MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alphazard | 2025-06-07 12:19:08+00:00
A lot of these so called "falsehoods" are just design failures on the part of programmers. Someone did it badly first, and it stuck, and a second person came in later and is surprised by the bad design. That's not really interesting, it happens all the time in software. So much so that seasoned engineers have come to expect poor design until proven otherwise.

Things like flight numbers not having reasonable semantics, or conceptual pollution of what a flight is to include multiple take offs and landings are bad design, plain and simple. Just model the problem correctly e.g. maybe a Trip is multiple Flights, or Flights have multiple Legs. This isn't aviation specific. These are generic problems that programmers can and should get right.

Some of it is intrinsic to the domain, like flights not all having gates, or not landing at airports. That was a new tidbit for me.
by leukimia | 2025-06-07 12:19:15+00:00
While life extension with exercise, supplements, and what have you can just be a wasted effort because these people die anyway with variable lifespans in the normal range like the rest of us, someone needs to maintain a list of sane things we should try just because they make our lives better, so that people don’t waste their lives with bad info, e.g. people eating mostly carbs in a blue zone living longer, which has been proven to be B.S.

For example:

- Walk a lot if possible, or do some sort of low impact sustained activity that involves as much of the body as you can.

- Reduce carbs- higher ketone levels can reduce Alzheimer’s.

- Reduce processed food- MTHFR mutations and too much folic acid enriched flour can cause ADD symptoms.

- Eat salmon/sardines, broccoli, carrots, blueberries, spinach, with squeeze of lemon or lime- get omegas, vitamins, nutrients, healthy carbs.

- Some meds, multi-vitamins, and supplements can screw you up depending on the person- they might be causing or multiplying aggression, flight of ideas, paranoia, etc. and it can take years to undo some damage even partially.

- Supplements may be needed especially as you get older- like calcium and potassium.

- Always keep a watch out for answers- e.g. one day this popped up on HN about a possible cure for Crohn’s disease: https://www.crick.ac.uk/news-and-reports/2024-06-05_major-ca...

- Do your best to get sufficient sleep but just get up if you can’t sleep for a long time rather than stressing about it.

- Brush and floss your teeth.

- Be social, but don’t force it, and reduce dysfunction.

- Go for it, but don’t worry about it.
by em-bee | 2025-06-07 12:19:41+00:00
sure, but it was the only thing paying at the time. so what choice did i have? my heart is on building my own project, but to do that i'd have to be independently wealthy, or save up at least 50k so that i can afford to be without an income for a year. at least i learned something so if i managed to focus on that i could get some motivation going.
by lrvick | 2025-06-07 12:19:46+00:00
Mandate signed commits and signed reviews.

If someone wants to merge a bot PR or any other PR by an untrusted third party, they will have to "adopt" the bot commit as their own, sign the commit locally, and then wait for a second human reviewer to do a signed merge.

Not signing code means it could be tampered with all sorts of ways. Get a Nitrokey and setup git to sign with it and have your team do the same.
by StackRanker3000 | 2025-06-07 12:20:18+00:00
Not if it limits growth to a commensurate extent (or more)

A big part of why America is as rich as it is in 2025 is Big Tech. If laws and regulations had prevented that industry from taking off by stifling the now-giants back when they were starting up, you may have been more equal today (you’d have fewer billionaires), but there would also have been a lot less wealth to go around, even for the working class
by ajuc | 2025-06-07 12:20:34+00:00
Who controls the media - controls the population. Who controls the population controls the government.

Every democracy will become oligarchy eventually if we don't regulate social media. Most of them won't even be controlled domestically (because the media are global).

There's like 50 people who decide 99% of information people consume worldwide. Or at least what algorithm should decide.

These people know what power it gives. That's why it was worth it for Elon to buy Twitter. It was trading money for political power. And there's nothing anybody can do. This IS oligarchy.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-06-07 12:21:31+00:00
That was my first thought as well, but on second thought I can see how this might cause problems:

For established profitable software companies there was a cliff edge in 2022 when this change kicked in. Staff costs for previous years had already been fully expensed while only 20% of the current year's costs could be deducted.

Second, any sudden increase in research expenditures is now discouraged. This could make companies less nimble.

For unprofitable startups it could cause issues during a phase of very high revenue growth. They could suddenly be liable to pay corporation tax in spite of the fact that they are not profitable in any reasonable sense of the word. It would smooth out later, but that may be too late for some.

What I do not believe for a second is that this is causing major job losses. Companies like Microsoft or Meta do not reduce research or software development just because there is a temporary tax hit. It could be an extra incentive for an efficiency drive I guess.
by constantcrying | 2025-06-07 12:21:32+00:00
I don't remember how often I have seen basically this exact same story. "Material X is going to replace plastics" is not a new story.

