MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwanem | 2025-06-03 07:43:41+00:00
It's always fascinated me how the incest scene in the final chapter elicits this response, but the much more explicit rape and sexualized torture earlier in the book comes in for no similar obloquy. Specifically, the rape and sexualized torture with which the book approximately starts. This people are on board for, but not the other. Both are about twisted sex stuff, but only one actually upsets people who otherwise highly value the work. That seems inconsistent enough to require some explanation.

The narrative is at pains to be clear neither is less consensual than the other, so that can't be the basis for objecting to one and not the other. There is also an explicit contrast drawn at length in the text between the twisted nihilism of a purposeless universe early on, and what occurs at the end: Caroline muses aloud that had she awakened next to the to-have-been-executed child rapist and murderer whose sexual fancies she had entertained within the simulation, her response would have been instantly and ferociously - and necessarily - lethal, while her daughter's controversial actions in the final chapter take place at Caroline's explicit urging - practically at her direction. So if the concern were that the moral center of the novel had failed, I would expect to see criticism on that basis, rather than a retail effort at censorship.

Likewise, though it's been years since I bothered to reread, I don't really recall the quality of the writing changing, either; it's determinedly mediocre throughout, no less in the last chapter than elsewhere.

Well, as I said, I've never understood why people so easily excuse the pedophilic rape and murder scenes early in the book, while what comes later is such a problem. It still seems inconsistent to me, but I have only my own experience of childhood rape and sexual torture at my now-dead father's hands to draw on, which here no doubt ill equips me to speak.
by hatefulmoron | 2025-06-03 07:43:59+00:00
> LLMs immediately and completely displace the bread-and-butter replacement-tier illustration and design work that makes up much of that profession

And so what? Tell it to the Graphviz diagram creators, entry level Javascript programmers, horse carriage drivers, etc. What's special?

> .. and does so by effectively counterfeiting creative expression

What does this actually mean, though? ChatGPT isn't claiming to have "creative expression" in this sense. Everybody knows that it's generating an image using mathematics executed on a GPU. It's creating images. Like an LLM creates text. It creates artwork in the same sense that it creates novels.

> Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have.

Programmers are very particular about licenses in opposition to your theory. Copyleft licensing leans heavily on enforcing copyright. Besides, I hear artists complain about the duration of copyright frequently. Pointing to some subset of programmers that are against IPR is just nutpicking in any case.
by WhyIsItAlwaysHN | 2025-06-03 07:44:26+00:00
What would you need to tackle this assignment?

I think you're right to complain about the design of the question. It used Google's disadvantage in that it couldn't process visual information to add difficulty to the task.

However I'm pretty sure there's many of these challenges in an average stem subject. An example would be information dense diagrams which describe some chemical process.

I'm genuinely curious to understand how someone manages to understand these without sight. On my side, I can barely visualize so it was always extremely hard to decipher them and even worse remember them.
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-06-03 07:46:04+00:00
This was very hard to read and I wasn't even sure what is the conclusion. One thing I didn't understand, how does one disagree with agile dev processes, which are mostly built on top of the fact that many things, especially UX, you can't know in advance, so you have to build something small, get feedback, then either scrap it or improve it. The process described here sounds exactly like someone spending weeks if not months designing the GUI, then devs spend weeks or months implementing it, without any cross-communication, so it's kind of obvious it needs to be fully re-done so many times. People started switching to agile dev specifically to shorten the feedback loop and scrap bad ideas faster.
by ajb | 2025-06-03 07:46:56+00:00
Definitely

Risks to consider in general are (also of the top of my head don't take as exhaustive):

* Electrocution

* Burning yourself

* Setting stuff on fire

* Fumes, both from soldering and overheating/burning plastic

There's a kind of balance between habits and awareness. Rely too much on awareness and you will miss some safety issue during a complicated repair. You need good habits, but rely too much on them and you won't notice when you finally make a mistake.

