MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrtksn | 2025-06-20 17:40:06+00:00
I knew what was this all about the moment I glimpsed at the title on the front page, my neural nets must have been trained to output that from the few tokens I guess, which makes me think maybe all this AI stuff isn't that different from what's happening in real brains. I bet others too had similar experience.

So the AI thing is happening, maybe its not with this particular tech we have today but they are on to something and we probably better embrace it.

Humans rolled the ladder up behind on so many things. Very few people will survive the planet Earth without the tools and abstractions we built over the many Millenia's and that's how we all live like kings. Any misery out there in the world is a result of our inability to manage it, not because the resources are scarce.

The Luddites, as explained in the article were indeed about the way tech is being adopted. All that tech eventually reached every corner of the world and not every place had Luddites.

Programming computers by hand is shitty anyway, good riddance. Finally we are about to have machines that can be programmed without thinking about the intricacies of programming that have nothing to do with the thing we want to achieve.

All the tech left behind still does have aficionados, maybe in 10 years we can watch someone program a computer using Java on the Primitive Technology channel.
by anthonypasq | 2025-06-20 17:40:34+00:00
where i live (Boston) it is impossible to build anything new that is not qualified as "luxury" because its competing with a 150 year old tenement with 20year old appliances.

i dont even know what it would mean to build a new non-luxury apartment. No one has ever explained this to me. New housing is always lampooned as being shit quality yet luxury at the same time just because it has.... cabinets that arent falling off the walls and a floor that isnt slanted so badly that i roll away from my desk?

When the existing current housing stock is so old and bad you just need to build to bring up the average quality of an apartment. Rich people will go to the new stuff and it brings up the floor of housing quality.
by quickthrowman | 2025-06-20 17:40:43+00:00
Accounts know nothing about running construction projects. If you want to control costs, use fixed price or GMP contracts instead of cost plus or T&M. You also need to make sure your engineers are accurately representing the work scope in the RFP so you don’t get change ordered to death.

That being said, there is definitely corruption in the NYC construction market that doesn’t exist in the market I operate in, and I’ve read articles specifically about sandhogs inflating contracts and so on. Their union contract could possibly specify certain positions being required that are extraneous to the work being performed that would inflate the cost of the project and line the union’s coffers.

Net margins on a 9 to 10 figure construction contract should be around 3-5% in a competitive market.

FWIW I am a construction management professional.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-06-20 17:40:46+00:00
> Compositors are incompatible with one another and have totally different levels of functionality.

I see far more similar about compositors than different. They have freedom of implementation & do different things, but they offer to apps a very common set of protocols, and some of the newer edgier protocols have more varied adoption. But I see standards & growth & development forward as 'what Wayland is', not "incompatibility" (that's why Wayland proper is purely 100% protocols & not a bespoke impl) and "totally different" (???).

Finding formal concensus to make special stable has been hard. But there is a pleasantly large amount of overlap and interop, even if compositors end up implementing more than one flavor of say gamma control.

> Most compositors don't do any proper kind of security and permissions and just limit data flows in the most primitive and restrictive way possible.

When starting a composite yeah, you figure out who has input and send it there. You render the surface the apps give you. Dataflow is inherently quite unidirectional for a long time when beginning a desktop compositor.

But that doesn't feel true at all today. Most compositors support advanced screen sharing, virtual pointers, and other fairly advanced data-flow protocols, almost all built security in mind, requiring more advanced routing & permissioning, as is very visible with the screen share flows of most apps.

> Using something with existing security but the possibility of cross-communication like DBUS is just easier here.

Agreed, but you yourself in your very negative comment on Wayland in this topic seem quite opposed to second systems in broad basis (and pretty radically down on Wayland in general). I'd like to see the display system protocols able to better tackle talking about and managing what's on the screen, rather than building a second parallel system for saying and working with what's on the screen.

I also think there's a decently strong basis already there in the current protocols. There's a security context to start. https://wayland.app/protocols/security-context-v1 We see more advanced flows like XDG Foreign for apps to expose surfaces and mix them onto our own apps.

At-spi d-bus was already right there & done, and it felt easy to keep using it. It was mostly convenience I feel like, and the justification of security feels like a blunt hammer to deny exploration. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/at-spi2-core/
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-06-20 17:40:46+00:00
This happens anyway, lol. Go to a car lot and you will see the majority of cars available are black, white, silver, and maybe red. Your car will have a stereo. Your car will probably have 4 seats, not 2. Dealers stock the most common configurations and, maybe this is not your experience, but my experience is that they will twist themselves into knots to avoid helping customers make custom orders for exactly what they want, even though the manufacturer has a fancy configurator page where you can do exactly that.
by asmxyz | 2025-06-20 17:41:08+00:00
There are _other options_!

