MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by philwelch | 2025-06-07 22:40:39+00:00
> I'm not saying it has to be C++ levels of abstraction. But there is a line between interface and implementation that ought to be kept. C headers are nearly perfect for this, letting you hide and rename and recast stuff differently than your .c file has, allowing you to change how stuff works internally.

Can’t you do this in Zig with modules? I thought that’s what the ‘pub’ keyword was for.

You can’t have private fields in a struct that’s publicly available but the same is sort of true in C too. OO style encapsulation isn’t the only way to skin a cat, or to send the cat a message to skin itself as the case may be.
by vkou | 2025-06-07 22:40:47+00:00
Yeltsin was the strongman ruler of the 90s. When parliament wouldn't kowtow to him, he launched a bloody coup and then rewrote the constitution to consolidate power in his office.

The only thing that he was truly unsuccessful at as a politician was failing to shrug off some bullshit credit card bribery scandal.

When you've deployed tanks and mortars against the lawful government, and everyone's fine with that I can't understand why you'd let a few thousands dollars that you put on a company credit card bring you down.

> Present circumstances in America aren't that different.

They are different, in the sense that all the damage happening right now is both unnecessary and self-inflicted. Russia needed to do something to transition from the USSR. Shock therapy was a terrible 'something', but it's at least possible to see how it got there.

2025 is... Something else entirely.
by gausswho | 2025-06-07 22:42:35+00:00
My current approach is restic, but I'd prefer to have asymmetric passwords, essentially the backup machine only having write access (while maintaining deduplication). This way if the backup machine were compromised, and therefore the password it needs to write, the backup repo itself would still be secure since it would use a different password for reading.

Is this what append-only achieved for Borg?
by exceptione | 2025-06-07 22:43:30+00:00
> A culture that produces that kind of hatred will not be stopped by losing > a channel to express it. Word of mouth spreads quickly, > and actions speak even louder.

Culture... is the thing that prevents the enacting of our bestial urges. This channel normalizes the bestiality, and so it becomes culture.

Every society have some people without a mic that are blatantly inhuman. A society becomes it when you give them a mic.
by Retric | 2025-06-07 22:44:08+00:00
52.9% vs 45.7% of the electoral vote doesn’t come down to race here.

Obama was vastly more charismatic and coming after for years of an unpopular Republican president, 28% on election night. https://news.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ra...

Not that idiot was enough to resonate with voters.
by bink | 2025-06-07 22:44:34+00:00
It does sound fantastical. A piece of code that can violate the same origin policy would be a huge vulnerability. Meta could be working with other sites to share data on users via code running on both sites, but snooping on tax data without the IRS helping? Unlikely.

I can only assume they're suggesting that companies like Intuit and H&R Block are sharing this data with Meta, but that seems like a huge violation of privacy and with tax data it might even be illegal.
by vips7L | 2025-06-07 22:44:47+00:00
Foundation and Earth (the last of the sequels) had some good sections. Like when they visited the Spacer worlds and the mystery around Earth. But in the end that mystery just fell flat.

I personally felt like the worst part was the dialog between Golan and Bliss/Gaia; they just droned on in debate about isolates bs galaxia. I think I could have overlooked that if there was something to do with the Foundation at all in the book.
by kasey_junk | 2025-06-07 22:46:13+00:00
One of the exciting things to me about the ai agents is how they push and allow you to build processes that we’ve always known were important but were frequently not prioritized in the face of shipping the system.

You can use how uncomfortable you are with the ai doing something as a signal that you need to invest in systematic verification of that something. As a for instance in the link, the team could build a system for verifying and validating their data migrations. That would move a whole class of changes into the ai relm.

This is usually much easier to quantify and explain externally than nebulous talk about tech debt in that system.
by cma | 2025-06-07 22:46:25+00:00
> an inexperienced President (Yeltsin) who lacked a unifying vision for the newly formed republic and wasn't respected by its business elite or by foreign leaders

Probably can't mention Yeltsin in the context of strongmen without mentioning the shelling of the parliament building.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Russian_constitutional_cr...
by brudgers | 2025-06-07 22:47:18+00:00
Competing on price is a disadvantageous business strategy.

