MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quantadev | 2025-06-04 16:16:17+00:00
Objectives can come into conflict. For example, if you have two employees who simply cannot work together, and you have no other team to move one of them to, you fire the guy who's less productive, because your primary objective is getting the job done. But if the lead guy is more of a troublemaker you fire him instead, but only if net benefit to "productivity" is positive. This is why managers cannot be "friends" with co-workers, because sometimes you have to let somebody go, and you'd never do that to a friend.
by marcodiego | 2025-06-04 16:16:53+00:00
> we have immense wealth, medicine, etc. that doesn’t necessarily imply we are psychologically healthier or happier.

That may make sense if you compare us to a few generations ago because maybe we're almost in a "diminishing returns" phase and our lives aren't significantly better than our closest ancestors. Nevertheless, I'm not sure if we were happier during periods of famine, plague and inquisition. It is still possible to have a "go-to oversimplified answer to this" even for this "go-to oversimplified answer to this".
by sherdil2022 | 2025-06-04 16:17:02+00:00
So it looks like we all need to have firm understanding and tailor our prompts now to effectively use LLMs. Isn't this all subjective? I get different answers based upon how I word my question. Shouldn't things be little bit more objective? Isn't this random that I get different results based upon just wording? This whole thing is just discombobulating to me.
by a_cardboard_box | 2025-06-04 16:17:03+00:00
> I once, for a side gig, had to write a 16-bit long-division routine on a processor with only one 8-bit accumulator. That was the point at which I declared that I'd never write another assembly program.

This is exactly the kind of job I'd enjoy! A perfectly doable technical challenge with clear requirements. Some people like solving Sudoku puzzles, I like solving programming puzzles.

I guess I'm just not "the overwhelming majority of programmers".
by ednite | 2025-06-04 16:17:25+00:00
Well put. And funny enough, I’m actually a complete newbie in photography and just got one of those expensive Sony cameras, so I know exactly what you mean. It’s overkill for my current skill set.

But the key difference? I’m not planning to use it as the primary photographer at my cousin’s wedding next week.

As you said, the real danger isn’t just the tool, it’s the false confidence it gives. AI can make us feel a bit too capable and too fast, and that’s when things can go sideways.
Show HN: Arrakis-How to Build an AI Sandbox from Scratch [video]
by abshkbh | 2025-06-04 16:17:27+00:00
Arrakis (https://github.com/abshkbh/arrakis) provides MicroVM-based secure sandboxes for code execution and full computer use. It features first-class support for backtracking, a Python SDK, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.

In this talk, we go under the hood to explore how to architect an AI sandbox from the ground up. We’ll also dive into why sandboxes are becoming essential infrastructure for AI models and agents — enabling the next big unlock in intelligence.

Links - Slides for the talk available here - https://tinyurl.com/arrakis-aie Vibe coding with Claude and Arrakis -https://x.com/abshkbh/status/19074803...
by tptacek | 2025-06-04 16:18:04+00:00
I've got no dog on this hunt at all, the idea that any give AI company could be a house of cards is not only plausible but is the bet I would place every time, but the whole "builder.com is all Indians" thing is something 'dang spent a half an hour ruefully looking into yesterday and it turned out not to be substantiated.
by apsurd | 2025-06-04 16:18:06+00:00
ok then "selfishness" is now the unanswerable topic. it's too complex. Classic "there is no altruism". All acts are selfish if one derives any benefit from them. are there acts that people do by choice that give them no benefit?

i don't think this is reductionist btw. Philosophy tends to make people eye-roll. These are unanswerable questions! Discussion is the fun part.
by whatshisface | 2025-06-04 16:18:39+00:00
It's impossible to discover a basic fact, such as "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell," and monetize it fully within the same organization. A million scientists can take a look at that basic fact and involve it in their own research in ten million ways.

It's also not practical to keep those facts as trade secrets over the several decades over which their applications need to develop. Even if an industry consortium was willing to discover that clouds are made of water droplets, it would certainly leak before the science of meteorology had progressed far enough for that consortium to offer saleable rain forecasts.

