MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FateOfNations | 2025-05-19 22:11:34+00:00
A "Windows Subsystem" is a concept that dates back to the original Windows NT line of operating systems. Historically, there've been a number of supported "Windows Subsystems", essentially APIs for the kernel. In Windows NT 3.1, there were multiple subsystems: Win32, POSIX, and OS/2, plus a separate one specifically for security.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem

While WSL2 isn't implemented as an architectural sub-system (it uses a VM instead), WSL1 was far closer to the original architecture, providing a Linux compatible API for the Windows kernel.
by Animats | 2025-05-19 22:12:16+00:00
Verizon buying Frontier. Charter buying Cox.

So we're mostly down to AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter.

Verizon previously tried to merge with Charter back in 2017, but that didn't work out.[1]

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/verizon-is-exploring-combinatio...
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-19 22:12:35+00:00
I disagree. The pie-in-the-sky academia dreams are not risk, they are safety. ITER and CERN and similar do fascinating research, and I don't mean to throw any shade their way, but they do not represent risk. There's not any possibility of failure. Things could go completely sideways and papers would keep getting written and no bureaucrat would lose their neck.

On the other hand, most startups have the ability to be total failures. If your social network, or your rocket company, or your new type of airplane collapses, it is a total loss. That is risk.
by jchw | 2025-05-19 22:13:20+00:00
That's true, but even when money is donated, it needs to be directed somewhere. And one big problem, IMO, is that polish and UX issues are not usually the highest priority to sort out; many would rather focus on higher impact. That's all well and good and there's plenty of high impact work that needs to be done (we need more funding on accessibility, for example.) But if there's always bigger fires to put out, it's going to be rather hard to ever find time to do anything about the random smaller issues. I think the best thing anyone can do about the smaller issues is having more individual people reporting and working on them.
by pjc50 | 2025-05-19 22:13:57+00:00
So .. where are the speech rules for visa holders written down?

The important thing in rule of law is that it should be possible to comply. If visa holders were told that not engaging in political speech or holding certain views in public was a condition of their visa, then it's somewhat defensible.

What are the speech laws that apply here?

Or are you arguing that visas are pure whimsy? That they're awarded based on whether elected officials like you or not?
by daveguy | 2025-05-19 22:13:58+00:00
The state of LLMs right now seems analogous to the state of CAD software. There are free options available but they aren't as capable. The good part about this analogy is that the needs of the users aren't very dynamic -- if you are using a CAD software it is for design tasks. The interface may change, but the purpose doesn't. Because of this, the quality gap between free CAD packages and

LLMs are natural language models (what words are likely to come next given the context), not any sort of AGI. For that purpose, the gap between open and closed models is closing much faster in LLMs than CAD. I think LLMs will go the way of chess engines -- one of these models will become the Stockfish of LLMs and the proprietary models will end up being a waste of money and resources.
by gleenn | 2025-05-19 22:14:09+00:00
It's not circular reasoning, I literally have piles of boolean-typed functions in business logic and there is no quantity of type-checking that will validate that (defn should-go [light-is-green? intersection-is-clear?] (and light-is-green? intersection-is-clear?)) is correct. That requires an actual test. Obviously my example is trivial but they quickly become non-trivial and the type-chrcker will never save me if I replace "and" with "or".
by amlib | 2025-05-19 22:14:10+00:00
> No Remoting Software beats RDP. When I remote to a Windows workstation through RDP, I can't tell the difference. VNC is always janky

Any recent distro running Gnome or KDE has built-in support for connecting and hosting an RDP session. This used to be a pain point, you don't need to use VNC anymore.

It's actually worse on windows since you need to pony up for a pro license to get RDP hosting support...
by bigyabai | 2025-05-19 22:14:20+00:00
> Proprietary LLMs will just keep growing

Strictly speaking - we don't really know if this is true. There is no study proving AI gets smarter up to a certain point. It might keep scaling forever, or one day we might unknowingly reach the soft limit of LLM intelligence. I think assertions like the one you're making require specific evidence.

