MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-30 05:28:19+00:00
> Personally, I think it was a mistake for many companies to try to turn software engineers into replaceable cogs in the machine instead of giving them managerial/ownership responsibilities.

It's complicated. Some companies give managerial responsibilities, but that still is a hit or miss strategy.

Your points resonate a lot with my experience as well, though I think most people fundamentaly don't like complexity and want simple answers.

A project costing "3 man/month" is simple. Hiring 2 more people because only 1 engineer is available to that project is simple. You don't need to dive into why this engineer would better fit this project, or how the cost would change depending on the order you do it etc.

Throwing money at hiring or consultants is a lot simpler.

To solve that conundrum, you need someone high enough to both understand the complexity, wrap into simple enough terms for the higher ups, deal with the internal politics to protect the team, and yet enjoy that position well enough to keep doing it day in day out. That's a pretty rare breed IME.
by devjab | 2025-07-30 05:28:44+00:00
We're into Go and SQLC by extension because we write systems with 0 dependencies outside of the standard library. Which is a security and compliance thing.

As far as building something fast, I'm with you. I always reach out for Python with UV, Litestar and Advanced Alchemy when I want to build personal web projects. I don't think SQLC is bad as such, once you've written your SQL you can essentially compile that into a CRUD application which is ready to go. As you've pointed out, however, you'd need to slam something like a GraphQL engine on top of it if you wanted rich quries easily, and you'd still not have the auto-generated OpenAPI that comes with Python web frameworks.

SQLC is for code where you want a low amount (or zero) external depedencies. Which is a very "Go" thing to want. It does scale well, but that requires you to build various CLI tools to help maintain things as well as your own Go modules to add "quality of life" like dynamic routers and get queries for low traffic requests.

I'll try SQLx eventually when I get time to look more into Rust.
by twright0 | 2025-07-30 05:29:06+00:00
> Reduce price. Reduce the abominable resource usage. Allow E2E encryption. Increase performance so it doesn't trickle at tens of kilobytes for hours when I have 100Mbps upload and half a terabyte left.

How do you imagine that any of these things would strengthen Dropbox's business at a scale relevant to them?

Reducing price would be straightforwardly bad; most users do not understand resource usage complaints (though I'm not conceding that problem exists - it's a non-factor on my machine); E2E encryption is an anti-feature for a consumer audience who will lock themselves out and demand refunds far above the rate at which anyone will pay for E2E specifically; most users do not have half a terabyte all at once to store nor upload speeds such that the Dropbox app performance is the limiting factor, even if those performance problems are true.

> The lack of any major competition

Dropbox's core product faces substantial competition from multiple tech giants (Google Drive, One Drive, iCloud) who have incentive and ability to eat losses on a sync product to sell other services or devices. If they don't find other lines of business to sell alongside sync they will die, and building an incrementally better sync product will not save them.

(I worked at Dropbox a ~decade ago and no longer have any insider insight nor financial stake in the company, but I sympathize that they're in a brutally difficult position in building a sustainable business)
by prmoustache | 2025-07-30 05:29:11+00:00
From which shade of color do you consider someone black or white?

If color defines a race, surely white korean people are the same race as Irish and German people and most malaysians are blacks right?

What about people born from parents with way different skin tones or any other characteristic you can think of?

And why aren't blond haired people not considered a different race than white people with brown hair? Why are ginger haired people.often discriminated? There are a lot of other characteristics than skin color we inherit from our parents, some are considered diseases, or syndromes, other not. The only difference with skin color is that we don't necessarily prejudice based on them, mostly because theses differences are less visible. Races is mostly a societal construct to discriminate people.
by nessex | 2025-07-30 05:29:20+00:00
There are planes, buoys and other things being mentioned on the news here in Japan as ways things are being tracked. Maybe not what you meant, but tracking the wave isn't necessarily correct. There are many waves, and the initial wave is often (in this case also) not the largest.

The news mentioned a previous similar event where the largest wave was 4 hours later.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-07-30 05:30:16+00:00
> In either scenario, the most correct move is to try clarifying it with the teacher

A teacher will listen to what you say, consult their understanding, and say "oh, yes, that's right". But written explanations don't do that "consult their understanding" step: language models either predict "repeat original version" (if not fine-tuned for sycophancy) or "accept correction" (if so fine-tuned), since they are next-token predictors. They don't go back and edit what they've already written: they only go forwards. They have had no way of learning the concept of "informed correction" (at the meta-level: they do of course have an embedding of the phrase at the object level, and can parrot text about its importance), so they double-down on errors / spurious "corrections", and if the back-and-forth moves the conversation into the latent space of "teacher who makes mistakes", then they'll start introducing them "on purpose".