You're argument is that the only two alternatives are that the ruling class and owning class be separate groups of people, or the same group of people. And either way the labor class if F'ed. You're right that having the ruling class and the owning class being the _same people_ is terrible. That's what we're living in right now!

But what about the labor class being the owning class? What if Amazon was owned by the people who work at Amazon? Instead of Bezos?
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-20 17:41:57+00:00
Well, as someone who considers themselves to be a "software craftsman," I have come to the conclusion that the work I do will never be valued, and will always be considered "too expensive." Since I work for free, that's not an issue for me, but that's economically unfeasible for most folks.

The issue with an industry awash with cheap dross, is that it becomes prohibitively expensive to produce high Quality stuff. Anyone that tries, will get driven out of business. Some clever folks will figure out how to do "slightly better" stuff, and charge more for it, but a good way to go out of business, is to focus on Quality as a principal axis.

That's basic market dynamics. It is what it is, and is neither evil, nor good.

It does mean that only "niche" craftsmen, like myself, will produce anything of decent Quality, but will be unable to do so at scale, because we can't get a team together, large enough to do big things.

I guess the saddest thing, is that I have really wanted to help teach my techniques to others, but have found that no one wants to learn, so I gave up on that, many years ago.
by andrewla | 2025-06-20 17:42:19+00:00
Agreed -- "is a term of the sum" is such an inverted way to look at it.

Better I think would be to say "the result in column i and row j is the sum of product of elements in column i of the left cracovian and column j of the right cracovian".

And even by this definition the example given doesn't seem to track (and the strangeness of sometimes saying "+" and sometimes not, and having both "0" and "-0" in the example is bananas!):

{ 3 2 } { 1 -4 } = { 5 -2 } { -1 0 } { -2 3 } = { 0 2 } 3 * 1 + -1 * -2 == 5 -- check 3 * -4 + -1 * 3 == -15 -- what? 2 * 1 + 0 * -2 == 2 (okay, but shouldn't this be in the lower left, column 1 dotted with column 2?) 2 * -4 + 0 * 3 = -8 (now I'm really missing something)
by lapcat | 2025-06-20 17:42:37+00:00
You're missing the point. There's a fundamental difference between doing what you're good at for the benefit of the tribe and doing what you're good at for your own personal benefit, refusing to share with the tribe unless they agree to your terms.

The former is sharing, the latter is trading. And again, there's no evidence that trading ever occurred in that situation. As another commenter mentioned, in the life-or-death scarcity of hunter-gatherer communities, you'd be punished or exiled (which would mean death) for modern capitalist-style selfishness. There's no commodification.

Also, knowledge and skills were shared. There were no trade secrets, no patents. It would be have been extremely dangerous for one person to be the exclusive source of an essential good. Again, specialization is a luxury of abundance.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-20 17:42:49+00:00
> Ofcourse, but that's the whole point right? At similar power levels, Apple M-series is a lot faster. The only way for AMD and Intel to compete on performance is by providing more power

They're saying the exact opposite of that. Their claim is that all the extra power is only juicing performance a little bit, so at similar power levels the performance is not all that far apart.
by lolinder | 2025-06-20 17:43:19+00:00
In the cases we're discussing rich people pay more for increased access, so they're still exchanging money for something of value, not just paying more into the system for the sake of it. They get opportunities and benefits out of the toll/fee system that are not available to people who cannot afford to pay.

If the taxes earned from these transactions are then spent on things that also benefit the wealthy just as much as they do the poor, then the rich are double-dipping and poor people still end up net behind the wealthy. They lose access to something that previously was paid for out of property taxes in exchange for more revenue funding services that the wealthy are just as likely to use.

This model at least doesn't further exacerbate the regressiveness of the tax by only funding things used by the rich, but it doesn't restore balance.

That's why I say that the only way that you flip the tax to be progressive is if the proceeds benefit the poor disproportionately rather than benefiting everyone equally.
by schmidtleonard | 2025-06-20 17:43:34+00:00
I'd have more luck petitioning the Central Car Design Committee because

> it is more profitable not to

...and if anyone thinks this is ridiculous, I'd ask them if they are for or against repealing all of our current motor vehicle regulations. If "for," they have admitted to being a hopeless libertarian, and if "against," they have acknowledged that important reasonable features can be incompatible with the profit motive of a free market and it no longer seems so strange that I might have a list which is more of the same.
by johnea | 2025-06-20 17:44:03+00:00
+1 I do love a good js rant!

For a stark comparison, consider the site where these comments are entered.

HN Rulz! No js, no problem! Fast and functional...

And regarding the comment:

> it loads 754kB of JS across 13 requests

It didn't for me, since I browse by default with javascript and cookies disabled.

The site jonoalderson.com worked just fine without them.

