's what aligns best with what most people are looking for help on.

There is a disconnect between reality and the AI product consumer envisioned here. There is no magical enlightened user who's going to unleash their inner potential.

How much physics or math does the average person know? How much do you think they even WANT to know? The answer is surprisingly little.

On a day-to-day basis the layman writes emails and other mundane tasks, and wants to do them faster and easier.

Having a squad of geniuses in my pocket doesn't pay my bills.
by john-h-k | 2025-05-26 17:49:13+00:00
Right. But given all pairs of mainstream LLM combinations, it seems a model is more likely to say “yes I am X” when it is X than when it isn’t X, even if it still has a high chance of being wrong.

Which means you should (as a bayesian actor) update on it saying “I am X” as evidence it is X
by nicbou | 2025-05-26 17:49:32+00:00
The problem is that there is no audience without a third-party platform nowadays. At least not at a scale.

Google was the lesser evil, but I still fully expected to get killed by an algorithm update some day.

I vowed to ride this website into the ground if I have to. I believe in its value, even if I need a side job to support it.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-05-26 17:49:34+00:00
Code is a little too fancy though it's easy to fall into that temptation with Haskell. Particularly though, using the Monoid instance on strings ties you to concatenating the strings together. There was an example the other day where the strings had to be separated by spaces and terminated by an exclam point ("Fizz Buzz!"). My solution used lists straightforwardly instead of Monoids. It goes to 110 instead of 100 since 105 is 3*5*7.

import Data.List (intercalate) fizzle :: Int -> String fizzle n = let ws = [(3,"Fizz"),(5,"Buzz"),(7,"Bazz")] a = [s | (d,s) <- ws, n`rem`d == 0] in case a of [] -> show n otherwise -> intercalate " " a ++ "!" main = mapM_ (putStrLn . fizzle) [1..110]
by wenc | 2025-05-26 17:50:02+00:00
I've observed the same. University science PR pieces are usually unreliable -- they are optimized toward generating buzz than scientific accuracy. They usually link to the actual science papers, but the prose is usually a stretch.

Even in this case -- "defying the laws of physics" is sensationalist narrative manufacturing.

The real claim is actually more moderate, and the research is not really close to commercial yet.
by explain | 2025-05-26 17:50:23+00:00
> The problem? The file was unencrypted. No password protection. No security. Just a plain text file with millions of sensitive pieces of data.

> Based on his analysis, Fowler determined the data was captured by some kind of infostealer malware.

Then the mere exposure of the file and whether it was encrypted is irrelevant. The data was already stolen, the damage was already done.
by specialist | 2025-05-26 17:50:51+00:00
I can barely take credit for my reprogrammings. They were mostly done under duress, when I had run out of options.

#1 I was just a kid. Mostly an attitude adjustment. I remember wanting to join society. I was pretty into Jesus at the time, so the phrase 'God helps those who helps themselves" resonated with me.

#2 Post divorce, I finally addressed my anger. I had already tried All The Things. Met a terrific therapist who turned me onto the book When Anger Hurts. I had nothing left to lose, so I read it. Super eureka.

But I still had the habit of anger. And no clue what to do about it.

Then I unwittingly reinvented the notion "fake it til you make it". I pretended to be happy. Mostly to fit in and maybe spare my son from all my baggage. At first the words were sarcastic. About 3 years later I woke up and was surprised the words were sincere. Wow, when did that happen?! Some time later I learned this is a known technique.

#3 My activist phase. Years into it, I ran for political office. I play to win. So I LARPed as a politician. eg No more vulgarity. Over time you no longer notice you're "faking it". Now, much later, it's like code switching.

This was the only instance when I deliberately changed with a goal personality in mind.

#4 Doing the Pain Services stuff, what I call "Pain College". It was seminar format and cramming a lot of information. Because of insurance (coverage), we only learned well established skills and techniques. More than any individual skill, most of which I had dabbled with, they advocate a regiment. Plus, I think, understanding the best available science -- neuroplasticity, pain is protection, "don't get mad; get curious", other stuff I don't quickly remember -- is somehow empowering.

