MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jajko | 2025-06-08 06:39:43+00:00
You are completely missing Gorbachev, the fall began with him. He was a good guy, but a bit naive within soviet situation. Everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY hated russians. That's where brutal oppression came from for rest of soviet republics, that's where eastern Europe satellites were invaded and controlled from via strong firm hand (and many military bases). I know this damn well as I was raised thre and saw first hand the continuous destruction of what we would call normal society that russians brought along with them everywhere they went.

When the soviet empire twitched a bit and seams became just slightly more loose, everybody run the fuck away from them. You can't be literally enslaved for 2 generations and ignore whats around you and whats happening to all your citizens, family, friends, yourself. Not when you clearly see how west has technological, moral and societal advantage in its approach and its getting bigger every year. The only exception is Belarus, and the only reason is that the dicktator there needs desperately strong continuous backing or he would be brought down in quick coup.
by rendall | 2025-06-08 06:39:48+00:00
Horseshoe theory has always read like a Pythagorean epicycle to me, an attempt to redeem a broken model. For a reductive political model, I prefer the 2 dimensional Collectivist-Individualist, Authoritarian-Libertarian axes. No need to literally contort the outdated Left-Right spectrum.

An added benefit is you get to avoid annoying semantic battles such as whether Nazis or Fascists are Right wing or Left wing.

Plus you get to add other axes as needed. My favorite, perhaps relevant today, is principled vs. expedient: do we apply principles like this "Rights" stuff impartially, even to people with whom we disagree, or do we just git 'r done?
by xucian | 2025-06-08 06:40:12+00:00
a hundred percent. just a poor choice of words on my end. I'm generally asking higher pays, but I can literally take 1k a month if all I have to do is check some PRs 2 hours per week. pretty much what I was pointing at, even though it's an extreme example.

I've had my fair share of cheap a* clients in my early days with upwork (which I never figured out, my bigger clients came from outside), it's easy to spot one.

about hard work, I just wanted to set a boundary for the weekly hours I can contribute, and the intensity part is actually secondary (I think I should've left that out). but you touch on an important point, some things you just don't want to hear -- we are all adults, I get paid and I deliver, we all know that most likely everyone will get what they ask for, just that explicitly excluding "hard work" might raise unnecessary questions. useful info, thanks
by mkayokay | 2025-06-08 06:43:09+00:00
I can also recommend Lenovo ThinkCentre MiniPCs or similar brands. Those can often be found cheap when companies upgrade their Hardware. These machines are also power efficient when idling, use even less space than a laptop and the case fan is very quiet (which can be annoying with laptops under load).

I'm currently running Syncthing, Forgejo, Pihole, Grafana, a DB, Jellyfin, etc... on a M910 with an i5 (6th or 7th Gen) without problems.
by mediumdeviation | 2025-06-08 06:44:24+00:00
The other part that's disconcerting is the person who did all this has decided to put his name on the public record in an interview with journalists. After reading through the article I had the feeling this would, in a few years, show up in software / AI ethics courses in university. Is this a form of atonement, whistleblower, or extremely misplaced pride?
by patcon | 2025-06-08 06:46:15+00:00
Yes, being clever in one domain (such that Navy and Air Force funds you work) does not mean you can't be a crank. But people funded by those orgs usually get a little more leeway: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

To be honest, I don't expect much in the way of sorting through these fuzzy and high dimensional topics, from someone like yourself who gravitates toward formal logic system as a way to understand the world. I would expect someone from your world to dismiss such things
by CalRobert | 2025-06-08 06:49:01+00:00
Lots of people here favour a lenient regulatory environment and are pro business which seems classically centre right.