For comparison's sake, proprietary models like GPT-3 now pale in comparison to the results you get from a 7b Open Source LLM. The Open Source stuff really does move along, if not at the pace everyone would prefer.
by satvikpendem | 2025-05-19 22:14:39+00:00
> but we are already seeing an unprecedented fall in worldwide birth rates, which shows our social fabric itself is being pulled apart for paperclips

People choose to have fewer kids as they get richer, it's not about living conditions like so many people like to claim, otherwise poor people wouldn't be having so many children. Even controlling for high living conditions, like in Scandinavia, people still choose to have fewer kids.
by diggan | 2025-05-19 22:14:48+00:00
> it feels like they're suggesting that coding is a chore to be avoided, rather than a creative and enjoyable activity

I occasionally code for fun, but usually I don’t. I treat programming as a last-resort tool, something I use only when it’s the best way to achieve my goal. If I can achieve some thing without coding or with coding, I usually opt for the first unless the tradeoffs are really shit.
by stuartjohnson12 | 2025-05-19 22:15:19+00:00
I'm in the bubble where probably the most engineer brain drain of any bubble (VC early stage). My observation is that the brain drain is... moderate. Huge, huge brain drain of startup founders. But of engineers? A tendency towards risk aversion and a preference for stability nixes that in my experience. I know some specialists who hopped over to the Bay in pursuit of the niche and lucrative jobs that their specialism rewards. But for most run-of-the-mill software engineers, I really haven't seen anyone fleeing to the bay for more money.
by nilslice | 2025-05-19 22:15:24+00:00
all of the servers deployed to mcp.run[0] are Wasm modules, and can run client side. they run in our cloud too, but you could use mcpx to pull them locally instead.

you can also get the raw wasm via our API and run them anywhere you can run Extism[1], the open source wasm runtime & framework that underpins it all. (Including this hyper-mcp project!)

[0]: https://mcp.run [1]: https://github.com/extism/extism
by imiric | 2025-05-19 22:16:01+00:00
The trick for greenfield projects is to use it to help you design detailed specs and a tentative implementation plan. Just bounce some ideas off of it, as with a somewhat smarter rubber duck, and hone the design until you arrive at something you're happy with. Then feed the detailed implementation plan step by step to another model or session.

This is a popular workflow I first read about here[1].

This has been the most useful use case for LLMs for me. Actually getting them to implement the spec correctly is the hard part, and you'll have to take the reigns and course correct often.

[1]: https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/
by cjbgkagh | 2025-05-19 22:16:02+00:00
Yeah, psychologizing was in vogue. Has the added benefit of obviating the government of responsibility - a form of victim blaming. It used to be hoped that the cost of care would motivate the government to look for treatments they now are instead pushing MAID as an option.

Medical history is a horror show. It's weird that we have absolutely fantastic sources of information and tooling with abundant genome sequences and computers to process them and still medicine is very much prestige driven where dominant experts can hold back competing research for generations. I think patients will increasingly do an end run around them with more patient community sharing.

I do think ozempic will turn out to be a wonder drug not just for weight but also for auto-immune. And then consider - how much of mental illnesses is actually an expression of an auto-immune disorder. I think we're going to find out, and I expect we will look back on how badly people with mental illnesses were treated like we now look back on those who were lobotomized.
by keybored | 2025-05-19 22:16:28+00:00
> > being obliterated under an AI mushroom cloud might take a dim view of such technologies, without perhaps being aware that AI can be used in less obvious but more beneficial ways.

How vivid. Never mind the mushroom cloud in front of your face. Think about the less obvious... more beneficial ways?

Of course non-ideologues and people who have to survive in this world will look at the mushroom cloud of giant corporations controlling the technology. Artists don’t. And artists don’t control the companies they work for.

So artists are gonna take solace in the fact that they can rent AI to augment their craft for a few months before the mushroom cloud gets them? I mean juxtaposing a nuclear bomb with appreciating the little things in life is weird.
by loxodrome | 2025-05-19 22:16:28+00:00
Bullshit. All the big VC firms in the USA are funded by private investors (rich people). They fund risky tech startups because big, fast gains are possible and the marginal capital gains tax rate is 20%. In the UK it's 39%! But 24% for residential property, hence the focus on real-estate that you mention.