Note that I thought it was all BS. I was super pissed my care givers wouldn't do a surgery (that I'll eventually need) and suggested Pain Services.

But I had completely run out of options. So I decided if I had to jump thru yet another hoop, then so be it. I'll just go thru the motions.

Fortunately, we patients get an immediate (very modest) benefit. (Which could just be placebo, right?) But maybe, just maybe it's working, thereby keeping me engaged.

Imagine my surprise when ~3 months later when my body released a dump truck full of pain, guarding behavior, anxiety. I really can't explained what happened, I have no words.

Trying to articulate it: it was like decades of bottled up pain (mental, physical) was uncorked.

Happily, I've steadily "improved" since. I'm still in a huge amount of pain. But it's somehow less emotional, less debilitating.

--

So I guess that's my long way of saying that in my case, for the very needful transformations, I didn't seek it out, have any hope.

Since you're already aware of neuroplasticity (sign of an open mind), I'm sure you'll achive better results more quickly.
by ninth_ant | 2025-05-26 17:50:57+00:00
For one, I didn’t say anything about email or you had to boycott Google completely. You can just change your browser to use another engine it takes like 10 seconds max. Google Search is not the web.

Second, since you brought up email —- I’ve used Fastmail for a decade and it works just fine.

> Google owns too much. They're easily on the same level as standard oil and the railroad tycoons.

I agree 100% but since regulators largely refuse to deal with it, there’s nothing stopping individual people like you or me to make our own decisions. You literally just have to click a few buttons if you’re unhappy with the service Google Search is providing.
by sargstuff | 2025-05-26 17:51:04+00:00
Ah, what about equivalent of treesitter/object grammar,~api[1] to group/relate/associate object(s). aka spatial versions of fold/roll-up. Perhaps also as way to interface visuals with other actions/devices[2].

Because it's y-combinator, perhaps emacs "note card(s)" for links related to object/group of objects further details.

--------

[1] : https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/

[2] : https://www.bigmotive.com/blog/minority-report-g-speak-ais-a...
by kenmacd | 2025-05-26 17:52:01+00:00
du -sh /nix 187G /nix

This is with

nix.gc = { automatic = true; dates = "weekly"; options = "--delete-older-than 30d"; };

Cleaning up some direnv versions and a `nix-collect-garbage --delete-older-than 5d` would bring it down to around 40G. For me this isn't _too much_ space, but it's easy for an update to download multiple gigs, so something to keep in mind I guess.

The size of the nix store has never really caused me issues, but ending up with a full `/boot` has. I now always set `boot.loader.systemd-boot.configurationLimit` to avoid these issues.
by keybored | 2025-05-26 17:52:04+00:00
If you can’t solidly define your love for your wife/husband, you can’t definitely state that you couldn’t hypothetically love this bonobo that I have in my lab on the same level. If you zoom out enough they are virtually indistinguishable.

> That doesn't mean I think they can think myself. I just get frustrated at the quality of discussion every time this topic comes up.

You’re arguing for the potential of a ghost in a machine based on people not being able to answer hard philosophical questions behind human behavior and properties.[1] That’s a kind of Vulgar Theism quality of argumentation.

[1] Not exclusively human. I’m sure killer whales can think.
by tkiolp4 | 2025-05-26 17:52:07+00:00
Your conclusion is wrong I think. LLMs cannot magically replace entry levels devs. Who’s gonna ask the LLM to create the basic website? The product owner? The accountant? The sales guy? They wouldn’t know how to be precise enough to state what they actually need. An entry level engineer would make use of the LLM to produce the website and push it to production. Hell, only engineers know that the devil is in the details. Quick example: let’s say a Contact Us page needs to be built. There are tons of details that need to be accounted for and the LLM may skip them if it is not told about them: where does the data of the form go to? A backend endpoint? What about captcha? What about analytics? What about validation of specific fields? What about the friendly URL? And disabling the button after sending to prevent duplicate requests?

An LLM is very capable of implementing all of that… if only someone who knows all of that stuff tell them first.