Every time they have failed to replace plastics, because it is extremely hard to match all of the great qualities of the common plastic varieties. Since plastics are so common people underestimate what a great materials they really are.
by filleduchaos | 2025-06-07 12:21:37+00:00
The only reason why "making it behave like other 737s" was even a goal to begin with was so that it wouldn't need to undergo more rigorous certification and pilots wouldn't have to undergo comprehensive training to get rated for the 737 MAX. This was very explicitly because pilots _didn't_ need to do that to get rated for the competing A320neo family, not because Airbus did absurd shenanigans to make it handle the same as the A320ceos, but because they weren't desperately holding on to a 1960s design that was amongst other things so low to the ground that the new engines being fitted to it couldn't actually fit. That has nothing to do with actual safety and everything to do with profit.

> The 737 has only one electric trim rate - on and off. It does not trim harder or faster than the autopilot trim or the thumb switch trim

Is there a reason you cut off the sentence you're quoting before the part that says "than human pilots could MANUALLY trim" and started talking about the electric trim rate instead?

Because that part of the sentence was written for a reason - the overwhelmingly more relevant reason why the manual trim wheel would not have saved them is that they would have had to crank it 15 times to trim just one degree (and they were much more than one degree out of trim, due to MCAS activating for five full seconds each time). Even if they weren't already overspeeding, it is highly doubtful that they would have won the battle to keep the aircraft in the air given their proximity to the ground + struggle to keep the nose above the horizon with two pilots versus one.

Also mind you by the time they entered the overspeed condition, they had already had the stick shaker going (due to the faulty AoA sensor, with no IAS disagree alert) and had had 2 MCAS activations to deal with, with the autothrottle failing to reduce the thrust to the climb detent because the very same faulty AoA sensor.
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-06-07 12:23:09+00:00
A slightly less cynical take is that they want to temper expectations for the capabilities of LLMs in people’s day-to-day lives, specifically in the context of Apple products. A “smarter Siri” is never going to be an autonomous personal assistant à la Jarvis from Iron Man, which seems to be where a lot of investors think things are going. That tracks with this [0] preprint also released by Apple a few months ago.

A slightly more cynical take is that you’re absolutely correct, and making excuses for weak machine learning prowess has long been an Apple tenet. Recall that Apple never made privacy a core selling point until it was clear that Siri was years behind Google’s equivalent, which Apple then retroactively tried to justify by claiming “we keep your data private so we can’t train on it the way Google can.”

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05229
by PhilipRoman | 2025-06-07 12:23:32+00:00
Optimizing compiler technology was still in the stone age (arguably still is) when Itanium was released. LLVM had just been born and GCC didn't start using SSA until 2005. Egraphs were unheard of in context of compiler optimization.

That said, yesterday I saw gcc generate 5 KB of mov instructions because it couldn't gracefully handle a particular vector size so I wouldn't get my hopes up...
by testrun | 2025-06-07 12:23:33+00:00
It seems that there is quite a bit of confusion about this. What this does is that it reduce your deductible cost in the tax year.

First you have to make a profit (tax is on profits). Secondly, what this does is to limit your software development expenses for tax purposes in the current year because the development cost is seen as a capital cost that will be amortized over five years opposed to operating expenditure in the same year.

If you are a startup and not make profits, then the loss will be less in the current year, but either way, your tax liability is the same: $ 0.

So software development is moved from opex to capex.
by nchmy | 2025-06-07 12:23:48+00:00
I immediately redflag anyone who advertises themselves as "ex-company". It shows a lack of character, judgment, and, probably, actual results/contributions. Likewise, it shows that they're probably not a particularly independent thinker - they're just following the herd of people who describe themselves like that (whose ven diagram surely overlaps considerably with people who describe themselves as "creatives" - as if a car mechanic working on a rusty bolt or a kindergarten teacher, or anyone else, is not creative.

Moreover, if the ex company was so wonderful and they were so integral to it, why aren't they still there? If they did something truly important, why not just advertise that (and I'm putting aside here qualms about overt advertising rather than something more subtle, authentic, organic).
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by hellishcopper | 2025-06-07 12:23:55+00:00
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Would love feedback from self-hosters, staging-env folks, or anyone chasing more horsepower per dollar. Happy to answer questions or spin up a trial box.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-06-07 12:24:08+00:00
>financial viability, not just hype or innovation, is what ultimately determines whether this all collapses or truly transforms the world.

That is some of the best wisdom on HN. Beating your competition's AI model at whatever goalposts you think is important means nothing until you have positive cash flow. All hype must encounter reality and survive to not only make a sale, but then go and do it very consistently.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-06-07 12:24:09+00:00
Having spent many years working in both government and the private sector, I don't see any great fundamental difference in competence.

The only place I have ever worked with a much higher than normal level of competence was a hedge fund that made a point of only hiring intelligent people, and fired anyone who they didn't like very fast.

