MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-23 02:08:07+00:00
20 years ago: "Oh no, the distros are struggling over packaging! We've got apt, yum, dnf, rpm, nix, docker..."

https://m.xkcd.com/927/

For a long time, there was a pax debiana in my world. I used Ubuntu mostly (swapped to Debian and added Fedora towards the end) and the package management was really good. APT was a great tool and I got quite chummy with its ways. It was straightforward to keep my system updated and resolve dependencies. It was way smoother than any other updater system had been, even across major system upgrades.

I sort of lost it when snap started usurping stuff. I knew it was coming, because docker was already making inroads. Then we had flatpak and company. As an admin, as a system architect, I felt that's the point when I lost control of my system. It wasn't possible to know its update state anymore. It wasn't possible to centrally manage or monitor those updates. It became a free-for-all of self-updates and shadow updates. Ubuntu was also introducing livepatch and kernel updates that went outside the apt model.

I think that perhaps it became too great a burden for the major distros to be packaging all of their own downstream packages. Perhaps they saw the opportunity to offload some of that packaging burden on a really pro service that could just package everything, and make pan-distro packages available. If Debian and RHEL packagers are doing less downstream packaging, then perhaps they could focus on their core competencies. I noticed that nearly every Ubuntu package needed to include Ubuntu-specific tweaks, and basically when Ubuntu was already downstream from Debian, why should Canonical be maintaining every damn package themselves as well?

So what's the endgame for all this? Would apt or dnf/rpm eventually get abandoned and have them go all-in on a new system? Or does the proliferation and splintering continue? Many of us said that the beauty of Linux is our freedom of choice. Well there's too much choice. Look at Distrowatch and be paralyzed by not knowing what to choose. Windows or macOS on your desktop is easy to choose because there's... one of each.

When I visited Catalonia my friend took me to Carrefour. We strolled the aisles and I spotted pig-legs (jamon serrano) on every counter. A huge selection of eggs. Everything my stomach could desire. She led me into the olives aisle and gestured around to all the olives there. She said pick whichever I want. There were so many. They were all in fancy jars. I knew nothing of olives. I left without choosing any.

Linux will die a death of a thousand cuts, until some consolidation and unification can happen that's beyond the kernel.
by BeetleB | 2025-05-23 02:08:20+00:00
> Aside from the fact that you seem to be demanding a lot from someone who's informally sharing their experience online

Looking at isolated comments, you are right. My point was that it was a trend. I don't expect everyone to go into details, but I notice almost none do.

Even what you pointed out ("great for somethings, crappy for others") has much higher entropy.

Consider this, if every C++ related submission had comments that said the equivalent of "After using C++ for a few weeks, my verdict is that its performance capabilities are unimpressive", and then didn't go into any details about what made them think that, I think you'd find my analogous criticism about such comments fair.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-23 02:08:31+00:00
Foobar2000 has been on the App Store for ages…

Actually, I think it is a bit odd that the author didn’t find a free music app they liked. But I also think you don’t really need an excuse to go make something anyway, so… I dunno, it think maybe that was just a framing narrative to get the story started.
by johnb231 | 2025-05-23 02:08:51+00:00
> hugely multidimentional number line mapped to words

No. That hugely multidimensional vector maps to much higher abstractions than words.

We are talking about deep learning models with hundreds of layers and trillions of parameters.

They learn patterns of reasoning from data and learn a conceptual model. This is already quite obvious and not really disputed. What is disputed is how accurate that model is. The emulation is pretty good but it's only an emulation.
by jboggan | 2025-05-23 02:10:58+00:00
This is the crux of the piece to me:

"We'll enshrine this current bloated, sluggish, over-abstracted hellscape as the pinnacle of software—and the idea of squeezing every last drop of performance out of a system, or building something lean and wild and precise, will sound like folklore."