Tax less, and prosperity follows!
by slwvx | 2025-05-19 22:16:29+00:00
I always get nervous when the author is the one who is posting a link to their work on Hacker News. I find humility to be very appealing.

The abstract in the research gate page is garbled (equations are duplicated), and don't match the PDF.

Some of the author's other publications are shown on his google scholar page. In all cases Voltes is the sole author: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=uA1sptcAAAAJ&hl=en

On an unrelated note; I guess that respected journals are getting a significant amount of papers written with varying amounts of AI assistance. I never envied or enjoyed reviewing papers, and would enjoy such activities even less now.
by bionhoward | 2025-05-19 22:17:26+00:00
Major scam alert, they are training on your code in private repos if you use this

You can tell because they advertise “Pro” and “Pro+” but then the FAQ reads,

> Does GitHub use Copilot Business or Enterprise data to train GitHub’s model? > No. GitHub does not use either Copilot Business or Enterprise data to train its models.

Aka, even paid individuals plans are getting brain raped
by jstummbillig | 2025-05-19 22:17:51+00:00
I read that a couple of times. It sounds vaguely clever and a bit ominous, but I have no clue what it means. Can you explain?

Google products had had a net positive impact on my life over, what is it, 20 years now. If I had had to pay subscription fees over that span of time, for all the services that I use, that would have been a lot of very real money that I would not have right now.

Is there a next step where it all gets worse? When?
by diggan | 2025-05-19 22:18:10+00:00
Heh, personally I'd say any coding solution that lives inside an IDE is nonsense :P Funny how perspectives can be so different. I want something standalone, that I can use in in a pane to the left/right of my already opened nvim instance, or even further away than that. Gave Cursor a try some weeks ago but seems worse than Aider even, and having an entire editor just for some LLM edits/pair programming seems way overkill and unnecessary.
by antonchekhov | 2025-05-19 22:18:24+00:00
The J Peterman catalog is still around around (at least, online) and approaches satire in its selection of goods (mostly clothing) that assiduously conveys "casual, interesting, old-money wealth". The Elaine Benes character on "Seinfeld" worked there, and had to deal with the kooky habits of the Mr Peterman character.
by saghm | 2025-05-19 22:18:39+00:00
> Considering how the submitted article is about a shitty implementation in a regular Windows program, you can be sure the implementation in UEFI is even shittier (may not check certs, may not even use HTTPS, etc)

I don't think it's fair to conflate the security of perpetually running daemon that allows arbitrary instructions from remote endpoints with a manual download that's only initiated in very specific circumstances. Yes, it would be bad not to check certs or use HTTPS, but I'm not sure I buy that this would be "too insecure to fix" compared to trying to allow something to remotely push updates that I never asked for. You don't have to accept that my threat model where I've decided that I'm willing to risk one manually-initiated request that might be somewhat unsafe every few months or so is worth it, but I don't see how you can argue that it's somehow _more_ dangerous than the version that runs continuously at all times and doesn't require any input from me.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-19 22:18:57+00:00
I was a Dilbert fanatic for a long time.

Adams, himself? Not so much. I think he tends to have a rather nasty outlook on humanity, and I had a hard time reconciling it.

I do know that he was/is pretty much about as far away from Diamond Joe* as you can get. Interesting that they seem to be fighting the same battle.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden_(The_Onion)
by throw1235435 | 2025-05-19 22:19:00+00:00
Its interesting that even people initially skeptical are now thinking they are on the "chopping block" so to speak. I'm seeing it all over the internet and the slow realization that what supposed to be the "top of the heap" is actually at the bottom - not because of difficulty of coding but because the AI labs themselves are domain experts in software and therefore have the knowledge and data to tackle it as a problem first. I also think to a degree they "smell blood" and fear, more so than greed, is the best marketing tool. Many invested a good chunk of time on this career, and it will result in a lot of negative outcomes. Its a warning to other intellectual careers that's for sure - and you will start seeing resistance to domain knowledge sharing from more "professionalized" careers for sure.

