MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrbungie | 2025-06-24 04:16:12+00:00
Actually, you're not missing anything. The thing is, hype cycles are just that, cycles. They come around with a mix of genuine amnesia, convenient amnesia, and junior enthusiasm, because cycles require a society (and/or industry) both able and willing to repeat exploration and decisions, whether they end up in wins or losses. Some people start to get get the pattern after a while but they are seen as cynics. After all, the show must go on, "what if this or the next cycle is the one that leads us to tech nirvana?"

Software engineering for any non-trivial problem means a baseline level of essential complexity that isn't going away, no matter the tool, not even if we someday "code" directly from our minds in some almost-free way via parallel programming thought diffusion. That's because (1) depth and breadth of choice; and (2) coordination/socials, mostly due but not uniquely related to (1) are the real bottlenecks.

Sure, accidental complexity can shrink, if you design in a way that's aligned with the tools, but even then, the gains are often overhyped. These kinds of "developer accelerators" (IDEs, low-code platforms, etc.) are always oversold in depth and scope, LLMs included.

The promise of the "10x engineer" is always there, but the reality is more mundane. For example, IDEs and LSPs are helpful, but not really transformative. Up to a point that people are being payed right now and don't use them at all, and they still deliver in a "economically justifiable" (by someone) way.

Today it's LLMs. Tomorrow it'll be LISP Machines v2.
by eclipticplane | 2025-06-24 04:17:14+00:00
If you're engaged with the vendor's sales team, ask to see the report. 99% of the content is useless. Most read like a poorly performing LLM even if the controls were written pre-LLM.

Why would a vendor get a SOC 2? Because their customers demanded it. Why did their customers demand it? Their customers demanded it.

99% of it is a useless make-work assessment demanded by equally incompetent customers' auditors demanding it to justify their own existence.
by curtisf | 2025-06-24 04:17:57+00:00
What is the actual model that takes 15 seconds to compute?

If I understand the setting, you are estimating the demand curve for a given price... And there are only 40 such curves to compute.

Surely each curve is fit with only a few parameters, probably fewer than five. (I think for small price ranges the demand curve is usually approximated as something trivial like y=mx+b or y=a/(x+b)+c)

Why does evaluating the model at a particular price need to take milliseconds, yet alone 15 seconds?
by Saline9515 | 2025-06-24 04:18:49+00:00
Solar and wind are wrongly designated as renewable. They aren't and need to be replaced every 25 years. Wind turbines aren't easily recyclable, the current solution is to...just discard them in massive landfills. Hydro is the only "real" renewable energy. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/30/climate/wind-turbine-recy...
by nerdsniper | 2025-06-24 04:19:52+00:00
MSDS is just a small part of process safety. CSB deals with the very largest industrial accidents. These are at plants where millions of pounds of chemical flow through any pipe every day.

The examples you mention about MSDS sounds relevant to a large building/warehouse, but we’re talking about massive industrial complexes nearly equal to the area encompassing all of Seattle+Bellevue+Redmond+Renton+Tukwila.

At that scale, there are still plenty of surprises. Like, “oh shit, I didn’t realize the new version of the lubricating oil the manufacturer recommends for our massive pumps have a different additive that reacts with an impurity in our process stream which catalyzes an exothermic reaction”.

I highly recommend a very short book named “What Went Wrong” by Trevor Kletz. It’s surprisingly entertaining and walks you through basic things that have caused disasters at countless chemical plants over and over again.
by dogcow | 2025-06-24 04:20:18+00:00
Anyone looking for a commercial-free, listener-supported "radio" station would be remiss not to check out https://radioparadise.com -- it is truly a rare-gem in our over-commercialized world.

And we can't talk about music streaming on the Internet without mentioning one of the originals -- https://somafm.com -- still going strong.

I support both of these stations because their "business model" is so refreshing, very much in the spirit of the "Old Internet," which I miss dearly.
by crackalamoo | 2025-06-24 04:20:34+00:00
Yeah, unfortunately I feel like despite all the advances in Unicode tech, my modern terminal (MacOS) still bugs out badly with emojis and certain special characters.

