MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by h4kunamata | 2025-06-10 01:05:22+00:00
Apple empire is crashing down....finally!

Apple used to be against the app store business model until trey tasted it and ever since, app store business model is their main income. I mean, it was, Apple lost the lawsuit against Epic Games regarding its mandatory 30% for any sales and it must be done via Apple Store.

Apple no longer sells hardware as it used to, app store business model is their everything now. But with the lawsuit giving them the middle finger, Apple will do everything they can to lock their hardware and services even more. If you are still using Apple hardware in 2025 for whatever reason, you won't be able to use anything else.

I am pretty sure those Intel Macs are still good hardware, but due to Apple being greedy as usual, Apple is forcing people to destroy it or install Windows or Linux on it assuming that still possible.

Even if you can use Intel Macs as it is, Apple own history will make them incompatible with new software releases so sure, it works but zero support whatsoever forcing users to use third party software.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-10 01:06:15+00:00
It's not how homebrew worked on Intel Macs, or even PowerMacs[0] either. It's a change made with the Apple Silicon lineup - I cannot speak on Apple's behalf to tell you why they did that. But I can blame UEFI as the reason why the M3 continues to have pitiful Linux support when brand-new AMD and Intel chips have video drivers and power management on Day One.

[1] https://mac-classic.com/articles/open-firmware-basics/
by amlib | 2025-06-10 01:07:04+00:00
You seem out of touch with the current trends, as it is right now you have to open a command line window during the installation of windows and run some commands just so you have the privillege of being able to install the system without the requirement of an online account. (And it's now a mandatory procedure if you have no internet access! You are locked up from even proceeding with installation until supplying access to the internet, unless you do that CLI kung-fu) Also, make sure you have the correct incantation because Microsoft keeps changing it from time to time!

I've also noticed a lot of solutions to issues in windows now adopting the usage of power shell one liners as an easy way to fix it, and some times even the only way to change a setting or disable something in the system.

Meanwhile in Linux land with the more recent distros running Gnome I've noticed less and less need to use the command line. Can still be annoying though, but I guess it's the price to pay when you roll the OS of your choice on a system that wasn't really validated for it. (it's amazing it works as well as it does honestly)
by thayne | 2025-06-10 01:07:13+00:00
The prices of search APIs has increased significantly in the past several years, even if you correct for inflation. I suspect part of this is increased use of ML/AI in search, so comparing LLMs to search APIs isn't as different as it might initially appear. It also isn't a very competitive market, so I would expect margins to be fairly high.

There has also been restrictions on API usage. In the case of google, they put in place a hard cap on the number of requests you can make in a month, and it isn't that hard to hit it, and you can't buy more usage for any price. And the Bing API is going to be shuttered by the end of the summer. I don't really know the reason for making it hard to use an API, but it does suggest that the price is artificially high to discourage use for whatever reason search engines don't want people to use their API for.

: except maybe if you set up some special deal with google that probably requires you to know someone high up at google.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-10 01:08:24+00:00
I use an LLM as a reference (on-demand), and don't use agents (yet). I was never into pair programming, anyway, so it isn't a familiar workflow for me.

I will admit that it encourages "laziness," on my part, but I'm OK with that (remember when they said that calculators would do that? They were right).

For example, I am working on a SwiftUI project (an Apple Watch app), and forgot how to do a fairly basic thing. I could have looked it up, in a few minutes, but it was easier to just spin up ChatGPT, and ask it how to do it. I had the answer in a few seconds. Looking up SwiftUI stuff is a misery. The documentation is ... a work in progress ...
by Marsymars | 2025-06-10 01:08:55+00:00
> I expect that anybody you asked 10 years ago who was at least decently knowledgeable about tech and AI would have agreed that the Turing Test is a pretty decent way to determine if we have a "real" AI, that's actually "thinking" and is on the road to AGI etc.

I wouldn’t have, but through no great insight of my own - I had an acquaintance posit that given enough time, we’d brute-force our way to a pile of if/else statements that could pass the Turing Test - I figured this was reasonable, but would come long before “real” AI.
by RajT88 | 2025-06-10 01:09:06+00:00
I don't have kids. My wife and I chose not to. We are really happy with all the stuff we have going on that we don't have to juggle kids as well.

What an amazing world we live in where we can make that choice.

I think of my friends - they all seem firmly in the camp of "having kids is awesome". Even the one friend who almost died from her pregnancy (her daughter is now 13, plays saxophone, wears all black and has blue hair).