Nuanced discussion of things like immigration are challenging though, in all fora I think. I’ve tried to make the point that this is a great opportunity for Europe to pick up valuable American immigrants but somehow am apparently being xenophobic by sharing data of net tax contributions of immigrants by region of origin
by cornholio | 2025-06-08 06:49:13+00:00
Again, the MCAS trim rate is fixed to a relatively high value, that's what the FAA report talks about. The rate of a pilot issued command is variable, affected by the flaps setting and airspeed. This is very easy to confirm. You can see an experienced 737 pilot explain this at the link above, around the 40 minutes mark.
by huuhee3 | 2025-06-08 06:49:42+00:00
Yeah I would recommend this too. I've only used Dell Optiplex Micro series, no issues so far. They use external PSU similar to those in laptops, which helps with power efficiency.

Something with 8th gen i5 can be had for about 100-150 USD from ebay, and that's more than powerful enough for nearly all self-hosting needs. Supports 32-64gb of RAM and two SSD.
by auggierose | 2025-06-08 06:49:58+00:00
> And as a last point, I fear very much what’s going on in schools. My son is in school. And the teacher literally said they need to use an LLM otherwise they won’t score high enough because the other pupils are using LLMs and the teacher is using an LLM to grade/check it. This is ridiculous. And if you think that’s okay or you don’t see a serious problem with this, then that’s an even greater problem.

If that is true, it is indeed a serious problem.
by flomo | 2025-06-08 06:50:00+00:00
"And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days."

> from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10 (about:mozilla)

And now Mozilla is being scorched to the earth. The End.
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by Ayushsingh59 | 2025-06-08 06:50:26+00:00
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by dlcarrier | 2025-06-08 06:50:38+00:00
With only several dollars worth of high-precision PCB specifications, you two can save multiple fractions of a cent worth of passive components!

There are applications where this can be useful, though. Especially when PCB production quirks can be more repeatable than component soldering, which can be affected by ambient temperature, humidity, solder paste age, and a bunch of other factors.
by Animats | 2025-06-08 06:51:00+00:00
A 15 meter turning radius is tight, but not revolutionary. San Francisco's MUNI system's tightest turns are 45 feet, or 13.7 meters. The newer vehicles are designed for that, and the old PCC cars had to be modified to allow the trucks some extra rotation. The turning loop on Embarcadero near Market is that tight. There is much wheel screeching when a PCC car goes through that loop, because wheels have to slip to turn that tight. But it works.[1]

Battery powered trams have real potential, now that batteries with 5 to 7 minute charging and large numbers of charging cycles are a thing. That's compatible with typical end of line holding times. Steel wheel on steel rail is low friction, and you get most of the energy used to go uphill back when you go downhill. This could work out.

[1] https://youtu.be/XKN0MTCUSV0?t=265
by xboxnolifes | 2025-06-08 06:51:06+00:00
> Most data structures have invariants that must hold for the data structure to behave correctly. If users can directly read and write members, there's no way for the public APIs to guarantee that they will uphold their documented API behaviors.

You can, just not in the "strictly technical" sense. You add a "warranty void if these fields are touched" documentation string.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-06-08 06:52:02+00:00
I feel (hah!) that we've reached a point where instead of focusing on objective things that the LLM-based systems can do, we are wasting energy and "ink" on how they make us feel. And how others using them make us feel. And how Hollywood-style stories about "AI" make us feel. And how people commenting on these things make us feel. And so on.

IMO it's best to focus on objective things that the systems can do today, with maybe a look forward so we can prepare for things they'll be able to do "tomorrow". The rest is too noisy for me. I'm OK with some skepticism, but not outright denial. You can't take an unbiased look at what these things can do today and say "well, yes, but can they do x y z"? That's literally moving the goalposts, and I find it extremely counter productive.

In a way I see a parallel to the self driving cars discussions of 5 years ago. Lots of very smart people were focusing on silly things like "they have to solve the trolley problem in 0.0001 ms before we can allow them on our roads", instead of "let's see if they can drive from point A to point B first". We are now at the point where they can do that, somewhat reliably, with some degree of variability between solutions (waymos, teslas, mercedes, etc). All that talk 5 years ago was useless, IMO.
by jaynetics | 2025-06-08 06:52:32+00:00
Of the top 10 HN posts atm, 8 are closely related to software, one is about tech but not computers (Coventry Very Light Rail), and just one is really non-tech (My experiment living in a tent in Hong Kong's jungle).