My view is in between yours: A bit of column A and B in the sense both outcomes to an extent will play out. There will be less engineers but not by the factor of productivity (Jevon's paradox will play out but eventually tap out), there will be even more software especially of the low end, and the ones that are there will be expected to be smarter and work harder for the same or less pay grateful they got a job at all. There will be more "precision and rigor", more keeping up required by workers, but less reward for the workers that perform it. In a capitalist economy it won't be seen as a profession to aspire to anymore by most people.

Given most people don't live to work, and use their career to also finance and pursue other life meanings it won't be viable for most people long term especially when other careers give "more bang for buck" w.r.t effort put into them. The uncertainty in the SWE career that most I know are feeling right now means to newcomers I recommend on the balance of risk/reward its better to go another career path especially for juniors who have a longer runway. To be transparent I want to be wrong, but the risk of this is getting higher now everyday.

i.e. AI is a dream for the capital class, and IMO potentially disastrous for social mobility long term.
by megous | 2025-05-19 22:19:03+00:00
Yeah, clear law:

"(b) Persons Authorized To Be Freed.--The authority of subsection (a) shall extend to the following persons: (2) Covered allied persons."

That includes Nehterlands, which is a member of NATO.

So US can snatch Dutch war criminal from Netherlands if US president likes the person or whatever? :) Very clear law with no weird implications.

Addenum: I solely react to your claim that this law is very clear.
by ramesh31 | 2025-05-19 22:19:33+00:00
>The world is being optimized for clockwatchers who want to do their work with the least amount of effort. Before long (if not already) people who enjoy their craft, and think of their work as a craft, will be ridiculed for wanting to do it themselves.

There is one clock you should be watching regardless, which is the clock of your life. Your code will not come see you in the hospital, or cheer you up when you're having a rough day. You wont be sitting around at 70 wishing you had spent more 3am nights debugging something. When your back gives out from 18hrs a day of grinding at a desk to get something out, and you can barely walk from the sciatica, you wont be thinking about that great new feature you shipped. There are far more important things in life once you come to terms with that, and you will learn that the whole point of the former is enabling the latter.
by Kinrany | 2025-05-19 22:19:39+00:00
Every mention of Github Actions is an occasion to start looking for the best alternative in <current_month>, let's go!

Is Dagger usable yet? Is there still hope for Earthly? Are general purpose workflow systems winning any time soon, or are we still afraid of writing code? Any new systems out there that cover all the totally basic features like running locally, unlike Github Actions?
by kmacdough | 2025-05-19 22:19:49+00:00
Certainly would be better to laminate IF you're using wood. But it's still got a long road ahead.

Aluminum still has a higher strength/weight ratio which is everything in aero. Also, I'm not finding any information on cyclic strain behavior. Dimensional stability is only part of that.

Edit: There could be room for this in experimental aircraft. Once we tease out all the failure modes and properly characterize cyclic behaviorof course.
by Lerc | 2025-05-19 22:20:02+00:00
I found this a little frustrating. I liked the content of the talk, but I live in New Zealand, I have thoughts and opinions on this topic. I would like to think I offer a useful perspective. This post was how I found out that there are people in my vicinity talking about these issues in private.

I don't presume that I am important enough that it should be necessary to invite me to discussions with esteemed people, nor that my opinion is imported enough that everyone should hear it, but I would least like to know that such events are happening in my neighbourhood and who I can share ideas with.

This isn't really a criticism of this specific event or even topic, but the overall feeling that things in the world are being discussed in places where I and presumably many other people with valuable input in their individual domains have no voice. Maybe in this particular event it was just a group of individuals who wanted to learn more about the topic, on the other hand, maybe some of those people will end up drafting policy.

