MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rekenaut | 2025-05-31 07:44:55+00:00
They’re not important to (most) young people today for the same reasons health insurance plans aren’t important to young people today: they just haven’t reached the professional world yet. Once they get there, computers suddenly become very important.

Many people who are not tech enthusiasts will be interacting with a computer for at least 40 hours a week or more for nearly half of their lives. If you used any other tool that much, you’d want to get really good at using it. Why shouldn’t the same hold for computers today?
by eimrine | 2025-05-31 07:45:14+00:00
Lisp is a king of PLs, those who do not write in Lisp are just ruining our world because FOSS values are effectively lost if bad guys can use GPL code which becames elusive after compilation. Lisp program which does not share its source code can not share full set of properties which are expected from Lisp code. Some devs really understand how it is inevitable to be fully FOSS for the sake of preventing digital feudalism, but no one claims that all software must be not only FOSS but also written in Lisp.
by boxed | 2025-05-31 07:45:35+00:00
I don't get it. That's the only pattern that makes any sense imo.

If you get problems because two or more projects needs to be updated simultaneously because of DRY or whatever, I would argue that you actually have ONE project and you're just fooling yourself.

Hmm.. actually, I guess that's what you're saying? When I said "project" above, I meant something like "product" or "system".
by eddythompson80 | 2025-05-31 07:45:44+00:00
> But remember how the internet was hyped in the 90s? Sure it'll change the world, but it's too early to predict how or when. But clearly we've entered a new era and if will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Yes, I actually think we can have pretty good guess looking at how the internet evolved. It's really not how it was envisioned in the 90s. A lot of people knew it was gonna be big of course, but they couldn't tell you how. There is the type of applications/services the internet enabled, and how do you actually make monetize the internet.

Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, etc all had different "takes" on how the internet was gonna be big and how they will monetize it. The actual services they provide are things that WAS correctly envisioned and was "known" in the 90s. I remember people talking about the "future where you could have":

- On-Demand video streaming service

- News, weather, and communication (email, IM, chat, video conference) services

- Commerce

You could go to videos from the 90s on YouTube and see many people (including Bill Gates himself) easily say "One day you'll be doing all your shopping online. You can watch any movie in the world in a second. You can chat with your loved ones around the world in video in real time and send and receive messages from them instantaneously whenever and whereever you like. Everyone familiar with computers and networks knew that future was possible. It was a matter of timeline and when the technology/cost curves would cross for it to work.

How you monetize that though wasn't exactly known/agreed on. Monetizing a commerce and paid services is straightforward, and you just need the technology to be ready for the scenario you wanted to achieve.

Google on the other hand put all their cards on Ads for example. Microsoft initially thought they can just sell the software to run email or hosting for a web services, but they also dabbled in Ads, paid services (cloud and otherwise)

Not sure what the similar verticals in AI will be. It's not Application vs Monetization. I think it's something else.
by t0bia_s | 2025-05-31 07:46:13+00:00
If you belive that art could be generative, think twice. Its not about how is it done. But what is a purpose of it? What is a point of make art? To express yourself? To give observers new point of view? To share experience? Also art is beyond digital pixels.

Paradigm is shifting same as first camera wad invented. Obsession with reproducing reality was abolished and shift to all kinds of *isms. Some artist (ie Mucha) used new technology for improve their creative process. Some believed, that photography stole a part of our soul that was trapped on taken picture. It repeats. Just with different technologies.

I'm honestly very interest how we, as humans, will deal with it and how paradigm evolve.
by flohofwoe | 2025-05-31 07:46:23+00:00
It's still a surprisingly tricky topic because simply measuring the frame duration (or using rAF's timestamp) gives significant timing jitter - which in turn introduces microstutter (and the other problem is that some browsers still limit timer precision to whole milliseconds due to the Specter/Meltdown fallout - but at least here the random jitter is useful because averaging over enough frames gives you the precise frame duration back, eg 16.667 or 8.333 ms instead of 15<=>17 or 7<=>9 ms
by dataflow | 2025-05-31 07:47:57+00:00
I am not "deflecting" anything, I am going to the heart of the matter.

Let me lay this out very explicitly. This comment will likely be my final one on the matter as this back-and-forth is getting quite tiresome, and I'm not enjoying it, especially with the swipes directed at me.

Please take a look at the following two C++ and Java programs: https://godbolt.org/z/EjWWac1bG

For the sake of this discussion, assume the command-line arguments behave the same in both languages. (i.e. ignore the C++ argv[0] vs. Java args[0] distinction and whatnot.)

Somehow, you simultaneously believe (a) that Java program contains data races, while believing (b) the C++ program does not.

