MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BeetleB | 2025-06-12 17:04:20+00:00
> Normal LLM use, fine, but I am not giving up reasoning.

Ouch! Reminds me of:

- I'm never going to use cell phones. I care about voice quality (me decades ago)

- I'm never going to use VoIP. I care about voice quality (everyone but me 2 decades ago).

- I'm never going to use a calculator. I am not going to give up on reasoning.

- I'm never going to let my kids play with <random other ethnicity>. I care about good manners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
by meganlanziello | 2025-06-12 17:04:21+00:00
Brother HL-6200DW (or similar variation). Before that I used another brother printer. When I researched (noting this was years ago) that was the only one that it would work with (may be others now). I had tried on various HP printers but they didn't work. Now you have to be careful how many cards you stack in the manual hopper also it works but not super robust.
by noworriesnate | 2025-06-12 17:04:45+00:00
I mean, in a broad sense this is true. But do you really think Sam Altman wouldn’t be in the news if he wasn’t Jewish? What about SBF? Or go back further, do you think people know about Einstein or Karl Marx only because they were Jewish?

Like it or not, Jews have been involved at a high level in a lot of pivotal developments in the west.
by resource_waste | 2025-06-12 17:05:00+00:00
Oh look Apple devices were hacked again. Security through obscurity isnt really working out. Their big cash apparently isnt enough.

I have sensitive data on my phone that I must carry around, and there is no way I'd ever keep it on an iphone. 'Pegasus' was the moment corporations and governments should have banned iphones for their terrible security.
by mrandish | 2025-06-12 17:05:30+00:00
> probably just thinking "Well it's wires somehow, I just don't know how,"

Yes, I agree this is likely a big component. It's interesting to ponder why "less pure" versions of levitation get bigger reactions. You can see Flying here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=112EIHu5gFc. What I like about the Flying illusion is that it is basically just a guy dangling on a wire. The artistry is in how Copperfield packages the presentation from the story-telling upfront to elevate the significance to the 'proof points' to eliminate audience suspicion like passing hoops over him and flying into a human sized glass fish tank with a lid (which each involve a lot of cleverness). It must've taken an enormous amount of practice to develop the body control that transforms it from "a guy dangling on a wire" to someone flying gracefully.

> object permanence is a pretty old, primitive part of our brains

Indeed. This is why close-up coin magic has always been my focus.
by simpaticoder | 2025-06-12 17:06:03+00:00
>Trump has a massive ego and I would have expected him to want the biggest rockets, and to pain them gold.

Sure, but he has to weigh the cost of funding intellectual elites against the benefit of what they can make for him. His base wants smaller government and doesn't want intellectuals. So, the move is to defund NASA and fund a military parade on his birthday. This undermines the future, but the future past 3.5 years is not his problem.
by xenocratus | 2025-06-12 17:06:06+00:00
I've only gotten a few paragraphs in, but this seems like a pipe dream of someone working in trades. Who, exactly, starts calling up locksmiths more when their job is gone and they don't have much money to spare? A lot of people being out of a job results in deflation for trades, not inflation. There's also more competition for the jobs that are still available, so you effectively have two sources of deflationary pressure working together. And somehow that results in a locksmith being able to charge 3x. Sure.
by jmyeet | 2025-06-12 17:06:29+00:00
There is now a rich history in outsourcing activities that would otherwise be illegal to other countries where it is legal. For example, the CIA's extreme rendition [1], knowingly sending prisoners to countries to be tortured and/or executed. This is how such countries make themselves useful to American empire.

Likewise, restrictions on the NSA spying on American citizens, for example, are bypassed by outsourcing that spying to, say, other Five Eyes countries.

Israel's role in this hacking phones of politicians, dissidents and now journalists on the behalf of the US and its allies, including Saudi Arabia [2].

The Israeli company NSO Group was sued by WhatsApp for their use of Pegasus [3], something Israel tried to intervene to block [4].