YMMV.
by pfdietz | 2025-06-10 01:09:12+00:00
China is generating 4x as much electrical energy from solar+wind as it is from nuclear, and solar+wind are growing much more rapidly. Nuclear generation as a fraction of total is at best flat.

Hydrogen hype is dying for things like vehicles where it is poorly suited, now that batteries are so cheap. But for niches like long term storage it's the last nail in the coffin for nuclear. This may not be apparent when natural gas is still burnable to provide that final backup, but to get to a 100% non-fossil grid hydrogen can be very useful.
by kcplate | 2025-06-10 01:09:18+00:00
Nope, they don’t get a pass for being incompetent from me just because a job is difficult. I’ll also never accept a “well their intentions were good” type of argument—-If the results suck, the results suck. Our country moved towards antivax mentality in a big way because of how our government handled that pandemic. That’s unforgivable and I am not someone who will blame the effect instead of the cause.
by surgical_fire | 2025-06-10 01:09:19+00:00
> scales of these things make me feel a deep sense of existential dread

Perhaps ironically, what instills in me this sense of existential dread are supervoids, more than any massively destructive structure.

I can't really explain why, but something about the idea of a incomprehensibly vast nothingness really rubs me in the wrong way.
by kentonv | 2025-06-10 01:09:30+00:00
I have only claimed that for this particular project it worked really well, and was much faster than writing by hand. This particular project was arguably a best-case scenario: a greenfield project implementing a well-known standard against a well-specified design.

I have tried using AI to make changes to the Cloudflare Workers Runtime -- my usual main project, which I started, and know like the back of my hand, and which incidentally handles over a trillion web requests every day -- and in general in that case I haven't found it saved me much time. (Though I've been a bit surprised by the fact that it can find its way around the code at all, it's a pretty complicated C++ codebase.)

It really depends on the use case.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-06-10 01:10:20+00:00
Why would he?

The Supreme Court has made him untouchable. Congress has abdicated all power to him. Cops can act with reckless abandoned with no consequences and it sure seems like he can now deploy the military against his own people with no resistance from his party. Sue his opposition, use power he doesn't have to ban foreigners and academics, use the government to punish businesses for their speech.

There's no bar too low. No insult too petty, no crime too agregious, no lie too obvious.

Yesterday an Australian reporter was, on video, aimed at and deliberately shot in her back with less lethal rounds by a cop. The LAPD just said "no comment". There it is, done, case closed, our LEO mafia leaders deem it acceptable. There will be no consequences.
by mirashii | 2025-06-10 01:10:31+00:00
In addition to the other comments about the fact that this wasn't forced to adopt the GPL, even if it were, there's nothing in the license that forces you to work with the community to take contributions from the public. You can have an entirely closed development process, take no feedback, accept no patches, and release no source code until specifically asked to do so.

They don't have to do literally any of this.
by dmoy | 2025-06-10 01:10:55+00:00
Note that LLC isn't a tax status

An LLC can either file as a c corp and get corporate tax rates, or (sometimes) file as passthrough like as in a sole proprietorship. Or as a partnership. It gets complicated

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

Anyways, it's up to you, it's not necessarily due to it being an LLC.
by flessner | 2025-06-10 01:12:10+00:00
I recently got a new laptop and had to setup my IDE again.

After a couple hours of coding something felt "weird" - turns out I forgot to login to GitHub Copilot and I was working without it the entire time. I felt a lot more proactive and confident as I wasn't waiting on the autocomplete.

Also, Cursor was exceptional at interrupting any kind of "flow" - who even wants their next cursor position predicted?

I'll probably keep Copilot disabled for now and stick to the agent-style tools like aider for boilerplate or redundant tasks.
by fiddlerwoaroof | 2025-06-10 01:12:55+00:00
Yeah, it probably would be feasible to dust off the FreeBSD Linux compatibility layer[1] and turn that into native support for Linux apps on Mac.

I think Apple’s main hesitation would be that the Linux userland is all GPL.

[1]: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/linuxemu/
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-10 01:13:38+00:00
If I have a 20 line function in my mind and the LLM injects 20 lines for me to accept or reject, I have two problems

First I have to review the 20 lines the LLM has produced

Second, if I reject those lines, it has probably shoved the function I had in mind out of my head

It's enormously disruptive to my progress
by tmp10423288442 | 2025-06-10 01:13:38+00:00
- In a steady state where you're spending the same amount every year, the tax burden of amortized vs. unamortized accounting makes no difference. It only matters for R&D - i.e., new products.

