MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jaysonelliot | 2025-05-15 22:04:31+00:00
You're making the error of judging Raskin's approach with the knowledge of user interfaces that a person in 2025 has. It's been 40 years since that interview. Many people today weren't even born yet.

In that 40 years, many UI conventions have sprung up, and we've internalized them to the point that they're so familiar we actually say they're intuitive.

But if you go back to the state of computing in 1986, or even earlier, when Raskin was developing his UX principles for the Canon Cat and the SwyftCard, he was considering computer interfaces that were almost exclusively command-line interfaces.

You're not supposed to "idolize" any designer or engineer. But I would highly encourage you to read The Humane Interface, learn about the underlying principles of usability and interface design, and consider how you'd apply them to a UI today, 40 years later. The execution you'd come up with would be different. But the principles he started from are foundational and very useful.
by _bin_ | 2025-05-15 22:04:58+00:00
Interesting. I've never tested o1-pro because it's insanely expensive but preview seemed to do okay.

I wouldn't be shocked if huge, expensive-to-run models performed better and if all the "optimized" versions were actually labs trying to ram cheaper bullshit down everyone's throat. Basically chinesium for LLMs; you can afford them but it's not worth it. I remember someone saying o1 was, what, 200B dense? I might be misremembering.
by theendisney | 2025-05-15 22:05:08+00:00
Rating systemen should really mature to exclude non customers and list the customers purchase history.

Weight by amount spend could be interesting.

Big vendors/companies should probably be required to have per product ratings rather than optional. Rating adobe or alibaba on general is probably not all that useful.

The EU almost requires it but google (for example) still didnt find a nice technical solution.
by gxs | 2025-05-15 22:05:12+00:00
Maybe if the headline said Stop using REST for state synchronization in these scenarios, I would have been on board

Dismissing something outright is usually the wrong answer, and for the same reason I did read the article

Using REST for synchronization isn’t some huge transgression and is fine in a lot of scenarios, silly in others.

Keeping record updates that a user makes in one system in sync with a single record in another system that uses those updates is fine

Trying to sync giant databases in bulk on the other hand might not be
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-15 22:05:38+00:00
This was a 1970s paperback by someone who attracted attention for his work on spiritual matters and sold a lot of books but didn't leave an organization behind so you can find his books at used bookstores.

https://www.amazon.com/Discovering-Secrets-Happiness-Intimat...

Not rare at all but some people might say it has some prurient interest (talks about his sexual misadjustment) so maybe they think it has to be limited access or maybe people will steal it or something. (The same library kept Steal this book in a restricted area of the stacks but let me check it out.)
by acyou | 2025-05-15 22:05:55+00:00
I'm curious if Stack Overflow was a good resource for human learning? As in, run into a problem, look through other related questions and answers, check the documentation, struggle for awhile learning and figuring out how to frame and pose the question, struggle some more while you wait to get an answer. I kind of find LLMs "too easy" and can distinctly feel myself "not learning", not the way I used to, but after all I am getting older.

I'm pretty sure you can get a stack overflowy experience out of an llm with the right system prompt, but the human factor might not be the same. Not wanting to be berated by others on the internet is maybe underrated as a motivational tool. How are we going to get that back?
by irrational | 2025-05-15 22:07:34+00:00
> 2014: questions started to decline, which was also when Stack Overflow significantly improved moderator efficiency. From then, questions were closed faster, many more were closed, and “low quality” questions were removed more efficiently. This tallies with my memory of feeling that site moderators had gone on a power trip by closing legitimate questions. I stopped asking questions around this time because the site felt unwelcome.

I also felt around that time that it became unwelcoming. I didn’t realize they had revamped the moderator tools. That is the time period when I stopped using it too. Now I know why.

How many other websites have also shot themselves in the foot by tweaking things?
by Balgair | 2025-05-15 22:09:25+00:00
Not under the current way we do things, I don't imagine.

