MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ilaksh | 2025-06-04 15:40:34+00:00
The biggest reason there is such a difference of opinion on this is that people have fundamentally different worldviews. If you have bought into the singularity concept and exponential acceleration of computing performance, then you are likely to believe that we are right on track to shortly have smarter-than-human AI. This is also related to just having a technology-positive versus negative worldview. Many people like to blame technology for humanity's failings when in reality it's a neutral lever. But that comes down to the way people look at the world.

People who don't "believe" in the exponential of computing (even though I find the charts pretty convincing) seem to always assume that AI progress will stop near where it is. With that assumption, the skepticism is reasonable. But it's a poorly informed assumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity#Expo...

I think that some of that gets into somewhat religious territory, but the increasing power and efficiency of compute seems fairly objective. And also the intelligence of LLMs seems to track roughly with their size and amount of training. So this does look like it's about scale. And we continue to increase the scale with innovations and new paradigms. There will likely be a new memory-centric computing paradigm (or maybe multiple) within the next five years that increases efficiency by another two orders of magnitude.

Why can I just throw out a prediction about orders of magnitude? Because we have increased the efficiency and performance by orders of magnitude over and over again throughout the entire history of computing.
by Veen | 2025-06-04 15:40:36+00:00
Coming up with new ways to describe things is what scholars do. That's compounded by the fact that they rarely like the "popular" terminology for what they study — it's always more complicated and fragmented and interesting than we common folk understand. Therefore, we are invited to "change our thinking". See also the interminable witterings about what to call Vikings and Anglo-Saxons. Articles of this type are about as common in the humanities as "X considered harmful" articles are in in tech.
by lentoutcry | 2025-06-04 15:40:45+00:00
a lot of basic research is very risky and most of the time it’s not stuff that leads to immediate development of a new drug. it’s basically acquiring knowledge with the hope that some of it might turn out to be practically useful in the future, but in the short term, it just allows us to understand stuff. but it’s not directly profitable, so private companies aren’t motivated to invest so much money in that
by joering2 | 2025-06-04 15:40:48+00:00
I can promise you that's not a better solution. I witnessed a card testers smarter than Stripe tech and Stripe shutting down account that had literally 0% chargeback ratio and doing over $10MM in sales monthly. Still to them that was peanuts. They will help you initially and customer support is pretty fast at figuring things out, but in no shape of form will they say "gee, we see you are not the bad guy and someone else is doing that so your account is good to continue abusing our merchant accounts". They. Will. Shut. You. Down. Because they care about their rates of CB more than about your business. Just 2c, based on experience.
by KaoruAoiShiho | 2025-06-04 15:41:04+00:00
You're right. I think it's extremely cultural to Christianity. The notion of suffering for your sins, and when bad things happen you ought to try to feel it as much as possible instead of working on pain mitigation. This is definitely how a lot of people approach life and it makes sense for his characters. But IMO coping and rationalization strategies are built into every human, a lot of angst is performative and communicative rather than "soulful". They do it because they want to be a good religious boy and communicate devoutness. I honestly don't think he gets that. When his characters perform pain he treats it as evidence of the soul’s torment which doesn't resonate with me since I don't believe in the soul.
by sionisrecur | 2025-06-04 15:41:19+00:00
To be fair, the advice from sigmavirus24 was about dealing with decoding the ':' character: https://github.com/psf/requests/pull/2936/files

The code already had `host = ri.netloc.split(':')[0]` before that.

The actual root issue is urlparse doesn't split the host, user, pass and port and trying to do it manually is very error prone:

urllib.parse.urlparse('http://example.com:@evil.com:8080/') ParseResult(scheme='http', netloc='example.com:@evil.com:8080', path='/', params='', query='', fragment='')

Compare this with php:

parse_url ('http://example.com:@evil.com:8080/') [ "scheme" => "http", "host" => "evil.com", "port" => 8080, "user" => "example.com", "pass" => "", "path" => "/", ]
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-06-04 15:41:29+00:00
> I believe it's very common.