- I read once, although I have no idea how accurate this is, that a company could classify maintenance expenses (i.e., paying SREs and some SWEs to keep the service running and fix bugs) as non-R&D and therefore be able to amortize. That's another advantage to mature services over new services.
by AngryData | 2025-06-10 01:14:19+00:00
Wheel barrows are certainly useful on relatively flat ground, or relatively short ramps that you can use momentum to climb a short distance. But if you are on actual steep terrain they are kind of a huge pain in the ass in my opinion and not worth it. Walking up a hill with 100+ pounds on my back isn't that difficult and I could do it for quite a long time if not all day, but pushing 100+ pounds on a wheel up a steep hill, while in the short term might be faster if I can manage it, becomes a herculean task after doing it for an hour or two. Your ability to stop and rest is also dictated by the terrain rather than your abilities. If I get halfway up a hill with a load on foot and need to rest, no problem, but if I got a wheelbarrow halfway up the hill, unless there is a convenient spot to stop and set down the wheel barrow you can't stop to rest, you have to keep going, which may be a problem when you are too tired to prevent spilling or dropping the load near the top because some little rock caught the tire and there wasn't enough reserve strength to brute force it over the relatively little obstacle.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-06-10 01:14:46+00:00
> At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.

I feel like a few years back when I still used an Intel macbook i noticed an increase in battery life and less frames dropping (like during 'Expose' animations) by disabling transparency in Accessibility settings.

I think this was after the BIg Sur update.
by cardanome | 2025-06-10 01:15:04+00:00
The vast majority of things don't get recycled properly.

We are not talking about new features. Of course no one expects to run a LLM on an ten year old phone, again we are talking about fashion. It is change for change's sake. It is not providing value to users it is so the the designer gets to eat and management and shareholders are kept happy.

There is a difference between actual technical progress and you throwing out your skinny jeans because baggy pants are now in fashion.

Why shouldn't we build phones that last ten year, twenty years, or even more?
by dmoy | 2025-06-10 01:15:51+00:00
The "or you need to take away someone else’s pie" is the relevant part here

The 174 changes (and SALT changes, and some other stuff) were how TCJA got balanced and passed without a 60% majority. 50%+1 is enough to undo previously passed legislation that was also passed with 50%+1 in this case (handwaving - not exactly right, because the balancing point is a different time range, so the math might not work out exactly the same).

The Democratic party absolutely could have passed some legislation in 2021-2023 to undo a lot of TCJA with just a 50%+1 vote, if they cut other stuff to balance. They didn't do that though. In part because they had literally 50%+1 majority and couldn't lose a single vote in the Senate, and couldn't come to an internal agreement.
by kbenson | 2025-06-10 01:17:03+00:00
That's about as clicbait a title given the content as I can imagine. I would summarize the article as:

- Subsidy schemes can often cause problems where monoculture farmable tree crops can reduce biodiversity can cause problems. But I think it's worth noting that replacing trees with another is not what I would call, or what most people likely think, when referring to new forests, and even if we ignore that point, the problem is not the new forests in general but the incentives used to cause it to happen.

- Carbon sequestration may be overestimated because if the ground is already rich in carbon, some of that may be reduced so the overall additional effect of sequestration is less than one might assume.

Neither of those are really in support of "new forests can do more hard than good" in my opinion. They may be worth discussing, but this isn't a good start for a useful conversation on the BBC's part.
by yummypaint | 2025-06-10 01:17:20+00:00
Using an LLM to directly generate code makes writing code feel like reviewing code, and thereby kills the joy in solving problems with software. I don't think people trying to learn are doing themselves any favors either.

I work with grad students who write a lot of code to analyze data. There is an obvious divide in comprehension between those who genuinely write their own programs vs those who use LLMs for bulk code generation. Whether that is correlation or causation is of course debatable.

In one sense, blindly copying from an LLM is just the new version of blindly copying from stack overflow and forum posts, and it seems to about be the same fraction of people either way. There isn't much harm in reproducing boilerplate that's already searchable online, but in that situation it puts orders of magnitude less carbon in the atmosphere to just search for it traditionally.
by kcplate | 2025-06-10 01:17:24+00:00
It doesn’t matter that Biden et al. are pro vaccination and that RFKjr is antivax. What matters is that Biden et al. influenced more antivax attitudes than RFKjr could have ever hoped to in all the time he evangelized it.

That is the real issue. RFKjr is in the position he is as a reaction to bad leadership. Whatever further damage that he manages to do, is still owned by the mismanagement caused by the prior administration.
by landl0rd | 2025-06-10 01:18:11+00:00
Yeah there's functionally no good solution besides occasional stimulant use and staying off them the rest of the time. I vaguely recall some literature that claimed many patients had basically no benefit by some period (believe over a year) which matches friends' anecdotal experience. Exceptions exist; they aren't super common.

