MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-12 04:21:17+00:00
The IDF is using AI to whitewash ethics in the same way genai is using it to whitewash copyright.

Historically, things have gone badly for society when ills were mostly constrained by potential culpability and prosecution of humans... and then that restriction was suddenly removed by technological advancement.

And the cybersecurity industry / CISOs (aka fall people, giving someone responsibility without authority) are a poor pattern to use to effectively limit tail risk.

At minimum, something more like financial auditing / engineer sign-off should be put in place around productionalized AI, preferably via a third-party.
by alexjplant | 2025-06-12 04:22:15+00:00
Ruby is only just now getting static typing and Rails has a lot of "magic" as part of its value prop. If you're trying to launch something of low to medium complexity quickly and stay on the happy path of the tools in the ecosystem then it works great. The lack of rigor from dynamic typing and latitude afforded by Ruby's expressive syntax can quickly become a footgun though.

My pet theory is that LLM coding is going to give the upper hand to more verbose languages like Golang or Typescript because more of the execution flow will end up explicitly in the LLM's context. Convention over configuration-type frameworks ruled when one-person code bulldozers shipped MVPs but Continue is upending this paradigm.
by yencabulator | 2025-06-12 04:22:51+00:00
Meanwhile, all the self-driving that's currently happening is within well-controlled small geographic areas and some limited interstates/highways, and based on matching observed surroundings to pre-made very detailed maps. Okay, sure.

As I said, I'll believe it's solved when these limitations are no longer necessary for it to work. You can choose to believe it based on a research project or marketing materials.
by 0xCE0 | 2025-06-12 04:23:26+00:00
This premise is how AI is sold by the AI companies. It is the software-level equivalent of perfect cheap obidient slave (employee) for the master (employer).

I really wonder how all this AI stuff feels/seems to a management person who is not a programmer/low-level-minded person. I remember the time when large portion of average workers could barely understand how to "use computer", let alone the wonder of some simple Excel-VBA/Python magic, and as of now, humanlike magical text prompts. Now after decade(s), some of these persons are in a management position dealing with "AI".
by w-hn | 2025-06-12 04:23:33+00:00
Do these tech overlords find it really hard to resist the “pitching in” part even after they’ve already deployed millions and billions in PR? Maybe just the itching thumb? Yeah, maybe.

> AI driving faster scientific progress and increased productivity will be enormous; the future can be vastly better than the present

And then nothing substantial after this proclamatory hot-take. So let’s just choose to believe le ai propheté.

It’s like quick instructions to PR team style written post (and then asking an LLM to inflate it) from the comforts of a warm and cozy Japanese seat.

Definitely not written by Genini at least. Usually does a better job than this. Well, at least like Zuck he eats his own food that he killed.

Will be looking forward to titles like “The Vehement Duality” &c in the near future.
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-06-12 04:27:19+00:00
Why on Earth would they have designed the lock so that it would not respond to mouse moves or keyboard input but WOULD respond to mouse clicks?

Is it possible there was an intended use case where the machine was set to do exactly one thing, which could be safely triggered by anyone with a mouse click event? Or was it simply that mouse clicks without mouse moves were low risk enough to not bother limiting them?
by frfl | 2025-06-12 04:27:23+00:00
Sorry, but what's the point of your comment exactly? It's a famous picture and the article already mentioned it's criticized by some for lacking a focal point. Yet it's a famous and iconic photo that's immediately recognized by hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, around the world. "Real" seems completely irrelevant. Windows 98, Vista, 7, 10 all dont look real, but are they going to have the same fame as XP and it's background did...probably not on the same level.
by cloudtrucks | 2025-06-12 04:27:30+00:00
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by pixelsynth | 2025-06-12 04:28:28+00:00
Spark allows you to construct compute graphs at runtime in Javascript and have them compiled and run on the GPU and not be bound by the CPU: https://sparkjs.dev/docs/dyno-overview/

WebGL2 isn't the best graphics API, but it allows anyone to write Javascript code to harness the GPU for compute and rendering, and run on pretty much any device via the web browser. That's pretty amazing IMO!
by marcus_holmes | 2025-06-12 04:28:50+00:00
Yeah, but the Africans involved didn't invent the phones.

I've always found it fascinating with the history of the Industrial Revolution that it wasn't so much about technology, as about the exact right circumstances arising so that the technology could be used and improved. There had to be industrialists, an industry that needed the invention badly enough and people rich enough to be able to gamble on the unproven inventions. The technology itself (as others have said) rests on the shoulders of multiple layers of giants. The society had to be willing to change, and cope with the new inventions and their social consequences (Britain nearly wasn't, as the Luddites showed, and both China and Japan sealed themselves off from foreign inventions to preserve their societies unchanged).

