MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lostlogin | 2025-06-08 00:59:19+00:00
> AI is rapidly reducing the need for radiologists.

I work in radiology. This isn’t true. Having the AI circle the obviously broken bone, and put a ‘maybe fracture’ on anything vaguely difficult to interpret is a waste of time.

I also receive ‘AI’ referrals. They are hot trash and generate more work that the worst human referral. They sound like they are saying something sensible. But they aren’t.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-06-08 00:59:47+00:00
I completely disagree.

> Docker adds indirection on storage, networking, etc.,

What do you mean by "indirection"? It adds OS level isolation. It's not an overhead or a bad thing.

> makes upgrades difficult as you have to either rebuild the container, or rely on others to do so to get security and other updates.

Literally the entire selfhost stack could be updated and redeployed in a matter of:

docker compose pull docker compose build . docker compose up -d

Self hosting with something like docker compose means that your server is entirely describable in 1 docker-compose.yml file (or a set of files if you like to break things apart) + storage.

You have clean separation between your applications/services and their versions/configurations (docker-compose.yml), and yous state/storage (usually a NAS share or a drive mount somewhere).

Not only are you no longer depended on a particular OS vendor (wanna move your setup to a cheap instance on a random VPS provider but they only have CentOS for some reason?), but also the clean seperation of all the parts allows to very easily scale individual components as needed.

There is 1 place where everything goes. With the OS vendor package everytime you need to check is it in systemd unit? is it a config file in /etc/? wth?

Then next time you're trying to move the host, you forget the random /etc/foo.d/conf change you made. With docker-compose, that change has to be stored somewhere for the docker-compose to mount or rebuild, so moving is trivial.

It's not Nixos, sure. but it's much much better than a list of APT or dnf or yum packages and scripts to copy files around
by Fire-Dragon-DoL | 2025-06-08 00:59:49+00:00
I haven't worked in the frontend in quite a while, but when I interact with it, the problem seems to be that is written by a lot of inexperienced people, so it's full of rookie mistakes which make the tech debt even more unmanageable than the backend. Given that performance is more relevant to deliver a good ui in the frontend, unless you are going to but the devices yourself, the poor code ends up being a problem, so more people are hired to fix it, executing the vision of the more senior devs.

Given the situation with hiring, this might be good and still give some space to junior devs to exist. But I could be wrong and AI could be doing already a better job.
by sandworm101 | 2025-06-08 01:00:24+00:00
The new reality. Every corporate decision made today now must involve an analysis of the local and national government authority, thier political leanings and thier tendancy towards vindictivness.

Does anyone not think that every major corporation is not commissioning psychological reports on certain US leaders? They have public affairs and social media consultants to gauge public reactions. Now they need head shrinks to tell them if and how the guy in the big office might react, be that a state governor, the president, or any number of politically-minded media owners.
by mdaniel | 2025-06-08 01:01:14+00:00
prelude: I realized that I typed out a ton of words but in the end engineering is all about tradeoffs, so, fine if there's a way I can teach some existing GPU, or some existing PCIe TPU, to access system RAM over an existing PCIe slot, that sounds like a fine step forward. I just don't have a lot of experience in that setup to know if only certain video cards allow that or what

Bearing in mind the aforementioned "I'm not a hardware guy," my mental model of any system RAM access for GPUs is:

1. copy weights from SSD to RAM 2. trigger GPU with that RAM location 3. GPU copies weights over PCIe bus to do calculation 4. GPU copies activations over PCIe bus back to some place in RAM 5. goto 3

If my understanding is correct, this PCIe (even at 16 lanes) is still shared with everything else on the motherboard that is also using PCIe, to say nothing of the actual protocol handshaking since it's a common bus and thus needs contention management. I would presume doing such a stunt would at bare minimum need to contend with other SSD traffic and the actual graphical part of the GPU's job[1][2]