Direct dopamine regulation is just a crappy target for this. TAAR1 agonism may be a better target. I've heard some sketchy reports that things in the class of bromantane might be good options, as it acts to epigenetically upregulate dopamine synthesis rather than altering clearance, but not super well-investigated and noot bros are a little weird here (initial research chose it for a balance between physical work capacity increase vs. cognitive benefits, whereas a cognition-focused analogue might perform better.) HDAC inhibition is vaguely interesting but much too large a target.

There are some possibilities to work on, but basically this remains a very unsolved problem, and rhetoric around tolerance often reminds me of the oxycodone "pseudo-addiction" language as much as anything. "Your brain is dopamine-deficient!" No, homeostasis means this probably isn't the case. There may be deficits in signaling but it's not an issue with the concentration of a neurotransmitter.
by hakfoo | 2025-06-10 01:18:36+00:00
I've noticed in my particular region of the US, there's an attempt to move them somewhat upmarket-- instead of (or in addition to) the hot-dog roller there's a food counter preparing almost edible hot foods, the drinks machines have much wider choices (10-20 sodas and 8 coffee products instead of 6 sodas and two coffees)

Guessing the plan is that as EV charging replaces petrol purchases, they can reposition into the quick-meal market.
by bsder | 2025-06-10 01:19:55+00:00
This UI "update" is so obviously detrimental to anyone who doesn't have great 20ish-year-old eyesight, that it is going to negatively impact customer support costs, sales, engagement, etc.

So, you can either assume that Apple are blundering, incompetent dolts who have completely lost the plot (certainly possible) or that Apple has an actual purpose behind this.

If you ask for the purpose and the look at the GUI, you see Apple cramming a UI update targeted with the design language from AR (transparency behind everything, motion cues to activate orienting reflex, etc.) down the throats of all developers as opposed to just those on the Vision.
by arthurcolle | 2025-06-10 01:20:49+00:00
It doesn't feel different enough to merit a difference. Elixir is just a set of Erlang macros that turn one syntax into .beam that otherwise wouldn't turn into .beam

Elixir is way more productive to write/deal with (Phoenix vs. Erlang templating) maybe if you're a web dev, but at the end of the day you're dealing with the same exact same underlying architecture. If you're a prolog programmer, Erlang will feel nicer than if you're a ruby programmer.

I have many packages published as Mix packages, and some published as rebar packages.

Overall, ergonomics definitely feel nicer with Elixir, but I feel like by having it be portrayed as "so different" from Erlang, people don't pull open the Erlang/OTP docs, and don't look at the dozens of behaviors that already exist that usually solve your problem.

Like, why is there a gen stage in Elixir but not in Erlang?

If you wanna use the BEAM, you can use it. If they were more in sync, and provided OOTB in the same distribution, I'd always lean towards Elixir.

Just feels weird that Elixir gets a bunch of street cred for what are fundamentally Erlang/OTP capabilities
by sershe | 2025-06-10 01:20:49+00:00
What I wonder is (from someone who has been in a room like that, not speculation), how do these decisions go down?

My other favorite example is un-disabling telemetry, resetting default browser, etc. Some PM or VP is in a meeting saying we are going to do this shady user hostile thing and everyone just nods? What is the amount and type of euphemisation?

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in one of these..
by 90s_dev | 2025-06-10 01:22:16+00:00
I think you have a romanticized revisionary memory of back then.

I went to school in the 90s and learned computers in school.

All they taught us was the basics. How to use Windows explorer. What files are and how to rename and delete and undelete them.

And some hypercard clone. Which barely taught us anything about computers except "they can do stuff you tell them to," which I guess was a valuable lesson?
by stult | 2025-06-10 01:23:14+00:00
Many larger companies have an incentive to attribute layoffs to AI, because that serves to hype their AI products. Basically, they didn't want to say, "we are laying people off for financial reasons." Even though the financial reasons were triggered by a change to the tax code, because that doesn't play well in the media, particularly during a period of elevated profits. So Google, Microsoft, etc. laid a bunch of engineers off to reduce their tax burden and used AI as an excuse.
by sanswork | 2025-06-10 01:23:22+00:00
Apple offers a recycling program.

>We are not talking about new features

We are, you are just choosing to ignore them and call them fashion. There have been immense changes in capabilities over the past 10 years.

>Why shouldn't we build phones that last ten year, twenty years, or even more?

We do, dumb phones, why don't you own one of those instead of trying to limit progress in the phones pushing progress?