Good clients want to pay enough to get good results…they want to pay you to do it right. Good clients have budgets to cover this and a low price is a red flag.

Bad clients don’t care if you make money and are attracted by low rates.

If you have a low rate you won’t be paid well and will be dealing with bad clients.

And on top of all that, no client wants to hear that you don’t want to work hard…and to the degree your question is intended as an indirect way of marketing your services, it is a footgun.
by trod1234 | 2025-06-07 22:47:36+00:00
I think someone may have wanted to bring more attention to this because contrary to surface level opinion and the peak on the surface; there is actually a growing number of people who meet the requirements to be eligible for disability but who do not receive those benefits.

There's a longstanding fear, and one that seems well founded, where those that meet the requirements won't actually file for it because doing so will have an adverse effect on any potential future employment.

Disability discrimination during hiring is almost impossible to prove with AI these days.

I've heard horror stories from some people at the shelter where I volunteer. One guy apparently had a county representative check the wrong boxes on benefit documents by mistake during welfare processing, saying a person was disabled because of a health condition (sleep apnea iirc) when they weren't disabled or receiving disability, and those people couldn't even find retail work afterwards.

AI has opened the floodgates to all sorts of discrimination as a result of the weights and decision-making being a black box with no accountability.
by Tijdreiziger | 2025-06-07 22:47:41+00:00
I read a comment on Reddit along the lines of ‘if you doomscroll every day to wake up, you wreck your dopamine levels for the day before even getting out of bed’.

I don’t have enough medical knowledge to assess this claim, but I made a simple rule: don’t touch the phone before getting out of bed! (except to turn off the alarm)

So far, it really seems to work!
by npinsker | 2025-06-07 22:48:07+00:00
I think the summary at the beginning of your first video is misleading; it's not a way to "trade space for time", at least not in an arbitrary program. The real statement is a bit odder to wrap one's head around -- "every problem solvable in t time on a multitape Turing machine is also solvable in close to √t space".

For a Turing machine that already solves a problem in n time and √n space (in other words, a lot of them!), it doesn't say anything.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-06-07 22:48:32+00:00
It isn’t hard at all if you live in east or west Africa. Or if you live in Italy, or if you live in China, you can see local variations that are generalized in other places. It’s always been like, only recently have we made distinctions between Asians in say Iran and Japan (both are technically oriental by medieval European standards) .
by originalvichy | 2025-06-07 22:51:03+00:00
It’s not GPS geolocation, it’s the fact that the use of supply chains for injecting a container filled with drones is easier to sneak in when you’re a massive exporter like China. Nukes might already be flying before China has to resort to these tactics against the US, but there are other potential victims like Taiwan or other neighbours who can have major hubs and infrastructure damaged like this before a major attack.
by numpad0 | 2025-06-07 22:51:13+00:00
Those don't work in Tokyo during summers. 40C/104F ambient temp, all-day 100% RH, optional salt in the wind, the every populated areas of the country is basically a bioreactor. We just haven't found such materials that can make distinction between just waiting at a crosswalk in Tokyo and being in a bacterial composting chamber.

I mean, the simplest solution to this problem might be to leave that borderline uninhabitable hellhole and move to Europe where food in bamboo wraps or home-washed glass containers don't start stringing in matters of hours, but that's not an option for most.

Also, you might be thinking that some of those wrap materials were historically viable, but it has to be noted that the content inside were much less healthier than it is now. Medieval Japanese people were estimated to have taken as much as 50g/day/person of salt, which is literally 10x WHO recommendations, or like 1.5 cups per week, or one small backpack worth per year. Adding that much of salt to food is no different from marinading it in chemical preservatives, only much worse.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-06-07 22:51:16+00:00
I get why you want to self host, although I also get why you don’t want.

