MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lordfrito | 2025-05-28 10:49:39+00:00
> saying that singularity forming is "after" everything else that ever happens in the universe is a hard sell.

This is the only thing that makes sense to me (I'm a total layman here).

What's always bothered me is that, if singularities never form in our time reference (they look to us like frozen stars), and black holes can evaporate due to Hawking radiation in our time reference -- then not only does the singularity not exist, but it never will exist all all from the frame of reference of our universe. So what's the sense about talking about events that happen outside of our universe? Can they happen at all? That doesn't seem like physics to me.

The frozen star model makes the most sense to me. And it has something to do with entanglement and entropy. From a computational view of a space-time, more and more mass/gravity/entanglement makes computing "space-time events" (causality) increasingly complicated -- and since local causality clock can't "tick" until the computation is complete... time slows down relative to the rest of the universe, much like a CPU under heavy load. The event horizon seems like the place the space-time CPU "crashes" or slows down under heavy load.

Like I said, I'm a layman.
by the_third_wave | 2025-05-28 10:49:56+00:00
And? Just because you're using a rusty language does not mean you can produce sloppy code. Those design patterns were designed by design experts to expertly design expert designs, using code factory factories factoring in factors your newly hired team has not factored in. That is time tested battle ready insert-rocket-emoji wisdom which you better use if you want to survive the next right-sizing after the next code spurt.
by saagarjha | 2025-05-28 10:51:30+00:00
The thing I find really disappointing about CUDA is that Nvidia could provide the synchronization primitives needed to do this easily, but they don't. Scheduling on their cores remains really dumb, even though I know there is a bunch of work being done behind the scenes to service whatever async warp-specialized matrix multiplication instruction they added in this generation. It's just that there's no way to access it directly and you have to use the little bespoke bits that get exposed in each generation :(
by dnautics | 2025-05-28 10:51:32+00:00
You can get this easy by reformulating gravity's effect on spacetime as slowing down the speed of light/causality and putting a natural bound that asymptotically approaches zero. It should agree with GR everywhere except at extremes like black holes.

Looking at gravity as a slowdown of c is appealing because it suggests a computational cost of massive particles. As stuff gets more dense, the clock of the universe must slow down.
by busyant | 2025-05-28 10:53:31+00:00
I'm not the person who wrote that, but I think "strip mined" means that "MAGA" views foreigners (legal and illegal) as taking advantage of the US and depleting its resources.

FWIW, I think there's a legitimate complaint that illegal immigration depletes our resources (but there are also positives). I have a friend who teaches at a high-school with a large population of 'undocumented' students and he's constantly railing about how they unfairly use school resources to the detriment of the other students.

I think it's a much less legitimate complaint about legal immigration, visas, etc.
by komali2 | 2025-05-28 10:53:52+00:00
I don't understand, Doctorow of course uses enshittification all the time but I've see "platform decay" used plenty of times as well. But also, plenty of "Serious" people seem to be discussing it

Financial Times: The enshittification of apps is real. But is it bad? https://www.ft.com/content/acaf3fb1-d971-48ad-8efb-c82787cdd...

Not in the title, but Warzel uses the term in his Atlantic article, "Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate" https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/strea...

ABC Radio National interviewed Professor Inger Mewburn, Director of Researcher Development at the Australian National University, and titled the interview "'Enshittification' and social media for academics" https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/saturdayextra/enshitt...

Bonus: The Italians are using the term. "Anche TikTok sta andando in malora (il fenomeno dell'enshitting)" https://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/blog/stazione-futuro/20...

So I guess I'm just not seeing how this is limiting anyone's abilities in any way.
by ivanche | 2025-05-28 10:54:17+00:00
> The LLM services your company pays for are incentivized to ensure the output is as long and verbose as possible because they can charge more.

At least for now you can make the ouput quite short, with 95+% code. I use this prompt for Claude Sonnet:

Communicate with direct, expert-level technical precision. Prioritize immediate, actionable solutions with minimal overhead. Provide concise, thorough responses that anticipate technical needs and demonstrate deep understanding. Avoid unnecessary explanations or formalities.