Yeah, me too. There was a paper doing the rounds a few years back (computer programming is more related to language skill rather than maths) so I downloaded the data and looked at their approach, and it was garbage. Like, polynomial regression on 30 datapoints kind of bad.

And based on my experience during the PhD this is very common. It's not surprising though, given the incentive structure in science.
by nostrademons | 2025-06-04 15:41:38+00:00
It's the median, not the mean. Here's the raw data:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States

The median is more relevant than the mean simply because it's less sensitive to outliers. 9/11 was an outlier; 85% of all U.S. terrorist deaths in the last 50 years happened on that one day.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-06-04 15:41:52+00:00
Sam altman literally said something like this, i forgot the youtube video.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1axkvns/sam_altman...

Its crazy. Idk what else to say because my jaw gets dropped every time I hear something like this. Humanity is a mess sometimes.
by gregw2 | 2025-06-04 15:42:02+00:00
To qualify for R&D tax breaks, IIRC having identified qualifying work for a segment of my firm, there must be elements of hypothesis, experimentation, results, etc that I would consider more science-y 'Research' than just turn the crank software 'Development.' It has to be both. And that has to be documented. And offshore research+development doesn't get you a tax break. The irony is that the R+D tax actually discourages onshore pure development as a 'trade' and encourages a split of onshore R+D and offshore D.

This sort of thing appears to be self-reported; I don't know if it ever gets audited. I don't know if big tech lies or creatively interprets what counts and that has contributed to the issue. But this article sort of over-represents what qualifies as R&D for US tax purposes.
by aadityaubhat | 2025-06-04 15:42:21+00:00
I was tired of using ChatGPT/Cursor to generate code and then copy-pasting it into notebooks to actually run things, so I built Bloom.

Bloom is a local IDE for data science with an AI agent built-in. It works with Jupyter notebooks, helps you write SQL/Python, runs code, plots, and can even generate reports and dashboards.

The macOS installer is live on the website, the beta is free for a limited time. Would love feedback on what’s useful, what’s broken, and what you’d want to see next.
by freedomben | 2025-06-04 15:42:30+00:00
As Doc Brown famously said, "I don't think you're thinking fourth-dimensionally."

Current gen AI taking all the medical jobs is indeed laughable, but the amount of R&D going into AI right now is staggering and the progress has been rapid, with no signs of slowing down. 5 years from now things will be very different IMHO.
by nullpointerexp | 2025-06-04 15:42:39+00:00
When scaling from 0 to 1 instances, yes, you have to wait 19 seconds.

For scaling N --> N+1 - If you configure the correct concurrency value (the number of parallel requests one instance can handle), Cloud Run will scale up to additional instances when getting to X% (I think it's 70%). That will be before the instance is fully exhausted. So your users should not experience the 19 seconds cold start.
by ghuntley | 2025-06-04 15:42:51+00:00
Absolutely! I kind of hate the term "vibe coding" because of its associations with brain off. It is so important for an engineer to take accountability for what they ship.

Now to your ponderoo about libraries, something I've found that's really fascinating is I've really stopped using open source libraries unless there's a network ecosystem effect for example like Tailwind. But for everything else, it's much easier to code generate it. And if there's something wrong with the implementation, I can take ownership and accountability for that implementation and I can just fix it with a couple more prompts. No more bullshit in open source. Some person might not even be maintaining the project anymore or having to deal with like getting a pull request fixed or open source supply chain attack vectors related to project takeovers and all that noise. It just doesn't exist anymore. It's really changed how I do software development.
by the_af | 2025-06-04 15:42:57+00:00
I agree that Mark Twain had contradictions, like all real people do, but is there anything to back this assertion from TFA?

> O’Brien said that Twain hated racism too, and it is true that Twain came to hate racism, although he had been a racist earlier in his life and even farcically fought for the Confederacy for a couple of weeks.

"He had been a racist earlier"? I know about Twain's half-hearted stint in the Confederacy -- I've read the heavily fictionalized account he wrote about it, " The Private History of a Campaign That Failed" -- but I've never read he was fighting for any clear cause (neither slavery nor that "states rights" bullshit or anything). He probably was just caught up in it, and did no actual fighting, and got out of it soon enough (2 weeks!). Does this really qualify as "being a racist", even briefly?

