MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by makeitdouble | 2025-06-08 08:34:28+00:00
To play the devil/right holder's advocate, the next turn in that game is to never "sell" anything, so you won't have "bought" the content nor have any standard codified right to it.

We're already there in many places of course, and many stores have already replaced the "buy" action with more ambiguous wording.

Next turn to that being people turning to the seventh' seas, and then we have again an iTunes Store/Steam moment, and the cycle goes on.
by samsepi01 | 2025-06-08 08:35:02+00:00
> "The loop of prompt->study->prompt->study... is disruptive to my inner loop for several reasons, but a big one is that the machine doesn't "think" like i do. So the solutions it scaffolds commonly make me say "huh?" and i have to change my thought process to interpet them and then study them for mistakes. My intution and iteration is, for the time being, more effective than this machine assisted loop..."

My thoughts exactly as an ADHD dev.

Was having trouble describing my main issue with LLM-assisted development...

Thank you for giving me the words!
by whstl | 2025-06-08 08:36:41+00:00
For music I blame poptimism.

An entire generation of critics tried to appeal to a new market and money suddenly became synonymous with quality.

Naturally artists stopped caring about authenticity, sharing their beliefs. And also about the critics.

Just as music was replaced by reality shows in MTV, music journalism was entirely replaced by gossip and tabloids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism
by petedoyle | 2025-06-08 08:37:32+00:00
> The absolute nightmare is about giving Google the root signing key of your application

I wish more people talked about this. At Amazon, I helped with the early threat modeling around adoption of "App Signing by Google Play", which requires sending your app's root signing key to Google (and is now required, with no publicly-available opt-out for new apps.) It would have added some nice things for Android devs: app bundles, smaller downloads, instant apps, etc.

That said, we imagined the following scenario, and were unable to find a reasonable mitigation at the time:

It seems plausible the US government could send a NSL (or similar) to Google and force them to distribute modified APKs for apps like Signal (ex: to exfiltrate keys). This would be nearly impossible to detect, especially if the modified APK were distributed to only an individual user, or a small group. A few people raised concerns [1], but I don't recall Google ever giving a reasonable response.

[1] https://commonsware.com/blog/2020/09/23/uncomfortable-questi...

Edit: clarify no opt out applies to new apps
by buran77 | 2025-06-08 08:37:59+00:00
It doesn't matter if you upgrade Docker or not. All tech, self hosted or not, fails for three reasons:

1) You did something to it (changed a setting, upgraded software, etc.)

2) You didn't do something to it (change a setting, upgrade a software, etc.)

3) Just because.

When it does you get the wonderful "work-like" experience, frantically trying to troubleshoot while the things around your house are failing and your family is giving you looks for it.

Self host but be aware that there's a tradeoff. The work that used to be done by someone else, somewhere else, before issues hit you is now done by you alone.
by krysp | 2025-06-08 08:38:22+00:00
I agree that a lot of the noise at the moment is an emotional reaction to LLMs, rather than a dispassionate assessment of how useful they are. It's understandable - they are changing the way we work, and for lots of us (software developers), the reason we chose this career was because we _enjoy_ writing code and solving problems.

As with a lot of issues in today's world, each side is talking past the other. It can simultaneously be true that LLMs make writing code less enjoyable / gratifying, and that LLMs can speed up our work.
by whstl | 2025-06-08 08:38:54+00:00
As an old-school leftist that feels politically orphaned, I feel like there's a huge group that is hating all the current bullshit. Even terminally online people.

I don't see a way out, though. I just hope we can leave a planet for the animals.