So the real trick here isn't the mRNA, it's the nanobubbles. Basically, you're putting these bits of mRNA into these little fat bubbles and then injecting those into the blood. Making those bubble shelf stable is really hard, hence the issues with temperature and the covid vaccine. To then make those little fat bubbles stable-ish in the blood is also a really hard thing to do. They have to get to the right places (in this baby's case, the liver) and then degrade there, drop off the mRNA, and not mess up other tissues all that much. Like, it's not terrible to make these micelles degrade in vivo, but to have them do that and not degrade in the tubes, ... wow... that is really difficult. There's a reason that Moderna is so highly valued, and it's these bubbles.

To try to then put these in a weapon that could do this though the airways would be, like, nearly impossible. Like, as in I think the second law of thermodynamics, let alone biology, and then simple industrial countermeasure like a N95 respirator, yeah, I think all of that makes it pretty much impossible to weaponize.

(Hedging my bets here: I don't know if they had to do all that with this baby, as you can kinda go from lab to baby really fast, since it's such a special case. But for mRNA based vaccines and cancer treatments, you have to deal with the shelf stable issue)

(Also, other bio people, yes, I am trying to explain to laymen here. Please chime in and tell me how I'm wrong here)
by zahlman | 2025-05-15 22:10:31+00:00
>the current StackOverflow moderators

Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators. I explained this to someone else a week ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927665) and you replied to that comment.

> Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing

So what? Stack Overflow users get $0.00 for this, whether they're moderators, active curators or just signed up. For users, growing the site isn't the goal. Growing interaction with the site is not the goal. The goal is building a useful artifact (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770). This frequently entails removing, closing or duplicating questions, for the same reason that building a useful program frequently entails removing lines of code, deprecating parts of the API, and refactoring.

> and now it's dying

Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"?

> Maybe something was better before

Who do you think should get to decide what's "better" here? More importantly, why?

If the YC team decided to prioritize increasing site traffic (and introduce ads to capitalize on that) on HN and maximizing the rate of new submissions, at the expense or ignorance of the quality of the discussion, that would be clearly be bad, right? You'd leave, right? I would.

The same principle applies to sites that aren't about having a discussion. Bigger is not better.
by kulahan | 2025-05-15 22:11:17+00:00
I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone describe the stack overflow community as “kind”. Usually it’s the exact opposite: “I asked a question and just got 30 questions asking why I’m trying to do this” or “my question was closed for seemingly no reason”.

It’s literally the most blunt and aggressive website I’ve ever been on that wasn’t a straight-up troll site like 4-Chan.
by tqwhite | 2025-05-15 22:11:19+00:00
I find that writing a thorough design spec is really worth it. Also, asking for its reaction. "What's missing?" "Should I do X or Y" does good things for its thought process, like engaging a younger programmer in the process.

Definitely, I ask for a plan and then, even if it's obvious, I ask questions and discuss it. I also point it as samples of code that I like with instructions for what is good about it.

Once we have settled on a plan, I ask it to break it into phases that can be tested (I am not one for a unit testing) to lock in progress. Claude LOVES that. It organizes a new plan and, at the end of each phase tells me how to test (curl, command line, whatever is appropriate) and what I should see that represents success.

The most important thing I have figured out is that Claude is a collaborator, not a minion. I agree with visarga, it's much more like surfing that walking. Also, Trust... but Verify.

This is a great time to be a programmer.
by catigula | 2025-05-15 22:11:25+00:00
I mean, I feel like autism is a terrible example here, it's not just some quirky personality trait, it's a reality people live with that runs the gamut from difficult to completely debilitating. Even the more mild forms of autism cause extreme difficulty in many aspects of life. If that was curable or preventable, that'd be great.