Some random site I just googled, https://civilwarsaga.com/mark-twains-civil-war-experience, claims "It is not known exactly why Twain quit the militia. He defended his actions throughout the years by describing his confusion while enrolling and explained he was ignorant of the politics behind the war."

So confusion = racism?

From the same page:

> "Twain also described the Civil War in general as: “A blot on our history, but not as great a blot as the buying and selling of Negro souls.” Whatever the reason, Twain left the military and never looked back."

So why does it matter? Well, it does to me, because the article flings this random assertion, that Twain "had been a racist earlier in life", and now that assertion is out there for someone else to quote it without evaluating what evidence is there, or lack thereof.

So it bugs me.
by paradox460 | 2025-06-04 15:43:01+00:00
I believe it's purely marketing

Other languages (Java, C#, Go) are supported by massive corporate backers, who have vested interest in seeing them succeed. Erlang's own corporate owner tried to strangle it in the crib, and even since then they've been standoffishness towards anything apart from technical resources.

We didn't really see much marketing like material arise until things like Elixir came about, and even that is more following the ruby model, which is very dev oriented. And the world to which Elixir emerged in 2014 is very different than the world rails sprung into in 2004.

Devs can usually be convinced about how good BEAMlangs are, but without the glossy, you have a harder time convincing the MBA set
by Rietty | 2025-06-04 15:43:09+00:00
> we had a hack to drop all messages in a process's mailbox through the introspection facilities and sometimes we automated that with cron...

What happens to the messages? Do they get processed at a slower rate or on a subsystem that works in the background without having more messages being constantly added? Or do you just nuke them out of orbit and not care? That doesn't seem like a good idea to me since loss of information. Would love to know more about this!
by mock-possum | 2025-06-04 15:43:36+00:00
Lovely article, worth the read~30mins read. I’ve read the usual suspects from Twain’s body of work, but somehow I never remember any particular attention being paid to Huck’s moment of decision to go to hell trying to help Jim - I wouldn’t have thought to tie it to the classical ‘journey to hell’ katabasis trope at the time, but now - maybe it’s time for a re-read.
by ednite | 2025-06-04 15:43:56+00:00
Hope I’m not too off-base here, but reading this really hit home as i recently decided to make some drastic changes.

I get it, life throws different stuff at all of us. I’ve had more lemons than I ever asked for. But for me, it’s not about living in the what-ifs. It’s more about asking how can I?

Sure, we all think about starting over or going back in time. But for me, those thoughts usually fade when I ask myself: Why not now? Is it really too late?

What helped was letting go of regret.

Just my two cents: drop the what-ifs mindset. If something needs to change, don’t dwell on what could’ve been. Ask yourself: How can I make it happen now?
by zahlman | 2025-06-04 15:43:59+00:00
> most posters advocating learning assembly language have never had to use it in a production environment... For the overwhelming majority of programmers, assembly offers absolutely no benefit.

I don't follow. Why should assembly have to be useful or pleasant in a production environment, for learning it to be useful?

I was taught a couple different flavours of assembly in university, and I found it quite useful for appreciating what the machine actually does. Certainly more so than C. Abstractions do ultimately have to be rooted in something.
by ty6853 | 2025-06-04 15:44:12+00:00
>in this sense there's no discussion on why humans chooses kids or heroin, or taking a shit. The answer is "they don't"

This is false equivalence, taking heroin isn't a biologicals imperative, reproduction is obligatory to life.

My thesis is humans have no real choice at a population level not to reproduce, your fallaciously equate that to a reductionist view on everything else including things not obligatory to life.
by criddell | 2025-06-04 15:44:30+00:00
> Because regardless of how good the object itself is, it is an inarguable testament to the fact that I chose to spend dozens of quiet hours making stitch after stitch, all the while thinking about her and how much she means to me. A fraction of my life’s wick that I burned for her and no one else.

That's lovely.

When I moved to Portland in 2004, we went to the bank (Umpqua) to open accounts and found out that they have a knitting group at the bank every week. It was so weird and felt very Portland.