Selfhosting is a pain in the ass, it needs updating docker, things break sometimes, sometimes it’s only you and not anyone else so you’re left alone searching the solution, and even when it works it’s often a bit clunky.

I have a extremely limited list of self hosted tool that just work and are saving me time (first one on that list would be firefly) but god knows i wasted quite a bit of my time setting up stuffs that eventually broke and that i just abandoned.

Today I’m very happy with paying for stuff if the company is respecting privacy and has descent pricing.
by magicalhippo | 2025-06-07 22:51:39+00:00
> The problem is that the recent government studies that say high altitude can hurt electronics are all made by alarmists.

Was just thinking about how electronics back in the 80s and 90s tended to die from static electricity and similar very often, as they didn't have much built-in protection.

These days almost all transistors and microcontrollers have built-in overvoltage protection, and all serious circuits adds additional external protection like TVS diodes and such, especially for anything connected to cables (which would act as antennas).

So I'm guessing the area which an EMP is effective could be lower these days compared to back in the 80s and 90s?
by mwkaufma | 2025-06-07 22:52:07+00:00
> You need to be able to change the internal representation without breaking users.

Unless the user only links an opaque pointer, then just changing the sizeof() is breaking, even if the fields in question are hidden. A simple doc comment indicating that "fields starting with _ are not guaranteed to be minor-version-stable" or somesuch is a perfectly "reasonable" API.
by bell-cot | 2025-06-07 22:52:58+00:00
Summary: Lawyers filed fake citations, court made unhappy noises.

If the courts actually cared about lawyers filing AI-fabricated lies, then they'd perma-ban the offenders for life.

Vs. it sure sounds like the courts only care about preserving their shoddy delusions of a competent and honest legal system. While protecting their buddies on the other side of the bench.
by zxexz | 2025-06-07 22:53:31+00:00
I’m all for not using nix, especially where it doesn’t make sense. But rebuilding a working system from scratch, for reasons that aren’t actually a problem if they were to have spent even a couple hours looking at how people already solve those issues, seems fundamentally insane.

Like others have said here, nix2container and flakes seem like they would address every problem they have.

With regard to versioning, I have flakes written 3 years ago that still build with exactly the same versions and the same output as when it was first written.

Sure does sound like that want to go to market and raise off a platform :D

Edit: Literally just checked nixpacks’ github and it immediately jumped out to me that they are using rustPlatform in nixpkgs, not oxalica’s rust-overlay[0] which would have come up in any cursory search for the rust issues. And is one of the most useful and powerful overlays I’ve used.

[0] https://github.com/oxalica/rust-overlay
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-06-07 22:54:04+00:00
>> You're quoting articles from 2019. Do you realise how quickly technology and startups evolve in a single year, let alone 6?

So that I don't misunderstand what you mean, do you mean that Builder.ai evolved into using less AI than what they were using in 2019?

That is, do you mean that in 2019 roughly 82% of an app the company had recently developed “was built autonomously, in the first hour” by Engineer.ai’s technology, according to the quote above, and during the next 6 years the company evolved so that less of their apps' code was built by AI?
by sbierwagen | 2025-06-07 22:54:10+00:00
Yes, 2020 was much better, despite the scattering of Orange Man Bad that the author couldn't help from inserting.

One important thing is that the US's response to NK in that book was non-nuclear. They can kill millions of Americans but they are not actually an existential threat. The US did not use nuclear weapons on Afghanistan after 9/11, they used conventional explosives.

Another is that, according to 2020 at least, the North does not have a very robust nuclear command and control communications system, or, being a small country, much in the way of space surveillance assets. They apparently use regular cell phones and commercial imagery.

