MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DragonStrength | 2025-06-17 21:51:07+00:00
My entire old team at Amazon has been reduced from 8 people of which 5 were citizens (and one got his green card while I was there) to 2 immigrants who arrived right before the pandemic both from different at-war countries. I only know this because after the last round of layoffs one of them reached out to me asking if I could get him out of that hell. Seems pretty straightforward what has happened here.
by eadmund | 2025-06-17 21:51:22+00:00
That doesn’t really work. If there’s no longer a browser which supports X11, then I have to choose between browsing the web and having a usable desktop.

The problem is that the Wayland folks are trying to replace X11 rather than provide an easy upgrade path. They simply don’t care about anyone who uses a computer in any way outside of the ways they can be bothered to support. ‘It’s better!’ they cry, despite users telling them for well over a decade now that it’s not actually, because we cannot do the things we want.

And Wayland is being used as a form of lock-in. ‘GNOME uses Wayland now. Just drop support for that crufty old X11,’ they whisper. Never mind that plenty of folks don’t use GNOME and don’t want to use GNOME. Never mind that Wayland is still not fit for purpose.

It may be someday, and that would be great. I’d genuinely look forward to being able to move on from X11. But Wayland does not work for me, and as projects start to remove support for X11 they are removing support for me.
by tkgally | 2025-06-17 21:51:29+00:00
> ... a translators’ and interpreters’ work is mostly about ensuring context, navigating ambiguity, and handling cultural sensitivity. This is what Google Translate cannot currently do.

Google Translate can't, but LLMs given enough context can. I've been testing and experimenting with LLMs extensively for translation between Japanese and English for more than two years, and, when properly prompted, they are really good. I say this as someone who worked for twenty years as a freelance translator of Japanese and who still does translation part-time.

Just yesterday, as it happens, I spent the day with Claude Code vibe-coding a multi-LLM system for translating between Japanese and English. You give it a text to be translated, and it asks you questions that it generates on the fly about the purpose of the translation and how you want it translated--literal or free, adapted to the target-language culture or not, with or without footnotes, etc. It then writes a prompt based on your answers, sends the text to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, creates a combined draft from the three translations, and then sends that draft back to the three models for several rounds of revision, checking, and polishing. I had time to run only a few tests on real texts before going to bed, but the results were really good--better than any model alone when I've tested them, much better than Google Translate, and as good as top-level professional human translation.

The situation is different with interpreting, especially in person. If that were how I made my living, I wouldn't be too worried yet. But for straight translation work where the translator's personality and individual identity aren't emphasized, it's becoming increasingly hard for humans to compete.
by josephg | 2025-06-17 21:51:29+00:00
But plenty of ideas can’t be made manifest in the physical world. Like the idea of infinity doesn’t - and can’t - exist in the physical. Yet it’s still a useful idea in mathematics.

And again, the physical cannot be perceived except through a mind of some kind. To play devils advocate, we can imagine the universe existing without a mind to observe it - but it’s just that - an imagination.
by jsemrau | 2025-06-17 21:51:35+00:00
(1) Running multiple agents is expensive, decreasing RoI. My DeepSearch agent for stocks uses 6 agents, and each query costs about 2 USD.

(2) Multi-agent orchestration is difficult to control.

(3) The more capable the model, the lower the need for multi-agents.

(4) The less capable the model, the higher the business case for narrow AI.
by Jotalea | 2025-06-17 21:51:49+00:00
I've been using Firefox mobile browser on my not that old Samsung Galaxy S21FE for one year or more, and I can confidently say that the performance is awful. I often see delayed app loading (the navigation layer loads while the actual webview is still transparent) [1], it has a high memory usage and often caused the system to terminate another app that runs in the background at the moment. Rendering issues are also a thing. It often glitches and flashes white when opening/closing the on-screen keyboard and it blinds me for a second if using at night.

But I keep using it because I use the sync feature and it sucks less than chrome.

[1] https://files.catbox.moe/aqhh3e.mp4
by shadowgovt | 2025-06-17 21:52:39+00:00
The anecdote about rob pike and logging made me chuckle.

