MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stillpointlab | 2025-07-15 10:06:44+00:00
> Natural language is trying to be a new programming language, one of many, but it's the least precise one imho.

I disagree that natural language is trying to be a programming language. I disagree that being less precise is a flaw.

Consider:

- https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc793.txt

- https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2616

I think we can agree these are both documents written in natural language. They underpin the very technology we are using to have this discussion. It doesn't matter to either of us what platform we are on, or what programming language was used to implement them. That is not a flaw.

Biological evolution shows us how far you can get with "good enough". Perfection and precision are highly overrated.

Let's imagine a wild future, one where you copy-and-paste the HTML spec (a natural language doc) into a coding agent and it writes a complete implementation of an HTML agent. Can you say with 100% certainty that this will not happen within your own lifetime?

In such a world, I would prefer to be an expert in writing specs rather than to be an expert in implementing them in a particular programming language.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-07-15 10:07:43+00:00
> So, nothing concrete beyond your opinions not grounded in facts.

You can read about every round of negotiation, going back to Madrid in 1990. This was consistently the Palestinian position. At Madrid, the Israelis were so obstinate that they refused to even meet with a Palestinian delegation at all. The Palestinians had to join the Jordanian delegation. The Palestinians proposed a two-state solution with 1967 borders. The Israelis refused to commit to the idea of a Palestinian state at all.

> What? How do you replace entire tank force within days from across the globe?? How do you train the crews on new equipment? Why are inventing things that never happened?

It sounds amazing because it was. The US used its massive airborne heavy-lift capacity, and flew in hundreds of M60 tanks within literally days. It was an amazing, unprecedented feat of logistics, intended partly to save Israel from defeat, and partly to impress the Soviets. The Israeli tank crews did not have to be replaced from scratch - when a tank is knocked out, the crew often survives. They just don't have a tank any more. The resupply effort also brought in large numbers of aircraft to replenish the Israeli air force, and massive amounts of ammunition. The Israelis simply did not have enough ammo to fight such a high-intensity war for longer than about one week. No US ammo resupply would have meant that the Israelis would have had to freeze all of their offensive operations and start conserving ammo just a few days into the war.

> Realizing that piece is better than constant wars and trading the land for it is a good move. I’m not sure what are you trying to show here.

That Israel will not trade land for peace with the Palestinians, because unlike the Egyptians, the Palestinians don't have anything like a serious army that could threaten Israel.

> Of course not. Making your own people blow themselves up in cafes and buses is immoral.

Israel just dropped a bomb on a café in Gaza used by Palestinian journalists a few days ago. Is that more moral? Israel has been doing things like this many times a day, every day, for nearly two years, killing tens of thousands of civilians and wiping Gaza off the face of the earth. Now, the Israeli Defense Minister has proposed building a giant concentration camp for 600,000 Palestinians in southern Gaza. Is that moral?
by modo_mario | 2025-07-15 10:10:03+00:00
The luddites or at least some of them threatened employers, factories and/or machinery with physical aggression. They lived in the locations where these industries for a long time remained tho automation certainly made the industry more mobile. Like unions they used collective bargaining power in part derived from their geographic location and presence among each other.

A Guatemalan or Indian can write code for my boss today...instead of me. Software engineers despite the cliff in employment and the like are still rather well paid and there's plenty of room to undercut and for people to disregard principles. If this is perceived to be an issue to them at all. If you talk to many irl... Well it is not in the slightest.
by colesantiago | 2025-07-15 10:10:32+00:00
> "/r/BuyFromEU" - A community dedicated to supporting European-made goods and services!

> Apple looking to "buy" a company (service) from the EU (France)

> "No not YOU, Stop APPLE from buying MISTRAL AI from the EU!"

sweet sweet irony.

I don't care if anyone says two things can be true.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-15 10:11:49+00:00
I've dabbled with some ruby and jruby with rails about 12 years ago. It was fine. I used Django briefly around the time 1.0 was about to be released sixteen or so years ago. And I later encountered it again on some different projects.

Neither Python nor Ruby are my main languages. I used to do a lot of Java and the last eight years I'm using Kotlin mostly. But I've done a lot of freelance and consulting projects as well where I'm happy to use whatever people are using there. I did some pyton and typescript+react recently. I've dabbled with a few Go and Scala projects even. And I'll grudgingly admit to having touched some Php even.

So here's my view:

For me, Django is slightly better than Rails because the people seem to prioritize it just being rock solid, stable, and simple. Python isn't the best, or most elegant at anything it does IMHO. But it's always simple and rock solid and I love it for that. That's what makes it a popular choice for non computer scientists working with data, people in university doing whatever, etc. Ruby was always the more esotheric choice. Lots of people obsessing about meta programming, programming esthetics, and changing their mind about how stuff should be done every 3 months. I found rails to be a bit limited and convoluted. Django and rails do similar things in the end.

