MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-06-22 23:20:24+00:00
Steve Yegge, are you OK?

You're bragging about a gambling addiction.

> I can't bring myself to leave when my brutes are hungry. I've tried, it's a no-go. I have to run a practiced escape plan every night to get my computer closed by 2am. First I get them all spinning at once. Then I leap up, run out of the room, slam the door, jam my fingers in my ears, and sprint away shouting lalalala.

> It's potent stuff. If you do attempt running six agents in separate workstreams, bring potable water and a couple of empty jugs.

Technology has a concentrating effect. When tech makes a thing cheaper, easier, and more accessible, more can happen. Mostly this is good. Mostly a bunch of other newly possible stuff happens too.

But with almost everything there's a point of concentration beyond which it switches over to being harmful. That point is different for everyone and even could be different for the same person on a different day. It's up to each of us to enforce our own boundaries.

Not everything can be enforced by individuals refusing to play. Sometimes a thing needs to be enforced at a societal level. Consider why there are speed limits on roads. Cars can go really really fast, and people in a hurry hate being held up. By capping the speed everyone can go, there's less FOMO and less danger when driving. This stuff is easy to understand when the risk is bodily harm. Sadly humans struggle to see the same phenomenon when all it's doing is wrecking your sleep and downtime and getting in the way of doing literally anything else. So maybe, this will need to be enforced at a societal level. Australia already has "right to disconnect" laws, for example.

But the risk of addiction doesn't stop at individuals.

Further in comes the turn: Stevey's stopped pulling his agentic coding slot machine lever long enough to shill an obscure product which adds a layer of competition among your teammates. Now the casino gets a new jackpot board and FOMO because your teammates are better gamblers than you.

> Amp is also more fun. It takes a different design approach, being intentionally team-centric. Amp gamifies your agentic development by making it public, with leaderboards and friendly competition, as well as liberal thread sharing. It all manages to be low-pressure and engaging.

You can tell Steve doesn't believe his own words because he doesn't back up that final sentence at all, nor does he back up his statement with personal experience. Whatever Amp becomes in a team context, Steve only wrote enough about it to collect a paycheck. Make of that what you will.

It is definitely not all bad. Despite being addictive, with good guardrails you can produce a lot high quality work.

Just don't addict yourself to pulling that next item off the backlog, or trying one more time to feel that magic mind-reading vibe when the agent nails it. Rather, work your hours then go out and stare at the sun. Or get the code done as fast as possible and spend more time talking to customers so you can be sure the thing you're building really fast is actually the thing they need.
by gerdesj | 2025-06-22 23:20:34+00:00
When I specify smart home stuff, I have several criteria. Things like controls must be mains powered or on UPS or both.

If it is important, then if wifi/ethernet out then it should still work. So my doorbell used to have a link to a mechanical chime (Doorbird), the current Reolink jobbie does not but it is PoE and all my switches have UPS. The Reolink does have a separate chime that plugs into a power socket and a way better camera.

Oh and none of my home things ever get unfettered access to the internet. I have two VLANs for IoT: things is for most devices and sewer is for those that scare me somewhat.

I treat the whole thing the same way I do corporate IT and I do point Nessus at it. I have several Home Assistants that I look after - home and work and several customer ones too.

The OP's choice of smart plug is clearly designed to be mildly inconvenient to get at but also reliable. I'll put money on there being a monitoring function too.

That's a nerd that does things "proper like".
by bigfatkitten | 2025-06-22 23:21:18+00:00
> There’s also no reason that the public facing name has to be the same as the internal name. They could have called it Windows 9 and internally reported it as anything in the apis.

This is what they were doing at the time anyway.

Windows 7 was 6.1, Windows 8 was 6.2, Windows 8.1 was 6.3.
by RickS | 2025-06-22 23:22:00+00:00
I am a somewhat unremarkable product designer. I'm great at my job, but still just a guy in a chair doing the thing. And I've been using this advice for years. It has made an absolutely mind boggling impact on my life. I recently took a few years off (achievable in part thanks to the OG version of this post), and was worried about returning to the cooled-off job market thanks to all the doomers on here talking about firing hundreds of applications into the empty void. Very little has changed. The market is a bit tighter but still fine. Please do not let the other crabs convince you that the bucket is too greased to be worth clawing at. Patio11 has probably made me 1M+ over my career with his blog post. And it is not because I'm some mega genius. I am merely good enough at my job to be worth wanting on a normal team. If you aren't that, fix that. But 20-50% lift on the majority of offers is super, super, super achievable if you're able to recognize what employers value, and communicate your ability to meet those needs. Seriously. So frustrating to see how many people are here telling others this is BS and not to try. Fuck that. At least *try*.
by mhuffman | 2025-06-22 23:22:40+00:00
>Re/ the speed limit, I'm afraid I simply don't understand. Why not just raise the speed limit to 70 instead of having everyone lie?

