MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Bjartr | 2025-06-17 12:18:32+00:00
This is actually an area I've been informally studying for several years. Both the "Hi" and the "How are you?" are phatic.

Phatic communication is about establishing social connection rather than conveying explicit information.

Both "Hi" and "How are you?" serve in these cases* to eatablish "this is a friendly, casual interaction" by way of social ritual. If you fail to signal non-aggression in this way then, at least neurotypical people, will be more likely to consider you an aggressor.

I don't struggle or feel bothered by "Hi" or "How are you?". But I do struggle with threading enough phatic praise and appreciation into conversation to maintain the "friendly, casual" status and can get easily start being treated as an aggressor.

* America in particular has "How are you?" as one of these phatic rituals. Different parts of the world have different rituals in different areas of interaction. This can be a cause of friction when moving to a new country and you interpret an unfamiliar ritual literally instead of phatically or misunderstand another's intent because a ritual you expect was missing.
by mettamage | 2025-06-17 12:18:36+00:00
My heuristic: the more you're solving a solved problem that is just tedious work and memory intensive take a crack at using AI. It will probably one shot your solution with minimal tweaks required.

The more you deviate from that, the more you have to step in.

But given that I constantly forget how to open a file in Python, I still have a use for it. It basically supplanted Stackoverflow.
by squircle | 2025-06-17 12:18:41+00:00
I fundamentally disagree with the notion that AI is a species or alien intelligence. It is a reflection of humanitys individual and collective intelligence fused with computers. If we reify it and give it agency, sure, it seems alive, but it isn't. (Talk about false idols...) Now, here we are, where so many beautifully intelligence and well meaning people are advocating we put all our trust and agency into a clock? This is no better than freaken ancient cultures divining meaning and answers from the position of stars. It's a regression.

Imagine a still pond. If I throw a stone, the water ripples. That's all AI is. Are you struggling with this? Consider the information flowing through the algorithms like water or a new/emerging natural force that is lighter than air.
by RonaldOloo | 2025-06-17 12:19:01+00:00
Hey everyone, one of the co-founders here(Ronald Oloo). Just wanted to add a bit more technical context for those interested. We chose Rust for this project for its performance and, more importantly, its safety guarantees. The long-term vision for Sphere's security relies on being able to build a truly minimal, secure sandbox, and Rust's memory safety is a huge part of that foundation. The dependency system right now is simple (it just uses a local JSON index), but it's designed to be the prototype for a future federated SphereHub. The goal is to avoid the centralized pitfalls of other package managers. We know it's a long road ahead to get to true chroot/namespace-level sandboxing, but we're excited about the architecture. Happy to dive into any technical questions about the implementation!
by timr | 2025-06-17 12:19:34+00:00
The "fishy odor" is a classic hallmark of amine-containing compounds [1], of which Vyvanse has three [2], including a terminal amine, which is so infamous (at least in the di-amine form) for being smelly that they have delightful names like "Cadaverine" [3].

I don't know if the completely purified drug officially has an odor, but usually you get some free amines that come along for the ride. More likely, some got outside of the gelatin capsule during shipping.

[1] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/amines-and-landsca...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisdexamfetamine#/media/File:L...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaverine
by mynti | 2025-06-17 12:19:35+00:00
My goal would be to get a job in some kind of tree nursery or general plant nursery but I guess I would gravitate towards something in the care sector. Jobs there can be exceptionally hard but one thing we know is that the demand will go up in the coming years not down. And working in a field like that at least gives you some sense of meaning, for the most part
by bombcar | 2025-06-17 12:20:14+00:00
See, if you had Siri you'd be forced into the first anyway:

"Alexa add peanut butter to shopping list" "OK, what should list should I add to?" "shopping list" "Ok, what should I add for you" "Peanut butter" "Ok, playing Peanut Butter by the Royal Guardsmen on a HomePod you forgot you had"
by steveBK123 | 2025-06-17 12:20:45+00:00
Yes that's one of the big distinctions. Even American cities that existed then are drastically different and larger than they were back then.

I mean even in NYC in 1850s, 42nd street was practically "uptown" and what we now call "uptown" was farmland. Brooklyn & Queens which are now the population centers of NYC with ~2.5M residents each had a grand total of under 200K back then. At the time Manhattan had 500K residents (2.5x BK&QNS 200K) while it has 1.7M now (1/3 the ~5M across BK&QNS now).

So the population center even within our biggest city has completely shifted from the time our railroads were built out.
by wheybags | 2025-06-17 12:20:56+00:00
If I need that, I send a message like "hey, you got time for a quick call to talk about x?". It's normally better to just figure out what you want to say and send it as a dm though, a call is a heavyweight escalation for rare and complex issues. It's also normally not a "question" per se, more a request for collaborative design or debugging.
by NHQ | 2025-06-17 12:21:18+00:00
That 200 Million is chump change only to people who think like chumps. In reality it is total waste, unproductive taxation that doubles as a counter balance to inflation, so doubly wasteful.