Is that too much non-tech? Or are the tech posts not news-like enough? Or do you dislike side-tracks in the discussions?
by perilunar | 2025-06-08 06:52:36+00:00
Been there, have done (most of) this. Never used Silverlight, but did use VRML, Java Applets, and Chromeffects.

I remember writing image maps by hand, getting the point coordinates directly from the image in Photoshop.

Re version control: learned very early on to make a backup of a website before making any changes. Our version control was /site/yyyymmdd/
by arjie | 2025-06-08 06:54:20+00:00
Tooling for self-hosting is quite powerful nowadays. You can start with hosted components and swap various things in for a self-hosted bit. For instance, my blog is self-hosted on a home-server.

It has Cloudflare Tunnel in front of it, but I previously have used nginx+letsencrypt+public_ip. It stores data on Cloudflare R2 but I've stored on S3 or I could store on a local NAS (since I access R2 through FUSE it wouldn't matter that much).

You have to rent:

* your domain name - and it is right that this is not a permanent purchase

* your internet access

But almost all other things now have tools that you can optionally use. If you turn them off the experience gets worse but everything still works. It's a much easier time than ever before. Back in the '90s and early 2000s, there was nothing like this. It is a glorious time. The one big difference is that email anti-spam is much stricter but I've handled mail myself as recently as 8 years ago without any trouble (though I now use G Suite).
by grues-dinner | 2025-06-08 06:54:40+00:00
Could that actually work? You'd have to expend energy to concentrate the heat into your power generation system to power the (I assume) a laser or similar emitter to beam the energy away. Would you be able to make sure that the extra energy used to move the heat around, plus inefficiencies in the laser power generation gets included in the outgoing photons? This seems, perhaps naively, like the entropy is going the "wrong" way.

You could presumably radiate it to space by moving the heat to something that can "see" a clear sky, but you can have this happen naturally on a far huger scale by reducing GHG content in the atmosphere and increasing the radiative efficiency of the entire planet surface, as well as various passive systems like cool roofs, albedo manipulation and special materials that radiate specific wavelengths.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-06-08 06:55:12+00:00
I agree! I see a lot of people who "have tried them and they suck". But when you dig deep, they barely tried a web interface for programming, or the OG chatgpt for writing, and that's basically it. They aren't willing to try again, and keep up to date. Things are moving incredibly fast, and the skeptics are adding noise without even being informed about current SotA capabilities.
by sunshine-o | 2025-06-08 06:55:32+00:00
The only way I know of is prepossessing with a web browser and piping it to some thing like monolith [0]

So you end up with something like this [1]:

> chromium --headless --window-size=1920,1080 --run-all-compositor-stages-before-draw --virtual-time-budget=9000 --incognito --dump-dom https://github.com | monolith - -I -b https://github.com -o github.html

- [0] https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith

- [1] https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith?tab=readme-ov-file#dynamic-c...
by bboygravity | 2025-06-08 06:56:28+00:00
I think you don't understand how this works.

You go to the market (broker) and say you want to buy an orange for 2$. You go to the "free" market (Robin Hood) that doesn't have any transaction costs for orange buying. This is your own choice. There are tons of orange sellers at the market who sell oranges for different prices, but it doesn't matter, because everybody has to go through the same guy (Citadel, Citadel pays for this privilege). Everybody has to go through Citadel, because everybody wants to trade for "free".

Citadel gets your 2$ order for an orange before anybody else at the market. They find someone who is selling an orange for 1,80$, they buy it from them and sell to you for 2$ and pocket the difference.

In reality, it's even worse than that: they will sell you the 2$ orange instantly without owning any orange or buying any orange and figure out how to get the orange later. Or never. (since stocks are digital you can pretend to deliver a stock (without actually delivering it) very easily as opposed to pretending to deliver an orange)
by ttiurani | 2025-06-08 06:56:29+00:00
Solid point.