I'm not sure why more technically literate people don't do this...
by paxys | 2025-06-20 17:44:08+00:00
The part that is always skipped when making the clothing analogy is that for most of human history good clothes were a luxury. At the time of the industrial revolution it was common for a family to spend 15-25% of their annual income just on clothing. A single shirt from that era would cost the equivalent of £2,000 today when considering material and labor. New clothes were something you may be able to afford once a year, if at all. Like the article says, weavers were the equivalent of PhD scientists who could charge whatever they wanted for their skills (and they would cater pretty much exclusively to kings and the 0.1% of the time). Great if you're the weaver, not so for everyone else.

So the industrial revolution wasn't a conspiracy to put down the lower classes. The lower classes were in fact the biggest benefactors of the industrial revolution.

If software can go the same way, I'd say good riddance. The profession has always kept free from gatekeepers, and that's a good thing.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-06-20 17:44:15+00:00
I was just saying HCL didn't invent block config. Perhaps nginx, Caddy, Lisp, F#'s Computation Expressions all primed me for HCL style syntax so it looks pretty clear to me. The key is understanding the value of that "repeating the key name", because it doesn't just become a keyname, it becomes a constructor and makes the syntax much simpler.

At the end of the day HCL isn't that much more complex than something like yaml. Saying "You don't want your developers learning yaml" is like saying "You don't want your developers learning Yaml. They send an email to the SRE guys, and the SRE guys are the Yaml experts"
by joe_the_user | 2025-06-20 17:44:48+00:00
I don't disagree that nuclear waste can be disposed of safely under good conditions[1].

But I think a fallacy to claim that natural phenomena should inherently be considered "environmentally safe" in human terms. There are coal seam fires that have been going on for centuries and the pollution of these is just as bad as the pollution generated by human created coal mine fires (and that's truly awful, a significant source of carbon pollution).

[1] The problem with nuclear reactors isn't that their pollution couldn't disposed of with ideal methods but that when they run by for-profit corporations, you will always have the company skirting the edge of what's safe 'cause corporations just go bankrupt with catastrophic events and so their risk-reward behavior isn't the risk-reward optima for humanity.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-20 17:46:10+00:00
Profit motives are a relatively recent phenomenon, though, and are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary).

> Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career.

Does this not horrify you? That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, or growing - is no longer a "profitable enterprise"? Something every human needs in order to survive, has been perverted and denigrated to the point that it is no longer profitable?

That should be horrifying. It should be the red flag that spurs action against a gross system of exploitation and goal misalignment. For all the crowing about AI misalignment wiping out humanity, we have actual economic misalignment leaving humans homeless, starving, and dying of curable illness not from lack of supply or demand, but purely from placing profit above all.

To see defeatists and fatalists jump in comments and say "that's just how it is" while prostrating themselves in worship to the almighty share price should infuriate us as a species, for these are humans who willingly accept their own demise at the hands of others rather than doing anything of value for their own self-preservation, let alone preservation of the species.
by bitpush | 2025-06-20 17:46:35+00:00
> Apple would get a bonafide AI service it could plug right into Safari and Siri that would revamp its disappointing AI offering.

Apple is not setup to ingest data at a large scale, analyze them and make anything useful about it. It will be such a weird cultural mismatch. For perplexity to be effective, they need to hoover worlds information at industrial scale, which Apple doesnt historically like.

I dont see a path for Apple to get effective in AI, by themselves. Apple made the bed with claiming data is radioactive, and now those decisions are coming to bite them in the ass.
by miki123211 | 2025-06-20 17:46:39+00:00
1. What's your approach to accessibility? Do you test accessibility of the phoenix.new UI? Considering that many people effectively use Phoenix to write front-ends, have you conducted any evals on how accessible those frontends come out?

2. How do you handle 3rd party libraries? Can the agent access library docs somehow? Considering that Elixir is less popular than more mainstream languages, and hence has less training data available, this seems like an important problem to solve.
by bloppe | 2025-06-20 17:46:46+00:00
I've been daily-driving Linux for decades. I know how valuable it is. But I'm also "that guy" who likes examining every little piece of my system. I thought we were talking about the normies who just "hear good things" about Linux (especially soft-core developers) but aren't really interested in everything going on under the hood, and are willing to shell out a grand or two every couple years for new hardware and tech support.
by erikerikson | 2025-06-20 17:47:00+00:00
As an adopted person "biological <insert title>" has worked well for the parents that had sex to make me. For a donor parent, I probably just use "donor <insert title>". I'd advise not worrying too much about the language though. Being kind and thoughtful is far more important than selecting the correct words. A snap judgment selection of proximal words is sloppy but it's impractical to pause to select exactly the right language in all cases for all statements. So too with something this sensitive it might be good to slow a little.
by codingdave | 2025-06-20 17:47:22+00:00
This is why when I am looking at the background of the leadership of any organization I am considering joining, I consider it a red flag if the leadership has a consulting background and is now trying to run a company. Even the top consultants from the most prestigious firms simply don't have experience living with the long tail impacts of their own work, and it shows. My worst jobs by far have been the ones led by ex-consultants.