Contrast this with memory socket(s) on the "GPU's mainboard" where it is, what, 3mm of trace wires away from ripping the data back and forth between its RAM and its processors, only choosing to PCIe the result out to RAM. It can have its own PCIe to speak to other sibling GPGPU setups for doing multi-device inference[3]

I would entertain people saying "but what a waste having 128GB of RAM only usable for GPGPU tasks" but if all these folks are right in claiming that it's the end of software engineering as we know it, I would guess it's not going to be that idle

1: I wish I had actually made a bigger deal out of wanting a GPGPU since for this purpose I don't care at all what DirectX or Vulkan whatever it runs

2: furthermore, if the "just use system RAM" was such a hot idea, I don't think it would be 2025 and we still have graphics cards with only 8GB of RAM on them. I'm not considering the Apple architecture because they already solder RAM and mark it up so much that normal people can't afford a sane system anyway, so I give no shits how awesome their unified architecture is

3: I also should have drew more attention to the inference need, since AIUI things like the TPUs I have on my desk aren't (able to do|good at) training jobs but that's where my expertise grinds to a halt because I have no idea why that is or how to fix it
by wefinh | 2025-06-08 01:01:34+00:00
I would not consider Musk as a researcher of the topic - he has not published any papers or even works on philosophical level, so you are giving Musk too much of attention - just like his appearance in Simpsons.

In regards to reality as simulation, well - the issue here is that definitions are not very precise. That simulation is reality to us. We have mind limitations, by which we operate just like animals have them and that makes our reality. I have experienced deja vu many times and the mechanisms to that might be linked that things are predestined - pretty much this is main belief, that all pre-Christian societies believed in and generally Christianity is not in opposition to that either - it just states that there is a free will to humans and that they must choose God over Santa and deja vu can be experienced only by saints that are in direct contact of Ultimate Being.

I don't know where Musk is getting his ideas, but what is mundane and boring to some might be exciting to others. Insects controlled by pheromones might be living most exciting life that there is.

I think I have heard some other ideas that most probably developed on the basis of ideas of Lilly. It involves reincarnation of souls in other beings. I'm not completely sold on idea(because that is presented as noble and next nuclear war is not under any definition), but that might explain why society is deranged as that right now, as current beings does not have noblest souls... though it can also be explained by many other factors. Though, the mechanics of transfer of nomadic souls would explain no need for transportation to reach all the other planets that have life, but also - that is not really what matters - we don't think that dinos had more importance over humans and to be fair humans themselves are just an episode in this Universe as well.

The idea of Lilly can be expanded - pretty much Universe can be just a playground for various beings to experience whatever - just like a RPG game or a live movie, where you can play a role. It does not necessarily require soul mechanism mentioned earlier. But it also does not matter for your existence - you are as real and important as you want it to be. Or don't matter at all and there is no reason or value for anything.

Regardless, your destiny is to live through this cosmic theater and experience Musk - do you like it or not. Pretty much your reality can also be formed by your mind and it seems, that Musk is very central part in it.
by yyyk | 2025-06-08 01:02:07+00:00
The big AV transit efficiency gains* can only happen when nearly all human drivers are removed from the road. Alas, that's at least 20 years ahead of now**, or more (e.g. if tech stalls for some reason, though I consider it unlikely). Otherwise they'd be limited by having to account for human drivers and that limits speed and throughput enough so other solutions are a must.

* Think having much higher speed limits (as far as humans are concerned, nonexistent), or mass coordinating movement over the entire traffic.

** We can reasonably estimate the minimum without bothering to ask how fast the tech will improve: Even if the tech were available now, think about fleet replacement costs which no one group would be too eager to pay. Best case, it's the typical 'make a concentrated pressure group lose for societal benefit' and we know how that politics goes. It will happen, but slowly.

