MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-06-01 13:44:48+00:00
> I also try to avoid cloud first. If servers are slow or down or you're locked out for whatever reason, you won't have access to your own files.

I still use Sketch instead of Figma for projects that are solo and where collaboration doesn’t require that the other participants have edit capabilities for this reason (among others).

Not only is it weird that with Figma you don’t get to keep a local file if you don’t constantly export to keep your local copy up to date, it means that your full fidelity work is locked up in a proprietary format that’s subject to sudden change at the company’s whims, breaking any tools reverse engineered for the purpose of liberating users’ work.

By contrast, while Sketch has a cloud mode it can also be local-first and its maker publishes an open spec for its file format. That’s the right way to do things.
by wiseowise | 2025-06-01 13:44:53+00:00
Recent resurgence of tools going native is really interesting. For years (at least last decade) I've heard mantra that JIT/interpreters are getting so good that you don't need to bother with native languages anymore, clients can be written in Python/Ruby, because it's a one-off operation anyway, etc., etc.

And now everyone is rewriting everything in Go/Rust left and right.
by ty6853 | 2025-06-01 13:45:05+00:00
I live in the middle of nowhere where lots of people build one room shacks in the desert, because we allow that here. You can build whatever the fuck you want. Some are living in mud huts (yes in the USA).

They shouldn't be forced to do it, but they seem to love it. You'd be suprised how many people would prefer a one room shack given the option, lots of people don't actually want the kind of houses zoning and codes require in more dystopian parts of the US, they would rather spend that money on leisure or their children, or their own health.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-06-01 13:45:39+00:00
> It will ruin places where some kinds of commercial speech is wanted (say, asking for a recommendation on reddit).

There is also a dependence on the culture. For example, what in the USA would be considered a "recommendation" (such as on Reddit) would often be considered "insanely pushy advertising" in Germany.

With this in mind, wouldn't a pertial solution also be to become less tolerant of such pushy advertisement in such places (say on Reddit), even if they are done by honest users?
by imtringued | 2025-06-01 13:46:13+00:00
Attention doesn't get batched and the runtime of attention for a given users token depends on the total context length. Hence even in the ideal scenario of you getting a dedicated attention calculating GPU, the MLP calculating GPU doing batching will have to wait for the slowest user.

In the worst case scenario you are sharing a single attention calculating GPU with someone who has a super long context window, then that guy will be hogging most of the memory bandwidth of the GPU, even though you both are generating the same quantity of tokens.

This means that in the distributed setting, you will not only need dedicated GPUs for the model and attention calculations, you will also need to duplicate the whole setup for a variety of context lengths, so that long contexts are batches alongside other long contexts and short contexts are batches alongside other short contexts.
by iforgotpassword | 2025-06-01 13:46:55+00:00
> If you're used to date changes happening "whenever", you'd stop assuming they happen at a fixed point during the day.

But that's not the case. We're not all cosmopolitans traveling the world all the time. For anyone living in a timezone where 00:00 happens when most people are asleep, there'd only be one word for tomorrow, as it'd be synonymous for "after date change" and "after the next sleep cycle". There would be no other word, because there is no need for that. Except in circles where coordinating meetings with people across the globe happens on a regular basis. But we already got that figured out by explicitly naming the time zone or using UTC.

The vast majority of people don't have to deal with this, so having the date change at night is just more convenient, as it completely avoids this ambiguity in day to day life.

But obviously as a nerd you get hung up on that one aspect and go "but imagine we had only one timezone, we could just say 13:00 and there'd be no ambiguity, no chance for a misunderstanding, it would be so much more efficient and coherent!"

> The argument against abolishing time zones always seems to assume that humanity would be incapable of adapting to a time zone free world.

Again, you need to take a step back and try to look at this from the average person's pov, not as a scientist trying to find the optimal solution for a problem 99% of people don't have. And "people would be able to adapt to this" Is a pretty weak argument. You could probably also change the clock itself so that there's 63 seconds in a minute, 59 minutes in an hour, and 195 hours in a day. I'm sure people could adapt to this. Doesn't make it a good argument.

On the other hand, just imagine the sheer chaos this switchover would cause worldwide, for what, marginal gains in convenience for a miniscule amount of people.

It reminds me of "that guy" who constantly wants to refactor half the codebase because something would look a little cleaner then, and if you let them, they'll end up refactoring the same part of the code over and over again every six months because they had another idea how to make it even more streamlined and elegant. And then someone else comes in wanting to implement a simple feature, but is greeted with an incomprehensible construct, while the refactoring-guy is repeatedly and excitedly reassuring them that it's "really simple and intuitive once you get the hang of it".
by msephton | 2025-06-01 13:48:51+00:00
The Atari ST was foundational for me. I loved it so much, learned a great deal, discovered and played many great video games, designed page layouts, made my own software and games. In December 2023 one of my recent games was listed in Ars Technica's "Best Games of 2023" alongside Super Mario Wonder and I can draw the line right the way back to my time on the Atari ST. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372936
by photonthug | 2025-06-01 13:48:53+00:00
Doesn’t it seem like LLMs can assist with moderation rather than making it harder?