The last time I did python, I picked Fastapi and ignored Django. Ruby is fine as a language but it seems to have gone out of fashion a bit. The last time I used it I was using Sinatra, not Rails.

I just prefer light weight frameworks. And I'm a bit opinionated on being able to use the full power of SQL and not having to proxy everything I do through some straight jacket ORM framework that does a lot of magical things in some mediocre way. I can create a table myself and mapping rows to objects isn't rocket science. And I'll write and optimize my queries myself. It's not that hard, and it's not consuming a lot of my time generally. So, the value of optimizing that time is not very high too me. The value of changing and optimizing it when I need to is. And so is the value of just doing it right the first time. And LLMs allow me to generate a lot of the boiler plate stuff (because it is so easy and straighforward). And I'm pretty good at abstracting and encapsulating that. ORMs don't really solve a problem I have.

In the same way server side model view controller (rendering HTML and serving it to the browser on every request) went out of fashion ages ago. Most web and mobile apps use APIs instead. And while server side rendering still is a thing these days, I don't really see a big need for that. It's an optimization. And not one I find I need a lot.

And since server side MVC and ORM are the main point of using Rails or Django, I don't really use either a lot these days.
by ryanjshaw | 2025-07-15 10:12:23+00:00
Every single HN post on AI or crypto I see this argument and it’s exhausting.

When Eliza was first built it was seen a toy. It took many more decades for LLMs to appear.

My favourite example is prime numbers: a bunch of ancient nerds messing around with numbers that today, thousands of years later, allow us to securely buy anything and everything without leaving our homes or opening our mouths.

You can’t dismiss a technology or discovery just because it’s not useful on an arbitrary timescale. You can dismiss it for other reasons, just not this reason.

Blockchain and related technologies have advanced the state of the art in various areas of computer science and mathematics research (zero knowledge proofs, consensus, smart contracts, etc.). To allege this work will bear no fruit is quite a claim.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-15 10:12:25+00:00
> I pointed out how the thought patterns are often the same across time, and the inability and unwillingness to recognize this is psychologically lazy, to over simplify.

It's not lazy to follow thought patterns that yield correct predictions. And that's the bedrock on which "AI hype" grows and persists - because these tools are actually useful, right now, today, across wide variety of work and life tasks, and we are barely even trying.

> And there are indeed examples of technological acceleration or dispersal which was deliberately curtailed – especially with weapons.

Name three.

(I do expect you to be able to name three, but that should also highlight how unusual that is, and how questionable the effectiveness of that is in practice when you dig into details.)

Also I challenge you to find but one restriction that actually denies countries useful capabilities that they cannot reproduce through other means.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-07-15 10:12:28+00:00
It is a fascinating take. One way to measure agency is whether Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel have the power to destroy their creations. With exception of Bezos ( and only because he no longer has full control of his company ), the rest could easily topple their creations suggesting that system values you refer to are wide enough to allow for actions greater than 'zero agency'.
by dd_xplore | 2025-07-15 10:13:37+00:00
Also to put in perspective, most of the mass isn't converted to energy in either nuclear or hydrogen bombs, it's just the bond energy. Pure energy for a given quantity of matter is released only in case of annihilation-like event(merging with anti matter). So even fusion releases max 0.7% energy of the mass

I'm not sure what happens in black hole merger.. is it an annihilation like event or is just fusion...
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-15 10:13:47+00:00
Are we seriously arguing this in 2025?

Go to ChatGPT.com and summon a ghost. It's real. It's not a particularly smart ghost, but gets a lot of useful work done. Try it with simpler tasks, to reduce the chances of holding it wrong.

That list of "things LLM apologists say" upthread? That's applicable when you try to make the ghost do work that's closer to the limits of its current capabilities.
by dale_glass | 2025-07-15 10:15:12+00:00
> With the “metaverse”, you clear out a space around you, strap a heavy thing on your head, and shut yourself into an artificial environment. After the first oohs and aahs, you enter a VR chat room… And realize the thing on your head adds absolutely nothing to the interaction.

It doesn't if you use it as just a chat room. For some people it does add a lot, though.

The "metaverse" as in Active Worlds, Second Life, VR Chat, our own Overte, etc has been around for a long time and does have an user base that likes using it.

What I'm not too sure about is it having mass appeal, at least just yet. To me it's a bit of a specialized area, like chess. It's of great interest to some and very little to most of the population. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with places like chess.com existing.
by Amezarak | 2025-07-15 10:17:18+00:00
I don't think any convincing is needed.

https://x.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1793144103800361050

> We are one of only two countries in the world that allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to consumers on television. Not surprisingly, Americans consume more pharmaceutical products than anyone else on the planet.