*** Another thing to account for is that there's no good reason to design an AV car like a normal car, and there'll be some iteration time over that too.
by _heimdall | 2025-06-08 01:02:26+00:00
> If you can cancel contacts not based on merit

That's a hard argument to hold in the context of recent history. Maybe for the better, maybe for worse, merit has taken a back seat in many cases as we prioritized other factors.

What's interesting to me here is that the executive branch has authority to change these contracts. I do understand that's how it has worked for a while, and you could argue that these contracts are part of executing on congress's mandate, but I personally would prefer the executive branch not have this power.

If it were up to me congressional committees would be responsible for this as part of budgeting responsibilities, and the executive branch would be much weaker than it is today.
by ramchip | 2025-06-08 01:02:28+00:00
Personally, I spend _more_ time thinking with Claude. I can focus on the design decisions while it does the mechanical work of turning that into code.

Sometimes I give the agent a vague design ("make XYZ configurable") and it implements it the wrong way, so I'll tell it to do it again with more precise instructions ("use a config file instead of a CLI argument"). The best thing is you can tell it after it wrote 500 lines of code and updated all the tests, and its feelings won't be hurt one bit :)

It can be useful as a research tool too, for instance I was porting a library to a new language, and I told the agent to 1) find all the core types and 2) for each type, run a subtask to compare the implementation in each language and write a markdown file that summarizes the differences with some code samples. 20 min later I had a neat collection of reports that I could refer to while designing the API in the new language.
by Nullabillity | 2025-06-08 01:03:02+00:00
> Is this obvious, simple, and default behaviour?

In the documentation[0] they're right next to each other, and `buildImage`[1] (builds a single layer) specifically calls out that you probably want to use `buildLayeredImage` or `streamLayeredImage`[2] (both produce a separate layer per dependency) instead.

Neither should cause the final image to include build dependencies, that sounds like they were doing something silly like running `nix-build` from inside a Dockerfile and just taking that as their final image. Which.. yes, would include build cruft. Oh,[3] I guess that was exactly what they were doing after all. And mixing in Debian packages... for reasons, I guess.

[0]: https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#sec-pkgs-dockerTool...

[1]: https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#ssec-pkgs-dockerToo...

[2]: https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#ssec-pkgs-dockerToo...

[3]: https://github.com/railwayapp/nixpacks/blob/205b33b515282cdf...
by zahlman | 2025-06-08 01:03:36+00:00
>And once again, among casual programmers, relatively few people define their own classes.

I find that I'm less interested in defining my own classes today than I was 10 or so years ago. https://us.pycon.org/2012/schedule/presentation/352/ left a big impression on me (though I didn't see it until a fair bit after the fact).
by busyant | 2025-06-08 01:05:10+00:00
> Shouldn't those SpaceX contracts be based on how well the country is served by them and at what price.

I'm always amazed when I read questions like this.

I mean ... have you been paying attention?

Law firms getting security clearances canceled, incarceration without due process, Harvard defunded, memecoins, gutting of the federal government, &c. &c. &c. &c.

Every data point screams malevolence and lack of concern for the common good of the nation.

And you're confused about decision-making over SpaceX that "seems" to ignore how the country is best served?

Don't get me wrong. You pose a valid question. In fact, only a person who himself cares about the common good would ask this type of question.

But man, the big flashing warning signs should be answering your question for you.
by whatever1 | 2025-06-08 01:05:49+00:00
You can always increase the labor by making more people and making more of them participate in the market. That is good because you can then start flattening the differences in income by taxation, so everyone gets richer (can afford more services) and you can also control the economic disparities.

The assets story is a different beast. They tend to be finite and the worse the economic disparities curve is the higher their price becomes.