I’m not sure exactly why we are still waiting for the obviously possible ad-hominem and sunk cost fallacy detectors, etc. For the first time we now have the ability to actually build a threaded comment system that (tries to) insist on rational and on topic discussion. Maybe part of that is that we haven’t actually made the leap yet to wanting to censor non contributing but still-human “ contributers” in addition to spam. I guess shit posting is still part of the “real” attention economy and important for engagement.

The apparently on topic but subtly wrong stuff is certainly annoying and in the case of vaguely relevant and not obviously commercial misinformation or misapprehension, I’m not sure how to tell humans from bots. But otoh you wouldn’t actually need that level of sophistication to clean up the cesspool of most YouTube or twitter threads.
by owebmaster | 2025-06-01 13:49:42+00:00
Why are the alternatives not better if, as you say (and I agree), react solves its own problems (accidental complexity)? not some essential complexity (at least not anymore).

State management and optimized DOM manipulation can be achieved with vanillajs nowadays and I'm not saying that as a purist, it is just good enough that React is not needed. To help a bit with the ergonomics, I use lit-html/uhtml for the templating but they are both based on template literals, a native JS feature.
by diggan | 2025-06-01 13:49:56+00:00
> I’ll try to learn LISP too, someday.

It's funny, as I could probably credit Dan with the reason I mostly spend time with Clojure and ClojureScript today. I think ClojureScript/Reagent/Om was mentioned really quickly when he did the "Hot Reloading / Time Traveling" talk back in 2014 sometime, which eventually led me to find Clojure which basically was made for making those things easy for the entire stack, not just frontend.

So thanks Dan for leading me to greener pastures, but a shame you still haven't taken the time to look into any lisp! Reagent+ClojureScript should be (relatively) familiar to you, as long as you get over the parenthesis-avoidance stage most of us go through :)
by marcosdumay | 2025-06-01 13:50:11+00:00
Presentation documents can never do double duty. They will always fail at least one of the goals, and if you insist on not optimizing for one, they will fail both.

Most routing corporate stuff is just people booking the time for denying others the excuse to say they didn't know about it because of time constraints. Those people don't care if the presentation fails to communicate anything (what it almost always does).
by ivan_gammel | 2025-06-01 13:51:23+00:00
The only way to solve it for decentralized messaging systems is a decentralized system for verification of identities based on chain of trust and use of digital signatures by default. It must be a legal framework supported by technical means. For example, id providers may be given a responsibility to confirm certain assumptions about their clients (is a real human, is adult etc) while keeping their identity confidential. The government and the corporations will know only what this person allows the id provider to disclose (unless there’s a legal basis for more, like a decision of the court to accept a lawsuit or a court order to identify suspect or witness). Id provider can issue an ID card that can be used as authentication factor. As long as a real person can be confirmed behind the nickname or email address, the cost of abuse will be permanent ban on a platform or on a network. Not many people will risk it. Natural candidates for id providers can be notaries.
by emporas | 2025-06-01 13:51:48+00:00
We will ditch anonymity, but for pseudonymity, not eponymity. Meaning someone, somewhere will know who is who and can attest that 1000 usernames are humans, but people will be able to identify with just a username to everyone else, except that one person.

>In practice that means PKI or web of trust (or variants/combinations), plus reputation systems.

Yep, that is the way.

Also LLMs will help us create new languages or dialects from existing languages, with the purpose of distinguishing the inner group of people from the outer group of people, and the outer group of LLMs as well. We are in a language arms race for that particular purpose for thousands of years. Now LLMs are one more reason for the arms race to continue.

If we focus for example in making new languages or dialects which sound better to the ear, LLMs have no ears, it is always humans who will be one step ahead of the machine, providing that the language evolves non stop. If it doesn't evolve all the time, LLMs will have time to catch up. Ears are some of the more advanced machinery on our bodies.

BTW I am making right now a program which takes a book written in Ancient Greek and creates an audiobook, or videobook automatically using Google's text to speech. The same program on Google Translate website.

I think people will be addicted in the future with how new languages sound or can be sung.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-06-01 13:53:02+00:00
> Because if there's one place where Google didn't solve spam, it's on YT's comments

I do believe that this problem is very self-inflicted (and perhaps even desired) by YouTube:

- The way the comments on YouTube are structured and ordered makes it very hard to make deep discussions on YouTube

- I think there is also a limit on the comment length on YouTube, which again makes it hard to write longer, sophisticated arguments.