I honestly don't know how people work on things like Pegasus knowing it's being used to target and kill journalists and politicians.

[1]: https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/rendition701/upda...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/world/middleeast/israel-s...

[3]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77n76kzmz4o

[4]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/07/israels-attem...
by estebank | 2025-06-12 17:06:40+00:00
There are multiple avenues to improve both first and incremental compiles. They "just" require large architectural changes that may yield marginal improvements, so it's hard to get those projects off the ground. But after the last project all-hands I do expect at least one of these to be pursued, of not more.

There are cases where cargo recompiles crates "unnecessarily", cargo+rustc could invert the compilation pyramid to start at the root and then only compile reachable items (similar effect to LTO, but can produce a binary if an item with a compile error isn't evaluated, improving clean compiles), having better communication with linkers and having access to incremental linking would be a boon for incremental compiles, etc.
by japanuspus | 2025-06-12 17:08:25+00:00
> Well right now I am very skeptical, but I think we have somewhat given quantum computing plenty of time (we have given it decades) unless someone can convince me that it is not a scam.

Shor's paper on polynomial time factoring is from 1997, first real demonstration of quantum hardware (Monroe et al.) is from 1995: Yes, quantum has had decades -- but only barely, and is has certainly only now started to have generations.

To look at the kind of progress this means, take a look of some of the recent phd spinouts of leading research groups (Oxford Ionics etc.): There are a lot of organisations with nothing but engineering to go before they reach fault tolerance.

When I came back to quantum three years ago, fault tolerance was still to be based on the surface code ideas that floated when I did my phd ('04). Today, after everyone has started looking harder, it turns out that a bit of long-range connectivity can cut the error correction overhead by orders of magnitude (see recent public posts by IBM Quantum): The goalposts for fault tolerance are moving in the right direction.

And this is the key thing about quantum computing: you need error correction, and you need to do it with the same error-prone hardware that you correct for. There is a threshold hardware quality that will let you do this at a reasonable overhead, and before you reach this threshold all you have is a fancy random number generator.

But yes, feel free to be a pessimist -- just remember to own it when quantum happens in a few years.
by BeetleB | 2025-06-12 17:08:31+00:00
> I... don't want that. Juniors just slow me down because I have to check what they did and fix their mistakes.

> (this is in the context of professional software development, not making scripts, tinkering etc)

I understand the sentiment. A few months ago they wanted us to move fast and dumped us (originally 2 developers) with 4 new people who have very little real world coding experience. Not fun, and very stressful.

However, keep in mind that in many workplaces, handling junior devs poorly means one of two things:

1. If you have some abstruse domain expertise, and it's OK that only 1-2 people work on it, you'll be relegated to doing that. Sadly, most workplaces don't have such tasks.

2. You'll be fantastic in your output. Your managers will like you. But they will not promote you. After some point, they expect you to be a leverage multiplier - if you can get others to code really well, the overall team productivity will exceed that of any superstar (and no, I don't believe 10x programmers exist in most workplaces).
by LanceH | 2025-06-12 17:08:35+00:00
I mentally earmark a month and wait for something "official" or at least some expert analysis which can be confirmed. I'm not sure what the experts could discern from any video that's out there, but sometimes it's a lot.

I'm reminded of the crane collapse in Seattle that had pictures afterward and the pins were no longer in it. The expert analysis I had seen discussing it had said the pins don't just come out in a crane collapse, and where the join the sections the crane would be at its strongest. He was, of course, lit up by those with possible agendas saying "you can't speculate". He was right in the end.

So with the crane collapse it was interesting to see it all play out, but it's a matter of keeping perspective. There were literal pictures of the pins not being in place. Explanation that those pins should not be removed until later in the disassembly of the crane. Then there was the other "side" hurling accusations at him. Finally the official report.

Keeping perspective to me is that yes, I want to know what caused it. But I'm also interested along the way that some people/companies/govts seem to have a vested interest in shaping the story. So I don't run with any of it, but I try to remember who said what, even though nobody ever seems to be responsible for being batshit crazy.
by schiffern | 2025-06-12 17:08:58+00:00
>black, optimized for losing heat inside

Black colored clothing does not lose heat faster inside.