I'm not sure how/when codepoints matter for wcwidth: my terminal handles many characters with more than one codepoint in UTF-8, like é and even Arabic characters, just fine.
by pmontra | 2025-06-24 04:22:15+00:00
We were offloading to jobs every long running activity in the Elixir/Phoenix project I've been working on years ago. There is no other way. The response to a web request must complete in a short time and free the server for further requests.

We solved debugging by sending all log lines to a centralized server. We were running on the Google cloud.

We were not multiregion though.

My current Rails project uses sidekiq a lot to send mail, generate PDFs, any activity that does not have to necessarily complete before we return the response. We keep the interactive web app up to date by websockets and with callbacks for clients using our public API. I don't think we would have done it differently in any other language.

By the way, we built our slimmer version of sidekiq for Elixir because the language plus the OTP libraries have a lot of functionality but we still need to persist jobs, retry them even after a complete reboot, exponential back off, etc.
by tomhow | 2025-06-24 04:22:27+00:00
This is not an acceptable comment on Hacker News. Further, this comment from a week ago is particularly bad:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44293075

Sure, if you must engage in discussions about politics here, criticize a country's government and its policies and practices. But don't use these kinds of insinuations and slurs.

Please have a read of the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by godelski | 2025-06-24 04:22:36+00:00
Definitely subjective. But popular enough that it should exist in the many many versions of Android phones that exist. What's the point of having so many varieties if they're all the same?

Fwiw, it I'm at my desk it'd usually be on its face for flip to silent. Then I pick up and it's natural. Or I'd be using scrcpy because if I'm in front of a computer why are my hands moving from the keyboard? I guess I'll compromise with the mouse lol

Single fingerprint registration is weird. Iirc I could do 2 on my pixel 2
by absurdo | 2025-06-24 04:23:14+00:00
I want the games I play to be an escapism. By proliferating them in media further it destroys that for me, because it’s now everywhere and no longer an escape. For many of us growing up, and in learning to code and build shit, escape from the “real world” was a cornerstone etched with bad experiences.

If you want to make a movie, make a movie. Don’t make a game and then make a movie about it and splatter posters and billboards all over about it.
by crackalamoo | 2025-06-24 04:23:43+00:00
I agree humans only rarely step outside the circle, but I do have this intuition that some people sometimes do, whereas LLMs never do. This distinction seems important over long time horizons when thinking about LLM vs human work.

But I can't quite articulate why I believe LLMs never step outside the circle, because they are seeded with some random noise via temperature. I could just be wrong.
by miles | 2025-06-24 04:24:14+00:00
> data here is from 2023

It's from February 2025[1]:

> Latest Release: February 20, 2025

> Labor Market Outcomes of College Graduates by Major

> Art History Unemployment Rate: 3.0%

> Computer Engineering Unemployment Rate: 7.5%

> Computer Science Unemployment Rate: 6.1%

[1] https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
by pyuser583 | 2025-06-24 04:24:41+00:00
Every decision to overturn a decided opinion, can potentially harm all other decided opinions.

Beyond that, no, it didn’t impact anything other than abortion.

When the SCOTUS ruled the constitution protected the right to engage in gay sex, and later gay marriage, precidents were overturned.

Conservatives claimed this might make it easier to overturn Roe. It didn’t.

Roe wasn’t in danger until SCOTUS had six reliable anti-Roe justices.
by patrickcalderon | 2025-06-24 04:25:29+00:00
In Mexico, thousands of luxury condos sit empty — while millions of informal workers can’t afford the homes they built.

We launched Mexican Idea Labs to tackle that, using AI trained on Oxxo receipts, WhatsApp chats, and local behavior data — not just pitch decks.

Our first prototype is Piedra: a tokenized real estate platform starting at $14 USD, designed for non-crypto users.