Finally, companies are unwilling to train people about basic facts. Academia is the only system where "and then you tell everybody" is a part of the incentive structure. Privately, you have a strong incentive to reveal nothing and punish leakers.
by altruios | 2025-06-04 16:19:01+00:00
We are excellent at figuring things out. We get better at it over time, as we grow our collective knowledge base.

I agree that we are great at figuring out things before we have a model of why things work. And we have a mountain of context to work from already. Shakespeare wasn't an idiot, and he wasn't in a vacuum but his 'context window' was 'smaller' than a lot of people today(quotes because dubious terminology).

Art is improving. Science is improving. human understanding, and communication of that understanding is improving too. That is my point.
by thenthenthen | 2025-06-04 16:19:01+00:00
I am a bit late to the (upgrade) party, but ios 18… what happened?! If you scroll through dates in the Calendar app, random date numbers vanish. Huh. Search in Notes is super weird (shows old, fuzzy matches first). Photos app is just.. wow where am I? How is there no jailbreak yet? (Is there?). I have read here the main issue is fragmentation, but I am not sure how that (not) works. If one team builds, let say Notes.app why is it so broken? Because it recycles search libs from (broken) Photos.app? Sorry for the rant.

Edit: is this to upsell the AI?
by toast0 | 2025-06-04 16:19:20+00:00
I went to MSOE after growing up in Southern California. Bubbler was a key way to identify those from Milwaukee and immediate surroundings. It's such a precise locator; even more so than calling I-5 the 5, just as accurate, but the 5 gets you to like Santa Barbara and south, where bubbler cuts off just over the Milwaukee county line. A Racine native drinks from a fountain like everyone else; Brookfield natives might use a bubbler.
Show HN: GIF.new – Instantly capture and create personal response GIFs
by choraria | 2025-06-04 16:19:28+00:00
i use GIFs a lot in my personal/professional life and so I'm pretty passionate about the topic :P

about a month ago I found out that this domain was available and couldn't believe it. Waited a good 3 weeks to pull the trigger on buying it (which, btw is hella expensive by default) and in the meantime, hopped from one idea to another on what it should house.

original idea was to build some kind of prompt-to-GIF service but very soon realised that i can't sustain the AI bill on my budget (top contender was to use runway).

then came the idea of animating charts from data (obvious: i work with spreadsheets) but didn't feel like it'd solve anything for anybody. idk, maybe/maybe not.

after ~20-25 days, realised that we could all use some break from AI shit and make things personal.

figured since I use GIFs a lot (people who know me, know this), could be a cool idea to now annoy people with my own reaction GIFs :P
by drabbiticus | 2025-06-04 16:19:29+00:00
> you're fabricating imaginary problems

That's a very strong statement. A less aggressive approach to discussion might involve asking for a concrete example of a problem rather than assuming bad faith argument.

Off the top of my head, and just spitballing, I would be more surprised if mature game devs or animation studios didn't want to version control pretty massive asset libraries.
by lapcat | 2025-06-04 16:20:08+00:00
> And really, I think many senior engineers are already doing both in a lot of cases where they're helping guide and teach junior and early mid-level developers.

Babysitting and correcting automated tools is radically different from mentoring less experienced engineers. First, and most important IMO, there's no relationship. It's entirely impersonal. You become alienated from your fellow humans. I'm reminded of Mark Zuckerberg recently claiming that in the future, most of your "friends" will be A.I. That's not an ideal, it's a damn dystopia.

Moreover, you're not teaching the LLM anything. If the LLMs happen to become better in the future, that's not due to your mentoring. The time you spend reviewing the automatically generated code does not have any productive side effects, doesn't help to "level up" your coworkers/copilots.

Also, since LLMs aren't human, they don't make human mistakes. In some sense, reviewing a human engineer's code is an exercise in mind reading: you can guess what they were thinking, and where they might have overlooked something. But LLMs don't "think" in the same way, and they tend to produce bizarre results and mistakes that a human would never make. Reviewing their code can be a very different, and indeed unpleasant WTF experience.
by eximius | 2025-06-04 16:20:28+00:00
Maybe. But I think this is a useful time to engage in the conversation about what we do as a semi-post-scarcity society and how we should treat people under that framework. If we _do_ replace all the jobs, how should we, as a society, treat each other?