This is a self-contradictory position. The programs are well-defined, direct translations of each other. They are equivalent in everything but syntax. If one contains a data race, so must the other. If one does not, then neither can the other.

This implies that TSAN does not detect "data races" as it is usually understood in the CS field -- it does not detect anything in the C++ program. What TSAN detects is only a particular, distinct situation that the C++ standard also happens to call a "data race". So if you're talking to a C++ language lawyer, you can say TSAN detects all data races within its window/buffer limits. But if you're talking to someone who doesn't sleep with the C++ standard under their pillow, they're not going to realize C++ is using a language-specific definition, and they're going to assume it flags programs like the equivalent of the Java program above, which has a data race but whose equivalent TSAN would absolutely not flag.
by xiphias2 | 2025-05-31 07:49:00+00:00
Incel is not a subculture, just a name for men who can't get laid.

I have a male friend under 170cm like that and a woman friend who uses Badoo just because it has a minimum height filter that she sets to 190cm.

My girlfriend also has minimum height that she selected for.

It's just a nature of life.

I just think people have the same right to not work their ass off if they don't see the ROI just like other people have the right to set the minimum height.
by tomhow | 2025-05-31 07:49:13+00:00
This comment and subthread has nothing to do with the central topic of the article. It's the epitome of a generic tangent, and has caused just the kind of hellish flamewar that we are most trying to avoid on Hacker News.

Please read the guidelines, particularly these ones, and make an effort to observe them in future.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't fulminate.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by ajb | 2025-05-31 07:50:04+00:00
You literally have some of your team buy new laptops and hang out in a temporary wework to set it up on entirely new infra, air-gapped from your ongoing forensic exercise. You just need to make sure none of the people you send are dumb enough to reuse their password. You need to take the domain name, but they will be using one of the high end domain companies so that can be handled.

Bear in mind that this is a company which still sells physically and has retail and warehouse staff. All that the e-commerce side needs to do is issue orders of what skus to send to what addresses, and pause items that are out of stock. M&S is not Amazon and doesn't have that many SKUs, 5 people could probably walk round the store in a few days and photograph all of them for the new shopping site.

Sure, customers will need to make a new account or buy as a guest. But this stuff is not hard on the technical side. There is no interaction between customers like a social media site, so horizontal scaling is easy.

Now I get that there are loads of refinements that go into maximising profit, like analytics, price optimization, etc. But to get in revenue these guys don't even need to set up advertising on day one because they have customers that have been buying from them for decades. The time to set up all that stuff is when your revenue is nonzero
by tomhow | 2025-05-31 07:52:05+00:00
This comment and subthread have nothing to do with the central topic of the article. It's the epitome of a generic tangent, and has caused just the kind of hellish flamewar that we are most trying to avoid on Hacker News.

(It currently has 276 replies, and I don't think any of them are about Polymarket or prediction markets, which is what the article is about.)

Please read the guidelines, particularly these ones, and make an effort to observe them in future.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't fulminate.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44126652 and marked it off topic.
by flohofwoe | 2025-05-31 07:52:39+00:00
There's no difference between WASM and JS in this situation.

Once you are in canvas land, you'll have to do the text rendering yourself - that's not the fault of JS or WASM though, but of the broken web API stack (what's there is not properly layered, and the whole layer stack is inverted, e.g. canvas sits on top of the DOM instead the DOM sitting on top of canvas).
by SebastianKra | 2025-05-31 07:53:00+00:00
It's not. Try some inputs in Figma or basically any numeric input:

- Focus an Input that only accepts numerical values

- Enter some non-numeric text

- Focus back out

My pattern is fairly common when you pay attention to it.

I'm not arguing that you should always use it; that's why I didn't replicate OP’s example. It’s just a demonstration that most cases have a solution that describes the intention more accurately than a dependency array.

The remaining cases can be solved by the workaround from react.dev or a userland alternative.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-31 07:53:03+00:00
A very real consequence of picking that particular license by Redis Inc. is that it is completely unacceptable to users of Valkey like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. That's probably intentional by Redis Inc. But it also means Valkey is going to continue to exist because its users simply require a more permissive license that allows them to run their cloud based products.

It will be interesting to see where the developer community goes but these forks have a way of becoming permanent. If you look at the Valkey Github, you'll see a lot of activity. Lots of contributors contributing lots of changes. All signs of a healthy open source community. And as the article shows, there have been some non trivial changes made to the code base that, at least temporarily, give it a bit of a lead in terms of performance. That indicates to me that there is a momentum of people maintaining it that seem to know what they are doing.

