MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ang_cire | 2025-06-08 07:45:11+00:00
> OK, are we worried that all the robots will somehow disappear?

No, you should be worried that you (or devs who come later, who never had to 'change the oil'/ write tests themselves) won't know if the robot has done it right or not, because if you can't do the work, you can't validate the work.

And the robot isn't an employee, it's just a tool you the employee use, so when you are asked whether the test was coded correctly, all you'd be able to say with your 'atrophied' test-writing skills is, "I think so, the AI did it". See the issue now?

> If it doesn't do it as well as I did, I'm still doing it myself.

I thought your unnecessary skill atrophied and was forgotten ? How are you going to do it yourself? How do you know you're still as good at it as you once were?
by Y_Y | 2025-06-08 07:45:55+00:00
> May be then the only solution is a law to protect consumer than the digital things we buy would still be available for us to download for at least x number of years. Especially when considering hosting it and the bandwidth is so cheap it isn't really a big risk for companies.

Why rely on the original publisher? Let me download it and then share it.

I think it's a much simpler requirement that the product be functional without "phoning home" and when the original prosper stops selling it then libraries abd torrents and archive websites step in.

”real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)”

- Linus Torvalds
by KronisLV | 2025-06-08 07:46:47+00:00
Another user of Roo Code here, I really like that I could hook it up to either OpenRouter or Anthropic/Google directly, for different use cases - for the most part I enjoy using Claude, but when their rate limits hit (e.g. when I needed to shuffle around ~100k tokens for a specific use case) then Gemini was also good enough!

Plus, it's a plugin for VSC, so I don't need an entirely new editor, which I think makes a lot of sense when you don't want to overhaul UI but just add a few features here and there (autocomplete, chat, ability to edit files and some UI for agentic work with checkpoints along the way etc.).

I'm actually not sure why Roo/Cline aren't way more popular, rather than Cursor etc.
by spwa4 | 2025-06-08 07:46:59+00:00
But ALL of the FANGs pride themselves on predictably rising numbers. They all have a semi-believable story, and in fact only Amazon has a unique tactic (which is cheating taxes entirely by having zero profit, hence their revenue goes up predictably instead of profit. The others have steadily rising profit with slight variation in the rise of their revenue)

But all of them do it. Facebook/Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple. Even the non-FANG fangs like Tesla, Twitter, ... and all have stories about faking it. Most are advertising and that's easy to fake on both sides (buy your own adertising, and of course fake engagement), Amazon has zero profit so they proudly declare they're faking it for the government (but, of course, they're not cheating you), Netflix has steadily rising subscriber numbers where everyone else has failed, even Apple's growth has switched to subscriber growth, the part of their business that would be the easiest to fake.

In fact this is quite common in the whole S&P 500, including outside of the US, with numbers not quite as dramatic as the FANGs, but still going up.
by ordu | 2025-06-08 07:47:02+00:00
It is just speculations. If we rely on LLMs, then something bad happens. Truly, something will happen, but will it be bad? A calculator ruins people's ability to do mental arithmetic, is it bad? I'm not sure, why I'd need to do mental arithmetic. Writing ruins memory. Is it bad? Probably, but I know no people who would reject writing to exercise their memory.

Moreover, if it will be so bad, as the author think, we can just spend like 15 minutes per day, to train the abilities that become unused with LLMs. And LLMs could help us to do it, so it will be like 15 min/day, not 2 hours/day.

> My son is in school. And the teacher literally said they need to use an LLM and the teacher is using an LLM to grade/check it. This is ridiculous.

I don't know, if it is ridiculous. I like LLMs, they really help to learn things. I mean, yes, LLMs can be detrimental to learning, if instead of doing a task at hand, the student will be asking LLM to do the task. But it can be a real help, because with the help of LLM you can do tasks, you cannot do without it. You can do tasks faster, and to do more of them. LLM can be bad for learning or it can be good, it depends on how it is used.

The teacher using LLM is very interesting. When I was at school, I thought I was smarter then my teachers at school, and I didn't like them, some of them I just hated. If they were using LLMs, I'm sure I would figure out ways to do tasks in a way, so their LLMs would hallucinate and grade my work wrongly. You can always complain and make the teacher to check it without LLM. Let them spend additional 10 minutes grading, and do it in front of other pupils, so teachers would need to admit their mistakes publicly. I would definitely do it. I did something like that with math, I would go for any length to find some non-standard solution for a problem, that cannot be checked by checking numbers in specific places of the solution. It made the teacher to make mistakes while grading, I just loved it. But if I had LLM... I would definitely do it with literature and history also. My math teacher was not so bad after all, but I hated the literature and history ones.
by chrismorgan | 2025-06-08 07:51:15+00:00
It’s used all over the place on Indian government websites, old and new. Often by <marquee>, sometimes by JS, maybe sometimes by CSS.