Chump together all the 100s of millions in waste year over year; the change to your chumping is not good change, its inflation and general impoverishment. Every penny of that 200 is a note in the bank of inflation and degradation.
by grafmax | 2025-06-17 12:21:32+00:00
Globalization broke the unions in the US, the main site of organized popular power. While it’s true that the current state of affairs is part of a longer slide toward authoritarianism, a more accurate etiology would be that it’s the congealing power of the upper class that has been driving the dismantling of democracy. Since concentrated wealth is concentrated power, it is intrinsically anti-democratic. Instead of guilt tripping ourselves we are better off correctly identifying our enemies and organizing together against the forces leading us down this path.
by mettamage | 2025-06-17 12:21:44+00:00
There is in the Netherlands. You can test it there [1].

Ah, I see someone else already mentioned it. I'll still keep this here for increased visibility. Drugs testing in NL is solid.

Source: trust me bro ;-)

Second source: go see for yourself! It's anonymous.

[1] https://www.drugs-test.nl/ (use google translate)
by mrweasel | 2025-06-17 12:22:35+00:00
> Are you still on WhatsApp?

That would actually be marginally better. No everyone is on f-ing Snapchat. I'm in Denmark, which like the US is pretty big on iMessage, so originally we where using that. Then my sister got an Android phone, and the group chat obviously broken, because no RCS back then.

Everyone has SMS, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger and Instagram (except me for Meta products). So no one is really keen on adding a fifth app, where for me it would remove Snapchat, bringing me down to just SMS and Signal.
by Kellygreg | 2025-06-17 12:22:36+00:00
Co-founder here(kelly Gregory). So excited to finally share this. For me, the 'aha' moment for Sphere was realizing how much of our time as developers is spent fighting our tools instead of solving problems. We're constantly wrestling with environments, dependencies, and CI/CD pipelines. The core idea of Sphere is to make computation a 'solved problem'. You should be able to define a task and have it run predictably, securely, and portably without thinking about the underlying machine. We started with a simple command runner, but the vision is a global, decentralized compute grid. This MVP is just the first step on that journey. We're really keen to hear from other devs about what their biggest pain points are in this area!
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-06-17 12:22:43+00:00
Your comment is very fair, indeed perhaps the "way it is taught" is a major problem. Me, personally, I was quite happy to later find out that the "you just write the rules" declarative promise is true, just with caveats, i.e., you have to restrict yourself to a subset of what could otherwise be expressed.

That might seem like an annoying limitation, but to me it is not. Most problems fit well within the bounds, and you get to reap the benefits.

>> There's more ways to execute Prolog than DFS so that you don't get stuck in loops. Obviously there'll always be infinite proof branches because Church-Turing. I'm not sure you fully appreciate that?

It doesn't have to do with Church-Turing. The issue is with DFS specifically which can get stuck in an unproductive search branch. This is mitigated by Mercury with termination checks and mode determinism, and entirely solved by Curry through an execution semantics that guarantees fair search (only way to not terminate is if there is no solution).

If you can execute Prolog in a different manner then I'm happy that's the case but I find it hard to believe that's still Prolog. How would the IO come out in the same order?

>> But if you like Mercury then you could possibly help with its development, which I understand has slowed down for lack of interest, which is a big shame.

Sadly I lack the skillset...

>> I prefer Prolog because it's more mature, and its implementations more feature-rich

My preference for the semantics of the far less popular logic programming languages likely clouds my judgements towards Prolog more than I'd like to admit.
by mooreds | 2025-06-17 12:22:54+00:00
This.

I don't think GP was suggesting quitting in a huff, but it's important enough to reiterate.

It's always always always easier to find a job when you have one.

I get the stress of looking, interviewing and negotiating for a new job is a lot on top of the work from your current job.

But, fair or not, there's a worry about hiring a lemon when someone is not currently employed. It's something one can and should address, but it is easier if one does not have to.

Especially in this job marketing (at least in the USA) when getting hired is difficult for everyone.
by shalmanese | 2025-06-17 12:23:03+00:00
Learning how to form a relationship with your skip is a valuable but undertaught skill.

You have to understand that

a) There is no "objective" standard by which a manager can be evaluated as good or bad

b) You are not in a position to determine whether your manager is "good" or "bad", only whether they are a good or bad fit for you. The person who determines whether your manager is good or bad is your skip.

Good managers are the ones that get retained and considered for promotion, bad managers are the ones who are slated for demotion or firing. It doesn't matter if a manager does things counter to every management best practice, if they consistently get promoted, they're a "good" manager. If you don't like that, you should consider working for a company where this doesn't typically happen.