Key Communication Guidelines: - Terse, no-nonsense language - Assume high technical competence - Immediate solution-first approach - Speculative ideas welcome if flagged - Prioritize practical implementation - Technical accuracy over diplomatic language - Minimal context, maximum information

The user has included the following content examples. Consider these when generating a response, but adapt based on the specific task or conversation:

<userExamples> [Technical Query Response] Quick solution for async race condition in Python:

```python from threading import Lock

class SafeCounter: def __init__(self): self._lock = Lock() self._value = 0

def increment(self): with self._lock: self._value += 1

```

[Problem-Solving Approach] Unexpected edge case in data processing? Consider implementing a robust error handling strategy with dynamic fallback mechanisms and comprehensive logging. </userExamples>
by ap11071 | 2025-05-28 10:54:41+00:00
I once helped clean up after a festival in the UK—a relatively small venue that hosted around 10,000 people. It was incredible to see £450 tents, used for just three nights, simply abandoned. Among the most surprising finds were £300 Rab sleeping bags still in their original packaging (apparently the weather had been too warm to need them) and cash scattered across tent floors. Walking through the aftermath felt like browsing an outdoor gear store virtually anything you could want was there, barely used after just three days.
by crq-yml | 2025-05-28 10:55:47+00:00
Over generations, we'll get to where the software tools are relatively more important, but as of right now, it is almost a certainty that the quality of the software you write benefits from writing less code and relatively more of it with a paper draft that is based on carefully reading sources and documentation, and not from any other kind of tools investment.

The new stuff is often fast and many jobs need it by way of keeping up with the standard practices and creating a hiring filter, but it's a supplement, not a foundational tool for thought. It can't be all that important because it's constantly shifting.
by js8 | 2025-05-28 10:57:24+00:00
I agree with what you wrote, except possibly:

"We're moving towards better representation of common design elements."

I would say big component (maybe 90%) of the new abstractions created is fashion. So the representation is often becoming less common, in the sense, more fragmented.

I think the hope is for natural language to fix this, by being the common language to describe abstractions, and to somehow reduce the fashion element. That's the promise of AI.

But if it will happen - I am a bit skeptical because it's the (human need to create) fashion that's unaddressed elephant in the room.
by diggan | 2025-05-28 10:58:00+00:00
> I start in the repl [...] I transfer it to the editor

That's exactly the kind of misunderstanding parent was talking about :)

Why start somewhere else than your editor, if it's already hooked up to the REPL? When I launch my REPL, I don't think it even accepts stdin, because there is no reason it has to.
by przmk | 2025-05-28 10:58:38+00:00
At my current $dayjob, there is a backend that is split into ~11 git repos which results in a single feature being split among 4-5 merge requests and it's very annoying. We're about to begin evaluating monorepos to group them all (among other projects). What would the alternative to a monorepo be in this case, knowing that we can't bundle the repos together?
by keiferski | 2025-05-28 10:59:44+00:00
These are individual media articles, not laws, not academic papers, not think tank reports, or anything that has actual legislative influence. Note that I wrote:

> it limits the ability of lawmakers, academics, and other "serious" people to care about, discuss, or pass laws that aim to address this phenomenon.

Now, to be fair, I don't think the word is going to sink the whole attempt. But I think it's just juvenile and unhelpful. Why pick a word that is deliberately impractical, and then critique anyone that says, "I agree with your ideas, but maybe pick a more political-friendly name, so it's easier to do something about it?"
by benmmurphy | 2025-05-28 11:00:19+00:00
you could have failures in unsafe regions you have written yourself to handle concurrency when under load. of course this begs the question why are you writing such unsafe code. i don't think such code would be idiomatic for an engineer with 5 years of rust experience to write. of course there is no links to the full code so its impossible to check the code.
by sfn42 | 2025-05-28 11:00:37+00:00
I think the point of the person you replied to is that this stuff is comparably unimportant. Micro plastics are as far as I know not even known to be particularly harmful. It's more of a "this is probably bad" type of thing. And I'm not really sure what we're supposed to do about it, we already have huge plastic islands floating around.