You're probably thinking this because of "black body radiation"[0], but room-temperature objects glow in the far IR, not in visible light. So what actually matters for radiant heat loss is to be 'black' in the far IR part of the spectrum, which is true for most non-metals.

Additionally, I doubt that radiative heat loss is a major cooling mode in clothing, vs convection and evaporation. I expect wearing black was more about protection from UV skin damage.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body_radiation
by kinjba11 | 2025-06-12 17:08:59+00:00
What about restricting yourself is not healthy?

When I was a kid, I'd eat Trix cereal. I enjoyed it. Now - I find it sort of gross. It's too sweet. You can reach that same point with cake or pizza or a candy bar, etc. - in that, those foods become sort of gross. Foods like spinach become more satisfying. Not only that, but that satisfaction may yield a higher reward than you ever could with Trix cereal. But you'd never reach that higher level of satisfaction as long as you're eating Trix cereal every day.
by jplrssn | 2025-06-12 17:09:03+00:00
> Ciro Pellegrino, who heads the Naples newsroom of an investigative news outlet called Fanpage.it, received a notice on April 29 that his iPhone had been targeted. Last year, Fanpage secretly infiltrated the youth wing of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party and filmed some of them making fascist and racist remarks.

It's never a good look going after journalists, but this seems especially petty.
by llm_nerd | 2025-06-12 17:09:07+00:00
>then it would be impossible to cut the scope of government spending

Despite becoming insular and retreating to being a hermit nation, already outrageous military spending is increasing by $100B+. Add a few trillion in tax cuts for the mega rich.

In the context of those things, dismissing the harm to NASA, with its relatively tiny budget, seems absolutely perverse.
by volkk | 2025-06-12 17:09:55+00:00
Not sure if I agree that the flippening is happening solely due to AI taking jobs. I think it's a factor of many complex things happening all at once. Section 174 is a big one for engineering. Another is the fact that VC money has really dried up which affects the economics of tech. Companies spend less money now because there's a lot less free/dumb money and because of a combination of everything, we have layoffs. Some of these layoffs are fueled by future fiscal projections, but I think some are crazy bets on AI. And of course, some departments are truly replaceable by ChatGPT like copywriting, low level marketing, etc.

tl;dr a clusterf*ck of a lot of things.
by datameta | 2025-06-12 17:10:05+00:00
I still experience what you outline for bootstrapping understanding, or bringing the knowledge horizon closer, so to speak. Part of the learning though is through the vigilance of parsing and correcting.

When I had a small passive circuit in my head that I wanted to one-shot solder on a protoboard and didn't want to get bogged down in KiCAD, talking through it with an AI and repeatedly correcting its understanding really solidified my own. It's like mentoring while being tutored.

So I still see value in use for smaller novel projects, but using LLMs to hit a deadline for production is not something I want to do any longer, for the time being.
by WorldMaker | 2025-06-12 17:10:44+00:00
That look reminds me so much of Steam's original UI from the time when it was very Windows 95-inspired, too, but used different color palettes, especially a lot more greens. There's not much of Steam left that will show up with that original UI style (but it still feels like there's some lesser known dialogs that still can show up in that style), so these days it is better known as the "Counter-Strike 1 UI".

https://cs16.samke.me/
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-06-12 17:11:04+00:00
No randomness when taking everything into account. I’m not an expert but I still hold out hope that if you know more about the universe than humanity does everything will be known to be deterministic.

Also implies that all singularities of the same mass are identical. I think this should be less bold of a statement. Let’s speculate that the more mass in the singularity would correspond to higher iterations in something like the Mandelbrot set. More of a resolution enhancement.