Those apply during repair processes. It's also possible to render a device unsafe to use, for example by damaging a li-ion battery or by a 'bodge' repair that circumvents a safety feature.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-06-03 07:47:31+00:00
I've not seen air pollution mentioned yet. We've passed peak air pollution and generally research keeps revealing it to be worse than we thought for a variety of diseases you might not immediately link it to, like heart disease and stroke.

Some of the research on gas stove pollution noticed an uptick in problems for women and linked it to them being closest to poorly operating kitchen burners (and burning food particles themselves might be a factor).

https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-world-has-proba...

Glancing at the data for the US this seems to go the opposite direction, ramping to a peak in the 60-70s when I'd assume most damage in early years and/or working age.

Though perhaps local and widespread air pollution are not following the same trajectory.
by barrell | 2025-06-03 07:47:41+00:00
Personally, I’ve never found this lean methodology to work for me. I have a bit of a mantra that I’ve found works really well for me: “Put everything on the screen”.

Every feature every variant ever possible configuration and all future potential states. Don’t care about how it looks or how it feels just put it all there. Build out as much of it as possible, as fast as possible, knowing it will be thrown away.

Then, whittle away. Combine, drop, group, reorganize, hide, delete, add. About halfway through this step it becomes clear what I really should have been striving for the whole time—and invariably, it’s a mile away from what I started out to build.

One I have that, then I think step three stays about the same.

This isn’t really a critique of lean development, but after a decade of trying to do things leanly, I’ve just accepted that it’s not how my brain works
by pzo | 2025-06-03 07:48:34+00:00
this is very dismissive and binary and thats what this whole article is about. AI skeptic expect that's either AGI or perfect with all use cases or otherwise its useless. SST, translation and TTS went really far away in last 2 years. My mother who doesn't speak english find it very useful when she my sister in US. I find it super useful while travelling in asia. Definitely much more useful than what we had in Google Translate.
by JodieBenitez | 2025-06-03 07:48:37+00:00
I don't get the focus on the coding. In all the projects I worked on for 25 years, coding has never been the bottleneck in projects. Maybe the projects I work on are simple, maybe I was lucky, but still: once the requirements are clear, coding is easy. And it's literally what takes the least time. I don't want to spend less time on coding thanks to AI. Because coding is what I like, not the rest of the job. Bring me AI that will do the meetings for me please.
by littlestymaar | 2025-06-03 07:49:31+00:00
Because even if the expected outcome is positive it doesn't mean that it isn't risky at an individual level. Like you wouldn't gamble your house in a coin flip game even for a 2:1 reward.

I actually had one of my finance friend quitting his job to do it on his own, but he stopped after just 3 month because the level of stress wasn't worth the additional money he was making.

But again, nobody would higher so many smart people if the optimal move was not to play and just passively investing.
Ask HN: How do you struggle with/optimize for deep,sustained focus?
by jenever | 2025-06-03 07:49:40+00:00
With digital distractions everywhere, and nowadays the need to have all these context switches between tabs, messages, emails, papers, prompting LLMs, literally anything, I feel like the ability to maintain deep focus on a high priority task is harder than ever. For those struggling with this, what are the main stressors for you and how do you deal with it to maximize productivity in your work sessions?
by mrheosuper | 2025-06-03 07:49:48+00:00
from the PM perspective, it makes little sense to transform from 2 to 3.

Those devs had spent weeks/months for this app, now they want to throw it all away ?, that means throwing money through windows. Also, the risk that the new app may not work like before, or missing deadline, etc. A safe bet would be reiterating (2)
by aronishchal | 2025-06-03 07:50:26+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Europe | Remote

Location: Europe

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Java EE, Spring, Spring Security, REST, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, Node.js, Python, Jaspersoft Studio, Eclipse, Tomcat, MySQL, Oracle, Git

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lMjbMfEHKdCETFNXcV3Q4dRu...

Email: nishchalaro[at]gmail[dot]com

I am a senior developer and consultant with over 11 years in the industry. My expertise is in building robust, secure and scalable backend services and enterprise applications.

My expertise includes data visualization, business intelligence and analytics. I have extensive experience with the TIBCO Jaspersoft BI suite - Jaspersoft Studio, JasperReports Server and Jaspersoft ETL (Talend Open Studio and Server).