Fundamentally, you either continue down the path of pure capitalism and let people starve in the streets or you adapt socially.
by w0m | 2025-06-04 16:20:30+00:00
Honestly; the exact opposite. Removing funding for research means either research is canceled, or funded private.

Funding the research privately increases costs to end user as private ensurer is directly accruing more cost. Research stopping increases costs to end user as new/novel cures/treatments aren't found.

Cost for consumer goes up because of lost opportunity cost of 1) learning to diagnose earlier 2) finding new or cheaper cures/treatments.

You can make the argument 'But other countries will pick up the slack!' - but that doesn't necessarily help either, why would they give us the results of their research cheaper? US already jacked up pricing via an executive order on drug pricing just this year to knock that.

Publicly funded medical research is an absolute positive for the US general public health and wallets. We're all losing here on both ends of the spectrum ($$ and actual general public health).
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-06-04 16:20:50+00:00
"That statement is not part of the license as far as I can tell"

What statement

The comment asks questions about detecting license violations and enforcing license provisions with respect to free software

It uses this "SQL Workbench" software as an example

The questions are not specific to SQL Workbench, the SQL Workbence license, or the SQL Workbench author

For example, replace "Republicans" with something like "anyone the author dislikes, for whatever reason"

If it is "free software", where no registration is required, no telemetry, no surveillance, etc., then

1. How does the author detect violations, i.e., someone the author dislikes is using the software

2. How does the author enforce the license, i.e., stop such persons from using the software
by ednite | 2025-06-04 16:21:31+00:00
Totally agree. I was simplifying for discussion’s sake, but yeah, I learned the hard way that vague prompts will lead you that rabbit hole. If you’re not crystal clear, you get everything but what you actually wanted.

These days, I make sure every “t” is crossed and every “i” dotted when giving instructions. Good point, definitely a lesson worth repeating.
by gumboshoes | 2025-06-04 16:21:54+00:00
You don't. Spam is the cost of business. You accept it because being over-protective of your email address means risking losing valuable email from legitimate correspondents. You want every click on your email address to work for legitimate senders, so that means you suffer illegitimate senders, too.

By the way, twenty spam emails a day is a tiny amount. My email accounts see hundreds a day after no-duh filtering.
by abeppu | 2025-06-04 16:21:57+00:00
IDK about "at cost" but shouldn't _some_ price regulation of spare parts be included? With no limits, any manufacturer might say "The price for any spare part is the cost of the original item + a significant additional fee, because our process will be to pull a complete new unit from the warehouse, and have someone disassemble it and send you the one part."
by pjmlp | 2025-06-04 16:22:17+00:00
My first experience with such a setup was connecting to DG/UX, via the terminal application on Windows for Workgroups, or some thin client terminals in a mix of green or ambar phosphor, spread around the campus.

The only time I used a Pascal compiler in ISO Pascal mode, it had the usual extensions inspired on UCSD, but we weren't allowed to use them on the assignments.
by pettycashstash2 | 2025-06-04 16:22:37+00:00
you have a very high HN karma - kudos. is it that you have it hosted on a server vs a provider such as Microsoft and Google or even Proton?

I use mailcow self hosted, which allows for fine tuning. I have a list of recipients I trust, and that goes in mailbox, next is a folder for unqalified mail, and finally 100% spam.
by quantadev | 2025-06-04 16:22:54+00:00
Right, there's kinetic energy in a system, and potential energy. For example the total energy that can be released from a moon in orbit is it's 1) kinetic energy of motion plus 2) potential energy, available thru the gravitational fields. If something with rotational energy shrinks it's rotational speed necessarily speeds up (energy conservation), and that can cause friction, resulting in heat. Any energy that isn't radiated away gets converted to heat ultimately yes. (this all omits nuclear reactions too!)
by nightski | 2025-06-04 16:23:00+00:00
I'd say every programmer uses the constructs in assembly. Just because we have layers and layers of abstraction on top of that doesn't mean it's not valuable to understand the far simpler world that it all sits upon (Granted I understand it sits upon machine code, not assembly, but assembly is probably the closest to machine code that is more human interpret-able without significant effort).