If it turns out some pathogen or chemical made me autistic, regardless of whether or not I could be cured as an adult, I'd have certainly preferred to live the reality where I had been as a child.
by lynndotpy | 2025-05-15 22:11:49+00:00
Our disagreement is probably in the "mostly only need energy to turn rocks into computer chips". I think our economy is a lot more fragile and complicated than that. And that economy relies on non-renewable resources which are dwindling, in a world which is posed to offer less of its renewable resources, which includes people and their labor. (This is a compounded problem, since people and their labor are what would drive recycling, say, to extract gold from old chips.) And important knowledge (say, about how to make CPUs) is something that can be lost with just an unlucky coincidence, or something like another world war.

You don't need to imagine a total economic collapse. Take any resource that goes into a chip, and contrive any reason we'll have to consume significantly less of that resource. How do you solve that?

Well, we have highly-redundant compute-per-person. I personally have nine pretty capable computer chips to my person, just in the building I'm in. That's a lot, and that represents an excess in resource consumption. A phone-as-motherboard laptop solves one of those chips. If we make the same games we're making today but we go back a decade or two in graphics, then we can have fewer consoles and gaming PCs, too.

I'm not saying "one chip for many devices" is a panacea. There are other things we might do. Maybe laptops and phones can be made to have display input, for example.
by primax | 2025-05-15 22:13:08+00:00
> There's no evidence to support that gene therapy will ever be inexpensive. We can merely say that the process may become less shockingly expensive.

A similar thing has been said about so many cutting edge therapies and technologies in the past that I think you'll end up being quite surprised.

Eventually someone will invent a machine that spits these therapies out like espresso machines.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-05-15 22:13:23+00:00
Further, I have read several sections of The Humane Interface, and I think it does contain some real insight, some of which we have unfortunately lost.

But I do not think that Raskin was channelling some remarkable stream of insight into these matters. And yes, "idolize" was more poking fun at people who use superlatives to describe him, in my opinion without much justification.
by ndneighbor | 2025-05-15 22:13:56+00:00
My day job includes moderation. I think I am more empathetic to the issues that moderators deal with on a day to day basis given that they are underpaid, under-appreciated, and overworked.

It's very difficult to scale a community to be both welcoming and productive. New users don't have the same context as existing ones. You find that norms and manners aren't transferred from one group to the next. So although that I noticed that SO started getting more strict from 2014 onward, I wouldn't know immediately what to do about the content quality issue.

My take is that, like most things, the medium of the old will be appreciated the way it wasn't in 2014. As the Brian Eno quote goes: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature." People will yearn for the human forums the same way they did years past when people tire of the LLM slop. (If they do.)
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-15 22:14:04+00:00
You managed to write three full paragraphs that didn't respond to what I wrote.

If you want to monologue, that's fine, but I thought we were having a conversation.

One of the greatest travesties of our modern times is that political conversation somehow robs people of the capacity to read and listen, because another person being wrong seemingly trumps any requirement for either.
by WhitneyLand | 2025-05-15 22:14:11+00:00
Not sure why you think that’s not rest. Because Roy Fielding wrote a paper that most people don’t care about?

Language isn’t controlled by a single authority or the first person to use a term. Words mean what people use them to mean. You can complain that it’s not the ‘proper’ definition, but if the majority of people use it a certain way, that becomes the definition in practice.

edit: Fielding not Crawford (thx ackfoobar)
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-05-15 22:14:22+00:00
If we're being honest with ourselves, I think most people who like old software like it the same way people like vintage cars.

Most modern software that needs to be built with performance on mind has that requirement because it's being built for commercial purposes. Most end-user software simply doesn't face that same constraint, although it's a property many claim to desire, because we all tend to have gigabytes of RAM and megabytes of network speed at our disposal. We have so much of these, in fact, sitting idle most of the time, that companies like Microsoft notice very few of their actual users max out their system usage and start building in their own ... stuff, to make better commercial use of it, let's say. (Whether that is a good outcome is a debate everyone is wrong about in a different way.)