There's a small part of me that's just feeling like I'm not one of the cool kids. The greater and more rational concern isn't so much about me as a person but me as a data point. If I am interested in a field, have a viewpoint I'd like to share and yet remain unaware of opportunities to talk to others, how many others does this happen to? If these are conversations that are important to humanity, are they being discussed in a collection of non overlapping bubbles?

I think the fact that this was in New Zealand is kind of irrelevant anyway, given how easy it is to communicate globally. It just served to for the title capture my attention.

(I hope, at least, that Simon or Jack attended)
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-05-19 22:20:16+00:00
Good call out. Most of the time people actually want one of the "wrapper" softwares because they want the collaboration components and they aren't old greybeards that want to ship around mailserv lists. But that use case doesn't apply here. There is probably no one to collaborate with in this use case, so barebones git is probably totally fine.

Though I'd say, if you're going through all of the effort to self host something, git or otherwise, doing the "wrapper" is probably worthwhile anyway due to the convenience if you ever do need those features. It's not that much harder to do that than host a vanilla git server.
by HenryBemis | 2025-05-19 22:20:49+00:00
There are thousands of _great_ books on gutenberg.org (classics, ancient Romans/Greeks, etc.). You can read for 100 lifetimes and spend 0 on (e)books

I got a laptop that I bought in 2015 and I took care of it nicely so it works great! I got my phone (new) from a pawnshop, for a fraction of its real price.

Cycling to work (to save on tickets (I don't use a 'monthly card') and squeeze in a 20km bicycle round-trip to work)
by saubeidl | 2025-05-19 22:20:54+00:00
Reading this made me nostalgic for the old internet and sad about what it's become since.

I miss the days of blogs and forums and authentic content like this.

Today it's all hyperpolished platforms filled with clickbaity influencers. Every step of the way, somebody's trying to extract as much money as they can.

I can't help but think that we in this community played a big part in turning it into what it is now and that thought fills me with regret.
by eterm | 2025-05-19 22:21:43+00:00
My point is that saving 1,000 hours each day doesn't actually give you 1,000 hours a day to do things with.

You still get your 24 hours, no matter how much time you save.

What actually matters is the value of what is delivered, not how much time it actually saves you. Justifying costs by "time saved" is a good way to eat up your money on time-saving devices.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-05-19 22:21:48+00:00
I really want to try out Google's new Gemini 2.5 Pro model that everyone says is so great at coding. However, the fact that Jules runs in cloud-based VMs instead of on my local machine makes it much less useful to me than Claude Code, even if the model was better.

The projects I work on have lots of bespoke build scripts and other stuff that is specific to my machine and environment. Making that work in Google's cloud VM would be a significant undertaking in itself.
by diggan | 2025-05-19 22:21:59+00:00
> That's all good and well but its takes time to compare the products

Hence many of us are still busy trying out Codex to it's full extent :)

> And people are rarely willing to use paid product for comparison.

Yeah, and I'm usually the same, unless there is some free trial or similar, I'm unlikely to spend money unless I know it's good.

My own calculation changed with the coming of better LLMs though. Even paying 200 EUR/month can be easily regained if you're say a freelance software engineer, so I'm starting to be a lot more flexible in "try for one month" subscriptions.
by kgeist | 2025-05-19 22:22:22+00:00
>People whose main environment is Linux intentionally buy hardware that works flawlessly with Linux.

Hm, recently I bought a random "gamer PC" for the beefier GPU (mainly to experiment with local LLMs), installed Linux on it, and everything just worked out of the box. I remember having tons of problems back in 2009 when I first tried Ubuntu, though. I have dual boot, just today I ran a few benchmarks with Qwen3. On Windows, token generation is 15% slower. Whenever I have to boot into Windows (mainly to let the kid play Roblox), everything feels about 30% slower and clunkier.

At work, we use Linux too - Dell laptops. The main irritating problem has been that on Linux, Dell's Dock Stations are often buggy with dual monitors (when switching, the screen will just freeze). The rest works flawlessly for me. It wasn't that long ago when my Windows (before I migrated to Linux) had BSODs every other day...