My first language was BASIC on a V-tech. It's not quite the same but it still was such a fantastic starting point.

I've tried luring people into programming with Python for example and see them get frustrated by the amount of abstractions and indirection going on. I am really starting to like this idea of starting with assembly.
by amluto | 2025-06-04 16:23:23+00:00
> we know how to make it statistically insignificant

TB is weird. We do indeed know how to actively manage it (e.g. screen people regularly and treat detected cases), but countries like the US don’t do that. Nonetheless TB does not cause much disease in the US.

Every time I’ve tried to figure out why this is, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that no one really knows. Maybe it’s the general lack of malnutrition?
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-06-04 16:23:25+00:00
assembly is a good first language if you have a simple instruction set or machine. When I saw new people learn java, easily the hardest initial bump to get over was "what the hell is public static void main(String[] args) ?" or "eclipse didn't build it for some reason"

Python is much easier to introduce someone to because there's no boilerplate and the tooling is very simple. Assembly on x86 machines is a royal PITA to set up, and you also need some kind of debugger to actively inspect the program counter and registers.

When I took Computer Organization & Architecture, they had us play around with MARIE[1] which really made assembly make sense to me. After that, I wrote an 8080 emulator and it made even MORE sense to me.

---

[1] https://marie.js.org/
by kunzhi | 2025-06-04 16:23:25+00:00
Reading the article and the comments I free-associated to Treebeard from Lord of the Rings:

"Still, I should have liked to see the songs come true about the Entwives. I should have dearly liked to see Fimbrethil again. But there, my friends, songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time their own way: and sometimes they are withered untimely."
by Xss3 | 2025-06-04 16:23:40+00:00
The overall vibe is good.

Animated backgrounds are gaudy though and most people (including me) dislike them in my experience.

They're distracting, increase load time, increase resource use and screen updates, (especially important for battery powered devices like laptops and mobile), and just dont tend to serve a purpose aside from aesthetic sugar that tech savvy users (your target market) in general dont appreciate even when static and minimal.
by solardev | 2025-06-04 16:23:40+00:00
> I think that in some ways I've been lucky as I started back when you could hold the entire knowledge of how your computer works in your head backed up by a single manual

Yeah, that's a great point. We were lucky to have already had a built-up knowledge of the "basics" by the time the complexity started to ramp exponentially.

It's one thing to have had years to learn basic mouse clicks, internet usage, BASIC, etc. and then to gradually have new techs spring up around you, one at a time. There were entire years (maybe half decades) where the most exciting buzz was peer-to-peer file-sharing, lol, something we just take for granted now.

I can't imagine what it'd be like to be born into a world where magic algorithms can already program better than most people, in ways we don't fully understand, while being bombarded by misinformation and advertising 24x7x365. You're overwhelmed from the day you're born =/

But humans are adaptable... the kids probably laugh at us old fogeys and wonder how we weren't bored with such simple techs :) This is all they've ever known.
by fgimenez | 2025-06-04 16:23:52+00:00
Basic research creates foundation knowledge that can drive medical innovation, but rarely does academic research create final composition of matter. Private funded work is all the non-research components of drug discovery - optimization of molecules, regulatory work, commercialization, etc...

To imply that private companies reap the rewards of basic research without contribute much is ignoring the many other components of translational work.
by whatshisface | 2025-06-04 16:24:14+00:00
Private and public philanthropy both contribute to science in the same way. If you're asking why private philanthropists can't replace federal funding, it's the same as the reason why we can't just make billionaires pay all the tax: the NSF budget would bankrupt Bill Gates in 13 years.