From what I know of late Roman society, it was stratified and fixed, an oligarchy. Any threat to the patrician class would not have been accepted, and the patrician class had no reason to change. This is different from 18th Century Britain where the rising merchant class were challenging the remnants of the feudal peerage, who didn't have enough power to stop them.

I think your premise is interesting, but only as fiction.
by wkat4242 | 2025-06-12 04:29:57+00:00
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think all of this stuff worked on iOS 1 in the original iPhone. It didn't have multi-tasking for most things, but preinstalled apps like the Clock and Mail were special.

Also, they forced app developers right from the start (well from iPhone OS 2 because 1 didn't have third party apps) to expect their app to be killed at any time, and to save state constantly so that they could resume exactly where the user left off. Sounds like Firefox neglected to do this which is really awful when targeting such limited devices. It's one of the little things hat could have made it more workable.
by kouteiheika | 2025-06-12 04:31:43+00:00
> You wrote exactly so I'm going to say "no". [...] If you think charitably, the author is right.

No, the author is objectively wrong. Let me quote the article and clarify myself:

> Fine-tuning advanced LLMs isn’t knowledge injection — it’s destructive overwriting. [...] When you fine-tune, you risk erasing valuable existing patterns, leading to unexpected and problematic downstream effects. [...] Instead, use modular methods like [...] adapters.

This is just incorrect. LoRA is exactly like normal fine-tuning here in this particular context. The author's argument is that you should do LoRA because it doesn't do any "destructive overwriting", but in that aspect it's no different than normal fine-tuning.

In fact, there's evidence that LoRA can actually make the problem worse[1]:

> we first show that the weight matrices trained with LoRA have new, high-ranking singular vectors, which we call intruder dimensions [...] LoRA fine-tuned models with intruder dimensions are inferior to fully fine-tuned models outside the adaptation task’s distribution, despite matching accuracy in distribution.

[1] -- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21228

To be fair, "if you don't know what you're doing then doing LoRA over normal finetuning" is, in general, a good advice in my opinion. But that's not what the article is saying.

> But on what basis do you say that "most people do"?

On the basis of seeing what the common practice is, at least in the open (in the local LLM community and in the research space).

> I would just say this: there are many good reasons to not merge

I never said that there aren't good reasons to not merge.

> It seems to me you are being some combination of: uncharitable, overlooking another valid way of reading the text, being too quick to judge.

No, I'm just tired of constantly seeing a torrent of misinformation from people who don't know much about how these models actually work nor have done any significant work on their internals, yet try to write about them with authority.
by gassi | 2025-06-12 04:31:46+00:00
Hosted as in self-hosted, as in run on a server with Docker/Proxmox/Unraid and accessible via a web browser, as opposed to running locally on a single device.

The solution isn't ideal for those who hoard entire romsets, but it's great for those of us who curate their collections down to a more manageable size. That can be anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand games, and the metadata sources are fairly robust at that scale.
by lelandbatey | 2025-06-12 04:32:21+00:00
I've seen poorly-built code on rails circa 2014, and I've seen Rails done pretty well circa-2025. I'd say rails is pretty neutral. Saying it's PHP bad seems a bit much, but hey.

The worst code I've ever seen by a country mile though was a huge Python 2 code base written on an old version of Tornado circa 2012, a library that basically hacked the Python language to get code to run asynchronously, but you had to contort yourself into knots to get it. You couldn't just call other async functions/methods, you had to `yield func()` when calling them. To return from a function, you couldn't use `return` you had to throw an exception of type Tornado.Return. Absolutely insane way to write code.

Then all the business logic written on top of this bizarre framework was terrible. Half of the code broke the rules I just mentioned but still half-worked sometimes, but would perform terribly or have mysterious problems.

One of my greatest accomplishments was getting it all to Python3 then onto more sane async-style code.
by throwanem | 2025-06-12 04:33:27+00:00
I wouldn't really call it a pet theory at this point; HN's front page daily further shows that LLMs suck at magic and excel at boring code, seeming quite immune to boredom. But I would argue what makes the difference for LLMs is not verbosity but locality, whether syntactic or analytical ie whether the type is just written here or you have an LSP server to query for it, the distinction is, being able to point to an arbitrary symbol and get lots of rich context about it.

It's a game changer for human devs also, and not really one I would expect a serious Rails habitué to necessarily evaluate in a way that's reliable. What did someone call that once, the "Blub Paradox?" Silly name, but that's this industry for you.
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-06-12 04:33:43+00:00
I think the proper way to compare probabilities/proportions is by odds ratios. 99:1 vs 99999:1. (So a little more than 1000x.) This also lets you talk about “doubling likelihood”, where twice as likely as 1/2=1:1 is 2:1=2/3, and twice as likely again is 4:1=4/5.
by roberttod | 2025-06-12 04:34:16+00:00
I remember such a project, and due to our large and aging TypeScript frontend projects it would have added a couple of weeks to adjust all the types affected. All IDs in many places deep in code caused thousands of errors from the mismatch which was a nightmare. I can't remember exactly why it was so tough to go through them all, but we were under intense time pressure.