That isn't to say those people don't have talents - they do. But long-term organizational leadership is not one of them.
by SquidJack | 2025-06-20 17:47:39+00:00
Hey HN, SR, co-founder of Kasp here.

Let's be honest: most "AI" chatbots are just glorified search bars with a chat UI. They match keywords, pull from a FAQ, and fail the moment a user asks something slightly complex.

I learned this the hard way. A few months ago, I was a full-stack dev at an e-commerce company, and we were drowning in support tickets. We were spending 6+ hours every day answering the same repetitive questions about pricing, features, and "how-to"s. It was killing our productivity.

We looked at existing solutions, but they were either the keyword-finders that frustrated users or complex enterprise tools that cost a fortune. So, we decided to build our own.

But we quickly found that even standard RAG solutions struggle with complex questions that require understanding the customer's context. We tried hundreds of techniques, but most were only good for simple Q&A.

Our key breakthrough was developing a custom implementation on top of RAG that's designed to understand user intent and context. The goal isn't to deflect users by linking to an article, but to provide a direct, accurate answer that genuinely solves their problem. For that project, it's now accurately handling ~80% of inbound queries.

We've decided to turn this into a product and just opened the waitlist. We'd love to hear what this community thinks. Is this "glorified search bar" problem something you've experienced too?

Link: https://www.kasp.chat/
by TZubiri | 2025-06-20 17:48:17+00:00
"You seem to think that paperwork with a country’s name on it"

Is that what you call your country's constitution?

It's the land of your country first, without a country and without a (1T/yr) army, you might have the right to land, but not its exercise. The right to your land is guaranteed by your constitution, and in the same breath it defines that they are sovereign to all of the land in the States. It's not your land first and then the state's sovereign, but the other way around.

Since we are on the subject of the constitution,

"“The Congress shall have Power... To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” “To provide for the common Defence…”

So I wasn't too far off with the argument of your neighbours having a say on who you invite over to your land. It seems you are the one with the contrarian viewpoint.
by prasadjoglekar | 2025-06-20 17:48:36+00:00
The biggest downside is that the reason this was done had little or nothing to do with congestion. That's a side effect. It was to fill budget holes in the MTA, which is a notorious money pit that delivers far less value than the billions if gobbles up.

There's a real chance that future cash flows from this congestion pricing are going to be securitized for today's cash payments, similar to Chicago parking.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-transit-governor-s...
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-06-20 17:49:20+00:00
> Unlike dark matter, ordinary matter emits light of various wavelengths and thus can be seen. But a large chunk of it is diffuse and spread thinly among halos that surround galaxies as well as in the vast spaces between galaxies.

> Due to its diffuse nature, roughly half of ordinary matter in the universe went unaccounted for and had been considered "missing"—until now.

Not being mean, genuine question: How would you improve the clarity of this?
by johnea | 2025-06-20 17:49:34+00:00
City of San Diego added over 9000 units last year, homelessness increased 8-/

When a shiny new 2 bedroom apartment is priced at $4200/month, it isn't going to do ANYTHING to resolve homelessness.

Outlaw AirBnB! Outlaw empty "investment" properties. There are a lot of things that could actually help. Empowering the California real estate mafia won't do anything for anyone here except the developers.
by Kye | 2025-06-20 17:49:36+00:00
That fits with how I was thinking of it. I had something like this in mind: https://www.sciencealert.com/galaxy-speared-with-black-holes...

Galaxies are tiny little things in a telescope's view and a satellite always in that view, even if it's only one out of so many shots, could make it harder to glean useful data from an interaction between two galaxies like that. That beam is moving at near the speed of light and a telescope like this could tell us if there are fleeting but significant changes in all that power interacting with matter. Unless a satellite interferes with that light at just the wrong time.
by WillAdams | 2025-06-20 17:50:37+00:00
The thing is, Literate Programming is not documentation --- if it was, _TeX: The Program_ and _The TeXbook_ would be interchangeable, and they are not (that plain.tex is not a literate program is a different discussion).

When I write Literate Programs, it's mostly for future me so that I can remember why a particular approach was taken, or what the significance of the two slightly differently named variable is and why they are not interchangeable. If it's for others to use, then user documentation is a specific section of the program code, and possibly a totally separate document (only written after the fact when the UI and so forth is stable enough that things won't change).

FWIW, I am working to reimplement parts of METAFONT in my current project (need the curves, and want an implementation which will also allow me to write out a .mp file) and I'm finding _METAFONT: The Program_ very helpful.