One of the unfortunate coincidences that kick off the nuclear launch is that the cell phone network is overloaded after South Korea does a missile strike on one of the dictator's residences. From NK's view, missile strikes on official residences and the abrupt collapse of communications, with no reliable information from the outside world, mean that a NATO decapitation strike is underway, so they launch the missiles before they lose them. You wouldn't have the same scenario in the US, simply because we have so many more nuclear weapons and a much longer nuclear command line of succession that a decapitation attack with conventional weapons would take millions of cruise missiles. (North Korea has no backup dictator, while the US has 18 people in the order of succession.)
by bombcar | 2025-06-07 22:54:54+00:00
Yeah, there are various regions but I don't consider it long distance until it has a sleeper (which I don't believe Acela has).

Pacific Surfliner is also very popular and close to profitable.

To be fair, Amtrak could make some or more of its routes profitable depending on how it allocates expenses - after all, they get hired to run some of the commuter rails, too.
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-06-07 22:55:49+00:00
Source? Liberalization since the 1970s (so called "neoliberalism") has lifted more people out of poverty than any economic system in human history. ~60% of all humans lived in extreme poverty in 1970, and less than 10% do today. This period coincided with the expansion of free trade, deregulation of markets, modernization of monetary policy, and, perhaps most notably, the downfall of communism. I'd say capitalism is a net positive compared to what we had before, and especially compared to the alternative
by Aloha | 2025-06-07 22:56:07+00:00
You always lose something when doing optical printing - you can often gain things too, but its not 1:1.

I adore this hybrid workflow, because I can pick how the photo will look, color palate, grain, whatever by picking my film, then I can use digital to fix (most if not all of) the inherent limitations in analog film.

Sadly, film is too much of a pain today, photography has long been about composition for me, not cameras or process - I liked film because I got a consistent result, but I can use digital too, and I do today.
by buu700 | 2025-06-07 22:56:12+00:00
Because if the LLM is a black box and its output must ultimately be verified by humans, then you can't treat conversion of prompts into code as a simple build step as though an AI agent were just some sort of compiler. You still need to persist the actual code in source control.

(I assume that isn't what you're actually arguing against, in which case at least one of us must have misread something from the parent chain.)
by bayindirh | 2025-06-07 22:56:14+00:00
This comment needs to be pinned, alongside what the developers say [0] since the change is very misunderstood.

> The "no-delete" permission disallows deleting objects as well as overwriting existing objects.

[0]: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/8798#issuecomment-29...
by trod1234 | 2025-06-07 22:56:20+00:00
Not just a total rethinking, but rather a total redevelopment to find an economic system that is just as stable as capitalism in a free market (without fiat).

Socialism fails 100% of the time given sufficient time, UBI is tied to socialism.

If your food production yield is dependent on maintaining your supply chain which fails under socialism, you basically run into a hysteresis trap under socialism where this fails, and everyone starves to death.

Its like the ending of Daybreakers, where blood becomes increasingly scarce, and the dynamics of it all force some unwilling sacrifices which start a chain reaction.

Just an FYI, Money-printing/non-reserve debt issuance is a catalyst for war/ revolution.
by starkparker | 2025-06-07 22:56:30+00:00
> Almost every feature required multiple iterations and refinements. This isn't a limitation—it's how the collaboration works.

I guess that's where a big miss in understanding so much of the messaging about generative AI in coding happens for me, and why the Fly.io skepticism blog post irritated me so much as well.

It _is_ how collaboration with a person works, but the when you have to fix the issues that the tool created, you aren't collaborating with a person, you're making up for a broken tool.

I can't think of any field where I'd be expected to not only put up with, but also celebrate, a tool that screwed up and required manual intervention so often.

The level of anthropomorphism that occurs in order to advocate on behalf of generative AI use leads to saying things like "it's how collaboration works" here, when I'd never say the same thing about the table saw in my woodshop, or even the relatively smart cruise control on my car.

Generative AI is still just a tool built by people following a design, and which purportedly makes work easier. But when my saw tears out cuts that I have to then sand or recut, or when my car slams on the brakes because it can't understand a bend in the road around a parking lane, I don't shrug and ascribe them human traits and blame myself for being frustrated over how they collaborate with me.
by paulryanrogers | 2025-06-07 22:56:45+00:00
IME Trump supporters will justify anything he does or may plausibly have done. They're too invested in him or have bought into the idea that the other must be so much worse.