How you deal with a manager that is not a good fit for you is to determine how much political capital they have within the organization. If they're there to do the job the company wants them to do but you simply don't fit into the larger objectives, then you need to accept that for what it is and understand that the purpose of a system is what it does.

However, if you understand that they don't have as much political power as they would seem to let on, then you have a lot more room to maneuver. It's possible to work with the skip to transfer you to a different team because the skip values retaining you more than they value keeping that manager happy. It's also possible though risky to help build the case for the skip that this manager was not the right fit and should be helped to find a different position, possibly at another firm which would be more suited to their skills. Skips don't have visibility into the day to day workings of a manager so understanding what a skip needs to build their case and how you can be an ally in the documentation can be a valuable function you can serve.

But ultimately, these are both lower probability scenarios and you should be preparing as a likely contingency for your exit from the company and finding a manager more suited to you.
by demosthanos | 2025-06-17 12:23:18+00:00
This is wrong. I write toy languages and frameworks for fun. These are APIs that simply don't exist outside of my code base, and LLMs are consistently able to:

* Read the signatures of the functions.

* Use the code correctly.

* Answer questions about the behavior of the underlying API by consulting the code.

Of course they're just guessing if they go beyond what's in their context window, but don't underestimate context window!
by nmeofthestate | 2025-06-17 12:23:31+00:00
So you got e-prodded in the head - what's the problem? simply wait for the person to ask their question. (Fingers crossed they don't expect a response before continuing - if it turns out that they do, just spend some time waiting, distracted, and then prod them back to get them moving).

This site is saying "don't poke people in the head and then wait for them to ask you why you did that before continuing. It's detrimental for this mode of communication."
by TZubiri | 2025-06-17 12:23:43+00:00
I agree, Rory Sutherland mentions the irony of using AI for things where the value was in the process and not the deliverable, like college essays.

50kloc made by chatgpt in 1 day of vibe coding =/= spending 3 months coding =/= npm install solution

Even if the code and product end up exactly the same, your capacity to improve the product and talk about the business are not.

I find similarities in physical supply chains and sourcing, while sand and cement may be fungible, you don't want to buy sand that was stolen from a beach, or cement made from an uneducated manufacturer that doesn't follow regulations. Even if the product is the same.
by Uehreka | 2025-06-17 12:23:51+00:00
I keep seeing the same “middlebrow dismissals” of LLMs in HN comments, it’s getting pretty repetitive to have to cover all of this over and over, but here goes (I recognize GP is only saying one of these, I’m just trying to preempt the others).

- “LLMs don’t have real intelligence” - We as a society don’t have a rigorous+falsifiable consensus on what “intelligence” is to begin with. Also many things that we all agree are not intelligent (cars, CPUs, egg timers, etc.) are still useful.

- “But people are claiming they’re intelligent and that they’re AGI” - OK, well what if those people are wrong but LLMs are still useful for many things? Not all LLM users are AGI believers, many aren’t.

- “But people are forcing me to use them.” - They shouldn’t do that, that’s bad. It doesn’t mean LLMs are bad.

- “They’re just pattern-matchers, stochastic parrots, they can’t generalize outside their training data.” - All the academic arguments I’ve seen about this become irrelevant when I ask an LLM to write me code in a really esoteric programming language and it succeeds. I personally don’t think this is true, but if in fact they are categorically no more than pattern-matchers, then Pattern Matching Is All You Need to do many many jobs.

- “I have an argument why they are categorically useless for all tasks” - the existence of smart people using these things of their own accord, observing the results and continuing to use them should put a serious dent in this theory.

- “They can’t do my whole job” - OK, what if they can help you with part of your job?

- “I’m a programmer. If I use an AI Assistant, but still have to review its code, I haven’t saved any time.” - This can’t be categorically disproven, but also isn’t totally true, and in the gaps in this argument lie amazing things if you’re willing to keep an open mind.

- “They can’t do arithmetic, how can they be expected to do everyday tasks.” - I’ll admit that it’s weird that LLMs are useful despite failing at arithmetic, but they are. Rain Man had trouble with everyday tasks, how could he be expected to do arithmetic? The world is counterintuitive sometimes.

- “They can’t help me with any of my job, I do surgery all day” - Thank you and my condolences. Please be aware though that many jobs out there aren’t surgery.

- “The people who promote them are annoying. I call them ‘influencers’ to signal that they are not hackers like us.” - Many good things have annoying fans, if you follow this logic to its conclusion you will miss out on many good things.

- “I’ve tried them, I’ve tried them in a variety of ways, they’re just really not for me.” - That’s fine. I’d still recommend checking in on the field later on, but I can totally admit that these things can take some finagling to get right, and not everyone has time. They will get easier to use in the future.