Sounds an awful lot like my dad complaining about all the junk they put in modern cars these days. And yet, I don't see a lot of vintage cars in active use. They're kept around mostly for the fun in the off-clock hours. Maybe you drive them to and from the job interview to leave a certain impression upon the interviewer. Who knows.
by ac29 | 2025-05-15 22:14:43+00:00
> To accomplish that feat, the treatment is wrapped in fatty lipid molecules to protect it from degradation in the blood on its way to the liver, where the edit will be made. Inside the lipids are instructions that command the cells to produce an enzyme that edits the gene.

This isnt entirely unlike the method mRNA vaccines use. Through some clever biochemistry, mRNA vaccines get bits of code into cells where the cell's built in code compilers manufacture proteins that induce immunity.

We have developed software patches for our biology.
by qudat | 2025-05-15 22:14:59+00:00
State synchronization is a bit of a hot topic for front end development since most of the “middle end” deals squarely with solving that problem.

I also agree that the way many APIs are built are pushing complexity to the FE: https://bower.sh/dogma-of-restful-api

However, virtually every company I’ve joined has needed to serve multiple clients. In those cases REST is the status quo. Some people have opted for graphql but even that makes some uneasy because tuning gql is non trivial. CRDTs are completely foreign to most organizations unless they deal specifically with multiplayer modes.

So while it sounds nice to ditch REST it’s just not realistic for most orgs. This is why I’ve been developing a side effect and state sync system that can easily interface with REST, websockets, graphql, etc because it’s built off of structured concurrency.

https://starfx.bower.sh/

https://bower.sh/why-structured-concurrency
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-15 22:16:06+00:00
A drone with sufficient range, payload, and protection against the standard litany of modern EW and counter-measure systems would be quite expensive. Even the crappy non-survivable drones used in Ukraine are tens of thousands of dollars and that would probably tip north of $100k each if they actually had to be hardened against modern countermeasures, which aren't really a thing in Ukraine. Aside from the cost issue, launching thousands of them against a single naval target is unlikely to be feasible due to the weight and volume considerations alone. The largest drone attacks ever mustered across an entire theater of war, never mind against a single target, were in the hundreds and those didn't have to contend with much in the way of serious broad spectrum countermeasures or point defenses.

You would likely be better off with several actual anti-ship missiles. A Harpoon only costs $1.4M and those are dedicated platforms purpose-built to defeat state-of-the-art defenses and countermeasures.

The US Navy is testing the lasers against cruise missiles and other systems with much more protection and capability than the typical cheap drone. Current versions are lower-power testbeds but production versions are expected to be several hundred kW.
by bloppe | 2025-05-15 22:16:27+00:00
This will have interesting implications for the LLMs as well, since SO is a wealth of training data. In my experience, LLMs are pretty useless when it comes to helping me with newer, faster-evolving, experimental tools and libraries, which is not surprising. But, if the SO community really atrophies to the point that a lot fewer people are bothering to answer questions, there won't be another centralized resource for answers. Perhaps that just means balkanized communities like random Slack channels will fill the gap, but those aren't search-indexed and I'd bet getting them all into training corpi won't be as easy either.

Maybe the future involves LLMs asking questions on something like SO when it routinely fumbles a particular topic. People could get paid to answer them and provide more training data. Who knows at this point
by ytpete | 2025-05-15 22:16:39+00:00
That quote sounds more like the professor was using ChatGPT as a clipart generator to simply liven up the slides. From this description alone, it's not clear that GPT was used for the slide content. "Distorted text" has got to be referring to the garbled letters you see in AI-generated images – not direct ChatGPT text output, which rarely contains misspellings let alone anything garbled.

But some other parts of that article are much clearer and egregious:

> Halfway through the document, which her business professor had made for a lesson on models of leadership, was an instruction to ChatGPT to “expand on all areas. Be more detailed and specific.” It was followed by a list of positive and negative leadership traits, each with a prosaic definition and a bullet-pointed example.