I am looking for freelance/consulting opportunities at the moment (up to 40 hours/week).

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Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nishchal-arora
by aronishchal | 2025-06-03 07:50:40+00:00
Location: Europe

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Java EE, Spring, Spring Security, REST, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, Node.js, Python, Jaspersoft Studio, Eclipse, Tomcat, MySQL, Oracle, Git

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lMjbMfEHKdCETFNXcV3Q4dRu...

Email: nishchalaro[at]gmail[dot]com

I am a senior developer and consultant with over 11 years in the industry. My expertise is in building robust, secure and scalable backend services and enterprise applications.

My expertise includes data visualization, business intelligence and analytics. I have extensive experience with the TIBCO Jaspersoft BI suite - Jaspersoft Studio, JasperReports Server and Jaspersoft ETL (Talend Open Studio and Server).

I am looking for freelance/consulting opportunities at the moment (up to 40 hours/week).

Website: https://www.nishchalarora.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nishchal-arora
by yuriaguernsey | 2025-06-03 07:50:40+00:00
Location: Guernsey, UK Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Astro, Supabase, PostgreSQL, Drizzle, Prisma, Flutter, PHP, JavaScript, n8n, HTML & CSS, NodeJS

Résumé/CV: https://tinyurl.com/yurisCV

Email: AeveaGG@pm.me

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/yuriguernsey

Hey, I’m Yuri. I am a full-stack developer based in Guernsey UK. I have been helping businesses ship mobile apps, websites, and automation for over 5+ years. I focus on fast-moving, high-impact work. My background blends hands-on mobile dev, backend systems, and no-code/low-code automation. I’ve helped founders, agencies, and businesses turn messy ideas into real, working software.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-06-03 07:51:07+00:00
Dancing wasn't the greatest (though by no means does it ruin the game), but the land battles were awesome and made the game significantly better by their inclusion. I would love a new version of Pirates to see what they do with it (though maybe I shouldn't, considering how badly they ruined Civ 7), but the 2004 version is still incredible to this day.
by FrostKiwi | 2025-06-03 07:51:23+00:00
DNS is already done by Tor. In fact, if you feed it a raw IP, it will warn in tor's output that it received an IP, which may indicate that the user has accidentally setup browsing via Tor, but DNS resolution via a normal, unsecured way.

YouTube mainly throttles TOR hard and it's a bit of a fight uphill against a never ending avalanche of Captchas or a straight up service refusal. Bridges solve this, by going through exit nodes that are not publicly listed to be TOR exist nodes. Even with bridges it's still a high chance to trip Google's bot detection.

HTTP/3 is unsupported.
by account42 | 2025-06-03 07:51:52+00:00
> Standard libraries of Java, JavaScript, and C# are counter-examples.

You mean because of the 16-bit character type baked into the language even though Unicode has moved past that?

> Technically, C++ standard could feature an abstract interface for a stream of bytes.

That's what iostreams are. Turns out such abstractions come with overhead and other limitations and you need to use OS-specific APIs for even slightly advanced features anyway.

> Many other languages have managed to design high-level platform agnostic abstractions over these things, and implemented them in the standard libraries.

And these lowest common denominator "abstraction" result in developers making software that doesn't work like users of the OS expect.

> By now this applies to files, file systems, pipes, and TCP sockets.

Not at all. Async interfaces are all the rage these days. Meanwhile browsers have moved from TCP to QUIC (which is much more than a stream of bytes so would need a completely different abstraction) and it's not unlikely that other applications will want to move to it too. You can make a basic bitch abstraction for these but if everyone that cares about performance needs to fall back to OS-specific interfaces then that doesn't help that much.
by throwanem | 2025-06-03 07:52:26+00:00
Safari reader mode works fine for me on an iPhone 13 mini, but there are also innumerable epub and PDF versions; this work has been popular among AI fantasist nerds for about twenty-five years.