It will be interesting to see if Redis Inc. will be able to keep up/recover from this. My impression is that the community around that shrunk to basically employees of Redis Inc. when they closed source and that the rest of the community jumped ship to Valkey. Maybe some of them will go back now that they switched to AGPL. But I think Valkey is where the cloud sponsored money and action is. And there is of course more than a bit of broken trust here as well. And while AGPL is open source, I think signing agreements to give Redis Inc. the permission to re-license your contributions as they want is not something any serious open source contributor would consider.
by kashunstva | 2025-05-31 07:53:11+00:00
> Anthropic are dead to me…

They’re dead to me until they fix their over-aggressive auto-ban. Having done nothing more than traveling frequently, rarely using VPN and only using it for coding, I was caught up in a random inexplicable auto-ban. Zero customer service. Appeal process that leads to a black hole. Whatever their technical advances, their user experience when something goes awry is terrible.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-31 07:53:51+00:00
On the contrary, LLMs have been good enough at summaries for over a year now.

For this task, AI summary doesn't need to be 100% reliable anyway. I'm fine with it missing some points; it's better than me missing all the points. I'm fine with it hallucinating or reporting the opposite of some claim - the very mention of that claim tells me the article talks about it in some way.

Also, it's not like there exists an alternative. You cannot do this task any other way - and in particular, there's no economical way to get humans involved in it.

I don't think people really appreciate that last point. Everyone's quick to complain that LLMs don't give you signed, notarized guarantees of being more thorough and accurate than a team of scholars studying a text for a year; few stop to think that they're already better than average person and few could afford to hire a human to do this job even at worst possible quality.
by disambiguation | 2025-05-31 07:54:30+00:00
I'm not advocating for p2p, but rather drawing attention to the word "value" and what it means to create it. For example, would netflix as a piece of software hold any value if the company were to suddenly lose all its copyrights and IP licenses? Whereas something like an operating system or excel has standalone utility, netflix is only as valuable as its IP. The software isn't designed to create value, but instead to fully utilize the value of a piece of property. It's an important distinction to keep in mind especially when designing such software. Now consider that in the streaming world there isn't just netflix, but prime, Hulu, HBO, etc. Etc.

The parent comment was complaining about certain employees contributions to "real value" or lack thereof. My question is, how do you ascertain the value of work in this context where the software isn't what's valuable but the IP is, and further how do justify working on a product thats already a solved problem and still refer to it as "creating 'real' value"?
by MaxikCZ | 2025-05-31 07:55:20+00:00
People who are suspectible to read AI slop as universal truth do so because they dont read much at all. I guess you would be surprised how huge amount of users dont bother to read anything at all: a popup only exists in a sense "how do I close this", which is being solved by clicking at the most visually distinct button. If you asked them what they clicked or what the popup was about, they look at you like you are crazy for even assuming they should know.
by garrettgarcia | 2025-05-31 07:56:20+00:00
I'm also confused by this. I taught myself touch typing in the 90's. I also had a required semester-long class that covered only typing my freshman year of high school (1999). Neither of my parents learned it, but I figured everyone younger than me knew how. Pretty shocking to find out that's not the case.

I can't imagine not being able to touch-type. It's such second-nature that I can hold a conversation with someone while typing out separate thoughts I'm having about the conversation on a keyboard.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-31 07:56:53+00:00
> Ctrl/Alt and Shift. How have folks overcome this?

ctrl and shift heavy flows are a remnant from ibmpc / windows era and suck for ergonomics, unfortunately. Most people realise just how much more comfortable cmd+ is from using a mac. You're holding the thumb there anyway, might as well make use of it.
by gizmo | 2025-05-31 07:57:01+00:00
Other than the "request for startups" YC publishes YC doesn't push founders to start a specific type of business. AI is simply where the opportunity is (or is perceived to be). YC (and everybody else) understands that most AI enterprise startups will fail, as you point out. The gamble, as always, is that a few startups in the current batch will get huge.
by Oras | 2025-05-31 07:57:42+00:00
I don’t think you realise how complicated the e-commerce is for a company. You are thinking of a garage sale.

With each order:

- you need warehouse integration to keep the sync of physical to digital store. That has to happen fast or you’ll get orders with no stock.

- You need to sync the payment to whatever ancient accounting system they use, again while issuing invoices, consolidating customers … etc.

- Logistics management, where to get the order from, issuing a label, using the right fleet, making sure it is dispatched on time, arrive on time.

- Customer support, refunds, partial refunds, adding items after order … etc.

So yeah, 5 people!
by constantcrying | 2025-05-31 07:57:49+00:00
>I'm afraid you're simply mistaken about that. It's not an ambiguous thing, it's repeated a bunch of times over and there are reams of mod comments about it.