This somewhat lines up with my concerns about libraries and patterns before 2023 getting frozen in stone once we pass over the event horizon where most new code to train on is generated by LLMs. We aren't innovating, we are going to forever reinforce the screwed up dependency stack and terrible kludges of the last 30 years of development. Javascript is going to live forever.
by quantadev | 2025-05-23 02:11:15+00:00
Despite that this post/blog about AI has some valid points, the truth of the matter is that a good experienced developer _can_ extract the power out of a Coding Agent to get 6 months worth of work done in 3 weeks, and even do it in a language he's never coded in before. AI just isn't AGI yet, so comparing it to a human developer doesn't make any sense, to me. On the other hand, I'd also say AI Coding Agents are "Superhuman" in their vast knowledge and code-writing abilities. This indeed does sound like a contradiction, but the world is nuanced enough for it not to be a contradiction, but just two things that are true in a nuanced way.
by noahjk | 2025-05-23 02:12:58+00:00
It would be neat if premium features could be attached to a group message without all contributors being required to purchase. Sort of like apples new events app which requires iCloud+ to schedule events but anyone can attend.

Side note, your calendar is showing wrong dates if the user sets their main iOS calendar to start on Monday instead of Sunday - your day titles never shift to match the date table which is presumably supplied through iOS.
by mbreese | 2025-05-23 02:13:32+00:00
Given the target of RHEL, I can’t say that I disagree with their decision to not package those applications for RHEL 10. RHEL isn’t really designed to be a user desktop. Ever since RH split out workstation and server versions of the OS, RHEL has always been targeted for servers. I don’t think the lack of an office suite will really be that impactful towards users.

This is just made all the more true if there is an alternative source for these tools, like Flathub.
by Sharon929 | 2025-05-23 02:14:14+00:00
We've been in a similar spot — running ~150 interviews/year mostly for junior candidates. Like you, we just need a reliable, low-friction way to collaboratively code and run things in real time. Most of the "extra" stuff (AI, automated scoring, prebuilt questions) just gets in the way for us.

We ended up switching from Repl.it to CoderPad. It's not perfect, but it nails the basics:

Collaborative editor with syntax support for most major languages

Real-time execution in the cloud (including terminal-based ones like Python, Bash)

Solid multi-user support — you can watch what they’re typing and guide them easily

No fluff

Other options we evaluated:

Codeshare: decent for quick interviews but lacks execution support

CodeInterview.io: had potential but felt a bit janky UX-wise

Visual Studio Code Live Share: great experience but assumes the candidate has a local dev environment, which is a no-go for us

CoderPad is around the same price range as Replit, but at least we feel like we’re paying for what we actually use. Hope that helps!
by godelski | 2025-05-23 02:14:19+00:00
> Americans have a very serious ego problem.

No need to make this political. Relevant to the article, the issue of ego is a human problem, not unique to any particular country or culture. It does not matter if you're America, French, German, European, Chinese, Japanese, Asian, South African, Nigerian, Egyptian, African or such affiliation: people have difficulties admitting mistakes. Doesn't matter the color of your skin or the holy text you do or don't read, the problem persists. You're right that it is most harmful and most frequent in those with power, but it would be naive to pretend that this isn't in part perpetuated by the shame that public casts for such mistakes. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. If we're unwilling to admit this then I think it is impossible to prevent such atrocious leaders from rising to power. It is no coincidence that at the head of any authoritarian regime sits a leader who "can do no wrong." Because to admit that they did wrong means we must also admit we did wrong in siding with them, instead of being duped by them. It's the same problem, but it is not remotely unique to America. A pick-pocket will gladly point your attention to another, if only to keep your attention on them while they rob you blind. Don't let one failure make another.
by jerf | 2025-05-23 02:14:30+00:00
If you need it here or there, no. I've got a use case where I need a single locked thread for a particular syscall's functionality. It's not like it leaks out into the rest of the program and everything else has to change to accomodate it.