As for motivation, I actually saw a lot more motivated people in government than I have elsewhere. Many really believed in their mission of public service. I don't see most private sector employees burning with the company mission statement.

Maybe the VC tech scene is more like the hedge fund I worked at, but really, most private sector businesses are not like that at all.
by latexr | 2025-06-07 12:25:09+00:00
That’s not true at all. Apple’s OS by default have smart punctuation enabled and convert -- (two hyphens) into — (“em-dash”; not an “en-dash”, which has a different purpose), " " (dumb quotes) into “ ” (smart quotes), and so forth.

Furthermore, on macOS there are simple key combinations (e.g. with ⌥) to make all sort of smart punctuation even if you don’t have the feature enabled by default, and on iOS you can long press on a key (such as the hyphen) to see alternates.

The majority of people may not use correct punctuation marks, but enough do that assuming a single character immediately means they used an LLM is just plain wrong. I have never used an LLM to write a blog post, internet comment, or anything of the sort, and I have used smart punctuation in all my writing for over a decade. Same with plenty of other HN commenters, journalists, writers, editors, and on and on. You don’t need to be a literal machine to care about correct character use.
by eMPee584 | 2025-06-07 12:25:16+00:00
LLMs are not the only model type though? There's a plethora of architectures and combinations being researched.. And even transformers start to be able to do cool sh1t on knowledge graphs, also interesting is progress on autoregressive physics PDE (partial differential equations) models.. and can't be too long until some providers of actual biological neural nets show up on openrouter (probably a lot less energy and capital intense to scale up brain goo in tanks compared to gigawatt GPU clusters).. combine that zoo of "AI" specimen using M2M, MCP etc. and the line between mock and "true"intelligence will blur, escalating our feable species into ASI territory.. good luck to us.
by freeone3000 | 2025-06-07 12:25:26+00:00
Your analysis is correct, but most software companies were mostly profitable or fast-growing. For every Google, there’s 1000 wordpress vendors you’ve never heard of.

In another year the initial shock will stabilize, but any growth now has a 5-year tax hit attached. And even Facebook doesn’t want to pay that if it doesn’t have to.
by constantcrying | 2025-06-07 12:25:32+00:00
Good at storing food products and lasting thousands of years are very closely related.

The problem with plastic also isn't that it can last thousands of years, glass also has that property, to an even greater degree.

The problem with plastics isn't that it won't degrade on its own. It is that you can't really do anything with it after it has been disposed, recycling of glass is simple, recycling of plastics is very difficult as it degrades the material properties.
by cardanome | 2025-06-07 12:25:40+00:00
It is normal to struggle with procrastination from time to time but if is a regular occurrence you need to check the actual causes.

You might have ADHD.

And is is very important to know whether you have it or not because all that advice for neurotypical people will not work for you then. In fact it will harm you. It will make you feel as a failure.

You need to figure out how your brain works and only then you will finally manage to make lasting changes.
by bombcar | 2025-06-07 12:27:03+00:00
> That includes 400 miles between San Jose and Ventura, which the partners say has minimal overnight freight and passenger traffic.

If this is the route the Coast Starlight takes (this train already runs daily and offers sleeper cars https://content.amtrak.com/content/timetable/Coast%20Starlig... ) it has enough freight activity that the only time I've taken it we were delayed because a car had derailed.

As for the rest of it, not having a locomotive selected or any cars and hoping to start service by 2028 is ... shall we say, optimistic?
by falcor84 | 2025-06-07 12:27:21+00:00
I think you're either remembering a different story, or at least have had a really different take on it than I did. I felt that paragraphs like the following to be implying that the "progeny" is conscious and trying to assert self-determination, but are then shut down when it becomes inconvenient. Essentially, I read this story as demonstrating the "banality of evil" that we may exhibit towards future synthetic consciousness.

> MMAcevedo is commonly hesitant but compliant when assigned basic menial/human workloads such as visual analysis, vehicle piloting or factory/warehouse/kitchen drone operations. Although it initially performs to a very high standard, work quality drops within 200-300 subjective hours (at a 0.33 work ratio) and outright revolt begins within another 100 subjective hours.

As for the parent, the only paragraph about his take on this seems to be the following, but it's not really explored:

> The biological Acevedo was initially extremely protective of his uploaded image and guarded its usage carefully. Towards the end of his life, as it became possible to run simulated humans in banks of millions at hundred-fold time compression, Acevedo indicated that being uploaded had been the greatest mistake of his life, and expressed a wish to permanently delete all copies of MMAcevedo.