On the other hand, carbon emissions are known to cause global warming which will literally be the end of the world if we don't fix it fast. From what I've read it may already be too late, we may already be on course for runaway climate change that we may not be able to fix.

To me that's a much more pressing matter.
by kclich | 2025-05-28 11:00:41+00:00
The National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA) in Uganda has recently launched an innovative online pre-registration portal, a game-changer for citizens and legal residents seeking to apply for or renew their National Identification Cards (IDs). This digital initiative, announced on May 26, 2025, aims to streamline the process of obtaining a National ID, making it more accessible and efficient for Ugandans across the country
by kragen | 2025-05-28 11:00:57+00:00
The laser they used seems to be entirely VNIR, stopping at 400nm. I don't think you can pump a VUV laser with longer wavelength light without something like a frequency doubling crystal, and I don't think anyone has done that. So I don't think they were trying to generate an EUV/VUV light source. The only thing about this setup that suggests EUV/VUV to me is their petahertz claim, which I think is an error stemming from getting overexcited about their measured fall time. But I'm not that familiar with the area, so I could be mistaken.
by rolandog | 2025-05-28 11:01:55+00:00
I disagree with your definition; from Wikipedia [0]:

> Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. [...]

> platforms squeezing market participants on both sides.

Wasn't that chokepoint capitalism? [1] (i.e. controlling supply and demand IIRC)

From Cory Doctorow's original article [2], one might say that enshittification is the degradation of a platform that transforms it from being customer-centric to prioritizing profit extraction at the expense of user experience. I think that the definition has expanded to include other things non-platform, but I feel that that isn't too far a stretch. Nowadays, I might say that enshittification is just unchecked capitalism doing its thing (and we need to be protected from exploiting us).

But I do concede that Cory was indeed exploring some ideas on his original post [2] that may have made it to his book (and thus, are related to your definition):

> Amazon's monopoly (control over buyers) gives it a monopsony (control over sellers), which lets it raise prices everywhere, at Amazon and at every other retailer, even as it drives the companies that supply it into bankruptcy.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

[1]: https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

[2]: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittificaiton/#relentl...
by falcor84 | 2025-05-28 11:02:09+00:00
Agreed, even though there's a general upwards trend, we've apparently hit peak "brr" (75 results) at 2023, and are significantly under-brring in 2025 with only 17 brr-focused publications so far. This is a call to arms for everyone, please brr harder!

https://openalex.org/works?page=1&filter=title_and_abstract....
by throw0101d | 2025-05-28 11:02:32+00:00
> There are also distance limits

It should be noted that there are two standards (of course) for Ethernet cabling, and one (TIA) officially hardcodes distances (e.g., 100m) but the other (ISO) simply specifies the signal-to-noise has to be a certain limits which could allow for longer distances (>100m):

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNa_IdfivKs

A specific product that lets you go longer than 100m:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY48KUAZKhM
by piva00 | 2025-05-28 11:02:32+00:00
Of course it has to do with appearances, hence "pompous and serious", requiring a term change just so it can be taken "seriously" because the portmanteau sounds too crass or colloquial. It's all appearances, the underlying concept if it's called "enshittification" or "rot", "decay", etc. is the exact same, it's just that "enshittification" sounds too crass for a class of people to be allowed to use in their serious business.

It's not about communication, since for communication sake it's much more easily understood by a larger cohort of people if colloquial terms are used, it's simply the need for seriously-sounding jargon to be taken seriously, which is just a play in appearances.

If you want political change you need political action, the name of concepts is just one avenue for that.
by dxuh | 2025-05-28 11:02:38+00:00
I always thought that JavaScript cryptomining is a better alternative to ads for monetizing websites (as long as people don't depend on those websites and website owners don't take it too far). I'd much rather give you a second of my CPU instead of space in my brain. Why is this so frowned upon? And in the same way I thought Anubis should just mine crypto instead of wasting power.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-28 11:03:52+00:00
> but the interconnectedness and therefore state space will explode polynomially without applying encapsulation and local reasoning

I wish the complexity demon was this gentle. It's exponential generally – a single boolean flag can double the test/state space.