I never figured out why the actual <marquee> tag has a low frame rate. Maybe it’s to make it more unpleasant so you won’t want to use it. Certainly I would use a CSS animation instead for the frame rate reason, if I was forced to put a marquee on a page.
by Aeolun | 2025-06-08 07:51:15+00:00
> Just because you enjoy it doesn't mean the game doesn't have problems, or it didn't have a negative affect on BGS's image

All of their games have a negative effect on BGS’s image. There’s no company that has more people complaining about their games. It’s going to take a whole lot more than a single terrible game to get people to stop buying them.
by motorest | 2025-06-08 07:53:07+00:00
> There's your problem. Docker adds indirection on storage, networking, etc., and also makes upgrades difficult as you have to either rebuild the container, or rely on others to do so to get security and other updates.

None of your points make any sense. Docker works beautifully well as an abstraction layer. It makes trivially simple to upgrade anything and everything running on it, to the point you do not even consider it as a concern. Your assertions are so far off that you managed to.l get all your points entirely backwards.

To top things off, you get clustering for free with Docker swarm mode.

> If you stick to things that can be deployed as an upstream OS vendor package, or as a single binary (go-based projects frequently do this), you'll likely have a better time in the long run.

I have news for you. In fact, you should be surprised to learn that nowadays that today you even get full blown Kubernetes distributions up and running in Linux distributions after a quick snap package install.
by lutusp | 2025-06-08 07:53:26+00:00
This fully reflects my own Android experience (https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Paul+Lutus) -- writing Android apps is by no means a write-and-forget experience. As time goes by more of my apps are dropped from the platform from my unwillingness to drop everything and rewrite code for each new Android version.

My original intent was to put my free, open-source apps on the platform, much as I had done before Android existed. But no -- Android doesn't work that way.

My best-known Android app is SSHelper (https://arachnoid.com/android/SSHelper/), a Secure Shell server meant for file transfers. Still works perfectly, dropped some time ago.

TankCalc (https://arachnoid.com/android/TankCalcAndroid/), same story. It's a well-known multi-platform app tank farm managers use to profile storage tanks. Still works, dropped from the platform.

And not just mine. Many other free, first-rate Android apps -- Termux (https://termux.dev/) comes to mind -- have been driven off the platform by Google's onerous demands and commercial focus.

It's as though a wall is going up between people who like programming and people who like money.
by lovestory | 2025-06-08 07:54:31+00:00
While tools like NotebookLM and Perplexity are impressive and highly effective for conducting research on any topic/query, SurfSense elevates this capability by integrating with your personal knowledge base. It is a highly customizable AI research agent, connected to external sources such as search engines (Tavily, LinkUp), Slack, Linear, Notion, YouTube, GitHub, Discord and more to come.
by Aeolun | 2025-06-08 07:54:47+00:00
I can agree that it’s different, but driving is not fundamentally different from walking, in that both get you from one place to another. Nobody drives to a place because it’s fundamentally different from walking there, they do it purely because it’s faster and leaves them less tired.

I think the same thing is true for AI. Or at least, for training or acting on public information. It’s not suddenly bad because you are able to do it on all information in existence at the same time.
by anal_reactor | 2025-06-08 07:55:07+00:00
I attended one of best high schools in the area.

One teacher, when I asked him what I can do about my failing grade, told me "you can go hang yourself". Why was I getting a failing grade in the first place? Well, it was normal that three quarters of the class would be failing his tests. That's just the kind of teacher he was.

The PE teacher thought that his role was to teach us discipline based on fear. Later I heard a fun story about him getting a new class and thinking that one of the girls was a student, while she was actually the mother of one of the students. She saw the students being yelled at for 45 minutes straight, she got yelled personally at and called retarded. Of course nothing happened to him.

The literature teacher yelled at us so hard that we were literally afraid of talking to her. She hated us, and at some point made that openly clear, by being mean on purpose. She never gave me more than "barely passing", even though at the standardized test I got a near-perfect score.

Once she did a test, threw the paper away, and assigned us grades by how much she liked each student. I brought up this story during reunion, and was told "she actually prepared us for how we'd be treated in college and adult life".

And that was one of the best schools that always took the most talented students from the region. In this context, having two LLMs talk to each other really isn't a bad thing.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-06-08 07:55:09+00:00
The America government now has the best socioeconomic footgunning snipers that don't even do the covert job of making the 0.003% richer over the long term properly anymore.

America's balance sheet distribution (not income) breakdown:

8.5% $1M+

1.6% $10M+

0.003% $100M+

0.00026% $1B+
by ethagnawl | 2025-06-08 07:55:40+00:00
Yes, FF was revelatory (features and performance) and, relatively, very popular for a time. 31% was a massive share considering it was up against a browser that was the default for the vast majority of people using computers.