This is about reclaiming who gets to participate in tech.
by atomicfiredoll | 2025-06-24 04:25:45+00:00
My understanding from folks outside the U.S. is that they desire U.S. products because they trust the safety more. I'm not sure everyone quite understands that by gutting [regulations], they trash part of their international advantage.

I'm no expert, but even if they somehow managed to get manufacturing back, slashing your competitive advantages and just taking the market position of "China 2: This time it's more expensive" doesn't strike me as a winner for exports.
by spongebobstoes | 2025-06-24 04:25:46+00:00
i think it is romanticizing poverty. most poor people don't get the opportunity to do anything to excellence. survival takes precedence

I think it is also an inaccurate view of the world that most capable people drop their passions in pursuit of a career and monetary gain. not only that, but talent is multidimensional, and being a great engineer does not imply making great rice wine under different circumstances

poverty, and lack of social mobility, is largely a curse of wasted potential, not a silver lining of talent molded into artisanal goods
by crackalamoo | 2025-06-24 04:26:47+00:00
I agree. And if human civilization survives, your concerns about energy and resources will be only short term on the scale of civilization, especially as we make models more efficient.

The human brain uses just 20 watts of power, so it seems to me like it is possible to reach human-level intelligence in principle by using much greater power and less of the evolutionary refinement over billions of years that the brain has.
by rendall | 2025-06-24 04:28:29+00:00
This is illuminating:

> "high-risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data..."

> "We disagree with the House Chief Administrative Officer's characterization in the strongest possible terms."

It seems like this is non-responsive to the first claim. Meta goes on to say that WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, but the quotes never really do address the transparency issue.
by mcyukon | 2025-06-24 04:28:48+00:00
Haha, thank you!

I have many fond memories playing Marble Blast on a G5 iMac as a teen, I think it came to our Internet-less house bundled with the iMac along with Glider Pro which I think came via CD.

I managed to get Marble Blast ultra running on my Steam deck, but the controls weren't amazing. Marble It Up runs like a top, and scratches that itch I have for the original.
by refurb | 2025-06-24 04:29:07+00:00
It helps when you read your sources.

It literally says “GRAS must meet the same standards as new additives”.

The only reason GRAS exists is that FDA regulations have changed over time.

Unless you wanted all food additives immediately banned until years of tests could be conducted, the FDA created GRAS based on the evidence at the time but also required additional studies to bring existing additives up to the same safety standards as new additives.

Feel free to click on any of the GRAS decisions to read all about the studies done.
by morleytj | 2025-06-24 04:29:53+00:00
I've thought the same thing. Would love if other people were into that.

I'd ask you to consider the following thought experiment. If the regulatory barriers are lower to establish a nightlife business establishment without alcohol as an option, and a large number of people want to do activities without alcohol, why do these businesses not exist in significant numbers?

It's certainly not a novel concept to open a cafe or a late night board game location. If they were sustainable businesses economically, which barriers currently exist that prevent them from being present in cities to the same extent as bars?
by sothatsit | 2025-06-24 04:31:35+00:00
Yes, maybe using the word "verify" here is a bit confusing. The point was to compare software, where it is very easy to verify the positive case, to other domains where it is not possible to verify anything at all, and manual review is all you get.

For example, a research document could sound good, but be complete nonsense. There's no realistic way to verify that an English document is correct other than to verify it manually. Whereas, software has huge amounts of investment into testing whether a piece of software does what it should for a given environment and test cases.

Now, this is a bit different to formally verifying that the software is correct for all environments and inputs. But we definitely have a lot more verification tools at our disposal than most other domains.
by Saline9515 | 2025-06-24 04:31:40+00:00
This is caused by the (overly) stringent regulations asked by the French authorities, and the loss of skill around building modern nuclear reactors. For instance, the EPR can withstand an airliner crash.