EDIT: On the other hand: the internet is already a dystopia if you look closely. Maybe it will prove to be a fad and people will go back to their lives. One can hope!
by tim333 | 2025-06-08 08:38:59+00:00
>LLMs lack anything in any way resembling human intelligence

I think intelligence has many aspects from moulds solving mazes to chess etc. I find LLMs resemble very much human rapid language responses where you say something without thinking about it first. They are not very good at thinking though. And hopeless if you were to say hook one to a robot and tell it to fix your plumbing.
by root_axis | 2025-06-08 08:39:47+00:00
It may take a long time to be fully litigated, but the courts also take a while to act, and we've seen that this administration takes full advantage of this fact. The odds are also stacked against Elon here because the national security interests would likely make a compelling argument to stay any injunctions SpaceX might seek. SpaceX might prevail in the end, but the whole process would get very uncomfortable for Elon in the meantime.
by muzani | 2025-06-08 08:39:57+00:00
Claude is surprisingly bad with UI. Nearly every other is better at it. GPT-4o is proper multimodal, while Claude is a mix. I'm not sure about GPT 4.1, but it seems to gave better results than 4o.

You should be able to get good enough results with just a screenshot.

It stumbles on newer things like Next.js though. I'm always amused by the people who think it's taking jobs. It's always going to be mid; it has to be trained on someone's code.

It makes some good guesses, and often gets the color or font weights close. One trick is to have it go over your design system and summarize everything into ui.md and such.
by andrelaszlo | 2025-06-08 08:39:57+00:00
I remember a website about Ski-Doo snowmobiles that my friend was obsessed about (both the website and snowmobiles) in 1998 or so. It was from Canada, and the bgsound was the website owner saying something in French.

To us, it sounded like: fjänfny, hmmhmmhmm, dadadada. I only realized lately that the first word must be "bienvenue". It would be amazing to find it again on archive.org but unfortunately I dont remember more than this. :)
by yyyk | 2025-06-08 08:40:41+00:00
True, but this can be compensated for. Current vehicle design is based on human-operated gas vehicles - so it better be aerodynamic (to save gas), and a human needs to be in the front (to see) with only a glass to separate, and it needs a particular stopping action (again a consequence of carrying humans without enough separation). This has unfortunate implications for noise and stopping distance. Electric-powered AV can have creative designs to enable much quicker (yet safe) stopping action, an action which AV would also make rarer.
by KronisLV | 2025-06-08 08:41:35+00:00
They cynic in me wants to point out how for many (most?) of the programmers out there, they aren't working on novel problems that need a lot of involved thinking or using that gray matter to come up with something innovative.

Instead, your average Joe will be writing some Java code with Spring Boot (or .NET with ASP.NET, or Ruby with Ruby on Rails, or PHP with Laravel, or Python with Django) where how to do things is already largely established and they only need to answer the "what?" question - to codify a bunch of boring business rules into a technical solution that runs.

That work isn't entirely different from tasks where codegen shines - like writing DB migrations from entities, or entity mappings from some existing DB schema, or writing client code based on an OpenAPI spec, or writing an OpenAPI spec based on your endpoint definitions. The less people have to do that manually, the better the results seem to be (e.g. a bunch of deterministic code that will do everything correctly based on the inputs, given how well known the problem space is).

You could also say the same for having something like autocomplete, or automated code suggestions, or even all of those higher abstraction level frameworks there in the first place - where you don't start solving a problem with "First, I'll write something that binds to a port and takes incoming HTTP requests..." but rather "I'll look up how you add a required constraint for a business object that's mapped to a DB table so validations fail before I even try to save something bad. If I'm really lucky, I'll be able to return a user friendly error message too!"