To speed things up we decided to correct the ID types for the server response, which was key since they were generated from protobuf. But we kept everything using number type IDs everywhere else, even though they would actually be strings, which would not cause many issues because there ain't much reason to be doing numeric operations on an ID, except the odd sort function.

I remember the smirk on my face when I suggested it to my colleague and at the time we knew it was what made sense. It must have been one of the dumbest solutions I've ever thought of, but it allowed us to switch the type eventually to string as we changed code, instead of converting the entire repos at once. Such a Javascript memory that one :)
by runarberg | 2025-06-12 04:34:17+00:00
Sorry, I misspoke in my posting. I was gonna say zones which exclude Palestinians, i.e. the city is now segregated as a result of the Israeli occupation and illegal annexation of the city.

The segregation of 1948 was a direct result of Israels unilateral declaration of independence. So I think we can say that the city was unsegregated from the fourth century, throughout the Arab and the Ottoman conquest, all the way up to the formation of Israel, at which point the city became segregated again for the first time since the Roman period.

Just to clarify: I’m not a fan of segregation, it was not OK when Jordan did it, it was very bad that the Romans did it. And it is even worse that Israel is still doing it.
by soulofmischief | 2025-06-12 04:35:02+00:00
Oh hey Simon!

I independently landed on the same architecture in a prior startup before you published your dual LLM blog post, though unfortunately there's nothing left standing to show since that company experienced a hostile board takeover, the board squeezed me out of my CTO position in order to plant a yes man, pivoted to something I was against, and then recently shut down after failing to find product-market fit.

I still am interested in the architecture, have continued to play around with it in personal projects, and some other engineers I speak to have mentioned it before, so I think the idea is spreading although I haven't knowingly seen it in a popular product.
by scott_w | 2025-06-12 04:35:47+00:00
> No, you didn’t lol.

Just because you don’t like getting schooled doesn’t change the fact that you were.

> Also, are you under the impression that a random soldier going on a killing spree against innocent Americans would be treated the same as the President playing legal games, albeit ones with very serious consequences?

A president that pardoned murderers from January 6th? A president that said there were good people in a group of neonazi rioters? A president that sent those military people in there against the legal restrictions on sending the military in? A president that fired all people in the chain of command who would say “no?”

Yes, I think it’ll be treated differently, just not the same way you will.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-12 04:36:43+00:00
Who cares about it being a scoop or how they sourced it. The information came to me by them. Where did you get the notion that any of this is the sole purpose of a news organization?

You know that the newspaper had other sections in it that, wait for it, wasn't news, right? They had lifestyle sections. They had sports sections. They even had comics. None of that was news as whatever your strict definition seems to be, but it was information that people were interested in knowing. Maybe you don't. Great. Move along and stop trying to ruin it for everyone else just because you don't get it.
by geocrasher | 2025-06-12 04:37:27+00:00
If the real job doesn't match the interview, then it's the wrong job.

Simple as that.

I once took a position at a company that I had known because they were a customer of my then current employer. We'd always gotten along, they were nice folks, had a good interview.

In a very short time, I wondered what the heck was going on. There was so much drama, infighting, and backbiting, and it was the complete opposite of the company's external persona. People were constantly being moved to different desks with no rhyme or reason- as in, a whole department rearranged 4x in the 8 months I was there. I had 3 or 4 different desks in that time.

People were regularly worried about their jobs and whether the company would even be around after family fights. And when they no longer needed me they started playing games with me, writing me up for things I hadn't done etc. Anything to avoid having to pay unemployment.

I knew in the first couple of weeks. But a bit of me died at that job. Eventually they fired me. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't given them the opportunity and fired them instead. But I had mouths to feed besides my own.
by baobun | 2025-06-12 04:38:15+00:00
Canonical announcement: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-25-10-drops-support-fo... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44254368)

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-25.10-No-GNOME-X.Org

Text and primary sources preferred over influencer youtube video commentary.
by anon84873628 | 2025-06-12 04:38:58+00:00
Note that once the grass has grown past a certain height, you won't be able to use a mower anymore even if you want to. At that point it will require a line trimmer (a.k.a. weed whacker) which is a lot more work.

Though personally I'm a fan of "kill your lawn" efforts. You can smother it with cardboard (or burn it, or till it, etc) and replace with native meadow.
by RandallBrown | 2025-06-12 04:39:44+00:00
I doubt most teams ever used it.