> As I told @JoePolish, on my first day in office I will issue an executive order banning pharmaceutical advertising on television

Unfortunately, this is probably illegal. See cases like United States v Caronia.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-15 10:18:33+00:00
>They are rude, they will deny everything, if you try to escalate they threaten you (even if you show them evidences and no matter how well you documented things)

From my experience as an immigrant, it's exactly the same in Germany and Austria. For the locals who grew up into the system it doesn't feel terrible, but if you grew up in a country with common sense in business, this is infuriating.

>I think this extra 'arrogance tax' makes people think it twice before doing business in Belgium.

I think this is an intentional feature, not a bug. It's a hidden form of protectionism against EU's freedom of movement and trade, to discourage foreigners or small businesses from chapter countries with hustle mentality, to come in and displace entrenched local businesses who would like to have their cake and eat it too, since this pattern appears way too often in EUs rich countries to be just a coincidence. They specifically DON'T WANT YOUR business be opened there because then you're a competitor to the business establishment status quo there, but they can't outright say that.
by walleeee | 2025-07-15 10:19:03+00:00
It can simultaneously be true that people in these positions have less agency than most other people assume, and more than they themselves might think.

Another reply mentions that Bezos can't imagine anything different. If that is so (I am not unwilling to believe a certain lack of imagination tends to exist or emerge in extremely ambitious/successful people) then it's a personal failing, not an inevitable condition of his station, regardless of how much or little agency the enormous machine he sits on top of permits him to wield personally. He certainly doesn't have zero as the commenter claims.

FWIW I have read Scott's article and have tried to convince people of the agency of moloch on this site before. But the fact that impersonal systems have agency doesn't mean you suddenly turn into a human iron filing and lose all your self-direction. It might be convenient for some people to claim this is why they can do no different, and then you need to ask who benefits.
by jdross | 2025-07-15 10:19:38+00:00
I’m not trying to challenge how you feel, but I’ll note that in my social groups people don’t feel this way, life is good, and they also feel confident that they’re well informed.

So I’m open to the possibility that lot of these types of feeling, in both directions depending on the political era, is more dictated by environment and media consumption choices and their versions of doom and gloom than reality
by pornel | 2025-07-15 10:19:46+00:00
The related "Belgium is unsafe for CVD" post explains that if you discover any vulnerability in anything in Belgium, it automatically creates a legal obligation on you, with a 24h deadline, to report this secretly and exclusively to Belgian authorities, with logs of everything you've done, even if you're not a Belgian citizen and don't reside in Belgium.

This is a very short deadline, with onerous requirements. They most likely won't give you permission to share any information about this vulnerability with anyone else. If it's a common vulnerability affecting non-Belgian entities, you'll be required to leave them uninformed and vulnerable.

The most rational response for law-abiding vulnerability researches is to stay away from everything Belgian and never report anything to them.
by chmod775 | 2025-07-15 10:20:27+00:00
Not even close? Tencent and Sony likely have (indirectly) more game developers on their payroll, and even the top 3 (MS, Sony, Tencent) combined aren't that much of the market. Nobody seems to control even 10% of the 500 billion dollar video game market.[1] Also note that for MS and Sony this revenue may also contain sales of third-party games through their stores.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_video_game_com...
by Incipient | 2025-07-15 10:20:51+00:00
I generally see docker (used) as a second tier isolation. IT hands out VMs to vendors/teams, and then the vendor/team spins up 3-4 containers in that VM to suit their needs.

I'm aware it's technically possible to have a large, wide fleet of containers...but I don't really see it going that way (at all).

My current thoughts of why is separation of knowledge - IT knows how to manage infra and virtualisation, and the vendor/teams know how their individual docker containers need to be set up/work.

I do agree full virtualisation is probably on the decline, but the current tech is definitely staying around in my size of business.
by netsharc | 2025-07-15 10:20:59+00:00
As Sarah Chayes said about the "failed state" of Afghanistan:

> Afghanistan is often described as a “failed state,” but, in light of the outright thievery on display, Chayes began to reassess the problem. This wasn’t a situation in which the Afghan government was earnestly trying, but failing, to serve its people. The government was actually succeeding, albeit at “another objective altogether”—the enrichment of its own members.

From https://archive.is/CBQFY .

Was it here or in the reviewed book about corruption where it's mentioned, how corruption endangers security, because guess what the civilians who are mad about the blatant corruption will do when they see an insurgent plant a roadside bomb targeting the corrupt government?