For quite closely similar reasons, you are not missing all that much. It's seeing a fad among a generation previously ignorant, probably because of boosterism on the part of people my age who never quite figured out this is one of the ones you outgrow.
by pona-a | 2025-06-03 07:52:27+00:00
I've used computers since early childhood, but I never learned the proper technique. One day, I simply noticed I couldn't type a non-trivial text without significant pain.

When I started learning Colemak-DH, my QWERTY WPM was about 45. QWERTY was never a well-designed layout, but I wonder how much of it came down to actually relearning how to type with the right fingers. Within a couple months, my Colemak was 95 WPM, while my QWERTY is now <15 WPM.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-06-03 07:52:51+00:00
I think we will have to agree to disagree!

I fundamentally don't think IR35 is a class-based attack on the working class. It was introduced by a Labour government.

The consultancies don't pay their workers far less than they could get in a similar position as an employee of the client - or they would leave! They do charge the client a lot more of course - that's their profit, deserved or not.

While I totally acknowledge that large multinationals play fast and loose with tax, it's a totally different problem than going after small fry. I would welcome efforts to crack down on that, it's just very, very hard to pull off.

So my view is simply that IR35 was the taxman trying to bring in more revenue by targeting a common tax avoidance scheme used by people they thought would be easy to target. And then executed it incredibly poorly.
by solardev | 2025-06-03 07:53:19+00:00
How does Grinding Gear Games (who makes Path of Exile) do it? Is it only because they have Tencent funding?

They seem to have a couple of openings... https://grindinggear.com/?page=careers

I've often thought of moving there specifically for those jobs, but they specify "only apply if you currently reside in New Zealand/AUS and are a citizen" =/ Too bad.
by account42 | 2025-06-03 07:53:33+00:00
The stdlib's unordered_map could certainly have been designed better but there have also been significant developments in hash map implementations since it was added so no matter what they would have specified it would be obsolete by now. Meanwhile adding your favorite hash map to your C++ project doesn't take long at all. The only issue is if you want to pass a hash map between different libraries - there a standard type would be useful. But that also requires a stable implementation that doesn't change which gets the same ossification of sub-par implementations that you already have in the stdlib.
by gloosx | 2025-06-03 07:55:55+00:00
Putin really likes cool dates. 1st of June is not a random date, it is a Military Aviation Day in Russia, and they wanted to celebrate by bringing their heaviest bombers to a massive WWII Dresden-style raid before the "peace talks" to show their power and leverage. It was a pretty obvious move and on the 3rd year of ongoing war they got so careless they just exposed 30% of their strategic bombers fully loaded, standing still in the open and visible on every sat imagery for the sake of showing off.
by ethegwo | 2025-06-03 07:57:24+00:00
Tonbo IO | Product Engineer | Remote | https://tonbo.io/careers/product-engineer

Tonbo IO | Product Engineer | Remote | https://tonbo.io/careers/database-engineer

We are a startup founded in the fall of 2023, working on offering "headless" real-time data analytics under Postgres. We have released several open-source projects that you can check out at https://github.com/tonbo-io.

Back-End Core Stack: Rust, Apache Arrow/Parquet, Open Telemetry

Front-End Core Stack: Python/JavaScript, NodeJs/Deno, Next.js/React, Drizzle, D3.js, WebAssembly
by officehero | 2025-06-03 07:57:25+00:00
I've reproduced this type of sentiment over several of my hobby projects and it usually hits hard toward the latter half of the project and its usually related to bugs. In the beginning it's all great and fast with LLMs, but then there's a kind of steep drop in motivation as one realizes one has to dig as deep anyway into the tedious stuff, because there are always bugs.
by Zorass | 2025-06-03 07:57:55+00:00
For a long time, schools assumed that if a student turned in a written essay, it meant they had learned something. But now AI can write those essays too ,so that assumption doesn’t hold up anymore.

The real question is: if writing alone doesn’t prove learning, then what does?

Maybe we’ll see a return to oral exams or live discussions. Not because they’re perfect, but because they’re harder to fake.