Besides, the EPR is very powerful and can produce clean, constant and pilotable electricity at the largest scale for a very low footprint. No other tech currently matches nuclear, especially for uses that require high and predictable loads, such as AI or smelting.
by godelski | 2025-06-24 04:32:30+00:00
That was my experience with a back fingerprint reader. I reach my hand into my pocket, my finger naturally lands on the sensor, and my phone is unlocked before it's out!

I rarely saw my lockscreen

But when I switched to the pixel 8 with a front reader I always saw it

Now on my iPhone I see it frequently and it doesn't land when wearing a mask, when I'm talking, when I'm not looking (I could blind navigate my phone), or when it's just dark. So it just feels painfully slow in comparison...

Nothing has beaten the magical experience of a back fingerprint reader and I think this is why so many of us miss it. But I'm sure it's one of those things you'd have had to use to really feel the magic

It doesn't have to be for everyone but there's enough phones that the option should be available...
by karteum | 2025-06-24 04:33:03+00:00
UCB-C headphones use the same USB-C connector as the charging one (there are no smartphone with 2 usb-C connectors), therefore increasing the wear every time you plug/unplug. When using USB headphones you cannot charge at the same time, and when using USB-to-{usb+jack} the behavior is sometimes strange (e.g. does not detect and switch to internal audio when unplugging the jack). Besides, in many situations (especially when walking/moving), a USB-C connector tends to unplug itself so easily while a jack connector will just stay in place. Nothing really replaces an internal jack port ! (+ in some cases, the jack connector would also provide a debug UART :).

In comparison, Moto G84 has LineageOS/Calyx support, headphone jack, 2 SIM (or 1 SIM + SD-card), 12G RAM, and 7/10 repairability score in France (although I lack the details - I hope at least it's relatively easy to replace the battery and USB-C slot) + it weight 160g => even though I'd like to support Fairphone, I won't buy again a phone without jack port !

I totally agree with previous comments which highlight that we used to have removable jack + batteries + SD + root easily 10 years ago (and we also had more options for tiny phones, such as Galaxy S4 Mini).
by crackalamoo | 2025-06-24 04:34:03+00:00
The recent Apple paper seemed pretty flawed. Anthropic/Open Philanthropy did a rebuttal paper, The Illusion of the Illusion of Thinking.

> Do they reason? No. (Before you complain, please first define reason).

Defining reasoning is the problem. No, they don't reason in the same way as humans. But they seem to be able to go through reasoning steps in some important way. It's like asking if submarines swim.
by notjulianjaynes | 2025-06-24 04:34:21+00:00
I once wrote a ~2,000 word draft,on an alpha-smart ($6 at a goodwill) and then couldn't get the transfer to computer function to work correctly, so I had to rewrite the whole thing because I wasn't gonna sit there and manually re-type three lines at a time from the grayscale LCD. The subsequent draft was actually better though, so for this reason I would recommend such a device. It's also a fun novelty thing. Really though, if you keep getting distracted from your writing, maybe consider if it's because you don't actually have anything to say?
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-06-24 04:35:05+00:00
Great. Hire them, I will go work for someone who gives the same respect that they expect.

People like you are the ones who grumble that it's hard to find good employees, or have to deal with "bad hires". I've built up and staffed teams for a long time and I understand that the best employees sometimes need flexibility. Because the good ones are all going and working for people who want to treat them like adults and understand that the person doing the hiring is just as disposable as the people attempting to be hired.

If timelines don't line up, you just say they don't line up and go your separate ways. No harm no foul.
by anonymars | 2025-06-24 04:35:12+00:00
This is a lot of words, but does any of it contradict this:

> AI can very efficiently apply common patterns to vast amounts of code, but it has no inherent "idea" of what it's doing.”

Are you saying that AI does have an inherent idea of what it's doing or is doing more than that? Today?

We're in an informal discussion forum. I don't think the bar we're looking for is some rigorous deductive proof. The above matches my experience as well. Its a handy applied interactive version of an Internet search.