And most importantly: LLMs don’t challenge the task given. Engineers do. Many times, problems are solved without code.
by docsaintly | 2025-05-26 17:52:41+00:00
I think they meant: 窃钩者诛，窃国者侯 qiègōuzhě zhū, qièguózhě hóu He who steals a belt buckle pays with his life; he who steals a state gets to be a feudal lord.

Yes, it is a Chinese idiom.
by red_admiral | 2025-05-26 17:52:57+00:00
> Why introduce two layers of macro indirection

TeX already has more than enough layers of macro indirection :/

Try debugging an \makeatletter\expandafter and you're going to have a bad day. I think the macro system is even Turing-complete in some sense, certainly the number of times you potentially need to run TeX to guarantee a complete output reduces to the halting problem.
by DrZhvago | 2025-05-26 17:53:14+00:00
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but self-mutating code is not as uncommon as the author portrays it. I thought the whole idea of hotspot optimization in a compiler is essentially self-mutating code.

Also, I spent a moderately successful internship at Microsoft working on dynamic assemblies. I never got deep enough into that to fully understand when and how customers where actually using it.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fundamentals/reflec...
by pxc | 2025-05-26 17:53:30+00:00
> I had my time trying every new distro that would be popping up on Linux related magazines CD/DVDs up to the mid-2000's

Me, too! That was a blessed part of my childhood and adolescence.

You're not entirely wrong about the comparison to Gentoo, but I do think NixOS is more practical than Gentoo.
by dang | 2025-05-26 17:53:42+00:00
Yeah it's always a fuzzy area but I like what Mitchell said about this: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1759626842817069290

(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119777 and originally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40813750)

It's natural for people to post comments linking to similar things (products, projects, articles, you name it), and "how is this different from $Foo?" is one of the most common kinds of question. But launch threads (which can include Show HN threads) are a bit special.
by tptacek | 2025-05-26 17:54:20+00:00
This is simply not true. At the highest levels, security is about distributing costs between attackers and defenders, with defenders having the goal of raising costs past a threshold where attacks are no longer reasonable expenses for any plausible attacker. Obfuscation, done well, can certainly play a role in that. The Blu-ray BD+ scheme is a great case study on this.
by EA-3167 | 2025-05-26 17:55:31+00:00
Those are usually just calcium chloride in a bag, it's very hygroscopic and fairly cheap... also makes a halfway decent de-icer. The issue I see with this thin-film method is that no mention is made of the rate of production at a given relative humidity for a given area of the film.

It's interesting, but without the details (and with a lot of PR speak) I'm skeptical as hell about this in practice.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-26 17:56:08+00:00
Are you using Chrome, or Chromium?

Chromium is typically the bundled browser, but around 2019 Google restricted certain aspects of Chromium under Linux, and in order to continue using things like browser login under Ubuntu, I needed to install Chrome instead.

Hardware acceleration perks seem like another feature that may have a Chrome/Chromium divide.
by a1371 | 2025-05-26 17:56:30+00:00
I'm not sure what's forbidden here. You don't need 100% relative humidity to grab water from the air in fact in any wood has a moisture content that in equilibrium is in relation to the air moisture content. The moisture diffuses into every material and evaporates based on where it finds less vapor pressure. That's why you may have dry lips at 40% RH versus moisturized lips at 70% RH.

What you're referring to is condensation and is caused by air oversaturation due to a temperature drop which doesn't seem to be the case here.

Theoretically speaking, you can have a material that somehow absorbs high moisture from the air but has microscale properties that promote creation of droplets then somehow these droplets are separated from the rest of the air (with something like a smart vapor retarder, a passive material) and the water gets harvested.
by tyre | 2025-05-26 17:56:47+00:00
Matt Levine:

“I find all of this so weird because of how it elevates finance. [Various cases] imply that we are not entitled to be protected from pollution as citizens, or as humans. [Another] implies that we are not entitled to be told the truth as citizens. (Which: is true!) Rather, in each case, we are only entitled to be protected from lies as shareholders. The great harm of pollution, or of political dishonesty, is that it might lower the share prices of the companies we own.”
by anon7000 | 2025-05-26 17:57:24+00:00
It basically depends how deep the other tooling is sticking its claws into TS internals which won’t be accessible in the same way anymore.