How many condos are there andjacent to upper east side of Central Park? Let’s say 100. That number is fixed, and 1 million people on this planet want one. If they all had the same salary the rental price of the condos would be close their (same) monthly salary. Now because the economic disparity is huge there is a super low number of people that have super high income, but they are still more than 100. So these lets say 1,000 /1,000,000. These thousand folks can drive the rental of these condos to almost infinity.
by xnx | 2025-06-08 01:08:26+00:00
I think you've been lied to with that highly misleading statistic. The 3000 for cars is actual (though I'm skeptical of that now too), while the 30,000 for buses is theoretical. "While a typical traffic lane carries approximately 3,000 people in 2,000 cars each hour, the XBL lane can carry over 30,000 people in 700 buses during that same time period." http://fourthplan.org/action/highway-congestion
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-06-08 01:08:55+00:00
https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/new-wa...

https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/130_days_of_elon...

https://cepr.net/publications/corrupt-control-of-the-trump-a...

If Musk is engaging in corruption with respect to the US government, then what could be done to stop it. Whatever the answer, almost certainly Musk's ties to the government would need to be broken, including contracts and funding.
by ajkjk | 2025-06-08 01:09:00+00:00
Well the standard response to this kind of "do it the way everyone does it" is "... change has to start somewhere". It's hard to tell, without hearing a report from a council of open-minded-rigorous-experts, whether some claimed innovation on a particular is actually worth doing or not---but certainly neither of "innovation is always good" and "innovation never works" is true.

Anyway everyone is pretty sure that that something is wrong with the standard train economics as you describe them, because if there wasn't something wrong with it there'd be a lot more trains. I can't tell from the site, or from your comment, if this is the solution, or even worth doing as an experiment... but "don't change anything ever" doesn't strike me as productive either.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-08 01:09:20+00:00
> maintaining 3 stacks, a Nix stack, a Go stack, and a Rust stack

Nix is a package management system with a little bit of programming tucked onto the side. "Nix stack" is not the same type of thing as "Go/Rust stack". If you try to move things over to Go/Rust, you'll spend a little bit of time rewriting the code and a whole lot of time reinventing the wheel on everything else involved. You're not moving between implementations, you're building your own implementation. That's almost always a bad idea, and it's a much higher cost than learning the syntax.

Moving from a Nix stack to a Go stack only makes slightly more sense than moving from a docker stack to a Go stack. Which is to say, very little sense.
by diwank | 2025-06-08 01:10:02+00:00
I’d say around ~40% me, the ideating, editing, citations, and images are all mine; rest Opus 4 :)

I typically try to also include the original Claude chat’s link in the post but it seems like Claude doesn’t allow sharing chats with deep research used in them.

Update: here’s an older chatgpt conversation while preparing this: https://chatgpt.com/share/6844eaae-07d0-8001-a7f7-e532d63bf8...
by bigyabai | 2025-06-08 01:10:27+00:00
Part of the problem trying to isolate computing is that it's fundamentally material. Even cloud resources are a flimsy abstraction over a more complex business model. That materialism is part of the issue, too. You can't ever escape the churn, bit rot gets your drives and Hetzner doesn't sell a lifetime plan. If you're not computing for the short-term, you're arguably wasting your time.

I'm not against the idea of a disasterproof runtime, but you're not "pushing back" against the consumerist machine by outlasting it. When high-quality software becomes inaccessible to support some sort of longtermist runtime, low-quality software everywhere sees a rise in popularity.
by SlightlyLeftPad | 2025-06-08 01:13:24+00:00
Traveling abroad to asian countries it becomes immediately and shockingly clear how intolerable surveillance really can be. Between having your face and fingerprints scanned on a pirated windows xp pc to being fined heavily for going 51 kph in 50 zone it can be hard to imagine how much worse it can get from there, but it can.
by Anamon | 2025-06-08 01:13:47+00:00
I disagree with that. I was around when the web grew into the mainstream, and almost everybody was sure that it would have a huge impact on every industry and activity it touched. There wasn't even remotely a level of skepticism comparable to those around VR, blockchain, and now GenAI.

And it seems pretty obvious why. The benefits were clear and palpable. Communication was going to become a heck of a lot easier, faster, cheaper, barriers were being lowered.