More realistically, what would happen would be that rather than sacrificing themselves for the greater good in some kind of voluntarily socialist outpouring of wealth, they'd ask us to look to China for our scientific future.
by criddell | 2025-06-04 16:24:21+00:00
You are describing some of the exercises from the Justin Guitar Strumming SOS course. I bought that course and worked my way through it and enjoyed doing it, but it didn't have a big impact.

To answer your metronome question - I can do it for a few minutes but soon something like semantic satiation sets in and I get out of sync. I start to focus on how my arm feels strumming and I can feel the pick vibrating in my fingers and feel the air I'm moving with my arm and I notice the vibration in the guitar body and as my attention moves around, I lose track of the click.
by pjc50 | 2025-06-04 16:24:33+00:00
No, this is just upside down.

Various levels of elected monarchy have existed, but the whole reason that Magna Carta is important is that all sorts of abuses of power were going on in the name of the King and the aristocracy were fed up with it.

Given the full text, it's fairly easy to go through all the "X is not to Y" statements and work out what scenario caused that line to be in it: https://www.archives.gov/files/press/press-kits/magna-carta/... Quite a lot of it is complicated details of inheritance law and workings of courts, but you can take a guess at e.g. "No town or free man is to be distrained to make bridges or bank works save for those that ought to do so of old and by right." -> prohibition on corvee labour, people being press ganged into this kind of work.
by signaleleven | 2025-06-04 16:25:01+00:00
I did a very basic version of this and it was a lot of fun. I bought a chassis online with tank treads that each had a motor. I used an Arduino to send the signal to each tread to turn and a distance sensor so it knew when it was arriving at an object. If it sensed that something was in front of it, it just turned 90 degrees and kept going.

Super simple but it felt like a big accomplishment to get that far.
by latexr | 2025-06-04 16:25:35+00:00
> All that said, I’d rather hire someone today who overuses LLM tooling over someone who refuses to use any. Ultimately, as technologists in a for-profit company within a capitalist economy, we are hired to generate business value. (…) The LLMs aren’t going to take your software job, but they will let you be better at it.

This is a contender for the most disappointing writing I’ve ever seen from Mike (which isn’t a regular occurrence). It completely misses so many important factors which have been discussed ad nauseam, such that someone abusing LLM tooling today—especially a junior—is crippling their own learning. But all those arguments pale on the face of this blatant embrace for profit above all. I’m profoundly saddened these are the views of someone who is at the helm of one of the most popular open-source projects currently.

The whole article lacks any valuable insight and reeks of the “my business uses AI” hype so many companies are chasing just to be valued and get attention. This is not about “open source maintainers” in general, as the title suggests, but about Mike’s personal experience.

> Let’s build some cool shit (and faster than we could in 2020).

No, let’s not. Let’s go build some stable shit for once. Everything is broken, and you’re partying like breaking everything some more is a good thing.

LLMs are a tool. They can help someone drive a nail through a piece of wood or their own hand. You can use them right or wrong, effectively or ineffectively. But you’re fawning over them like it’s all a panacea and completely ignoring how many people are proudly and ignorantly using them wrong. One day, not too far now, one of those people is going to drive a nail through your hand.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-06-04 16:27:28+00:00
Stop doing expensive science? Some things can just wait for tech to catch up and make science easier by lowering costs.

An example is the superconducting supercollider. Chemistry and pharma industry were making NMRs cheaper and the cost of the supercollider components went down. So the LHC was a much more effective "buy" than the SSC.
by solardev | 2025-06-04 16:27:36+00:00
It's not just management. Neuroplasticity, from what I understand, can indeed be affected by your lifestyle (as you implied). But there's also the changing demands on your time. Many people are single or casually dating in their 20s and 30s, and have evenings and weekends to spend learning new things or playing with side projects. Then family and kids roll around, aging parents to take care of, eventually your own health issues... the demands of midlife and beyond will compete for your time and attention and leave many people with fewer resources (time, energy, money) to spend on intellectual gratification.

People like Linus are the exception rather than the rule, I think. Stallman maybe even more so? Sometimes I envy them, and sometimes I wonder how happy and balanced the rest of their lives are (maybe they're perfectly happy? I have no idea).