As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said (and Timothy McVeigh quoted):

> In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal -- would bring terrible retribution.
by 6510 | 2025-07-15 10:22:12+00:00
People know which ingredients to use, the ratios, how long to bake and cook them but the design of the kitchen prevents them from cooking the meal? Professional cooks debate which gas tube to use with which adapter and how to organize all the adapters according to ISO standards while the various tubes lay on the floor all over the building. The stove switches off if you try to use the wrong brand of pots. The cupboard has a retina scanner. Eventually people go to the back of the garden and make a campfire. There is no fridge there and no way to wash dishes. They are even using the wrong utensils. The horror!
by sirsinsalot | 2025-07-15 10:22:28+00:00
I agree with this. There's so much snake oil at the moment. Coding isn't the hard part of software development and we already have unambiguous language for describing computation. Human language is a bad choice for it, and we already find that when writing specs for other humans. Adding more humaness to the loop isn't a good thing IMHO.

At best an LLM is a new UI model for data. The push to get them writing code is bizarre.
by Amezarak | 2025-07-15 10:23:26+00:00
https://www.propublica.org/article/fda-drug-loophole-sun-pha...

> Digging through company records and test results, they found more evidence of quality problems, including how managers hadn’t properly investigated a series of complaints about foreign material, specks, spots and stains in tablets.

> Those unknowns have done little to slow the exemptions. In 2022, FDA inspectors described a “cascade of failure” at one of the Intas plants, finding workers had destroyed testing records, in one case pouring acid on some that had been stuffed in a trash bag. At the second Intas factory, inspectors said in their report that records were “routinely manipulated” to cover up the presence of particulate matter — which could include glass, fiber or other contaminants — in the company’s drugs.

> Sun Pharma’s transgressions were so egregious that the Food and Drug Administration imposed one of the government’s harshest penalties: banning the factory from exporting drugs to the United States.

> A secretive group inside the FDA gave the global manufacturer a special pass to continue shipping more than a dozen drugs to the United States even though they were made at the same substandard factory that the agency had officially sanctioned. [...] And the agency kept the exemptions largely hidden from the public and from Congress. Even others inside the FDA were unaware of the details.

FDA inspectors found actual, live contamination in drugs produced by a manufacturer, and the agency secretly (otherwise, it would have caused "some kind of frenzy" in the public") gave it an exemption anyway, to make sure supply wasn't impacted. This isn't a "funding" issue, and it's not a "regulations are too strict" issue. This is an issue with the people running the agency behaving completely inappropriately.
by zorked | 2025-07-15 10:23:40+00:00
> With crypto, it’s still the case that you create a wallet and then… there’s nothing to do on the platform. You’re expected to send real money to someone so they’ll give you some of the funny money that lets you play the game.

This became a problem later due to governments cracking down on cryptos and some terrible technical choices made transactions expensive just as adoption was ramping. (Pat yourselves on the back, small blockers.)

My first experience with crypto was buying $5 in bitcoin from a friend. If I didn't do it that way I could go on a number of websites and buy crypto without opening an account, via credit card, or via SMS. Today, most of the $5 would be eaten by fees, and buying for cash from an institution requires slow and intrusive KYC.
by a_wild_dandan | 2025-07-15 10:24:40+00:00
This is a fantastic framing method. Anyone who sees the future differently to you can be brushed aside as “an inevitablist,” and the only conversations worth engaging are those that already accept your premise.

---

This argument so easily commits sudoku that I couldn't help myself. It's philosophical relativism, and self-immolates for the same reason -- it's inconsistent. It eats itself.
by b112 | 2025-07-15 10:25:53+00:00
Indeed. I've seen DBMSes take close to 10 minutes to gracefully exit, even when idle.

Timeout in sysvinit and service files, for a graceful exit, is typically 900 seconds.

Most modern DBMS daemons will recover if SIGKILL, most of the time, especially if you're using transactions. But startup will then be lagged, as it churns through and resolves on startup.

(unless you've modified the code to short cut things, hello booking.com "we're smarter than you" in 2015 at least, if not today)
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-15 10:25:59+00:00
Thanks for the reminder. I had to look, because it wasn't obvious from the main page, but - it does seem to stay more-less current with Blender proper. For some reason I had the impression it's stuck at some ancient Blender version, but I'm glad to see this is not the case.

https://github.com/UPBGE/upbge
by eadmund | 2025-07-15 10:26:14+00:00
> So if you never want megacorps or anyone who runs a business to ever use your code, choose AGPL.

Plenty of businesses run AGPL software (e.g. Grafana, Mastodon or Mattermost). Fewer run AGPL software for external paying customers.

As a developer, I care about the freedom of my users; I don’t much care about the paranoia of a megacorp who wants to restrict the freedom of its customers.
by phoronixrly | 2025-07-15 10:26:55+00:00
> c8g.8xlarge (32 core non-NUMA ARM64)

Requests are scheduled on half of these. Despite that, a plateau is hit after 8 threads? Is this a 16-core 32-thread type of a setup?

Also, consider redoing this in linear scale.

Edit: Oddly enough, no? 1 thread per core as per https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/cpu-opti...