Again, I do not see which rules I would have broken. If there is some esoteric mod commentary, that it is off topic to talk about something more abstractly, than I am totally unaware of that and to be honest I neither believe that to be the case nor would I take that seriously. As far as the rules of the site go, I do not see how I violated them at all. Neither in wording nor in spirit, to be honest talking about things more abstractly seems to be explicitly encouraged by the rules and reading them again, after you linked them only made this more certain to me.

>You do owe everyone here basic decency or if you can't manage that, simply abstaining from bilecommenting.

I don't know what that means. My comment contained a substantive critique and I have not insulted any person, beyond pointing out what they did is a total waste of time. To be honest I do understand that my comment was quite negative and I agree that obviously many people reacted to this negatively. I fail to see how it is against any rules to make comments with harsh critiques that other perceive negatively.

>You could ask the moderators to remove the flag if that's the case.

Again, I expected the negative reaction. If people want to flag me for being critical that is their prerogative.
by notyouraibot | 2025-05-31 07:58:27+00:00
The hype around AI replacing software engineers is truly delusional. Yes they are very good at solving known problems, writing for loops and boilerplate code but introduce a little bit of complexity and creativity and it all fails. There have been countless tasks that I have given to AI, to which it simply concluded its not possible and suggested me to use several external libraries to get it done, after a little bit of manual digging, I was able to achieve that same task without any libraries and I'm not even a seasoned engineer.
by MrJohz | 2025-05-31 08:01:59+00:00
I mean that an election is (theoretically) an 100% sample because every eligible has the ability to interact with the voting process at the level that they choose. So the decision for some people to invalidate their vote, or to vote tactically, or not to vote at all, or whatever else: that's part of the act of taking part in an election. In that sense, you can't not take part in an election, if you're eligible to vote.

This is important, because normally, once you take a sample, you need to analyse that sample to ensure that it is representative, and potentially weight different responses if you want to make it more representative. For example, if you got a sample that was 75% women, you might weight the male responses more strongly to match the roughly 50/50 split between men and women in the general population. But in an election, we don't do this, because the assumption is that if you spoil your ballot or don't take part, that is part of your choice as a citizen.

But I think we're saying the same sort of thing, but in different ways: you can either see "the sample of an election is every citizen, regardless of whether they voted" or "the population of an election is everyone who voted", and in either case the sample is the same as the population, and we can therefore assume that it is representative of the population.
by chneu | 2025-05-31 08:02:36+00:00
The average American types around 40wpm, so definitely not touch typing. People definitely get by without learning it.

I work in a huge variety of fields and interact with people from all places in US society. My guess would be maybe 25-35% of people I've worked with use touch typing. Everyone chicken pecks.

Most people use phones nowadays and rarely use a physical keyboard. It just isn't that important to most people. They can get by without it.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-31 08:02:42+00:00
That was true before AI too (I know, I did such searches myself). Google results has been drowning in slop for over a decade now - it was just human-generated slop, aka. content marketing and SEO stuff.

I'm not defending the AI feature here, just trying to frame the problem: the lies and hallucinations were already there, but nobody cared because apparently people don't mind being constantly lied to by other people.
by keiferski | 2025-05-31 08:03:21+00:00
It matters if we are making a distinction between essence and output.

On the output side, it functionally doesn’t really have a difference. At least in terms of more abstract things like writing code. Although I would argue that the output AI makes still doesn’t match the complexity and nuance of an individual human being, though, and may never do so, simply because the AI is simulating embodiment and existing in the world. It might need to simulate an Earth equivalent to truly simulate a human’s personal output.

In the essence side, it’s much more of a clear distinction. We have numerous ways of determining if a thing is human or not - biology, for one. It would take some serious sci-fi until we get to the point where an android is indistinguishable from a human on the cellular level.
by jll29 | 2025-05-31 08:03:24+00:00
Language models are not designed to know things, they are designed to say things - that's why they are called language models and not knowledge models.

Given a bunch of words have already been generated, it always ads the next words based on how common the sequence is.

The reason you get different answers each time is the effect of the pseudo-random number generator on picking the next word. The model looks at the probability distribution of most likely next words, and when the configuration parameter called "temperature" is 0 (and it is actually not possible to set to 0 in the GUI), there is no random influence, and strictly the most likely next word (top-1 MLE) will always be chosen. This leads to output that we would classify as "very boring".

So the model knows nothing about IBM, PS/2, 80286 versus 80486, CPUs, 280 or any models per se. -- One of the answers seems to suggest that there is no model 280, I wonder whether that one was generated through another process (there is a way to incorporate user feedback via "reinforcement learning"), or whether that was a consequence of the same randomized next-word picking, just a more lucky attempt.