If you need it pervasively, Go may not be the correct choice. Then again, the list of languages that is not a correct choice in that case is quite long. That's a minority case. An important one, but a minority one.
by dbingham | 2025-05-23 02:14:34+00:00
It feels like these new models are no longer making order of magnitude jumps, but are instead into the long tail of incremental improvements. It seems like we might be close to maxing out what the current iteration of LLMs can accomplish and we're into the diminishing returns phase.

If that's the case, then I have a bad feeling for the state of our industry. My experience with LLMs is that their code does _not_ cut it. The hallucinations are still a serious issue, and even when they aren't hallucinating they do not generate quality code. Their code is riddled with bugs, bad architectures, and poor decisions.

Writing good code with an LLM isn't any faster than writing good code without it, since the vast majority of an engineer's time isn't spent writing -- it's spent reading and thinking. You have to spend more or less the same amount of time with the LLM understanding the code, thinking about the problems, and verifying its work (and then reprompting or redoing its work) as you would just writing it yourself from the beginning (most of the time).

Which means that all these companies that are firing workers and demanding their remaining employees use LLMs to increase their productivity and throughput are going to find themselves in a few years with spaghettified, bug-riddled codebases that no one understands. And competitors who _didn't_ jump on the AI bandwagon, but instead kept grinding with a strong focus on quality will eat their lunches.

Of course, there could be an unforeseen new order of magnitude jump. There's always the chance of that and then my prediction would be invalid. But so far, what I see is a fast approaching plateau.
by yencabulator | 2025-05-23 02:14:40+00:00
Businesses really, really, really would like to just have profit without any expenses. Ideally all of the money in the world as profit, please. And no taxes either. Just skip straight to splitting all the money in the world between the shareholders.

If you think running the output of an LLM as a serverless function in some cloud is a good way to differentiate your business, build a moat, and make a profit, good luck!
by bangertho | 2025-05-23 02:14:55+00:00
This already happened with Linux where people with no understanding of electrical engineering got jobs memorizing abstractions.

I look forward to a data driven system future where a few functions transform the machines electromagnetic geometry to solve a task based upon the most efficient energy model for solving a task as we continue to compress from the model all the non-essential syntax sugar of modern software.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668
by toss1 | 2025-05-23 02:15:18+00:00
No. It is so inaccurate that you either have serious problems with reading comprehension or are being deliberately disingenuous in order to destroy the conversation as if your Red Team is right.

The GP comment was about both the specific "Flood The Zone" strategy promoted by an advisor to the current administration and the overall and absolutely unprecedented assault by this administration on democracy and the rule of law itself.

Yes, I made a reference to the historical fact that the ideals of American democracy have always been aspirational. That is NOT license to whataboutism or claims that "everyone does it".

In a democracy, all the branches of govt (exec, ligislative, judicial) and the institutions of society (press, industry, academy, finance, religion, sport, charity, orgs, etc.) are ALL independent, balance power throughout society, and work for its advancement as best they can.

Under authoritarianism or fascism, all those branches and institutions are coerced or corrupted to concentrate power and serve the executive.

Never in the history of this country has any administration even come within orders of magnitude of this regime's attempt to cut off democracy. They are abusing the power of the state to coerce an corrupt every single branch and institution they can, starting with the judiciary, lawyers, press, and academia.

If you have actually "won young", you should take your gift of time and freedom to learn some history. Particularly relevant are how democracies are converted to autocracies, and it did not just happen in Germany in the 1930s, it happened today in Russia (ya, short weak democracy, but it didn't have to go that way), Venezuela, Hungary, and more; and the current party in power is abdicating it's legislative responsibilities to try to make it happen here. You might think you are safe because of your privilege of wealth, but if they succeed in their efforts to kill the 14th amendment and Habeas Corpus, you are not. Again, history is a guide, and the bog-standard authoritarian playbook is being run in broad daylight and secret Signal chat groups.
by sciurus | 2025-05-23 02:16:27+00:00
The leadership has been ousted.