I spent a couple years at Microsoft and our team used Source Depot because a lot of people thought that our products were special and even Microsoft's own source control (TFS at the time) wasn't good enough.

I had used TFS at a previous job and didn't like it much, but I really missed it after having to use Source Depot.
by defrost | 2025-06-12 04:41:17+00:00
A fair number of rugby players in the Commonwealth tradition have university degrees alongside skill in the scrum .. that's thugby for you.

eg: https://www.uts.edu.au/news/2024/09/how-sports-phd-became-hi...

Sports science blends biomechanics, data science, nutrition, and often a personal interest or involvement in one or several sports.
by lhl | 2025-06-12 04:43:51+00:00
For the Claude issues, I'm referring to the claude.ai frontend. While I use some Codex, Aider, and other agentic tools, I found Claude Code to be not to my taste - for my uses it tended burn a lot of tokens and gave relatively mediocre results, but I know it works well for others, so YMMV.
by graemep | 2025-06-12 04:45:02+00:00
I think the benefits greatly outweigh any dangers. I far prefer to read something like this than something written up by a journalist.

> I acknowledge that not everyone involved in science has or wishes to acquire the skills needed to write blog-form content.

They should. If your research is publicly funded you should make it as available to be public as possible. Academics should be able to communicate, and I very much doubt they are unable to acquire the skills

> I'd also be worried about a world where researchers are evaluated based on the virality of their blog posts, vs. how impactful their work was

Given how bad the measures of impact and the distorted incentives this produces I am not even sure this would even be a bad thing.

If nothing else it improves transparency about what they are doing, again with public money.
by Benjamin_Dobell | 2025-06-12 04:45:35+00:00
This takes me back. Whilst I was studying at university, I developed Heimdall, open source firmware flashing software for Samsung Android phones. I don't know that it was ever official, but I remember being pretty stoked when I realised some Mozilla employees were using Heimdall to flash Firefox OS onto Samsung devices: https://developer.mozilla.org.cach3.com/my/docs/Mozilla/B2G_...
by toofy | 2025-06-12 04:46:55+00:00
the reason for people rushing to engage in birth control is mostly economics. everyone i know who prevented birth at an early age explicitly did so because it would have fucked their life up to have a baby--financially, career dreams, and education dreams.

again, anecdotal, but every single person i know who prevented birth at parents young age, did this for those specific reasons. sure, sti protection are a piece as well but it pales in weight to the economics.

if we remove those barriers i have zero doubt the birth rates would rise almost overnight. and by remove those barriers, i dont mean like the ridiculous "thousand dollars to have a baby" or whatever laughable amount they're putting forward now.
by sagarpatil | 2025-06-12 04:47:39+00:00
Let need explain. Windows user for 28 years. I decided to try macOS and got hooked (no more WSL). Moved from Android to iPhone because of tight integration with macOS. 1. Universal copy (copy from/to Mac) 2. Automatically fill OTP from phone to mac 3. Passwords app integration means I don’t have to fill 2FA manually (mac or iPhone) 4. I use Apple TV 4K and I can use my iPhone as a remote, use it for color calibration, use it as a dedicated camera for FaceTime on TV 5. I use Apple Watch to receive important calls/ notifications when my phone is not around. When you are using Watch, macOS does not ask you to enter system password for when you are changing system settings, installing/uninstalling apps etc.

These are the things at the top of my mind, I’m sure I can come up with much more.

Photo sync and iCloud are pretty easy to replace with Google Photos/G drive, so I’m not worried about that part.

It’s these small things that add up and make the whole experience better.
by aaravchen | 2025-06-12 04:49:06+00:00
So the alternative is opaque types? Powershell tried adding structured types for the output, and it has some benefits, but now your pipeline composition options are severely limited. Only the tools that understand the output structure of the prior step are options. What if you have a new structure output type? You now need all new tools to do anything with it. I don't say text is an ideal format by any means, but it's a _universal_ format. That unviversality is necessary to be useful long term. Unix just picked text since it was easy for a human to look at and reason about.

Or are you suggesting monolithic tools instead of composable ones? Tomorrow I have a need you haven't thought of. Now your tool is useless to me and I have no way to do what I need. Modular composition isn't just a Unix philosophy, it's a basic development principle because it puts the power in the hands of the user to create almost anything they can think of, rather than restricting it to only what the creator thought of and implemented.

I'm not really sure what you're arguing is "terrible" about the solution. If you don't like the hazards and difficulty of dealing with something like your colon separator being in the data too, let me introduce you to data handling 101. It doesn't matter what format you put data in, the same problem exists. Even raw binary needs a delineator between elements, and eventually that delineator is going to need to be in the data itself somewhere. Unless you suggest we shouldn't be able to represent all data? It's the reason virtually every language supports escaping special characters (E.g. JSON's backslash escaping of quotes).