Then do you arrest all people going 71?

> I think we would have to define more closely what a 'bad law' actually is to answer that first. Under this kind of fine-based regime, it would have to be something that targets a small group, unfairly, and manages to consistently extract a lot of money from them

Is suspect everyone can hypothesize a small group they belong to. So make up one that you belong to and imagine a group coming into power in the legislature where you live that makes that kind of law. The money itself doesn't need to be a large amount (what might be "a lot" to you and I might be different for different people) to make it oppressive and frankly a weapon for the police and government to use.

>Re/ the idler's law itself ... The people of New York City voted in favor of it

Correct. I don't agree with it but the local people do. This is the both the blessing and curse of our government and the exact situation where some people can can use this pay-for-snitching technique for good or bad. If it works for them then so be it. I don't have to like it. I don't like a lot of stuff. And some stuff I do like others don't. My original argument is that using money as an incentive to turn citizens against each other is a very slippery slope. In his case it might be great for them. I understand that you and I disagree on this point and there is likely nothing I can say or you can say to make the other suddenly change position and I respect you defending your thought process on this. But it is nice to be able to have a conversation about something controversial without it spinning into something else. Cheers!
by toomuchtodo | 2025-06-22 23:22:50+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carts_of_Darkness

Carts of Darkness is a 2008 National Film Board of Canada documentary film by Murray Siple about a group of homeless men in the city of North Vancouver, who use shopping carts to collect bottles and cans to return for money and also race down the city's steep slope for thrills.
by pityJuke | 2025-06-22 23:23:18+00:00
Glad to hear Typst has people doing serious work with it.

I’ve been able to avoid LaTeX. At uni, I went for org-mode -> LaTeX, which was OK except when my .emacs file was filling up with LaTeX stuff to make random stuff work. To be honest, that means I probably can’t even compile it again if I wanted to.

Typst has been awesome (always ran into LaTeX just being horribly inconsistent when layout stuff) when I’ve used it. Hope it continues.
by phil21 | 2025-06-22 23:24:30+00:00
> The Reolink does have a separate chime that plugs into a power socket and a way better camera

I started using PoE to DC power adapters for most of these use-cases. It lets me centralize my UPS to the utility closet, and offer a ton of runtime that way. My router + switching setup now powers my entire house including remote switches (PoE++ powered) and access points. Security cameras (and slowly now - security floodlights) are PoE powered as well. I have probably 12-14 hours of runtime off a large stack of UPS batteries, and could add a few days to that if I wheel my "whole home" UPS I never had the time to hardwire into the house yet into the room.

Items like the fiber NIU and cable modem are powered via PoE splitters into 9/12/24V outputs they require. I still have a few random bridges and other various devices I should convert as well, but I've been lazy lately.

I went with two lower port count "core" switches vs. one so I have redundancy there, so one going out will only take out half my network and I can still operate in a degraded mode - my AP density is such that it works fine, and I can re-patch the in-wall and PoE powered switches for workstations.

The only issue is that it kind of grows with a mind of it's own... I am up to an absurd number of devices on the network now.
by thomasfedb | 2025-06-22 23:24:39+00:00
I wrote my joint med-CS honours (1 year research thing we have in Aus) thesis in Word. My med supervisor was happy with it. CS supervised insisted I reformat it in LaTeX as he couldn't stand the typesetting.

Honestly I don't disagree with him, it looked far better in 'TeX. But that's probably a learnt preference.

In essence, it's culture.
by python273 | 2025-06-22 23:24:55+00:00
A much better article on token prices: https://www.tensoreconomics.com/p/llm-inference-economics-fr...

There's not much incentive to subsidize prices for OpenRouter providers for example, and the prices are much lower than the $6.37/M estimate from the article.

https://openrouter.ai/meta-llama/llama-3.3-70b-instruct

avg $0.37/M input tokens, $0.73/M output tokens (21 providers)

Llama is not even a good example, as the recent models are more optimized using Mixture Of Experts and KV cache compression.
by algorithmsRcool | 2025-06-22 23:25:18+00:00
You are correct but although the B52 can technically carry the GBU-57 MOP, but it was only done that way during the initial testing of the weapon. The B2 is the only aircraft the USAF actually uses for that munition in combat scenarios.

Also the B2 is better suited for extreme endurance missions like this where the plane is in flight for >36 hours. It has a toilet, microwave and a cot for the pilots to use during the more mundane parts of the mission.
by nottorp | 2025-06-22 23:26:10+00:00
> versus fiction in a fantastical world or a "real world" where the existence of magic™ must be extensively explained.

Well now if we're drifting, I don't consider "fantasy" has to explain everything like it were an AD&D manual.