If someone has a different experience that would be interesting. But this just seems like navel-gazing over semantics.
by tomhow | 2025-06-24 04:36:29+00:00
> You are a pawn

Don't comment like this on HN. Please observe the guidelines, especially these ones:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-06-24 04:36:50+00:00
"However, McSherry warned that "it's only a matter of time before law enforcement and private litigants start going to OpenAI to try to get chat histories/records about users for all sorts of purposes, just as they do already for search histories, social media posts, etc.""

If this is a concern, is the the best course of action for McSherry to stop using ChatGPT.

We have read this sort of "advice" this countless times in HN comments relating to use of software/websites controlled by so-called "tech" companies.

Something like, "If you are concerned about [e.g., privacy, whatever], then do not use it. Most users do not care."

Don't use _____.

This is a common refrain in HN comment threads.

"OpenAI will have a chance to defend panicked users on June 26, when Wang hears oral arguments over the ChatGPT maker's concerns about the preservation order."

"Some users appear to be questioning how hard OpenAI will fight. In particular, Hunt is worried that OpenAI may not prioritize defending users' privacy if other concerns-like "financial costs of the case, desire for a quick resolution, and avoiding reputational damage"-are deemed more important, his filing said."

"Intervening ChatGPT users had tried to argue that, at minimum, OpenAI should have been required to directly notify users that their deleted and anonymous chats were being retained. Hunt suggested that it would have stopped him from inputting sensitive data sooner."

Any OpenAI argument that invokes "user privacy" is only doing so as an attempt to protect OpenAi from potentially incriminating discovery. OpenAI will argue for its own interests.
by 0x38B | 2025-06-24 04:37:00+00:00
The fingerprint reader is one of the things I most love about my iPhone SE; I don’t see any reason to get a new phone.

Apple’s declining software quality and walled garden incline me more and more towards ditching iPhone for GrapheneOS or a dumb phone like the Punkt MP; I find far more joy reading on an eReader, taking photos with a camera, or taking notes in my notebook than I do using the phone for any of those.

Especially for notes, keeping journals for the last few years, I find such peace and even connection with myself and my thoughts in my journals; I write down passages from books that are meaningful to me, and seeing my own handwriting, the ink I wrote it in, even the shading in the ink – it all adds up to a deeply meaningful, physical experience.

The answer is not more phone, it’s less!
by fzil | 2025-06-24 04:38:03+00:00
I think this bit gives it up:

> And now, with Iran's nuclear ambitions supposedly neutralized in a single blow, we can all relax. The threat is gone. No strategic aftershocks, no long term consequences, no unintended escalation. Just peace, stability, and a region completely satisfied with the outcome.

Sounds like sarcasm to me.
by musicale | 2025-06-24 04:38:10+00:00
People miss the old internet because the new internet is getting worse in tangible ways every year: adtech, AI-generated slop (and SEO slop even before that), manipulative algorithms, and ever-more-intrusive monetization.

The iron law of encrapification dictates that almost any web platform (youtube, reddit, etc.) will keep pushing the "degrade the end user experience to make more money" button until it stops working.

A slightly more charitable take is that people miss the "loss leader" versions of platforms before the inevitable monetization push (demanding continual growth even in a saturated market) took hold and started making them worse every year.
by bcrosby95 | 2025-06-24 04:38:17+00:00
This sounds exactly like the late '90s all over again. All the programming jobs were going to be outsourced to other countries and you'd be lucky to make minimum wage.

And then the last 25 years happened.

Now people are predicting the same thing will happen, but with AI.

The problem then, as is now, is not that coding is hard, it's that people don't know what the hell they actually want.
by jader201 | 2025-06-24 04:38:28+00:00
I’ve not really educated myself on the details of cancer treatments (I’m fortunate I’ve not had to learn yet), so my uneducated assumption was that chemo always did something for cancer, it was more a matter of weighing how much it helped fight the cancer vs. the harm it did to the otherwise healthy tissue/organs.

I wouldn’t have guessed the there are types of cancer where chemo just wouldn’t work at all.