> This includes major growth in our Boards, with 40% new Board members since we began our efforts to evolve and grow back in 2022. We’ve also been bringing in new executive talent, including a new MoFo Executive Director and a Managing Partner for Mozilla Ventures. By the end of the year, we hope to have new, permanent CEOs for both MoCo and Mozilla.ai... With these changes, Mitchell Baker ends her tenure as Chair and a member of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation boards.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growt...
by BeetleB | 2025-05-23 02:16:49+00:00
> That said, I want to see a video where of one of these people that apparently 10x'd there programming go against a dev without AI across various scenarios.

It would be interesting, but do understand that if AI coding is totally fantastic in one domain (basic automation scripting) and totally crappy in another (existing, complex codebase), it's still a (significant) improvement from the pre-AI days.

Concrete example: A few days ago I had an AI model write me a basic MCP tool: Creating a Jira story. In 15 minutes, it had written the API function for me, I manually wrapped it to make it an MCP tool, tested it, and then created tens of stories from a predefined list, and verified it worked.

Now if you already know the Jira APIs (endpoints, auth, etc), you could do it with similar speed. But I didn't. Just finding the docs, etc would take me longer.

Code quality is fine. This is not production code. It's just for me.

Yes, there are other Jira MCP libraries already. It was quicker for me to write my own than to figure out the existing ones (ditto for Github MCP). When using LLMs to solve a coding problem is faster than using Google/SO/official docs/existing libraries, that's clearly a win.

Would I do it this way for production code? No. Does that mean it's bad? No.
by MBCook | 2025-05-23 02:17:02+00:00
I’d rather the road stuff was paid for some other way.

I get EVs don’t pay through gas tax, and they’re generally heavier so do more damage.

But I don’t think we should be doing anything to disincentivize EVs. We should be pushing them more.

Just raise the registration fees on all cars, consider it a pollution tax for ICE cars.

Of course none of this matters. We all know why this legislation was pushed. And this debate I’m discussing wasn’t it.
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-05-23 02:17:42+00:00
It might be the ultimate irony if we were training them. But we aren't, at least not in the sense that we train dogs. Dogs learn, and exhibit some form of intelligence. LLMs do not.

It's one of many unfortunate anthropomorphic buzz words which conveniently wins hearts and minds (of investors) over to this notion that we're tickling the gods, rather than the more mundane fact that we're training tools for synthesising and summarising very, very large data sets.
by MeetingsBrowser | 2025-05-23 02:18:38+00:00
LLM tooling is useful. I have been using it on a daily basis for at least a year.

I am maybe 10-20% more productive at certain tasks in the long run (which is pretty good!). Nowhere close to to the 10x or even 2x boost people are claiming.

If LLMS were really making software developers 10x more productive over the last year, we would be seeing massive shifts in the industry. In theory either 90% layoffs or 10x product velocity.
by dbolgheroni | 2025-05-23 02:18:58+00:00
I've installed flatpak to install VSCode/Codium to have an usable debugger for a Python project I'm working on. After some time tweaking VSCode/Codium trying to get the debbuger to work, just realized flatpak could be the problem. After another considerable amount of time trying different flatpak permissions, realized this is not a good use of my time. Installed the same packages from snap, and everything worked OK.
Show HN: I made a zero-setup back end API to launch apps without coding back end
by skapi_api | 2025-05-23 02:19:47+00:00
Skapi is a zero-setup backend API that runs entirely serverless. Build full-featured web applications faster with Skapi - No complex installations, No server configurations, No database management required.