There, it doesn't really matter whether the official docs will tell you that, a colleague, StackOverflow, ChatGPT, or anything else... you're not doing that much creative work, but something a bit more blue collar. The end result of all this is programming becoming something closer to data entry with ample amounts of code to just glue other solutions together. There, the risks posed by LLMs are far lower and the utility far greater - because a lot of the code is similarly structured and quite boring.
by constantcrying | 2025-06-08 08:44:07+00:00
Here is an idea: Instead of using a decentralized network, which by design can not protect users against illicit use of their funds if a third party has the private keys, what if we had trusted and regulated institutions which would provide services such a safekeeping of money or distribution of funds? Having human in the loop means of course human errors, but it would also enable us to keep the institutions accountable in case of such human error and even reverse illicit transactions.
by ETH_start | 2025-06-08 08:44:35+00:00
There are hundreds of thousands of regulations carrying criminal penalties. If a political party is determined to imprison an opponent, it will find a law they’ve technically violated. In Trump’s case, they used an obscure accounting rule — one so trivial that even prominent Democratic supporters acknowledged it was an inappropriate basis for prosecution.

Hillary Clinton used a private email server while serving as Secretary of State, and in 2014, her staff deleted 31,000 emails they labeled personal to prevent them from being scrutinized in an impending investigation. You don't think that if Hillary had been a Republican and if the Democrats were determined to prosecute her, they couldn't have found some law that she broke and prosecuted her on it?
by tacker2000 | 2025-06-08 08:44:52+00:00
What are you talking about?

Docker is THE solution for self hosting stuff since one often has one server and runs a ton of stuff on it, with different PHP, Python versions, for example.

Docker makes it incredibly easy to a multitude of services on one machine however different they may be.

And if you ever need to move to a new server, all you need to do is move the volumes (if even necessary) and run the containers on the new machine.

So YES, self hosting stuff is a huge use case for docker.
by moffkalast | 2025-06-08 08:46:36+00:00
Looking at the HyperTalk syntax [0] it's interesting how we take left hand variable assignment as a given while math typically teaches the exact opposite since you can't really write the answer before you have the question.

Makes you think if lambda expressions would be more consistent with the rest if they were reversed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk#Fundamental_operatio...
by npteljes | 2025-06-08 08:47:11+00:00
I get your concerns, but I see it in a different way. I think we are at risk either way.

I think when people are actually vulnerable is when they are using an account-based service, for free. In your example, Gmail. If Google is being a bitch about my Premium service, I will just not pay it, and move on with my life. What does someone do when Google is being a bitch to them with Gmail? Do they change their email at all 100 places they have given their email to, just to resist a small monthly subscription for example, or ads or whatever? So if talking about risk, I'd rather look there.

Wrt ublock, similar deal. They would do that anyways. It's just unimaginable that such a power position as Google's wouldn't get abused.

Bottom line, I don't see how it's a bad thing paying them when they actually offer a paid service. I rather wish that these venture capital magic money free services would go away instead. Services should have a cost, and users should pay those costs as directly as possible. The weird things happen from all the indirections providers employ.
by anonzzzies | 2025-06-08 08:47:30+00:00
That's for sure; I said with the original chatgpt already ; if this is the level it stays at but just becomes (much) faster and open, it's already a bizar revolution. Something many old former (and current, as I see online, but I don't know any personally) AI students/researchers did not think possible in our lifetime, and there it was.
by buran77 | 2025-06-08 08:47:31+00:00
You can be a superstar and still not succeed alone, without other superstars around you. They are so successful because they know each other. And survivorship bias guarantees that all those who didn't make it are unknown, or not mentioned.

This is the role of successful companies like this, just like top universities. They help create the connection between people with huge potential (or money), superstars, and amplify it.

Remember those pictures will all the famous 20th century geniuses in one place. They each got to reach the peak by building a new step on top of someone else's previous step, and so on. Eventually they all climbed the same ladder together. They were like a talent packed sports team dominating the sports for many seasons. It's not a coincidence they're in the same picture.
by magicalhippo | 2025-06-08 08:47:58+00:00
I feel the exact opposite. Docker has made self-hosting so much easier and painless.

Backing up relevant configuration and data is a breeze with Docker. Upgrading is typically a breeze as well. No need to suffer with a 5-year old out of date version from your distro, run the version you want to and upgrade when you want to. And if shit hits the fan, it's trivial to roll back.