Fun fact about Google: logging is like 95% of the job, easily... From tracking everything every service is doing all the time to wrangling the incoming raw crawl data, it's all going through some kind of logging infrastructure.

I was there when they actually ran themselves out of integers; one of their core pieces of logging infrastructure used a protocol buffer to track datatypes of logged information. Since each field in a protocol buffer message is tagged with an integer key, they hit the problem when their top-level message bumped up against the (if memory serves) int16 implementation limit on maximum tag ID and had to scramble to fix it.
by arp242 | 2025-06-17 21:53:31+00:00
I'm sorry, but this is just complete nonsense. You can't just paint with a mega-broad brush just because there's one (or a few) unpleasant people in some demographic. You can do that for any demographic: Canadians, Vietnamese, people over 1.80m, people under 1.80m, people exactly 1.80m, etc.

I just got better things to do than rewrite code from one working display system to ... another working display system. That's all there is to it, and that's the case for many (probably most) people.
by jfengel | 2025-06-17 21:53:32+00:00
I am not an expert in the language or the culture, so I'm willing to accept that as the truth.

Nonetheless... they've had 45 years to figure out what it sounds like to us. Those 45 years started with actual violence, and has continued with various forms of proxy conflict. So I don't think it's 100% on us to de-escalate the situation.

(That said... they had been working on that de-escalation, and we're the ones who threw that in the bin about a decade ago. So I'd say the burden has shifted substantially back in our direction.)
by dralley | 2025-06-17 21:53:37+00:00
How realistic is it for the Trifecta Tech implementation to start displacing the "official" implementation used by linux distros, which hasn't seen an upstream release since 2019?

Fedora recently swapped the original Adler zlib implementation with zlib-ng, so that sort of thing isn't impossible. You just need to provide a C ABI compatible with the original one.
by arghwhat | 2025-06-17 21:54:06+00:00
A window (surface in Wayland speak) is just an object in the Wayland protocol, and a Wayland client can have as many as it likes - it will just never see anything outside its windows. If these are normal windows (top-levels), it won't even know where the windows are relative to each other - it just receives (surface-relative) input when focused, none when not.

Note that Wayland objects including surfaces does not have "properties", just requests and events. You create a surface object, create an xdg_toplevel role object to make it into a moral window, and send requests to attach and commit buffers with content, to request fullscreen, etc. In turn you get events if the display server would like you to change state, when it's a good time to start painting, etc.

It's not like X11 where a window is an arbitrary key value store that you write stuff to and cross your fingers in order to get particular behaviors.
by andrewstuart | 2025-06-17 21:54:27+00:00
I really wish all the AI companies would down tools on all development until they work out file downloads, ftp, sftp, git ANY way to access the files other than copy paste and “download file”.

The workflow is crushingly tedious.

And no I don’t want to use an AI IDE or some other tool. I like the UI of Gemini chat and AI Studio and I want them improved.
by pjerem | 2025-06-17 21:54:29+00:00
> Going to some top of the line Micheline star restaurant _will_ alter how you look at food for the rest of your life.

Interestingly I don’t agree with you and that’s what I would call elitism.

Food is a great example as I know I’m personally able to appreciate a great and complex meal at a high end restaurant and still enjoy some fast food.

It’s the same for art : does having a favorite book/movie/music/videogame/… makes you unable to enjoy other books/movies/music/videogames ?
by Ninjinka | 2025-06-17 21:54:43+00:00
For Google's Cloud Translation API you can choose between the standard Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model or the "Translation LLM (Google's newest highest quality LLM-style translation model)".

https://cloud.google.com/translate/docs/advanced/translating...

DeepL also has a translation LLM, which they claim is 1.4-1.7x better than their classic model: https://www.deepl.com/en/blog/next-gen-language-model
by basisword | 2025-06-17 21:54:49+00:00
Google can do what they want but they handle this poorly in my opinion.