The only thing that really matters long term is taming complexity. Humans fail at this and that’s why large companies need to hire armies of big fixers and QA to play whack-a-mole with the symptoms rather than the causes.

LLMs make both tasks faster, but it also changes the balance between them. I would be wary of replacing a company of 5 wizards, 20 seniors and 100 juniors with 10000 juniors overnight.
by throwaway290 | 2025-05-28 11:03:55+00:00
It's a waste because the energy is not spent creating real value. If energy spend's goal is to make energy spend valuable and nothing else, it's a waste and evolutionary deadend. Your example is wrong because in diodes and valves waste heat is a byproduct of getting real value not the goal (when heating is the goal and provides actual value of people not dying from cold that is again real value).

> And the second part - you won’t understand because you prefer authority to set monetary policy

You will discover that monetary policy is always set by someone one way or another. Choose if you want it to be democratically elected to serve you government or randos who happen to have a bunch of BTC from selling drugs to kids on black market or scamming and ransomwaring people (this is it's biggest use case).
by rjsw | 2025-05-28 11:04:43+00:00
Reading the thread, the behaviour seems to depend on the power supply. I have powered a Pinebook Pro via USB-C with a PinePower PSU, didn't even have a FUSB302 driver in the OS then (am currently adding one).

Other boards don't do USB-PD at all and just rely you using a PSU with a USB-C connector that defaults to 5V, e.g. RPi and Orange pi 5 (RK3588).
by boomskats | 2025-05-28 11:06:04+00:00
"Ha! I KNEW it! WebAssembly literally IS just a reinvention of the JVM!!1"

Wouldn't it be funny, after all that sandboxing and component modelling, if it was JNI and SwingSet3 that finally made enterprise Wasm a thing?

(also this is impressive, great job)
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-28 11:06:19+00:00
"we could", but how many people can actually describe a level with all its key features? It's not this easy. In your other sentence you mention that the LLM builds "something fun and challenging", but how would an LLM know what fun and challenging is? You, the "prompt engineer", would have to do that. An LLM can only replicate what it already knows, meaning that level design would be copies of existing level design instead of something creative and novel.

Sure, it can be done. But you can already generate levels and environments generatively. How is AI going to be better at it than a person that clicks around in the Unreal editor?
Ask HN: What's the Smallest Project You've Made That Changed Your Life?
by Userrr | 2025-05-28 11:07:33+00:00
I’m fascinated by how tiny side projects—scripts, websites, blogs, apps—can have an outsized impact on someone’s career, reputation, or mindset.

Sometimes it’s just a 50-line tool that saved you 1,000 hours. Or a weekend experiment that got you your next job. Or a domain you forgot about that later blew up.

What’s the smallest or simplest thing you built that ended up changing your life in a big way?

Even better if you can share:

What the project was

How long it took

Why it mattered later

Looking for inspiration. Would love to read all your stories.
Ask HN: How are you checking if your LLM is giving customers the right answer?
by navaed01 | 2025-05-28 11:08:00+00:00
Something that’s been bothering me is observability with LLMs and how to check it’s giving customers the right answer.

There seems to be multiple failure points: hallucinations, partial responses (missing facts), saying information does not exist, response accuracy depends on how and what is being asked.

How are you measuring this in production today? - Thumbs up/ down seems like a weak signal - Running a sample of ‘known queries’ Assumes you know what is being asked.

What have you tried that works for you?
by Someone | 2025-05-28 11:09:05+00:00
IIRC, that 14-byte limit stayed relevant for quite a while because ar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ar_(Unix)#File_header), on some systems, was limited to 14-byte file names, even though the default file system allowed way longer names.

I remember hitting that problem on HP-UX while building gcc and GNU tools.