Sure, OS tools should be updated by the distro. But for the things you actually use the OS for, Docker all the way in my view.
by fjfaase | 2025-06-08 08:48:15+00:00
I understand that the consitution also applies to people who are illegal in the United States. This is very important for people who travel to the United States by plane and are rejected entrance for some reason, for example having certain messaged on social media, and are thus declared illegals to be send home. The idea that I as an EU member could be deported to El Salvador, is enough reason for me to not consider to travel to the USA and advice everyone to avoid doing it as well, especially if the are of (mixed) color.
by motorest | 2025-06-08 08:50:43+00:00
> It's wild that a president can say, "I don't like Elon anymore, so out of retaliation, I'm canceling all his government contracts," and ~40% of the country doesn't see that as corruption in any way, shape, or form.

This is what a fascist dictatorship looks like. You have a leader who adheres to the persona of a strong man perpetually fighting against enemies who are both too weak and too strong, and at the drop of a hat their enemies change. Then of course rule of law doesn't apply anymore because the strong man in charge is the law, so he is supported in arbitrarily abusing and corrupting the state for his own personal benefit because his personal victories are sold as a show of stength.

The US needs to wake up to the fact that they are now living under a totalitarian dictatorship. The rest of the world is already well aware.
by ggm | 2025-06-08 08:51:20+00:00
Eh. He doesn't discuss which public dns upstream supports dtls and in some sense it's just picking who snoops, ie he argues against cloudflare snooping but doesn't discuss who else might.

Run hyperlocal root, run your own dns.

His "don't move off 22 for ssh" is also just opinion. He argues "you will be found" but misses the experience of those of us running on shifted ssh is continuously validated by the visibly lower level of probes we see. He offers no mathematical analysis of how quickly a port knock sequence will be uncovered, and again dismisses it as infeasible and useless.

I've got nothing against strongly held opinions and these are his. But, form your own opinions too.
by safety1st | 2025-06-08 08:51:35+00:00
I'm posting right now from a 13 year old Acer laptop running Linux Mint XFCE. I always feel bad about throwing away old tech so when the time came to buy a new laptop I hooked this one up to my living room TV via HDMI, bought a $25 Logitech K400+ wireless keyboard/trackpad combo, and it's still trucking along just fine. Surfs the web, handles YouTube, Netflix with no problems, I occasionally pop open VS Code or Thunderbird to check into something work-related. Even runs a couple indie games on Steam with gamepad support.

I bet Framework laptops would take this dynamic into overdrive, sadly I live in a country that they don't ship to.
by specproc | 2025-06-08 08:52:15+00:00
Totally agree, I think this whole conversation is a first language thing. I learned pandas first, and found the whole R ecosystem to be a complete mess.

So many different types of object, so many different syntaxes. The tidyverse makes sense, and sure, is elegant, but if your colleagues are using base R. Don't even get me started on docs and Stackoverflow for R. I much, and always will prefer Python.

The one area I still go back to R is on proper survey work. I've looked for years and haven't found anything equivalent to the survey package for Python. I do like that R tends to start from the assumption that data is weighted.

Fortunately I don't do surveys much anymore.
by 8s2ngy | 2025-06-08 08:52:28+00:00
> Emacs is a powerful tool, but it also demands a lot from its user. Eventually I got tired of dealing with the host of plugins and customizations that I needed to keep my system running the way I wanted. I'm at a point in my life where I would rather spend my spare time on hobbies, hanging out with family and friends, and otherwise not messing around with a patchwork of ELisp code snippets that I've cobbled together from various sources.

On the flip side, my experience with Emacs has been quite different. You don't need a ton of plugins to get the most out of it; I've been using the same configuration of under 200 lines for the past six years without encountering any breaking changes. I rely on Magit, Org-mode, Org-roam, and Org-agenda every single day.