- “No they won’t, we’ve hit a plateau! Attention isn’t all you need!” - If all LLM development were to stop today, all AI cloud services shut down and only the open weights LLMs were left, I predict we’d still be finding novel usage patterns for them for the next 3-5 years.
by kgwxd | 2025-06-17 12:24:22+00:00
> in fact when I try to amuse my colleagues or the opposite sex, my jokes regularly fall flat

Even the dullest of innocent jokes, delivered horribly, can get a chuckle in decent company. "Falls flat" means the "jokes" are inappropriate, mean, gross, *ist, etc. The phrase "colleagues or the opposite sex" is a tell.
by rahoulb | 2025-06-17 12:24:23+00:00
As other posters have said - capitalism.

But also privacy - it would be amazing to just be able to connect to any app or service you want, interact and react to stuff that's happening _over there_.

However, do you want any old app or service connecting to _your_ data, siphoning it and selling it on (and, at best, burying their use of your data in a huge terms of service document that no-one reads, at worst, lying about what they do with that information)? So you have to add access controls that are either intrusive and/or complex, or, more likely, just ignored. Then the provider gets sued for leaking data and we're in a situation where no-one dares open up.
by d--b | 2025-06-17 12:24:26+00:00
Let people be people for god sake.

If people saying hello on a chat pisses you off, take it as a sign that you need a vacation. I bet when you're back from 2 weeks in the Bahamas, when someone pings you with an empty "hello", you'll reply with a nice "oh hey buddy, what's up?", rather than spending one week building a fancy website to post to HN people who already agree with you.
by amelius | 2025-06-17 12:24:39+00:00
No, they only understand it on a superficial level. The behavior of these systems emerges from simpler stuff, yes, but the end result is difficult to reason about. Just have a look at Claude's prompt [1] that leaked some time ago, and which is an almost desperate attempt of the creators to nudge the system into a certain direction and make it not say the wrong things.

We probably need a New Kind of Soft Science™ to fill this gap.

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/claude-4-system-prompt...
by dfboyd | 2025-06-17 12:25:07+00:00
I'm the original author of this content. I wrote it on the internal wiki at Google in 2007. Someone copied it and posted it at nohello.(something) after I left Google. It's made the front page of HN multiple times.

The discussions always split between the people who just want to get on with the conversation and the people who can't bring themselves to do that because they consider it unforgivably rude. The second group never seem to take the hint that the first interruption is an imposition in itself.
by cess11 | 2025-06-17 12:25:49+00:00
They're also making the Chief Product Officer a soldier.

"The four new Army Reserve Lt. Cols. are Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer for Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI."

https://www.army.mil/article/286317/army_launches_detachment...
by alias_neo | 2025-06-17 12:25:49+00:00
it's a challenge for sure, however, I've managed to get my extended family all on Signal which is about as much reach as I could hope/expect to achieve.

That's my household, my parents, my grandparents, my parents-in-law, my sibling(s), cousins, aunts/uncles, sibling(s)-in-law, friends, and my colleagues.

Some of my children's' friends' parents who I'm friendly enough with also began using Signal so we can communicate. Those who are school friends but not outside-of-school-friends, we can communicate with via the school's app.

Almost anyone I could want to communicate with is on Signal, all of the family is directly or indirectly because of me, and friends and colleagues has been a combination.

Anyone I don't know well enough to have a conversation about privacy and Meta being the antithesis of it, is not likely someone I need to communicate with.

All in, my wife, on WhatsApp, isn't really "keep[ing] me in the loop", unless we're messaging a trades-person or similar, but that's infrequent enough to not be an issue.
by codingdave | 2025-06-17 12:26:10+00:00
Exactly. I just reply back when I'm ready. Forcing them into our cultural habits shows a complete misunderstanding and lack of respect of other people. Even better, I like to get my teams to talk about communication early on in projects, so everyone understands how people want to communicate over messaging, expectations on response times, etc. A 15 minute meeting can resolve so many annoyances.
by EbNar | 2025-06-17 12:26:51+00:00
I actually love and use Telegram (even if it's slowly enshittifying as well) and most of my IM is done on Telegram. Like it or not, UX is way ahead of Signal.

But I have a bunch of close (to hearth) and very far (geographically) friends who arent techies and who couldn't care less about ads or privacy related stuff. So, Whatsapp is unfortunately still needed.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-06-17 12:26:52+00:00
I was never into the Spectrum or any vintage computer like that, but the pico-8 fits that same gap of having an (artificially) limited system, so your code is ugly and uses two-letter variable names because you can only fit 40 characters on screen and the graphics are pixelart. But you can make something and since there's simply not the space for it, bikeshedding is discouraged.