Anyway, loved the post but I do have one question: how do you make coffee?
by card_zero | 2025-06-04 15:44:36+00:00
Central to the plot of Back to the Future Part II (for some reason not referenced in the New Yorker) is the sports almanac with information about future results. Any fantasy of going back and getting it right hinges on this kind of transfer of knowledge back into the earlier situation. The problem is then whether the information is subtle enough to be interesting, that is, to prevent the fantasy from devolving into a mere cheat to get rich by knowing things in advance. In practice the time traveller would at least attempt to invest early in bitcoin, learn the skills that will be in demand, befriend the awkward person who is going to be cool and successful later, and other cheaty stuff.

I suppose a better fantasy would involve going back into a similar but rearranged situation, with all the variables and trends changed to prevent predictions.
by stared | 2025-06-04 15:44:53+00:00
Well, when it comes to change, a sad truth is that it's generations who shift attitudes - not individuals. On average, people hold onto their established worldviews, and society evolves primarily because older generations gradually pass away.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/10/31/societie...

Here's also a cynical take on unicorns: they're immortal, so most of them hold rather outdated views.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sad-truths-mythical-creatu...
by Joker_vD | 2025-06-04 15:45:01+00:00
Yes, it would:

add_large_const: add w8, w0, #43, lsl #12 add w0, w8, #42 ret

The same happens e.g. on RISC-V:

add_large_const: lui a5,43 addi a5,a5,42 add a0,a0,a5 ret

Because there are only 32 bits in an instruction, you can't fit a whole 32-bit immediate into it. Contrast it with x86 which uses variable-length instructions (up to 15 bytes per instruction):

add_large_const: lea eax, [rdi+176170] # this instruction takes 6 bytes ret

P.S. Some people seem to be really puzzled by LEA instructions. It's intended use is to correspond to C's "dest = &base[offset]" which semantically is just "dest = base + offset", of course — but it allows one to express base and/or offset using available addressing modes.
by twic | 2025-06-04 15:45:02+00:00
It's more or less a ring buffer - new results are pushed on one by one, old results get popped off by being overwritten, and distances are relative to the newest entry.

Their second design, "clockhands", has multiple ring buffers, which makes it much easier to deal with conditional branches, amongst other things. Their third, "turbulence" has both a ring buffer and conventional registers.
by GMoromisato | 2025-06-04 15:45:09+00:00
There is a logical flaw in that syllogism: Just because death creates change doesn't mean that death is the only thing that creates change. And if you can substitute some other process to create change, then death is not necessary.

It's like this syllogism:

1. We must do something about unemployment.

2. Slavery is something.

3. Therefore, we must do slavery.

Once the syllogism falls apart, it's obvious that there are many (and even better) ways to create change. The entire history of humanity is filled with them.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-06-04 15:45:23+00:00
I have no problem with capitalism. I have problem with that there are people who have so much money that they can't even spend yet most people live paycheck to paycheck.

Maybe the solution might be socialism except you can own money till 10 million I guess. But I am not sure if its effective or not. Definitely loop holes. Idk
by JohnFen | 2025-06-04 15:45:24+00:00
It depends on what you mean by "project management tools", I suppose.

My personal projects are generally done by a team of 1 (sometimes I'll bring in one or two friends, but not usually). Project management for a team that small is trivial.

What I use to manage my personal projects is just a wiki and a version control system. Project management tools add some friction and overhead, so they're only useful if they're reducing more friction and overhead somewhere else. Working alone already greatly reduces such overhead, rendering heavier-duty tools counterproductive for me.
by drstewart | 2025-06-04 15:45:53+00:00
> I've found the app starts hiccuping when I'm making a very long recording, but I've learned to just cut it off and start a new one after about 10 minutes.

What phone are you using? I record ten hours a day and never get any issues whatsoever, so I'm not even sure what you mean by "hiccups".
by JdeBP | 2025-06-04 15:45:56+00:00
For completeness, as I pointed out on the FediVerse: The article has things backwards when it comes to partition table schemes. It's the older firmwares that place the requirement on what partitioning scheme is used; not the newer ones. So the suggested change to one of the forms, as it stands, would be telling users the wrong thing.