First of all they seem to apply the adblocker checking at random instead of on everyone. They won't do that because they know it'll cost them.

Secondly, I use Safari and can simply 'reload page without content blockers' to allow ads and disable the extension on the current page - Google doesn't accept this. You have to fully disable your adblocker extension at the browser level before they'll let you back in. They are 100% doing that so that you stop blocking Google ads on non-Google sites.
by Dumblydorr | 2025-06-17 21:55:00+00:00
My thoughts were that relationships and love are the true key to happiness and fulfillment in life. Those thoughts were integrated for sure.

Seems like you’re lost in the thought that scientific rationalism and spiritualism can’t co-exist. Look at definitions of the words meaning and spirituality and ponder why they’re universal across all “wrong” religions in your view.

I think It’s because those are true human experiences, regardless of their detachment from established religion or tropes. I don’t believe any religion but I do believe people have genuine awe and wonder and label it spirituality.

And to just go deny other people, sounds like a bummer to be around while tripping.
by bandoti | 2025-06-17 21:55:01+00:00
This is too much for me now haha.

A restaurant menu contains hamburgers, hotdogs, meatballs. A UI menu is represented by abstract icons of the items contained within a restaurant menu.

Now I am starting to like the hamburger menu after all… perhaps more as satire though. :)

For what it’s worth, ellipsis is the best of the bunch, because it means the same thing as in the written language, and is concise enough to use as a button that suggests what the action does.
by rglover | 2025-06-17 21:55:24+00:00
> Some of the bots identify themselves, but some don't. Either way, the respondents say that robots.txt directives – voluntary behavior guidelines that web publishers post for web crawlers – are not currently effective at controlling bot swarms.

Is anybody tracking the IP ranges of bots or anything similar that's reliable?

It seems like they're taking the "what are you gonna do about it" approach to this.

Edit: Yes [1]

[1] https://github.com/FabrizioCafolla/openai-crawlers-ip-ranges
by nadis | 2025-06-17 21:55:27+00:00
Appreciated this premise as it feels like a natural progression of what's needed now that AI can be used to generate more code, more quickly.

"AI-assisted coding has fundamentally shifted where complexity lives. We can now go from concept to code in minutes, but deploying reliably at scale still takes days or weeks. The constraint has moved from creation to delivery.

More people can build software, so more software gets built. More software means more infrastructure to provision, monitor, and maintain. The operational burden compounds while our ability to manage it manually approaches its limits."
by pier25 | 2025-06-17 21:55:42+00:00
Israel doesn't even need Whatsapp to be installed.

The IDF's Unit 8200[1] can probably hack most phones in Iran. And if not any of the private companies selling spyware software like the NSO Group[2 and 3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSO_Group

[3] https://mepc.org/commentaries/israeli-cyber-companies-overvi...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-17 21:55:58+00:00
> Do you have some theories about why continuing education requirements are so different in aviation compared with finance?

Culture of professionalism. That’s kind of a bullshit answer, but it’s the closest phrase I can come to that encapsulates pilots taking the rules seriously, both because they’re there for a good reason and the FAA isn’t afraid to yank your wings, but also because the FAA isn’t usually making rules to seem tough on pilots or otherwise infantilise them, it’s following an evidence-based approach that’s explicitly endorsed by pilots. (After a crash, you aren’t trying to find who to blame. You’re trying to prevent the next crash.)
by crazygringo | 2025-06-17 21:56:24+00:00
> I can't use adblockers on Chrome

Why does this myth persist?

uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly fine on Chrome, with the new Manifest v3. Blocks basically all the ads uBlock Origin did previously, including YouTube. But it uses less resources so pages load even faster.

There's an argument that adblocking could theoretically become less effective in the future but we haven't seen any evidence of that yet.

So you can very much use adblockers on Chrome.
by jiggawatts | 2025-06-17 21:56:31+00:00
I keep trying to explain this to tiny dev teams (1-2 people) that will cheerfully take a trivial web app with maybe five forms and split it up into “microservices” that share a database, an API Management layer, a queue for batch jobs to process “huge” volumes (megabytes) of data, an email notification system, an observablity platform (bespoke!) and then… and then… turn the trivial web forms into a SPA app because “that’s easier”.