More if a scifi prompt than anything else to be fair.
by zippyman55 | 2025-06-12 17:11:49+00:00
My favorites:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray Developer of the fastest computers at the time. A very unique individual.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig Developer of optimization methods used in modern day analysis.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper Grace Hopper - COBOL Language
by trod1234 | 2025-06-12 17:12:08+00:00
In my opinion, you need to properly define ambiguous terms, one person's radicalized is another person's principle. The same as one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter (i.e. in Venezuela, and its losing fight against communism).

That said, what people call DEI today is just a reformation of Maoism based in Marxism, and its goals follow hopes, and patterns that seek to engender social collectivist indoctrination in those subjected to it; following principles of thought reform/torture unironically also coming out of mainland China during Mao (1950s).

Its particularly effective against the habitually complacent.

The big trick of communism is to induce hope in people to narrow their focus to a circular but undefined viewpoint which can be falsely claimed as truth later, but which in reality lacks a property of what's called metaphysical objectivity in philosophy; an identity you need to prove anything through logic/critical thinking. This is how double-speak and double-think work.

It also takes advantage of a lot of psychological blindspots we all have (by purposeful design), just like any other cult programming.

Its important to note: Equity isn't equality, and its not properly defined.

If you want to learn more about blindspots, I'd suggest starting with Robert Cialdini (Influence). Robert Lifton covers case studies of actual torture mechanics which can be derived (elements, structuring, clustering), which use these blindspots (albeit this material came before Cialdini published back in the 1950s).

New Discourses covers the progression of DEI in damning detail albeit he sometimes becomes too wordy.

With any regime change playbook you inherently have two roles being played simultaneously by a single cohort. You have a subgroup of antagonists, who perform and carry out acts to inflame which then are used by the other role to create a unifying narrative/platform for influence and insurgency.

The fact that violence and rioting are occurring fairly often is sufficient evidence that DEI and its other forms have had some success as a memetic contagion.

The harm always comes at you sideways without any visibility or attribution being possible. Are you better off today than you were a decade ago? Could you imagine a decade ago police firing teargas and rubber bullets indiscriminately into a peaceful assembly, or people firebombing cars with molotov cocktails? Which came first?, none of the news is saying and all the public narratives lean towards omitted lies in one form or another.

No objective signals can be discernible or come out of channels jammed to the Shannon Limit.

People go absolutely insane when they cannot maintain an internal consistent narrative/mental state and this happens without them realizing it (subliminally), and its been known for quite a long time going all the way back to the 1800s with Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd.
by netbioserror | 2025-06-12 17:12:11+00:00
And an extraordinarily cheap psyop at that. If all it costs is 1) a rambling web page full of word vomit, and 2) an actor playing an enraged talking head for a 3 minute segment on cable TV about the word vomit webpage...you've got an almost infinitely scalable propaganda scheme. Pump it up, and you've confused everyone's sense-making right up until collective effort is made to filter the well poisoning. At which point it's easy to identify and suppress competent opposition.

Fifth generation warfare is so staggeringly cheap next to previous generations, it can be fought indefinitely. It requires literally every person, in every country, everywhere on Earth, to be constantly vigilant, wary of everything they read and hear and see. Maybe that forces us to collectively sharpen our mental knives over time. Who knows.
by ty6853 | 2025-06-12 17:12:27+00:00
The USPS does investigate content.

You can draw a swastika and a machinegun for sale on your regular mail envelope and it will show up in informed delivery, but as black and white.

If you try to get it displayed more prominently in an advertising campaign, it violates their second set of 'guidelines' that stop what you can put in the more prominent colored advertising image.