A bit tangential, but I've recently been baffled as to why is this belief held by so many:

"since LLMs are trained on online data, they are re-trained with their own AI slop, further damaging them. Soon bad code will get even worse, basically."

together with:

"I’m sure it will get better with time, but it’s not there yet."

What improvements people think will overcome the poisoning of the well? I'm not an expert at all, but to me it feels like we'd need a new breakthrough to get good output from garbage input.
by xucian | 2025-06-08 06:56:48+00:00
| There is no easy button for good part time work found that out early in my career. still didn't find decent work like this. one of my last jobs had a full-time schedule, but they hinted at the lower volume of work, where most of the time I just had to be available, not code/think for 8h straight, with just occasional spikes and overtime. and it turned out well.

you are right, I guess I'm looking to hit too many birds at once, I'll have to do some trimming. the birds: found my own startup, co-found someone else's startup, non-fulltime work for a company. I'm still exploring the right weights for each of them
by dlcarrier | 2025-06-08 06:57:42+00:00
It's really copied from Apple's anti-consumer measures, which seem to be targeting free software. (Not just free as in speech, but also free as in beer.)

A developer might not care whether or not a fun project earns them anything, but Apple and Google want their cut, so if they make distributing software through their store expensive and time consuming, the free stuff will fall by the wayside, so the only options for a simple tool are either ad-laden or have recurring expenses.

Also, I used to think that getting an FPGA IDE up and running was the most painful, unreliable, and bloated development environment possible, then I met Android Studio.
by hackyhacky | 2025-06-08 06:57:55+00:00
I hear you, but also we need to ask why is it a problem?

Used to be, it was considered critically important that students learn to write in cursive and to multiply 3 digit numbers in their head. I can't do either, and I suspect many folks these days can't either. The world has not ended. I also can't tie a square knot, lasso a steed, or mend a fence.

School assignments have always been a waste of time. Essay-writing is not a critical skill, and I'm not sure much is lost if LLMs do it for us.
by palmfacehn | 2025-06-08 06:58:06+00:00
Generally employees put the responsibility on management. As everyone has a higher up they answer to, no one feels personally responsible. From the top down, the concerns of how things are actually implemented are often too abstract. Combine these dynamics with institutional echochambers and group-think.

Employees just want to make it to the weekend. Execs want to hit their targets. Sales dept. needs their bonuses. The board wants to pump valuations.
by kennywinker | 2025-06-08 07:00:05+00:00
Agree with a lot said here - but it doesn’t touch on the socio-political consequences of ai. In a capitalist system, wealth concentrates in the hands of the already rich. But ultimately, the rich need everyone else. They need them to do their laundry, clean their mansions, fly their planes. That gives the not rich some small token of power over the rich. With each new job ai is capable of doing, it drains away that power.

Similarly, the state needs people to do the work of state power. People to investigate the citizenry, people to judge and prosecute and process appeals. AI takes away the human from that, allowing massive injustices to be rubber stamped. A small example - RFJ jr couldn’t get a human to write his garbage maha report, so he used AI (https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/rfk-jr-may-hav...). Small examples become bigger examples.

AI is accelerating us towards a techno-fascist oligarchy. That’s why i am skeptical of it. Not because it’s mid at writing unit tests or whatever.
by geysersam | 2025-06-08 07:01:14+00:00
It's about the contract with the users. I don't think you should worry about breaking someone using the private fields of your classes. Making a field private, for example by prefixing an underscore in Python, tells the users "for future maintainability of the software I allow myself the right to change this field without warning, use at your own peril".