Now I understand that “architecture” and “patterns” is a jobs program for useless developers. It’s this, or they’d be on the streets holding a sign saying “will write JavaScript for a sandwich”.
by dgb23 | 2025-06-17 21:56:55+00:00
I started using htmx relatively early on, because its a more elegant version of what I've been doing anyways for a series of projects.

It's very effective, simple and expressive to work this way, as long as you keep in mind that some client side rendering is fine.

There are a few bits I don't like about it, like defaulting to swap innerHTML instead of outerHTML, not swapping HTML when the status code isn't 200-299 by default and it has some features that I avoid, like inline JSON on buttons instead of just using forms.

Other than that, it's great. I can also recommend reading the book https://hypermedia.systems/.
by metalman | 2025-06-17 21:57:10+00:00
This idea has been around for a while, and scales both ways.... I know house where where 40 tons of crushed rock were added to a new basement enclosure under a new large south facing sun room, that has fans and a differential controller to pump excess heat into the rock, was built in the 1980's here in Nova Scotia, the house only needs suplimental heat for comfort in the form of a small wood stove.
by CaliforniaKarl | 2025-06-17 21:57:25+00:00
For folks in the Bay Area, a challenge: Do a loop around the bay by non-commuter bus only. That means you can use skip-stop routes like Muni's 9R, but you cannot use routes like AC Transit's OX line. You also cannot use the Dumbarton Express, since it cuts off the South Bay.

It's an interesting experience, and it (or some portion of it) is one that many folks do every workday.
by diggan | 2025-06-17 21:57:50+00:00
Personally, Tree-style tabs (via Sideberry nowadays) is why I can't let go of Firefox. Seems some browsers have started adding vertical tabs, which is cool, but missing the holy tree structure still.

A browser that blocks ads, has tree-style tabs and is FOSS would be enough for me to switch, doesn't even have to have addons/extensions if those things are built-in.
by reillyse | 2025-06-17 21:57:50+00:00
If describing events that took place is being dramatic , then I guess so?

Imagine if someone installed a puppet king in the USA to exploit the resources of the US for their gain, would you think that would be dramatic?

As for the Islamic revolution, it was a reaction to being colonized and subjugated, and I would argue it’s still around because the only other option is being a puppet of the US.
by int_19h | 2025-06-17 21:58:56+00:00
The whole "How are you?" ritual is quite possibly the most nonsensical thing about the Anglo cultures. Like, I get that the point is to feign polite interest in the other person. But then by asking this question with the expectation of the same formulaic reply "I'm fine!" (and confusion if the response is something else) - even if the other speaker is emphatically not fine - it literally does the opposite, making it clear that the way they actually feel doesn't matter.
by nine_k | 2025-06-17 21:58:58+00:00
The diaspora is a very self-filtered subset though. Say, the Russian diaspora overwhelmingly opposes the Russia's aggression in Ukraine, while the population within Russia is mostly indifferent enough, and often supports it. (Note that all the Russian troops in Ukraine are not taken by military draft, but went to war voluntarily, for a generous fee, or in exchange for release from prison.)
by kkukshtel | 2025-06-17 21:59:01+00:00
I've been drafting a blog post on this as well. My take is that programming langauges largely evolve around "human" ergonomics and solve for "humans writing the code", but that can result in code that is too abstract and non-performant. I think where LLMs will succeed (more) is in writing _very dumb verbose code_ that can be easily optimized by the compiler.

What humans look at and what an AI looks at right now are similar only by circumstance, and what I sort of expect is that you start seeing something more like a "structure editor" that expresses underlying "dumb" code in a more abstract way such that humans can refactor it effectively, but what the human sees/edits isn't literally what the code "is".