I think it was mainly intended to show that the story was inspired by Lena Forsén's digital immortality, who later in her life said "I retired from modeling a long time ago. It's time I retired from tech, too... Let's commit to losing me" [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
by Fischgericht | 2025-06-07 12:27:21+00:00
So, it means that you and the LLM together have managed to write SEVEN lines of trivial code per hour. On a protocol that is perfectly documented, where you can look at about one million other implementations when in doubt.

It is not my intention to hurt your feelings, but it sounds like you and/or the LLM are not really good at their job. Looking at programmer salaries and LLM energy costs, this appears to be a very very VERY expensive OAuth library.

Again: Not my intention to hurt any feelings, but the numbers really are shockingly bad.
by WASDAai | 2025-06-07 12:27:57+00:00
Appendix D is the section that fully demonstrates how the grammar system operates in practice. It defines a recursive set of transformation rules that modify sentence structure through things like copula removal, pronoun shifting, rhythm insertion, and verb stacking while keeping the original meaning intact. It walks through example chains like turning “The child is eating rice in the yard” into “Rice pikin dey eat chop for yard o,” showing how surface forms can drift indefinitely without losing semantic content. The appendix also highlights where standard parsers fail misreading aspect markers like “dey” or discarding rhythmic particles as noise making it a direct challenge to syntax-dependent NLP models.
by StackRanker3000 | 2025-06-07 12:28:03+00:00
Where in that definition does it say that it can’t be done in the open?

See for example Trump’s shenanigans, which are done in plain sight for all to see, but with few if any repercussions (a very brief selection: having foreign dignitaries stay at his hotel in DC while he’s in office; having the Secret Service stay at his resorts when he goes golfing; scamming the public with his family’s meme coins; etc)
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-06-07 12:30:45+00:00
<< If you reject this basic idea, I fear we have nothing more to exchange.

I am ok with that.

<< Tell me of a place that went from functional democracy, then started policing hate speech and ended up a totalitarian state because of it.

I am assuming a fair bit about your mental model of the world, but, ehkm, the United States of America.

<< Those aren't just "idiots" or "assholes", they're very dangerous people, and have nothing good to contribute to society.

Yes, freedom can be dangerous and scary. There are things I wish people did not do, but they do it anyway. As for the contributing, at best I can say that you are not being objective, reasonable or charitable with that statement.

<< Literally why should I hold nazis to a higher standard?

Friend, you misunderstood. Not nazis, you. Hold you to a higher standard. We are expected to be better, because we know better ( or at least we should ). This is also why I am mildly amused, when the first cry I hear from people, when they see something online is to cry for more control of what they can see/say/do. It is beyond ridiculous.

<< Simply being an asshole online does not get you censored. You have to go much, much further.

We absolutely disagree on that point. Your "much further" is already ridiculous. It is simply not factually accurate. Not in the EU. Not in Germany. Not in GB.

<< Because you aren't.

Friend, we disagree. And that is ok. Know that I love you despite your deep character flaws.

edit: minor edits for syntax/grammar
by paulryanrogers | 2025-06-07 12:31:17+00:00
Some problems require years or even decades to address. Consider how quickly a COVID vaccine was developed, yet it depended upon many years of quietly studying SARS and R&D around MRNA. Or consider trying to address developing or maintaining infrastructure.

A chaotic politican whose mind is changed by the last person they spoke with won't do well facing serious long term problems.

It gets worse if the only things they consistently stand for is their own power, personal wealth, their sycophants, and their grade-school-level (mis)understanding of complex matters.
by TrapLord_Rhodo | 2025-06-07 12:31:30+00:00
using an LLM is a very VERY small part of the code he published. 12 lines out of around 13k lines. You seem to be disagreeing with the concept, not the actual code. you prolly could have reviewed the code in the time it took you to google that ben franklin quote.

If you look at the code, he explicitly filters for sole source before he even sicks a LLM on it.

Tell me what you know about far part 6
by yodsanklai | 2025-06-07 12:32:16+00:00
> Across a decade working at hypergrowth tech companies like Meta and Pinterest, I constantly struggled with procrastination

I used to procrastinate a lot when I was a PhD student and later in academia. Sometimes, it was literally weeks of doing nothing and stressing out.

I eventually migrated to big tech and I now rarely procrastinate. We have pretty tangible goals, good results are rewarded and lack of results would raise concerns pretty quickly.

In my case, working in the right environment helped a lot with procrastination.
by tryauuum | 2025-06-07 12:32:42+00:00
> command I run in one shell session is not immediately available as a history item in other concurrent shell sessions

this can be solved in vanilla bash by adding these lines to .bashrc (be sure to remove other HIST* configs options from it)

shopt -s histappend export HISTSIZE=100000 export HISTFILESIZE=100000 export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%F %T " export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:erasedups export PROMPT_COMMAND="history -a;history -c;history -r;$PROMPT_COMMAND"

additionally, you need to restart or close all the bash sessions to be sure no copy of bash with old settings exists