Elon stans seem to have a similar mindset.

Getting folks to think critically about Elon's actions would require an Epstein video of Trump engaging in SA with a clearly underage child. Likely only if coming out of police evidence lockers sealed before AI video existed. And it would have to be reported widely and maybe even released publicly without cuts (only blurring).
by dgb23 | 2025-06-07 22:56:49+00:00
Some years ago I started to just not care about setting things to "private" (in any language). And I care _a lot_ about long term maintainability and breakage. I haven't regretted it since.

> You cannot reasonably form API contracts (...) unless you can hide the internal representation.

Yes you can, by communicating the intended use can be made with comments/docstrings, examples etc.

One thing I learned from the Clojure world, is to have a separate namespace/package or just section of code, that represents an API that is well documented, nice to use and more importantly stable. That's really all that is needed.

(Also, there are cases where you actually need to use a thing in a way that was not intended. That obviously comes with risk, but when you need it, you're _extremely_ glad that you can.)
by Retric | 2025-06-07 22:56:54+00:00
> Code is a liability, not an asset.

So you have no idea what that phrase means. If you don’t think code is an asset don’t write it.

O wait obviously that’s not what code is a liability means. Code is a liability in the same way roads or buildings are a liability, they incur an ongoing cost, but removing the US highway system would be just as idiotic as a startup deleting their source repository from a misunderstood idea.

More importantly valueless code stops being a liability because you can abandon it. Calling it a liability implies it has value.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-06-07 22:57:38+00:00
Your post has good points. The problem is you're assuming a group that invested X and believes they have to charge Y to recover it. That this is fair and makes sense. (It mostly is and does.)

In fact, most AI suppliers ripped off other people to the tune of TB (copyright infringement), spent a lot on the training, and want to recover their costs only while denying content creators theirs. So, let's start with this being about massive infringement of something they sell to shift all value to themselves.

From there, they can sell only top dollar to enterprises or tiered amounts based on buyer income. The latter being discounts applied to a high, but reasonable, default price. Also, they can be open about this or call us for a quote.

There are companies that do the first. They often bundle features into Plus, Pro, or Enterprise deals to make those sells more straightforward. So, the AI suppliers could definitely do that. They dont have to but it would be good. Hence, me bringing it up where their employees read.

The other point creates asymmetric information between the seller snd the buyer in a way that only benefits the seller in a sellers' market. High-performance AI is probably a seller's market right now. Most writing on that says the asymmetry is bad for buyers by default. Also, goes badly for them more often than transparent pricing upfront. So, I call it out by default.

The only thing worse is if the terms of deals are kept secret. That enables and drags out abuses for longer. I cant find any pricing information on a lot of the AI offerings. That suggests they're doing that, too. If any NDA's on price or performance, stay away unless absolutely necessary.
by hsbauauvhabzb | 2025-06-07 22:59:33+00:00
- they start using per-person pricing or continually increase the cost now that they know a nag > purchase workflow works

- that they start applying per-person based costs to other searches (just because gmail is free for me, maybe your account has ‘reached a maximum usage’ and now you must pay, or they just drop storage limits of free to 500kb)

- that they plug that data into their analytics platform and sell the information that you personally will purchase services if nagged enough

Should I continue?

To add, I think the biggest difference here is google is actively engineering detection mechanisms for ublock, and then nagging users who use ublock, most of the people who use ublock probably wouldn’t pay for premium. I’d sooner pay for floatplane than do that.

Edit: and all that in conjunction with abusing their browser monopoly control to reduce the effectiveness of ublock and similar plugins.
by lll-o-lll | 2025-06-07 23:01:18+00:00
Not everyone has to follow the MS approach of not breaking clients that rely on “undocumented” behavior. Document what will not be broken in future, change the rest and ignore the wailing.

It’s antithetical to what Zig is all about to hide the implementation. The whole idea is you can read the entire program without having to jump through abstractions 10 layers deep.