Take Glen Cook's Black Company series where magic just happens without explanation. Compare with something like Brandon Sanderson who describes "magic systems" in great detail always. I find the former enticing and the latter boring.

Lord of the Rings didn't explain anything either.
by wenc | 2025-06-22 23:26:38+00:00
It's because LaTeX gives us a sense of legitimacy. (it's also why people go overboard with math notation in LaTeX documents, even when prose is more appropriate).

It produces documents that look like those produced by professors, and luminaries in the field. If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious.

It's the same joy I felt when I laser-printed my first newsletter designed in Aldus PageMaker. I was only in my teens but I felt like a "professional".
by edmundsauto | 2025-06-22 23:27:13+00:00
Is this advice to help them maximize their business, or a personal whine that you want it but don’t want to pay so much?

Only the customers can tell this person if $60 is too much. If yure upset because it’s more than you would pay - say that. Otherwise you’re really just asking for a Porsche at the price of a Honda.

Is this what you should have said, without couching in a way that makes it sound “official”? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44349932
by gerdesj | 2025-06-22 23:27:30+00:00
It is possible that OP has made some parts of the story up or at least sexed it up a bit to jibe with the HN mindset (whatever that is).

I found the article refreshingly short and to the point whilst being jolly amusing and informative. The bloke is German so English is a second language - very good skills.

That's a skilled technical writer, that is.

Bookmarked. More please!
by RickS | 2025-06-22 23:27:49+00:00
Did you read the post? The numbers are fake, is how. That's the whole point of this post. They're arbitrary, made up, totally subject to change. The idea that they're immutable is corpo-propaganda designed to worsen your performance in a subtly adversarial encounter where it benefits the company for you to think you have no leverage. Job offers use craigslist pricing. They don't describe the actual desired end state. They put down an anchor in a favorable direction with the expectation that it will get haggled on for a round or two.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-06-22 23:27:49+00:00
Right but their version of rationality is very much lacking in emotional and even social intelligence. In fact it seems those traits are discouraged in discussions. Instead things are viewed from a purely Bayesian/Spock/Sherlocke/Data style perspective. These arguments can only make sense by assuming far more predictive power (or far less accounting for chaos and hidden variables) and by developing blind spots not found in softer arguments which have their own problems but at least try to consider ethics and economics from more nuanced perspectives.

Their core principle seems to be that many or even most answers to humanity's problems can be well defined in the first place and then solved by invoking Bayesian logic. This is only true in a frictionless vacuum.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-06-22 23:28:06+00:00
I have heard about it, but it isn't viable for me to switch to it because most academic journals and conferences have templates incompatible with XeTeX, or directly ask for the sources and compile them with pdflatex.

This is the same reason why it isn't viable for me to switch to typst either, by the way. I hope it gains popularity and ends up as a standard displacing (or along with) pdflatex.
by bell-cot | 2025-06-22 23:28:34+00:00
> In the era of AI, knowledge itself has become instant, infinite, and free.

Only if your philosophy equates AI hallucinations with actual truths.

EDIT, to add a trivial example of how shitty "AI" often is:

I just searched, in Google Shopping, for "shattered sword wwii midway". While watching, in other browser tabs, two different YouTube (also Google) videos about WWII and the Battle of Midway.

Anything remotely resembling "intelligence" should have been able to figure out that I wanted "Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway" by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully - right? Especially since "Jon Parshall" was on-screen and labeled in one of the videos, while the host praised his and Tony's book.

Reality: Of Google Shopping's 6 "Researched With AI" recommendations, 3 were swords & sorcery fantasy novels. Even though Google "knows" I'm 100X more interested in history / WWII / navies than I am in fantasy novels.

Vs.: Without having my browser history, or my YouTube history, or the added " wwii midway" in the search string, the simplistic search function on my little local book store's web site did a better job of figuring out what I wanted to see.
by BSOhealth | 2025-06-22 23:29:15+00:00
How does DOI interact with blockchain? I did a quick Google search and didn’t find much (lots of mismatches against “DAO”). Does DOI need blockchain for any legit reasons, like provenance?

I’m no blockchain evangelist in its current state of “value” but this seems like a great test case for resolving the academic or legitimate origin of published material.
by ICBTheory | 2025-06-22 23:30:41+00:00
1. I appreciate the comparison — but I’d argue this goes somewhat beyond the No Free Lunch theorem.

NFL says: no optimizer performs best across all domains. But the core of this paper doesnt talk about performance variability, it’s about structural inaccessibility. Specifically, that some semanti spaces (e.g., heavy-tailed, frame-unstable, undecidable contexts) can’t be computed or resolved by any algorithmic policy — no matter how clever or powerful. The model does not underperform here, the point is that the problem itself collapses the computational frame.