And:

> in a section for comments [on her three-page essay], her professor had accidentally posted a back-and-forth with ChatGPT. It included the grading rubric the professor had asked the chatbot to use and a request for some “really nice feedback” to give Marie
by Funes- | 2025-05-15 22:16:46+00:00
How ironic. "AI" feeds off structured knowledge, artistic creations and otherwise any human production to generate its output. As a consequence of its widespread adoption, people start to lean even more towards consuming rather than producing, a tendency which was already increasing before the advent of LLMs and modern machine-learning. This, in turn, leaves "AI" implementations with no new human content to feed off of. Now what? The whole process folds onto itself. Are we entering the dark ages of cultural (in the widest sense of the word) production? Not that I don't think that we're already there, in any case, but for other, somewhat related causes...
by salamanderman | 2025-05-15 22:16:59+00:00
UC Berkeley does this too. Nobody told us freshman, and in my very first class we were all dutifully early, wondering where the professor was, and at 8 minutes after the hour the whole lecture hall was wondering if we needed to bail. Then the lecturer came in and asked what we were all doing there, didn't we know classes don't start until 10 minutes after the listed time?
by nomadpenguin | 2025-05-15 22:17:14+00:00
High affinity RBCs would actually be a disadvantage for athletics. You actually don't need very high affinity to pick up oxygen from the lungs -- your lungs are comparatively extremely high in oxygen. What matters more is being able to drop the oxygen off in peripheral tissues. Higher affinity means that it's harder to actually deliver the oxygen, which is why we evolutionarily developed the switch away from fetal hemoglobin.
by daveatwork | 2025-05-15 22:17:39+00:00
Why not. I mean if you're expected to come and relieve a co-worker at 5pm, because he has to go get his kids from daycare, and you show up at 5:30 so now the police are at the daycare collecting his kids (because he's waiting for you all the time)

It always baffles me. Make accommodations for your conditions.. So the 30 plus students are meant to have their time interrupted by a late arrival. I have ADD, so when in a class if someone comes in late, I get distracted and can't pay attention. Which person should this prof accomodate? Me with ADD or you.

The "make accommodations" is always argued by the few, against the needs of the many. It's self centred. If waking up is hard, go to be earlier, get a better alarm clock, pick classes later in the day. Make accommodations for your own disability.

My ADD has me working from home, with noise cancelling headphones. I accommodated my own-self.
by OutOfHere | 2025-05-15 22:17:40+00:00
Just how is 25K new questions a month dead? Even if it gradually asymptomates to just 1K, the answers to them are enough to continue serving as a critical base layer of high-quality training data for LLMs.

Let's say for the sake of argument that 95% of humanity perished. Is humanity then dead? It isn't.
by zahlman | 2025-05-15 22:17:46+00:00
> Even with the beginnings of computer aided flows we didn't need to alienate most to get the best content and develop the few.

The large majority of new questions from new accounts are from people who are clearly there only to solve a personal problem, who show no interest in considering the value of their question to third parties, and rarely put any effort into attempting to even diagnose or specify a problem.

Even after it became possible for most of these people to get an instant answer from an LLM. Which is actively preferable from the standpoint of Stack Overflow curators. Before LLMs, the point was for them to use a search engine to find an existing question that lets them figure out the problem. But for the Q&A to help such users, they need to apply at least basic problem-solving and debugging skills. (It is explicitly out of scope for the Stack Overflow community to do that for others; and attempting to do this in an answer actively degrades the site for everyone else.) If an LLM can fill in some hypotheses for those users to test, then the LLM is doing what it's best at, and Stack Overflow is doing what it's best at.

Stack Overflow is not there to troubleshoot or debug anything for you, nor to reason about a multi-step problem and break it down into its natural logical steps. It's there to give a direct, objective answer to how to do each individual step, and to explain why the specific point of failure in a failing program fails, after you have identified it and made the problem reproducible.

So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.