If you hesitate changing it because you worry about users using it anyway you are hurting the fraction of your users who are not using it.
by cherryteastain | 2025-06-08 07:01:27+00:00
Yes but arguably anything below the equivalent of RAID6/RAIDZ2 puts you at a not inconsiderable risk of data loss. Most laptops cannot do parity of any sort because of a lack of SATA/M.2 ports so you will need new hardware if you want the resilience offered by RAID. Ideally you will want that twice on different machines if you go by the "backups in at least 2 different physical locations" rule.
by 6figurelenins | 2025-06-08 07:04:39+00:00
The geopolitical stability is now cheaper[1] than the debt service.

Naturally, that calls into question the incredibly low interest rates, and the reserve currency status.

If you need to blame Trump, the last straw was COVID.

> At incredibly low interest rates, most investments are positive ROI.

Step 1: Hold short term rates at zero, forever Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit Step 4: Wow, that's a lot of debt

[1] https://www.cfr.org/blog/first-time-us-spending-more-debt-in...
by pja | 2025-06-08 07:04:43+00:00
> Sigh. People are WAAAY too accepting of urbanist propaganda. > > Buses are _barely_ more effective than cars. A regular passenger car with 4 people is more efficient than a city bus. An EV needs 2.5 people (these numbers are for the US). > > The explanation is simple: > > 1. Buses have to drive _all_ _the_ _time_, even when there are few passengers. As a result, the average bus load tends to be around 10-20 people. And you can not increase the bus interval to compensate for it because it makes off-rush-hour bus commutes impractical. > > 2. Buses have INCREDIBLY polluting components: 2-3 drivers for each bus needed to provide the service. They are by far the dirtiest part of the bus. This part can be removed with the self-driving hardware, but... > > A full self-driving bus also makes no sense. It defeats the main advantage of self-driving: door-to-door transportation.

Even if you focus only on emissions this completely ignores the cost of congestion, which is huge.

Your complaint about self driving buses makes no sense either. If the most polluting part of the bus is the driver then removing the driver makes the bus far, far less polluting.

When your arguments don't even make sense on their own terms it suggests that you're making them from an emotional position instead of a rational one. That's ok: if you don't like buses just say so, but be honest about it instead of making spurious arguments.
by jaynetics | 2025-06-08 07:05:19+00:00
This is very true.

But perhaps the more important filtering is on quantity as opposed to neutrality? Perhaps filtering out a large amount of news, even with some bias, is the lesser evil, as compared to news outlets that depend on stirring the emotions of their readers every single day?

Wikinews used to be okay in this regard, but the German version I used has died down a bit, and the English one is even more centered on the Anglosphere than HN.
by JustinCS | 2025-06-08 07:05:39+00:00
Even as AI generates more writing and code, we still have a way of ranking quality: Good writing and successful projects tend to get more popular and prominent. This selection can allow LLMs to continue to improve. They get a huge flow of slop, but they generate based on the patterns correlated with better quality. The model developers can also develop better ways to curate the input data themselves and keep the slop at bay. It's not a guaranteed or trivial mechanism, but I don't think we need a new breakthrough either.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-06-08 07:07:17+00:00
Sort of. It's actually backwards because BE work should be demand based driven by the needs of the FE.

This allows 3 things: a BE API as a promise AND division of labor (when possible and/or necessary) AND building what's essential on-demand by thinking about the FE's planning and needs first.

The problem with building a BE first is that leads to unnecessary work.

I'm a bit biased because I prefer standardized/CoC, monolithic development that doesn't have too much disconnection between the FE and BE stacks.
by alexjurkiewicz | 2025-06-08 07:08:20+00:00
> So am I saying don’t use LLMs? No, I’m not. I’m saying it needs serious guardrails, documentation, oversight, usage data, research, and it should definitely be banned from schools. Because it’s doing serious damage to young people’s ability to think, figure out, read, understand, and research.

The original article didn't talk about any of these things....

> My son is in school. And the teacher literally said they need to use an LLM otherwise they won’t score high enough because the other pupils are using LLMs and the teacher is using an LLM to grade/check it. This is ridiculous.

Ah. The article's author heard a bad take on LLMs and accidentally attributed it to Ptacek's article.