2. OMG, lool. ... just to clarify, there’s been a major misunderstanding :)

the “weight-question”-Part is NOT a transcript from my actual life... thankfully - I did not transcribe a live ChatGPT consult while navigating emotional landmines with my (perfectly slim) wife, then submit it to PhilPapers and now here…

So - NOT a real thread, - NOT a real dialogue with my wife... - just an exemplary case... - No, I am not brain dead and/or categorically suicidal!! - And just to be clear: I dont write this while sitting in some marital counseling appointment, or in my lawyer's office, the ER, or in a coroners drawer

--> It’s a stylized, composite example of a class of decision contexts that resist algorithmic resolution — where tone, timing, prior context, and social nuance create an uncomputably divergent response space.

Again : No spouse was harmed in the making of that example.

;-))))
by wenc | 2025-06-22 23:30:51+00:00
Typst looks good, but I'm actually going back to LaTeX but paired with Claude Code in VS Code.

I took a hiatus from LaTeX (got my PhD more than a decade ago). I used to know TikZ commands by heart, and I used to write sophisticated preambles (lots of \newcommand). I still remember LaTeX math notation (it's in my muscle memory, and it's used everywhere including in Markdown), but I'd forgotten all the other stuff.

Claude Code, amazingly, knows all that other stuff. I just tell it what I want and it gets 95% of the way there in 1-2 shots.

Not only that, it can figure out the error messages. The biggest pain in the neck with LaTeX is figuring out what went wrong. With Claude, that's not such a big issue.
by wyager | 2025-06-22 23:32:43+00:00
> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting?

Why does anyone care about typesetting? Probably because they spend a lot of time working with text and have therefore developed a level of taste.

Just because the bottom 80% of consumers have zero taste and will accept any slop you give them doesn't mean there isn't value in doing something only appreciated by the top 20%. In any field, not just typesetting. Most people have ~no refined endogenous preferences for food, art, music, etc.
by II2II | 2025-06-22 23:35:20+00:00
In traffic, no, but on the streets, why not? Things like street hockey and basketball are real. Kids ought to be able to be able to play in a field and fetch their ball from the street without ending up as roadkill.

Of course, there are far too many drivers who view anything that impedes high speed travel as a nuisance, or worse. I regularly see drivers who run stop signs in front of a school, drivers passing unloading school busses with their stop signs extended, and impatient drivers try to push through crossing guards as children are crossing. I have also known crossing guards who were struck by motorists. Things like traffic calming measures don't work, since it typically ends up with drivers being more reckless. Very little seems to be done about it, aside from periodic campaigns (typically at the start of school years). And, of course, punishing children by limiting the spaces they can use and independence.

People often claim that the cycling culture of the Netherlands was a product of trying to protect children from traffic. Most of the rest of the world, including England with it's "no ball game" signs took the opposite approach: rather than addressing the problem, they punished the victims.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-22 23:35:52+00:00
Some perspective from the employer side of salary negotiations: It’s not hard to recognize when someone is following the patio11 salary negotiation guide after you recognize the pattern.

In my case I was already advocating for upper end pay packages for people joining us. One thing you learn quickly is that despite all the Internet talk about having a BATNA or putting companies in a bidding war against each other is that the majority of candidates really don’t have other options to even compare against.

Combine this with the one-size-fits-all salary negotiation advice and a problem arises: The only way they can feel like they’ve won the negotiation is to fight for some arbitrary increase and then have the company give it to them.

My mistake early on was trying to give people the best possible offer out of the gate that I could possibly justify. Many people took it because it was a big raise for them or they understood what we had discussed. However, you could tell when someone was reading a compensation negotiation guide because it was like the number did not actually matter. The only thing they cared about was getting something extra added on top of it. Some people would be so tunnel visioned on this idea of getting the extra bump that they’d threaten to walk from an excellent offer over something trivial like a $5K bump

So what’s the strategy? You start holding back that last little bit of your budget for the inevitable up negotiation round, then you give it to them when they do their negotiating script that the internet guide told them to follow.

If the person doesn’t negotiate, you then surprise them with it as bonus plan or something similar.

It works, but I hated it. Eventually you get a feel for who’s likely to play the negotiation script and who was not, so you could somewhat predict it most of the time.
by julianeon | 2025-06-22 23:37:14+00:00
I can give one.

As far as I can tell, as far as your entertainment options go, literary fiction is THE best option to exercise your mind.

Ranked, in order, it's: literary fiction, nonfiction, computer games, movies, TV.

"Meta-analyses show fiction reading has stronger associations with cognitive skills than nonfiction, with medium-sized benefits for verbal abilities and general cognition. Fiction enhances social cognition by exercising the brain's default network involved in theory of mind. Reading fiction increases brain connectivity, particularly in language areas and sensorimotor regions, with effects lasting beyond the reading session."