IDK it's not written yet but when it is it will be here: https://kylekukshtel.com/llms-programming-language-design
by maybevoid | 2025-06-17 21:59:05+00:00
Coincidentally, I released a DSL last week called Hypershell [1], a Rust-based domain-specific language for shell scripting at the type level. While writing the blog post, I found myself wondering: will this kind of DSL be easier for LLMs to use than for humans?

In an initial experiment, I found that LLMs could translate familiar shell scripting concepts into Hypershell syntax reasonably well. More interestingly, they were able to fix common issues like type mismatches, especially when given light guidance or examples. That’s a big deal, because, like many embedded DSLs, Hypershell produces verbose and noisy compiler errors. Surprisingly, the LLM could often identify the underlying cause hidden in that mess and make the right correction.

This opens up a compelling possibility: LLMs could help bridge the usability gap that often prevents embedded DSLs from being more widely adopted. Debuggability is often the Achilles' heel of such languages, and LLMs seem capable of mitigating that, at least in simple cases.

More broadly, I think DSLs are poised to play a much larger role in AI-assisted development. They can be designed to sit closer to natural language while retaining strong domain-specific semantics. And LLMs appear to pick them up quickly, as long as they're given the right examples or docs to work with.

[1] https://contextgeneric.dev/blog/hypershell-release/
by lukeschlather | 2025-06-17 21:59:34+00:00
> However, it's also worth keeping in mind that this is a map of commercial availability, not market penetration. Hypothetically, you could get the average speed of a US residential internet connection, but the FCC doesn't make such a statistic available.

It's actually worse than this. Companies will claim they offer gigabit within a zip code if there's a single gigabit connection, but they will not actually offer gigabit lines at any other addresses in the zip code.
by pasquinelli | 2025-06-17 21:59:58+00:00
> History ABSOLUTELY unfolds the way it does because they were tired of being 'taking the reasonable/way that makes sense path'.

i think we're talking at cross purposes. quoting myself:

>> ...everyone's doing the same thing: avoiding pain, uncertainty, and the limitation of their future choices; seeking pleasure, security, and to increase their future choices.

do you think that doesn't characterize the motivating factors that lead to invention?
by Jtsummers | 2025-06-17 22:00:22+00:00
It's an engineering tradeoff.

https://prog2.de/book/sec-java-expr-problem.html - Not the writeup I was looking for but seems to cover it well.

> Why burden ourselves with indirection and complexity when there's a more straight forward way?

Because each way has its own tradeoffs that make it more or less difficult to use in particular circumstances.

https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/expression/expr... - Wadler's description of the expression problem.
by exiguus | 2025-06-17 22:01:02+00:00
I understand your perspective and the challenges you're encountering with Wayland. It's evident that this transition can be difficult for many, particularly when it comes to maintaining compatibility with specific setups and personal preferences, such as your choice of window manager.

When selecting technology, I always consider my specific use case. For instance, at work, I need to manage multiple open windows simultaneously, so I rely on tiled windows across four monitors. To ensure stability and avoid OS issues, I use GNOME with Pop Shell on Debian. On my smaller laptop, where mobility and keyboard-only navigation are priorities, I've found Sway to be an excellent replacement for dwm.

The key point I want to emphasize is the importance of identifying your unique use case. Once you understand your needs, you can choose the tools that best meet those requirements. The tool itself isn't the ultimate goal; it's about finding what works best for your specific situation. Typically, there are plenty of tools available that can solve your problem or fit your use case.
by mandevil | 2025-06-17 22:01:12+00:00
Governments do fall to internal revolt/collapse regularly. I mean, Iran has done so within the memory of most of its senior leadership! They understand this much better than I do- Khamenei himself played a major role in toppling the Shah. Just generally that doesn't happen while being attacked by other countries air-power, which as a general rule makes populations support their governments rather than start marching in the streets against them.

Thanks to historians, we can understand things like the collapse of the USSR better (my favorite English language book- I am sadly monolingual- would be Plokhy's _The Last Empire_) and see the personal and impersonal forces that ended up tearing the country apart, and doubtless some of those are present in Iran right now. But I personally would not bet on these strikes helping to topple the existing government.