There's no such qualitative advantage offered by GenAI, compared to the way we did things before. Web vs. pre-Web, the benefits were clear.

GenAI? Some execs claim it's making stuff cheaper, but it doesn't consider quality and long-term effects, plus it's spouted by those with no technological knowledge and with a reputation to long have cashed out and moved on by the time their actions crash a company. Plus, still nobody seems to have figured out how to make money (real money, not VC) off of this. Faster -- again, at what price to quality?

Then there's the predictions. We've been told for about three years now about the explosive rise in quality we'll see from GenAI output. I'm still waiting. The predictions of wider spread, higher speed and lower cost of the web sounded plausible, and they materialised. Comparatively, I see a lot of very well-reasoned arguments for the hypothesis that GenAI has peaked (for now) and this is pretty much as good as it's going to get, with source data sets exhausted and increasingly polluted by poor GenAI slop. So far, the trajectory makes me believe this scenario to be a lot more likely.

None of this seems remotely comparable to the Internet or web cases to me. The web certainly didn't feel like a hype to me in the 90s and I don't remember anyone having had that view.
by Nullabillity | 2025-06-08 01:16:05+00:00
> Since package builds of node/python/ruby packages depend on stuff outside of the package dir in the tree, you need that mapping between versions and commits.

> Using nix without nixpkgs may be fine for more scoped use but seems hard to justify for a platform like Railway.

Nixpkgs isn't all-or-nothing. You're right that Nixpkgs itself rarely packages more than one version of something, but the standard approach for "language package managers" is that you use a tool like crate2nix[0] which automatically generates pinned derivations for all of your dependencies.[1] For system dependencies which aren't covered by your language package manager.. you're basically in the same position as for something like Debian: you can either pull it from Nixpkgs (and give up control beyond "which Nixpkgs am I on?") or you can write/fork your own package. Or you can pull specific packages from specific Nixpkgs checkouts and splice them into your "main" Nixpkgs version as an overlay (though this is definitely getting into the Weird Territory(tm)).

[0]: https://github.com/nix-community/crate2nix

[1]: For example: https://github.com/stackabletech/secret-operator/blob/30f0eb...
by pedalpete | 2025-06-08 01:16:47+00:00
I took the Acela NY to Boston this year, and won't ever do it again. What was the time difference from the non-high speed supposed to be? I think it's a 40 minute difference or something.

We had multiple delays along our route and the 4 hour trip turned into almost 7.

I'll fly for the same price next time.
by wefinh | 2025-06-08 01:17:23+00:00
Frankly, I would phrase this question the same way. But it has more to do with society, that simply just don't want to be responsible for anything. And that is the same society that put Musk on pedestal, that Simpsons immortalized and the same society has a bones to pick when reminded about those glorious moments, but not to just be ashamed of themselves and their behaviour, like you are demonstrating here just perfectly.
by amluto | 2025-06-08 01:17:27+00:00
> Chlorine in water is actually fine and tasteless at the concentrations it reaches at the taps - it's basically extremely diluted stomach acid.

No. The chlorine in tap water is HOCl + OCl- (it’s a weak acid/base equilibrium). Stomach acid is HCl. And chlorine has both a noticeable smell and odor even at low concentrations (e.g. 1ppm in water). The smell is much worse if any of the chlorine has reacted with organic crud to turn into NCl3.

More enlightened cities in the US use monochloramine (NH2Cl), which is a rather weak disinfectant but is barely noticeable at normal concentrations.
by 90s_dev | 2025-06-08 01:17:47+00:00
I'm nervous about mingw or msys2 partly because I don't know if windows will look native or unixy (I want native dark mode title bars), partly because I already have Git for Windows installed which comes with bash and a bunch of other unix utilities so I don't want to install doubles of any of those, and partly because I'm just too tired to do the uninstall dance all over again with yet another potential setup.