I’ll bet the two most painless improvements will be:

- tsc just for type checking. (A lot of places run tsc just as a type checking step, and avoid type checking during the full build.)

- TS language server. By far the worst part of TS for large repos today — in my main monorepo, it consumes like 10GB of RAM and actions like “jump to definition” become so slow that it’s unusable.

Things that may be painful:

- Integration with 3rd party compilers like webpack which use TSC. Also unsure how tools like Rspack will need to consume tsc, given that they use a highly parallel rust architecture already.

- Integration with tools like Jest which need to transpile code before running TS.

- Integration with running Node directly — eg swchook or ts-node for bin scripts
by scyclow | 2025-05-26 17:57:30+00:00
I said it was a contrived example! But people have really specific payment logic that doesn't seem to make much sense from the outside.

What you're describing can only be achieved by encoding specific logic into the coin's original contract, so you'd know what you're getting yourself into ahead of time. And this is tantamount to agreeing to be paid in a specific gift card with a really small payment network. No need to get crypto or stablecoins involved.
by wwweston | 2025-05-26 17:57:30+00:00
> From a commercial aspect it all sucks. Creatives are devalued and the creative process is arrested.

Don't worry, if we keep it up, we can do this to everyone, all humanity, and finish our centuries long work of making a world that's hard on humans and good for our superorganisms -- business, capital organizations, churches and states that we started on centuries ago. Our technical creations can help us accelerate and complete the process by which we have chosen to make our only possible significance and value in how much we can scramble to control of these, crushing every other human endeavor and the suffering we create and potential joys we torch in meanwhile nothing but the meaningless price of progress.
by haiku2077 | 2025-05-26 17:57:48+00:00
Modern CPUs are crazy fast. 4chan was serving 4 million users with a single server, a ten year old version of PHP and like 10000 lines of spaghetti code. If you do even basic code quality, profiling and optimization you can serve a huge number of users with a fraction of a CPU core.

I/O tends to be the bottleneck (disk IOPS and throughput, network connections, IOPS and throughput). HN only serves text so that's mostly an easy problem.
by junga | 2025-05-26 17:58:11+00:00
Not exactly. Volkswagen headquarters are located in Wolfsburg which belongs to the German state of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen). NRW, or officially abbreviated NW, is the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen).

Therefore it's Lower Saxony that owns some parts of Volkswagen.
by lostlogin | 2025-05-26 17:58:18+00:00
There are plenty of tools for exporting, and I’ve tried to leave Notes several times and had no issue getting the notes out.

But trouble free sync between machines, the ability to ‘scan’ documents, adding basic maths support, the ease… it always sucks me back in.

I wish it kept the date of creation and edits readily available, and supported markdown. But it’s damn close to what I want.

Why can’t Apple Mail do search as well as notes?
by skydhash | 2025-05-26 17:58:44+00:00
> I get the impression that a lot of people here think of software development as a craft, which is great for your own learning and development but not relevant from the company's perspective. It just has to work good enough.

Building the thing may be the primary objective, but you will eventually have to rework what you've built (dependency changes, requirement changes,...). All the craft is for that day, and whatever that goes against that is called technical debt.

You just need to make some tradeoffs between getting the thing out the faster possible and being able to alter it later. It's a spectrum, but instead of discussing it with the engineers, most executive suites (and their manager) wants to give out edicts from high.
by mlcruz | 2025-05-26 17:58:51+00:00
Hi Ethan,

I see that one of the pains points of your product is related to having an notetaker bot joining the call. You could probably offer to your enterprise customers that use teams a better experience by processing calls via compliance recording policy (since it does not require a bot to join the call and the user approval flow is way less disruptive).