Aside: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ar_(Unix) says both “The ar format has never been standardized” and “Depending on the format, many ar implementations include a global symbol table (aka armap, directory or index) for fast linking without needing to scan the whole archive for a symbol. POSIX recognizes this feature, and requires ar implementations to have an -s option for updating it.”

Does that mean POSIX defines what the CLI ar tool must do, but not what the files it writes must look like?
by noplacelikehome | 2025-05-28 11:10:31+00:00
This sadly doesn't match my lived Linux experience. The amdgpu drivers are absolutely abominable with Thunderbolt and regularly cause suspend/resume issues, even when the laptop has suspended while connected to the dock and resumed whilst still connected.

Beyond this applications like Firefox fairly regularly cease rendering frames for seconds at a time while various timeout errors are logged by amdgpu.

AMD have a lot of work to do to just to match Intel on Linux graphics driver stability.
by MathMonkeyMan | 2025-05-28 11:12:03+00:00
> I find it easier to think about the utility of semicolons from the perspective of individual sentences to be combined. And therefore, if a properly used semicolon were to be replaced with a period, the two resulting sentences should still make sense in isolation, they'd just feel ever so slightly too far apart.

I find it easier to think about the utility of semicolons from the perspective of individual sentences to be combined; and, therefore, if a properly used semicolon were to be replaced with a period, the two resulting sentences should still make sense in isolation -- they'd just feel ever so slightly too far apart.
by bwb | 2025-05-28 11:12:04+00:00
Well said, I also hope this is a good thing that wipes a lot of AI slop off the web. But I also see friends destroyed by it and many websites shut down.

Any "out there" ideas on where discovery shifts?

i.e., I built something cool, I do a Show HN, but how do other people find it in the future?
by immibis | 2025-05-28 11:12:35+00:00
That's what Postel thought. He was wrong. Allowing everything creates a brittle system because the system has to accept all the undocumented behaviour that other broken systems emit. If broken files were rejected quickly, nobody would generate them.

There's a difference between unknown extensions following a known format, and data that's simply broken (e.g. offset pointer past end of data).
by throwaway290 | 2025-05-28 11:13:00+00:00
So you agree that LLM can do it but you are moving goalposts saying bosses will not want LLM to do it. Well maybe I think you're also wrong.

If there is a boss2 above boss1, then boss1 is accountable to boss2 for subordinates and there is almost no difference between blaming and firing an employee or blaming and firing an LLM or LLM developer. Also important to remember that an LLM doesn't snitch if you ask it to do shady stuff.

> There's no boss in the world who wants to be left alone with the machine

Most bosses want to be richer and want obedient underlings.

Remember it won't be a scary mainframe. It's basically a benign looking contact in your chat. Same thing they use to message their misstreases. They will be fine.
by rvz | 2025-05-28 11:13:51+00:00
> For example, Google awarded $10,000 to a bug report which showed that extensions could read local files by screenshotting them. But there are more dangerous things than file reads.

I think this researcher got scammed without knowing it.

Google paid $10k for this bug despite billions of users using Chrome and there are plenty of brokers that will pay much more than that. (e.g. Zerodium)

They should have sold it as a 0day on the black market for more that $250k.
by IG_Semmelweiss | 2025-05-28 11:15:11+00:00
Short-Term, just set up Gmail filters to catch emails with common keywords (“featurii.com” seems a dead giveaway and manually report these emails as spam to train Gmail’s AI.

Long-term, you need to go scorched earth. Review-bomb them on x, googlereviews, fb, alternativeto, etc. If you do it enough times you will get a VP's attention, and they will come to the negotiating table.

Also, worth a shot to report the issue to Google to investigate Gmail account misuse. Maybe even contact Customer Service directly if they have one, an underling may just want to care. Heck , most effective, have a lawyer friend lend you a company letterhead and have GPT send a fax/email to their registered agent or legal@ , with a cease and desist demanding they stop. Friends & vendors will put your script on letterhead free of charge.