- Videos for which a lot of comments a generated tend to become promoted by YouTube's algorithm. Thus YouTubers encourage viewers to write lots of comments (thus also a lot of low-quality comments), i.e. YouTube incentivizes that videos are "spammed" with comments. The correct solution would be to incentivize few, but high-quality comments (i.e. de-incentivize comments that contribute nothing valuable (i.e. worth your time to read)). This makes it much easier to detect and remove the (real) spam among them.
by Mond_ | 2025-06-01 13:53:06+00:00
HoTT is a highly technical, highly niche topic and it doesn't make sense to tackle two ambitious projects at the same time like this. HoTT isn't even remotely close to being accepted as a reasonable standard, and it's kind of a non-starter for most people.

This is a bit like asking the developers of a Javascript framework why they they didn't write a framework for Elm or Haskell.
by wslh | 2025-06-01 13:53:32+00:00
The internet sometimes feels like living in a holographic world, as in "The Invention of Morel" [1].

A recent anecdote: an acquaintance of mine automated parts of his LinkedIn activity. After I liked one of his posts, I received an automatic message asking how I was doing. I recognized that the message didn't match a personal tone, but I replied anyway to catch up. He never responded, highlighting how people are automating the engagement process but can't really keep up with the manual follow-through.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Morel
by diggan | 2025-06-01 13:53:48+00:00
> And now everyone is rewriting everything in Go/Rust left and right.

Especially interesting for software that are 99.9% of the time waiting for inference to come back to you. Sure, makes sense to rewrite something that is heavily relying on the CPU, or where you want an easier time to deal with concurrency, but I feel like that's not what makes Codex takes long time to finish a prompt.

With that said, I also rewrote my local LLM agent software to Rust, as it's easier to deal with concurrency compared to my initial Python prototype. That it compiles into a neat binary is an additional benefit, but could have as easily gone with Go instead of Rust.
by goodpanda | 2025-06-01 13:54:00+00:00
Thx for the analysis! copyToClipboard is for copying the session link so it can be opened on your other device.

As for analytics, you are exactly right. I need to know if people are using the app the way it was intended and soon need to add more events for errors. Though perhaps it is something I can maintain on a separate repo? idk, the goal for me was to truly make everything on berb.app open source. no hiding anything
by dweekly | 2025-06-01 13:54:53+00:00
Everything follows a cycle. Client/server, flat/skeuomorphic, compiled/interpreted, cloud/colo, colorful/minimalist, microservices/monolithic, standards-driven/vendor-driven, open/proprietary, CPU/xPU. There is a natural tension in the technical universe that pushes progress in one direction that loads the spring in the other direction. Over time you'll see the cycles rhyme.
by isaacremuant | 2025-06-01 13:55:00+00:00
I'm not that worried because most content and content moderation became heavily homogenized through censorship and political manipulation to the point that a sizeable number of conversations and posts provided very little space for "breakthrough value" or "original value". Of course, if you're part of the Overton window you're just now concerned but if you weren't, you're actually excited to see the disruption.

I do recognize the capabilities to hurt from bots in many spaces and cause cost are a real thing to contend with but the paradigm shift is fascinating. Suddenly people need to question authority (LLM output). Awesome. You should've been doing that all along.
by phyalow | 2025-06-01 13:55:36+00:00
Huh? These are documents written (not a Maori technology), printed (not a Maori technology), bound into a book (not a Maori technology), placed in a library (not a Maori idea/concept). A Computer database is irrelent here, you seem to be picking out arbitrary words to try and sound smart?

People arent threatend by this specific activity, less so the nonsense behind it. The threat is the corruption of useful and working systems to virtue signal for no benefit, whilst espousing their apparent (but on close examination lack of benefits). It is the social and intellectual degredation which is alarming.

Creating a custom filing system is busy work simply put, changing to a propritory system lowers discoverability of information to an overwhelming majority of people initmately unfamiliar with "Maori gods" (99.9%), the same activity could be accomplished under standard tooling (Dewey), at lower cost, greater compatability and therefore benefit. It would be discoverable by default.
by catlifeonmars | 2025-06-01 13:57:04+00:00
Well it depends. For example, calculators have been around for a while and a calculator that only performs better than the average human is not very useful. Sorting algorithms are another example.

Autocomplete/intellisense in an IDE is probably the most salient example. An autocomplete that performs _as well_ as the average programmer is, well, totally useless.
by MaxBav | 2025-06-01 13:57:09+00:00
Every use case has its optimal stack. Isomorphic rendering (NextJS, Nuxt, Sveltekit with "non-static" adapters, ...) is a good fit for very few use cases only.