If it is something that interests you we could talk more in detail about how the implementation works and the its challanges
by tehjoker | 2025-05-26 17:59:46+00:00
Here's deepseek's answer. To Deepseek I add: Market failure is addressed even more in Lenin's "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism" which addresses market and financial consolidation in the early 20th century (it's worse now). I would also add that Marx built off of and sometimes critiqued Adam Smith and Ricardo, it's not an entirely different branch of the intellectual tree.

Elasticity of Demand – Marx does not explicitly discuss elasticity, but he analyzes demand fluctuations in terms of "the social need" (gesellschaftliche Bedürfnis) and "effective demand" under capitalism (Capital, Vol. III). He notes how capitalist production responds to demand shifts, though not in the formalized neoclassical sense. Market Equilibrium – Marx critiques the idea of equilibrium (a key concept in classical and neoclassical economics), instead emphasizing "anarchy of production" and "tendential laws" (e.g., the tendency of the rate of profit to fall). He sees markets as inherently unstable due to contradictions in capitalism (Capital, Vol. I & III). Externality – While Marx doesn’t use this term, he discusses "social costs of production" (e.g., environmental degradation, worker exploitation) as inherent to capitalism’s drive for profit (Capital, Vol. I). His concept of "metabolic rift" (in Capital, Vol. III and his ecological writings) touches on unintended consequences akin to negative externalities. Market Failure – Marx’s entire critique of capitalism can be seen as an analysis of systemic "failures," such as "crises of overproduction", "underconsumption", and "disproportionality" between sectors (Capital, Vol. II & III). He attributes these to contradictions in the capitalist mode of production rather than isolated market inefficiencies. Network Effect – Marx does not discuss this directly, but his analysis of "general social labor" (the socially necessary labor time underpinning exchange) and the role of "commodity fetishism" (Capital, Vol. I) implies that value is socially determined in a way that could loosely parallel network effects (e.g., the more a commodity is exchanged, the more its value appears natural). Opportunity Cost – Marx does not use this term (rooted in marginalist economics), but his labor theory of value centers on "socially necessary labor time", implying that the cost of producing one good is the labor diverted from other uses (Capital, Vol. I). His concept of "alternative employments of capital" in Capital, Vol. III also touches on trade-offs. Comparative Advantage – Marx critiques David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage (e.g., in Theories of Surplus Value), arguing that international trade under capitalism exploits unequal exchange and reinforces imperialism. He focuses on "uneven development" and "super-exploitation" rather than mutual gains from trade.
by foobarqux | 2025-05-26 17:59:58+00:00
> Since GPT mimics human language so convincingly, I've been wondering if there's any overlap of these two generative systems.

It's not really relevant if there is overlap, I'm sure you can list a bunch of ways they are similar. What's important is 1. if they are different in fundamental ways and 2. whether LLMs explain anything about the human language faculty.

For 1. the most important difference is that human languages appear to have certain constraints (roughly that language has parse tree/hierarchical structure) and (from the experiments of Moro) humans seem to not be able to learn arguably simpler structures that are not hierarchical. LLMs on the other hand can be trained on those simpler structures. That shows that the acquisition process is not the same, which is not surprising since neural networks work on arbitrary statistical data and don't have strong inductive biases.

For 2. even if it turned out that LLMs couldn't learn the same languages it doesn't explain anything. For example you could hard-code the training to fail if it detects an "impossible language" then what? You've managed to create an accurate predictor but you don't have any understanding of how or why it works. This is easier to understand with non-cognitive systems like the weather or gravity: If you create a deep neural network that accurately predicts gravity it is not the same as coming up with the general theory of relativity (which could in fact be a worse predictor for example at quantum scales). Everyone argues the ridiculous point that since LLMs are good predictors then gaining understanding about the human language faculty is useless, which is a stance that wouldn't be accepted for the study of gravity or in any other field.
by dundarious | 2025-05-26 18:00:13+00:00
Compare with Arch, e.g., https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=gf2-g..., where you just run `makepkg` or `makechrootpkg -r ~/archroot` (setup is just `mkdir -p ~/archroot ; mkarchroot ~/archroot/root base-devel`). The wiki is also wonderful (even for general-linux/non-Arch-specific information) -- informative and to-the-point.