Mozilla have had so many chances to position themselves as the privacy-preserving alternative in current years but just can't get out of its own way in any sense (e.g. corporate greed or being hostile towards users). There's still dim hope for FF and some of its forks, like Librewolf, but hopefully forward thinking projects like Servo and Ladybird can fill the void.
by muzani | 2025-06-08 07:56:11+00:00
Oddly enough, I try to search for paid software because if I buy a game, I want to be able to complete it. Not like pay $5/month to access half the game, and another $50 to get to the final 20%, and another $100 to get to the final 5%.

It's not letting me do that either. Google Play Games (the separate app) has such a filter but it's seemingly random.
by michael_forrest | 2025-06-08 07:56:23+00:00
I lasted about 18 months at Canonical (thankfully I didn’t have to deal with this interview process) and I can say that this description of an interaction with Shuttleworth rings true. The poster really did dodge a bullet by not getting hired. Enough time has passed that this now gives me amusement instead of making me feel outright angry. Shuttleworth is an autocratic micromanager who sprinkles arbitrary mandates into every aspect of the business, which accumulate to make it impossible to deliver anything effectively. The promise of the project was huge (this was over 10 years ago) and he hired many brilliant people but then largely ignored their expertise in favour of his own whims. You may notice that the things Ubuntu does well are mostly things that he didn’t find interesting enough to interfere with.
by Aeolun | 2025-06-08 07:56:25+00:00
No. It’s not fundamentally different. Big copyright holders are better at asserting their rights, and had their information under lock and key from the start, but I don’t think for a moment all these models haven’t been trained on all the content on the disney website (or all the websites with disney derative work).

Disney is just better at preventing the LLM companies from allowing it to regurgitate that stuff.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-06-08 07:57:42+00:00
Surely you're missing the wood for the trees here - isn't the point of asking for no 'AI' to avoid low effort slop? This is a relatively high value post about adopting new practices and the human-LLM integration.

Tag it, let users decide how they want to vote.

Aside: meta: If you're speaking on behalf of HN you should indicate that in the post (really with a marker outside of the comment).
by motorest | 2025-06-08 07:58:01+00:00
> Tools like Ansible exist and can do everything you mention on the deploy side and more (...)

Your comment is technically correct, but factually wrong. What you are leaving out is the fact that, in order to do what Docker provides out of the box, you need to come up with a huge custom Ansible script to even implement the happy path.

So, is your goal to self host your own services, or to endlessly toy with the likes of Ansible?
by knuppar | 2025-06-08 07:58:09+00:00
Better grades: could've spent more time in the library while paying rent anyway.

Learned a lot living at people's places: you could plan a month of no accomodation and couch surf, don't think that's such a stretch. More fundamentally, the tent piece was just a "social opener" to learn more about others. Many other things can be this social opener.

Material freedom: I buy that the experiment showed you that and that's awesome, but I also think some solid therapy around one's understanding of material reality could play a similar role.
by snickerbockers | 2025-06-08 07:59:57+00:00
I honestly don't think the modern web is a legitimate hypertext system at this point. It was already bad enough 20 years ago with flash and serverside CGI but now most of the major websites are just serving JavaScript programs that then fetch data using a dedicated API. And then there's all the paywalls and constant CAPTCHA checks to make sure you aren't training an LLM off their content without a license.

Look up hyperland, it's a early 90s documentary by Douglas Adams and the guy from doctor who about the then-future hypermedia revolution. I can remember the web resembling that a long time ago but the modern web is very far removed from anything remotely resembling hypertext.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-06-08 08:00:18+00:00
Optimization with the objectives we have today, and more generally financialism are all about splitting up end-to-end tasks into pieces and removing redundant common work. This is obviously good...upto a point. It gets bad because morals and a bunch of other stuff also gets split up.

Like someone mentioned below, it's unrealistic to expect people to think about second or third or nth order effects of their job. Heck, those effects are not even visible in 90% of cases.

To answer your question, the engineer at meta is just building a graph database. It takes a `void* node_data` as argument. Another is just building a kafka-clickhouse data pipeline that can transfer so many millions of `void* message`s a minute. The android engineer is just improving the percentage of requests without location data by using wifi ssids as fallback. The CEO just sees "advertising revenue WoW" in his dashboard. And so on. That it is actually being used for spying is many steps away from each of them -- OK, in the case of meta I'm sure the employees know to an extent. But it's still very different from the feeling they would get if they were doing the end-to-end task themselves.

It's the same thing with other questionable products. It's split up sufficiently across the supply chain that no one is actually aware enough of the task end-to-end.

In some cases, the same participant in the supply chain will be a supplier for something really good and necessary..but they will also be a supplier for something despicable. In this case, it is easy for everyone involved to sweep the latter under the rug.