In a way, AI didn’t ruin education it just exposed problems that were already there.
by Caelus9 | 2025-06-03 07:58:08+00:00
I’ve been thinking maybe part of it is just how much more we use our brains these days without even noticing. Like, my grandparents had tough lives, sure, but things were pretty routine. They did the same tasks every day, didn’t have to constantly adapt or juggle ten different things at once. Now? We’re switching between apps, replying to emails, figuring out random tech stuff, managing a million small decisions all day long. Even doing something simple like buying groceries online comes with dozens of tiny choices. So maybe it’s not just about avoiding brain damage maybe we’re giving our brains a constant workout without realizing it. Not saying we’re geniuses, but just being mentally active every day might help keep things sharp over time.
by dominicrose | 2025-06-03 07:58:43+00:00
> but it’s bad at rust

I gave chatgpt (the free desktop web version) my Ruby solution to one of my favorite adventofcode challenges and asked it to write in in Rust. I've no experience in Rust except reading the few first chapters of the book but with the help of the compiler I managed to fix it and it gave the right responses 100x faster than Ruby did. So chatgpt did a great job keeping the logic intact.

I would have done the same thing if LLMs didn't exist, write it in Ruby first and then in Rust. The flexibility and expressiveness of Ruby allows to actually find a working solution. Experienced Rustaceans would do it directly in Rust, but writing in Ruby should be easier and an LLM can transform it.
by PokerFacowaty | 2025-06-03 07:59:33+00:00
This is a great article and I think I agree with most of it, not being an agent user myself.

One point the author might be missing is:

> If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing

The tech giants and AI bros alike have been bombarding us with "but look what it can do NOW", "the new shiny model is revolutionary, now buy tokens", "look what's around the corner" and whatever else for over 2 years now. Can you really blame a typical "skeptic" for not being interested in putting their time to veryfing these claims themselves after seeing mediocre results so many times? You start to develop a filter for these things.
by ArtTimeInvestor | 2025-06-03 08:00:02+00:00
high p/e ratios as an indicator of overvalued companies

Again, you say that as if there was some kind of agreement on what a "high" p/e ratio is. But what is it? Since you multiple times mentioned "historical averages", I guess you assume that above the historical average means "high". But that is a big statement. How do you back it up?

Imagine an investor in 1988 (the middle of the p/e chart you linked to) who took your approach. From their perspective, the historical average p/e of the S&P 500 is about 15. Would they have played the market by selling over 15 and buying under 15, they would have missed almost all of the nice long rally that came in the decades after.
by Jordan-117 | 2025-06-03 08:00:23+00:00
I'm sorry you had to go through that.

On a meta level, the violence makes sense as an exploration of the boundaries of that universe -- Prime Intellect makes everything so anodyne and safe, that extreme (consensual) violent torture is one of the few ways for the jaded to feel anything anymore. Even then, the stakes are gone, so it becomes a more abstract experience of over-the-top, almost comical horror detached from any real danger -- pain for the sake of pain. And the pedophilic aspects are all roleplay among adults.

The incest stuff is pointlessly gross, though. It's handwaved as a way for them to restore the population, but that doesn't make biological sense. It's presented as a sudden compulsion of Caroline's, who showed no inclination towards it before. It makes even less sense for Lawrence. And the girl is so young, and the descriptions so explicit. All of those are deliberate choices the author makes, and none of them really necessary except as some kind of pervy wish-fulfillment. (Plus, children cannot consent period, much less when initiated into it by their overbearing mother in an otherwise empty world).
by juanfont | 2025-06-03 08:00:33+00:00
Headscale creator here.

> Fun fact: Tailscale have an almost-assuredly-accurate count of Headscale users due to how few people disable the Tailscale client's telemetry which by default sends them real-time events about everything you do on a Headscale network. See KB1011: https://tailscale.com/kb/1011/log-mesh-traffic

That is not true. We actually instruct all the clients to send no logs - since at least three years:

https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/blame/main/hscontrol/t....

And also in the config example:

https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/blob/main/config-examp...

That said, I would have loved to know how many nodes use Headscale... :)