That said, using Emacs does require some commitment to reading the documentation. While I agree that it has some outdated defaults, you only need to make those adjustments once.
by mellow-lake-day | 2025-06-08 08:52:46+00:00
Yes, it's quite disingenuous to say that USA is engaged a proxy war. Ukraine has military support from other countries but they are the ones making decisions at the end of day.

For example Ukraine just carried out a complex drone attack on Russia's bomber fleet, this was careful planned by Ukrainian miliary without any involvement of the US and US was not informed of this ahead of time. And after the fact USA got upset with Ukraine for doing that.
by energy123 | 2025-06-08 08:52:55+00:00
The empirical scaling laws are evidence. They're not deductive evidence, but still evidence.

The scaling laws themselves advertise diminishing returns, something like a natural log. This was never debated by AI optimists, so it's odd to suggest otherwise as if it contradicts anything the AI optimists have been saying.

The scaling laws are kind of a worst case scenario, anyway. They assume no paradigm shift in methodology. As we saw when the test-time scaling law was discovered, you can't bet on stasis here.
by radarsat1 | 2025-06-08 08:53:40+00:00
I've been using btrbk with a local linux machine i use as a file server. Works well for incremental snapshot backups, no need to "unthaw" an image, I can directly fetch files from a previous snapshot. The only thing I haven't figured out with btrfs is how to efficiently handle incremental backs to S3. I guess there's not much choice than to use image diffs using btrfs-send because you don't have hard/ref links. But I don't like this because then if i want to retrieve a file from some version I'd have to have an extra 30 TB free to install the base image and progressively all the diffs up to the point I want to retrieve, seems a lot harder. So to make this reasonable I'd have to choose to make periodic non-incremental base images, starts getting complicated.
by zaptrem | 2025-06-08 08:53:56+00:00
I'm around the age these guys were during this story. I feel the exact opposite way. I spent middle/high school feeling similarly, only pining for the 2000s ("wow, with smartphones and the internet the industry was wide open with opportunity, anything was possible. Now it seems like everything's been done and giants rule the world"). However, the GenAI boom completely changed my mind. I feel like we're the most lucky of all the generations of engineers so far considering how many crazy things are now possible with just a few determined individuals.
by KronisLV | 2025-06-08 08:54:14+00:00
Personally, I really liked using Liberation Mono (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts) or Google Cousine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croscore_fonts) because their readability at smaller font sizes is really good and they're not too hard on the eyes.

I also quite enjoyed PT Mono (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PT_Fonts) for similar reasons, except for some reason the full stop character (.) was way too small on the smaller font sizes, which is annoying enough to prevent me from daily driving it.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, I experimented with the Terminus font (https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/) though as you'll see in the linked page, there is a special version of it that's been converted to TTF and it only looks good at very specific sizes, which isn't always what you want, despite me actually really enjoying the font.

Eventually, I just settled on JetBrains Mono (https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/) because it was free, came as the default for the JetBrains IDEs (it's annoying to change the fonts for like 7-8 installed IDEs) and wasn't hard to set as the default for the rest of the programs either.

I've always just wanted to have a font that's easy on the eyes and lets me be productive, though nowadays I'm also thinking about whether light/dark themes might be more helpful (e.g. on Windows, the SourceTree light theme actually looks better than the dark one, so it's also a matter of good dark themes like in JetBrains vs just okay ones like in SourceTree).

Always nice to see more options for fonts, though! Really nice site design, too, I have to admit.
by flohofwoe | 2025-06-08 08:55:31+00:00
> Zig is hostile to encapsulation. You cannot make struct members private

In Zig (and plenty of other non-OOP languages) modules are the mechanism for encapsulation, not structs. E.g. don't make the public/private boundary inside a struct, that's a silly thing anyway if you think about it - why would one ever hand out data to a module user which is not public - just to tunnel it back into that same module later?

Instead keep your private data and code inside a module by not declaring it public, or alternatively: don't try to carry over bad ideas from C++/Java, sometimes it's better to unlearn things ;)