They use this mechanism in a matter different than most social media curation, but it's still a form of curation, and favoring the particular kinds of speech they like, using two different sets of guidelines -- one guideline for de minimis B&W presentation and a second set of 'guidelines' (which even at USPS are a bit vague) about whether you can get the pretty color image in informed delivery.
by h3lp | 2025-06-12 17:13:13+00:00
Well, historically, we used to have a robust industrial R&D that even did basic research: Bell Labs (astrophysics, semiconductor physics), IBM, Xerox, RCA, Kodak and many other; even Ford had an R&D lab with physicists. Their record was quite impressive, as we all know. The weird trick that made that work was a tax policy that supported that. IIRC, R&D was expense as opposed to amortization, together with a laxer trust regime that allowed large profits that could pay for all that.
by palmfacehn | 2025-06-12 17:13:36+00:00
This is a common response here and elsewhere. Generally every state allocation of funds is presented as incredibly vital. This is exactly the attitude I was speaking to in my comment above. It would be rare to find a spending program which the proponents didn't claim was incredibly valuable. Here on HN we have an interest in technology. It fits that we value some of the discoveries of NASA.

Down thread, you'll find others suggesting that defense spending should be cut. It isn't hard to imagine nor would you need to look far to find a hawkish interventionist. These communities will assure us that defense spending is vital, absolutely vital not only to our own well-being, but to support the globalized trading system as well.

Choose a topic. Pick a niche. Under every rock from K Street to Capitol Hill, you will find a bureaucrat, politician or lobbyist to justify more spending. Some may like to spend more here and less there. Others might like to spend more everywhere. Almost all of them will have particular issues for which spending cuts are beyond consideration.

>...research that had wound up beneficial in the long run indirectly due to incidental discoveries and unexpected connections.

This is a good point. What is missing here, are the missed opportunities in the private sector, which would have also been, unexpected. We don't know the things which were not built. We do not know what all of those scientists and engineers may have discovered or built, had they not been allocated into government funded research. For me, this is a problem with the post-hoc rationalizations.
by norir | 2025-06-12 17:13:44+00:00
Compiler performance must be considered up front in language design. It is nearly impossible to fix once the language reaches a certain size without it being a priority. I recently saw here the observation that one can often get a 2x performance improvement through optimization, but 10x requires redesigning the architecture.

Rust can likely never be rearchitected without causing a disastrous schism in the community, so it seems probable that compilation will always be slow.
by jmyeet | 2025-06-12 17:13:54+00:00
I'm a big fan of Rust but there are definitely warts that are going to be difficult to cure [1]. This is 5 years old now but I believe it's still largely relevant.

It is a weird hill to die on for C/C++ devs though, given header files and templates creating massive compile-time issues that really can't be solved.

Google is known for having infrastructure for compiling large projects. They use Blaze (open-sourced at Bazel) to define hermetic builds then use large systems to cache object graphs (for compilation units) and caching compiled objects because Google uses some significant monoliths that would take a significant amount of time to compile from scratch.

I wonder what this kind of infrastructure can do for a large Rust project.

[1]:https://www.pingcap.com/blog/rust-compilation-model-calamity...
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-06-12 17:14:16+00:00
A. You're flagged for graphic, inappropriate, and triggering language.

B. Oracle sued Google for a decade over whether a minor number of APIs were copyrighted in Java; do you think Apple's eager to embrace their technology regardless of license? Heck, even Ubuntu wasn't willing to make that bet.

C. Guess how much official licenses for those fancy file systems cost.

D. ZFS, and other fancy file systems, are not known for low RAM and CPU usage. In a server, this does not matter; but it's pretty important for anything on a battery.
by panarky | 2025-06-12 17:14:18+00:00
This is the thing that people don't realize about autonomous AI.

It's not primarily about saving money.

Autonomous taxis are superior to Uber and yellow cabs. It's a better experience, and it's far safer. Autonomous cars aren't cheaper, they're better.

When AI agents replace human jobs, any cost savings is secondary. A coding job where the AI does most of the grunt work is superior to a job where humans do everything. It's better for the worker (less tedium). It's better for the employer (consistent style, greater test coverage, security vulns evaluated for every function, follows company policy and procedures).

AI agents done well are superior at call center jobs, screen-based office work, mortgage processing, financial analysis, most business consulting like process redesign, etc. The biggest benefit isn't reducing payroll, it's doing the job faster, with higher quality and more consistency.