As far as I have thought about it, there is no way to get rid of this larger problem without also losing the (unfathomably massive) benefits.
by muzani | 2025-06-08 08:00:36+00:00
A lot of the changes are due to dark patterns. This was nowhere near as bad as the one that broke access to files and gallery, which would break saves for old games. There was another new breaking change on notifications, which probably prevented spoofing.

I'm still in full support of these. I keep telling people that social media apps are just massive violations of privacy and can just copy your password from clipboard or trace your location through images – I've been asked to code these at one time. At least these updates keep me from thinking I'm the paranoid one.
by Aeolun | 2025-06-08 08:01:14+00:00
1. I’m disinclined to believe that purely because of the inconvenience of doing so. Much easier to scrape the entire internet.

2. How so? If you sell your stuff and someone makes it public, it’s still your choice to sell it.

3. That’s only true as far as recreating the content is concerned. Reading and viewing is by definition fair use for publicly visible information.

4. Define fair compensation. I feel like the creatives are just upset that their work is “easy” to replicate with these models. And that isn’t even true, they never appear as unique or interesting as truly new work.
by motorest | 2025-06-08 08:02:03+00:00
> With docker, someone has to rebuild every container that contains a copy of the library.

I think you're grossly overblowing how much work it takes to refresh your containers.

In my case, I have personal projects which have nightly builds that pull the latest version of the base image, and services are just redeployed right under your nose. All it take to do this was to add a cron trigger to the same CICD pipeline.
by atoav | 2025-06-08 08:02:51+00:00
While directing actors on the film set one of the questions to ponder is whether you first need to put people into an emotional reality so they can produce gestures matching that reality or whether you tell them how to move and then they find their emotional reality within the movements.

In my experience both works and some actors prefer one and some the other. But you can try it yourself, think of a sad thing, slumb together make a sad gesture and listen (emotionally) what happens on the inside.
by vintagedave | 2025-06-08 08:03:19+00:00
While I completely agree with you -- that's what I would want too, I want Win98 without the pain, click or type and it's there, it's a very 2025 expectation -- I laughed because of the huge disparity between this and what installing DOS and Windows were really like. Part of the experience is selecting drivers and configuration :D (Even better in DOS with the IRQs and config.sys and whatnot.)
by owenversteeg | 2025-06-08 08:03:29+00:00
Interesting piece, thanks. I also enjoyed his piece "Streetcars: An Inconvenient Truth." His argument is based on length, speed and cost; the main point is that a technically equivalent bus would often be cheaper and thus could be run on a longer, more useful route. If you look at the hundreds of millions spent on DC Streetcar and its limited utility, this all starts to look quite obvious. So why did we do it?

I think there is another aspect that usually goes unstated, which is the vibes. If you're a mayor you want to build a tram. If you're a tourist you want to ride a tram. If you're a prospective resident you want to live near a tram. Yes, it's smoother and yadda yadda, but really it's because it has more sex appeal. A technically equivalent bus may well be _technically_ equivalent but could never be truly equivalent. Nobody would write a play entitled A Technically Equivalent Bus Named Desire. In a way, spending money on a tram is similar to spending money on parks or flowers or public art. And so we will spend the money; and we will build the streetcar; and damn the technical equivalence.

I wonder what the world would be like if we were honest with ourselves.
by vaxman | 2025-06-08 08:04:03+00:00
Interesting article. DOGE staffers are widely reported to be financially independent, genius technologists from Elon Musk's inner circle with a profound lack of ethics and very narrow world perspective that come from their extreme youth. Those guys aren't going to hang around for long and take the heat; if they do, they'll eventually hear Trump's two favorite words anyway. The name DOGE is also now politically toxic and remains associated with Elon Musk. NYT (and the liberal media they feed) will likely try to keep the DOGE name in the headlines as long as they can, since it is a tremendous embarrassment for Trump.

I do hope that after DOGE goes away, Trump goes back to supporting his base with respect to maintaining VA staffing and restricting H1B visas, especially after the R&D tax credit debacle cost so many tech jobs and the true potential for LLMs are being realized to increase productivity at all levels (as opposed to the halving the workforce at the bottom).
by keepamovin | 2025-06-08 08:05:38+00:00
I agree with that, but then I tried the setup, and i found it was straightforward.

playing with it gives you a sense of mastery (even if small), is satisfying, and may be the necessary "training" to get used to using/installing/configuring the full windows 98.

How is it even doing this? A full DOS/Windows 9x environment—running on an M1 Mac?? On so many architectures and OSes? With a ton of options, yet somehow everything just works—games, operating systems, all of it. Like a time machine you can configure. Seriously cool

i got windows 98 networking working (on macos needs sudo dosbox-x) and browsed google from ie 5. most websites will not work (due to TLS/cipher mismatch).

i want to write a very thin, old JS client for BrowserBox to let you connect to bbx running on local network so that old OS like this can browse the modern web.