And Ed Maste has confirmed that FreeBSD is quite happy to accept non-U.S. keyboard layouts, contrary to the implication that NetBSD accepts them where FreeBSD has not. Even more ones, that is. (-:

* https://mastodon.social/@emaste/114625612735189948
by sgt101 | 2025-06-04 15:46:07+00:00
My brother, you haven't drunk the right coolaid.

It's not impressive because text is a shit interface for interacting with a machine. GUI's are much better and we established this in like 1982.

Also what they are doing in that demo is inserting a machine shim in an interaction between people, which is what people, time and again, say they do not want.
by echelon | 2025-06-04 15:46:27+00:00
Look at how much of the developing world has been pulled out of poverty in the last 30 years. Look at the infant mortality rates.

We're looking at the wrong data points.

> It's lack of access to affordable healthcare,

When the leading cause of mortality is heart disease, the solution is not more affordable healthcare. It's healthy eating and living.

When the next leading cause is cancer, the solution is more research not more affordable healthcare.

When the next leading cause is "accidents", and those are then broken down into "poisoning", "falls", and "automotive", the solutions are again not health insurance. Autonomous vehicles will do more to solve automotive mortality than changes to the health insurance industry.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

https://www.statista.com/statistics/526300/deaths-number-uni...
by setr | 2025-06-04 15:46:56+00:00
One major difference is that tags/folders better enable discovery. Search can get you to “similar to thing I found”, but it can’t really do “related to thing I found” ala Wikipedia.

AI might be intelligent enough to fix that, but in the end it’d just be automating the curation of tags/ontologies (ideally in manner that’s user-visible and editable)
by palmotea | 2025-06-04 15:47:00+00:00
If anyone's interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Hermann_Hoppe:

> Hans-Hermann Hoppe (/ˈhɒpə/;[5] German: [ˈhɔpə]; born 2 September 1949) is a German-American academic associated with Austrian School economics, anarcho-capitalism, right-wing libertarianism, and opposition to democracy.[6][7][8][9][10] He is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), senior fellow of the Mises Institute think tank, and the founder and president of the Property and Freedom Society.[11][12]
by break_the_bank | 2025-06-04 15:47:17+00:00
Shameless plug here - we are working in a similar space, and have started at the copy & paste layer. We are calling it TabTabTab[0]; while we have a waitlist as we are working on our onboarding, you can already give it a go on[1]

The main actions are option+c to copy, option+v to paste. Take the front page of hackernews and capture it with option+c (use cmd+a to select all, if text is selected we pickup text, otherwise we pickup an image); and then go to sheets.new or numbers and hit option+v, see your Spreadsheet getting built. It works everywhere.

There's spells option+s (custom GPT per app / URL) and agent mode (option+I) but give magic copy/paste a shot. More examples here[2]

[0] https://tabtabtab.ai/

[1] https://tabtabtab.ai/TabTabTab.dmg

[2] https://tabtabtab.notion.site/tabtabtab-user-notes?pvs=4
by cameldrv | 2025-06-04 15:47:26+00:00
IMO Python used to be a great first language, but it's gotten much more complicated over the years. When I'm teaching programming, I want an absolute minimum number of things where I have to say "don't worry about that, it's just boilerplate, you'll learn what it means later."

In particular, Python having generators and making range() be a generator means that in order to fully explain a simple for loop that's supposed to do something X times, I have to explain generators, which are conceptually complicated. When range() just returned a list, it was much easier to explain that it was iterating over a list that I could actually see.
Show HN: Go AI SDK – A Unified Go API for LLMs
by dloreto | 2025-06-04 15:47:26+00:00
At our company we are building lots of AI applications and agents. We are a Go shop, so we've been using the official Go SDKs by OpenAI and an Anthropic ... but we kept running into two problems: 1. We felt the official SDKs weren't easy to use (they are automatically generated and don't feel like idiomatic Go to us) 2. We wanted to be able to easily switch models across providers without having to rewrite our code.

We ended up writing this SDK (inspired by Vercel's AI SDK in TypeScript). We are looking for feedback before finalizing the API.