Skapi provides all the backend features you need for your web application out of the box, without the need to set up or maintain any backend servers. - Authentication - Database - File Storage - Realtime websocket messaging - WebRTC media streaming - Notification - CDN - Automated Email Systems - API Bridge for 3rd party APIs - File Hosting

GitHub link: https://github.com/broadwayinc/skapi-js
by hamburga | 2025-05-23 02:20:13+00:00
Agreed. I see this more and more as the AI safety discourse spills more into the general lexicon and into PR efforts. For example, the “sycophantic” GPT 4o was also described as “misaligned” as code for “unlikable.” In the meme, I filed this under “personality programming.” Very different from the kinds of problems the original AI alignment writers were focused on.
by dmvdoug | 2025-05-23 02:20:16+00:00
Yes, I was being sloppy. Nevertheless, they can still only request that particular set of documents. And it’s not to assess a particular student’s status but the school’s compliance with the program requirements. (They can of course check individuals to make sure they’re also complying.) And just from the face of the letter to Harvard you can see they’re going way beyond the enumerated categories of information. Not to mention intermingling other SEVP-unrelated complaints (DEI! Antisemitism!) as to why Harvard is being targeted.

Our immigration system is so profoundly screwed up, and there is no doubt the executive agencies have wide powers to draw on, but they’re not even trying to provide a fig leaf of legality. It’s straight, “Comply or suffer!”
by godelski | 2025-05-23 02:20:27+00:00
I came back and found the difference. You clicked "Linux Only". But I'm glad you did, because it gives us additional information helping us actually answer the previous question more accurately. Strongly falsifying the earlier conjecture that they were mostly SteamOS. We can see only a third are. 2/3rds of Linux Gamers are NOT using SteamOS (definitely a subset of SteamOS users are also not using a Steam Deck)

"SteamOS Holo" 64 bit 33.78% -0.70% "Arch Linux" 64 bit 9.45% -0.23% Freedesktop SDK 24.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 6.41% +0.15% Linux Mint 22.1 64 bit 6.20% +0.89% Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit 4.62% +0.23% Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS 64 bit 4.44% +0.26% "Manjaro Linux" 64 bit 2.61% -0.05% "EndeavourOS Linux" 64 bit 2.46% +0.06% Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) 64 bit 2.27% -0.08% Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 2.23% +0.02% Other 25.54% -0.53% https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=linux
by kweingar | 2025-05-23 02:20:31+00:00
> If you cannot afford the hundreds of dollars a month Claude costs

Employers will buy AI tools for their employees, this isn't a problem.

If you're saying that you need to buy and learn these tools yourself in order to get a job, I strongly disagree. Prompting is not exactly rocket science, and with every generation of models it gets easier. Soon you'll be able to pick it up in a few hours. It's not a differentiator.
by bicepjai | 2025-05-23 02:20:38+00:00
I have lot of large gopro videos (have a 4 year old with all 4 years of gopro videos), that I painstakingly have to edit when my 256 GB card fills up (currently I have 500GB of vodes sitting) . No matter how careful you are while recording it has some parts that needs to be trimmed out for saving space and also play time. As of now I use quickplayer loading single videos for each and every one and have to save them carefully. I have not found any app or tool that can efficiently just show me the files on a sidebar that I can select and edit using simple edit options like trim to remove unwanted parts in 3 to 10GB files. anyone know any tools that work. The tools suggested here did not even load these files :( 1. clipjs.vercel.app 2. https://pikimov.com/app/ 3. https://omniclip.app/

I will happily pay for this tool. AI to show me the part where there are no humans, I will pay more :) by ofcourse all locally and no cloud shenanigans. Of course people saying why record so much, why do we do anything ? :) try to be optimistic nihilist
by dgunay | 2025-05-23 02:20:54+00:00
Some friends of mine drilled some plywood into the trunks of a set of overgrown trees by the side of the road when I was a kid, to use as an airsoft arena. We didn't live there or anything, but it was cool to have a secret space that was relatively spacious and secluded from view by all the leaves and branches. Some nosy neighbors eventually dismantled it because they thought a homeless person was living there or something.
by elcritch | 2025-05-23 02:22:01+00:00
It's not entirely infeasible that neurons could harness quantum effects. Not across the neurons as a whole, but via some sort of microstructures or chemical processes [0]. It seems likely that birds harness quantum effects to measure magnetic fields [1].

0: https://www.sciencealert.com/quantum-entanglement-in-neurons... 1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-migrating-bir...