Many "thought leaders" still don't get the math right. At first visit, your Next app can't serve individual content. So you need two round trips. Both are slow as they are typically served from a Node server.

Serving the app (properly built and bundled, e.g. using Astro or a small and fast SPA like Solid or Svelte) from a CDN and the data from an API is faster at first visit.

At consecutive visits the Next app can serve the rendered page with individual content. Nice and fast. But the CDN hosted app is still in the browser cache. It's even faster! So also just one request to the backend for the individual data is needed.

Regarding SEO the arguments for isomorphic rendering are also flawed. If you care about SEO, just create static html (again, Astro makes it very easy) and put it on a CDN. Why should a crawler care about individual content, that isomorphic frameworks can provide? For SEO the response of a anonymous request matters. So just the static content.

IMO 99% of the use cases are better solved with traditional server rendered MPAs (e.g. Django or ASP.NET MVC), fast SPAs (not React, but Solid, Svelte or Vue) and if SEO and first paint really matter static sites (e.g. Astro).
by JimDabell | 2025-06-01 13:57:33+00:00
This doesn’t work in perpetuity. One of the reason why spam is so persistent is that when you ban a spammer, they can just create a new identity and go again. If payment is required then not only do they have to repeatedly pay every time they get banned, they need a new payment card too because you aren’t limited to banning their account – you can ban the payment mechanism they used.
by techpineapple | 2025-06-01 13:57:43+00:00
Yeah, this is the trick, for example in the sort of private hacker news example I was talking about creating, I haven’t created it yet, but I sort of suspect that getting the comments to not sound canned would take a lot of prompt engineering, and I also suspect that even if say an individual comment is good, the style over time would be jarring.

On the internet, maybe you have people using character.io, or other complex prompts to make the comments sound more diverse and personal. Who knows.

I wonder how many different characters you would need on a forum like hacker news to pass a sort of collective Turing test.
by no_wizard | 2025-06-01 13:57:56+00:00
I think of the (imo legendary) presentation Jobs gave when introducing the iPhone. A brand new product with features and usage patterns that most people never saw before in a mobile device.

It had very little of those highly detailed bullet point slides, but you didn’t feel like after watching that presentation you didn’t “get it”.

That’s the barometer I think about when it comes to presentations
by bgwalter | 2025-06-01 13:58:04+00:00
That would presume that the moderation knows the truth, that a single truth even exists and that the moderation itself is unbiased.

It would also presume that an LLM knows the truth, which it does not. Even in technical and mathematical matters it fails.

I do not think an LLM can even accurately detect ad-hominem arguments. Is "you launched a scam coin scheme in the first days of your presidency and therefore I don't trust you on other issues" an ad-hominem or an application of probability theory?
by ty6853 | 2025-06-01 13:58:06+00:00
The biggest land horder in the USA is our government, they own ~25+% of the land and refuse to let people homestead anymore, no matter that much of it is far better than the land I 'homesteaded' for a high bid in literal desert shithole where people are willing to pay lots of money to be in bumfuck nowhere with far worse positioning than much of the BLM and national forest land. It's brilliantly clear people would homestead this land if it were opened and be a significant relief valve.

Our government literally just sits and sits and vast quantities of land that goes barely used for the lols, while our young people would happily build a shack on a piece of it instead of being relegated to hopelessness.
by 90s_dev | 2025-06-01 13:58:21+00:00
According to a resonating reddit comment, Svelte isn't more popular because it's simply too late; React and Vue got there early and got good enough, so Svelte can't really get as big as them.

I think this might be true short term, but long term it means Svelte has more room to evolve with the web and with JavaScript itself, since fewer users means more room to move fast and break things, like Zig can and does. And Zig isn't dead.

This gives me a little encouragement for my personal web reactivity project. I'm confident I came up with a reactivity model that's technically innovative, which does and is what I always wanted React to do and be. But being so late to the game, my hypothetical framework has no chance to gain traction. I say hypothetical because I haven't even started making it yet. It would be built on the Ref class[1] that came out of my experimental work on os.90s.dev, but only last night did I finally get around to experimenting with using it with HTML[2].

The concept is to have JSX transform to allowing attributes to be given MaybeRefs and if its a ref then watch it and set the attr to the value, and just return the HTMLElement itself. This should be a good enough foundation to build an entire reactive framework around.

Having almost no users is a blessing, because it gives me the complete freedom to experiment with this relatively slowly. The time between creating refs and stabilizing them was a few months. The time between stabilizing them and using them in that experiment was another month. It'll probably be another month before I get a functioning non-trivial app working with it. And another few months before it's cleaned up enough to be both generic and convenient.

Maybe this should have been a blog post. I never know.

[1]: https://90s.dev/guides/refs.html

[2]: https://github.com/sdegutis/bubbles/commit/cde2bea973b22538f...