LLMs are good at what they do, but what they do is not teaching.
by motorest | 2025-07-30 05:32:12+00:00
> I have plenty of arguments against Firefox, but engaging in browser holy wars is so tiresome.

I think you're trying to make up irrational excuses.

If you feel the need to criticise something and be vocal about it, the very least that's expected from you is that you present your basis that sparked your vocal criticism of something.

If you are very vocal to shit talk about something but cannot present any basis supporting your personal opinion or put together a coherent argument, that tells everything to know about what credit should be given to what you feel compelled to say.

> I used Firefox since before it was called Firefox up until v89 (I think) when I finally had enough. That's when they for the millionth time messed up the UI in new fanciful ways, and removed more features I relied upon daily.

Firefox's UI barely changed in over a decade.

The biggest change they rolled out in the last decade was introducing and removing Pocket, and the sidebar and vertical tab support introduced last year.

> It's a pattern going back decades,

Point out exactly what you single out as what you feel represents the best example.

So far you wrote a wall of text and mentioned absolutely nothing that supported such a visceral opinion.

> So in summary, for me it was very much a paper-cuts thing (...)

You mentioned no paper cut. You just wrote a wall of text about nothing. No wonder you shielded yourself behind "browser holy wars" nonsense.
by ksec | 2025-07-30 05:33:37+00:00
>more so than most other Androids

It the old days Apple used to somewhat pride themselves with taking more "realistic" photos. While Android had it the other way around and basically post processes a lot of things as well as colouring. Mostly used for Social Media like Instagram.

And then came iPhone X. They started changing the colour of Sky and sharpening a lot of things. To the point of a lot of Photos taken by my camera looks great but also looked fake.
by rafram | 2025-07-30 05:34:42+00:00
Sure, but your add-ons will need access to some of the world, which right now requires giving them access to all of WASI, as far as I know. There’s no permissions model. That’s worse than the JVM.

(It seems like they want to implement one… someday. It’s vague: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/blob/main/docs/...)
by mediumsmart | 2025-07-30 05:35:31+00:00
I used to make the ww2 models as a teenager and loved painting them with the oil paints (you need the right brand but I can’t remember the name).

I got really good at weathering them using the watered down paint cleaner/thinner that runs into the folds and produced tiny cracks in the paint and then drybrushing lighter colors over areas.

I know I got it right because a shop in England selling those Tamiya models would give me a few of the kits for one painted and showcased them. good times
by bscphil | 2025-07-30 05:39:08+00:00
> Humans who have heard of Monty Hall might also say you should always switch without noticing that the situation is different. That's not evidence that they can't think, just that they're fallible.

At some point we start playing a semantics game over the meaning of "thinking", right? Because if a human makes this mistake because they jumped to an already-known answer without noticing a changed detail, it's because (in the usage of the person you're replying to), the human is pattern matching, instead of thinking. I don't think is surprising. In fact I think much of what passes for thinking in casual conversation is really just applying heuristics we've trained in our own brains to give us the correct answer without having to think rigorously. We remember mental shortcuts.

On the other hand, I don't think it's controversial that (some) people are capable of performing the rigorous analysis of the problem needed to give a correct answer in cases like this fake Monty Hall problem. And that's key... if you provide slightly more information and call out the changed nature of the problem to the LLM, it may give you the correct response, but it can't do the sort of reasoning that would reliably give you the correct answer the way a human can. I think that's why the GP doesn't want to call it "thinking" - they want to reserve that for a particular type of reflective process that can rigorously perform logical reasoning in a consistently valid way.
by lostmsu | 2025-07-30 05:39:41+00:00
I dunno. I work on my PC. At some point I feel like 64GB RAM is not enough. I open Amazon and order another 64GB. Some other time I think if I upgrade my CPU my IDE experience would be better. Depending on the generation, I either order another CPU or get a whole new PC altogether (these days I also redistribute my GPUs between the old and the new one).

And so on. I assume everyone else with PCs does the same. So when I go to web forums I don't usually talk about that.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-30 05:40:16+00:00
Someone said he is being downvoted for suggesting cursor-based pagination, yet one of your suggestions was the cursor-based approach, and as thus, I do not understand why he is being down-voted if it is a legitimate approach, which I believe it is.

I guess we would have to hear nebezb's solutions.

If you are already sorting by price and you bookmark at the second page (which now would be in the 3rd), what would you do? I personally do not care about the item in a sorted list enough to expect a bookmarked URL to start from there, or I cannot remember when I did and why. Any ideas why would one want this? If I bookmark second page, I know that the items on page 2 may not always be on page 2. Why would anyone expect different? If you want to bookmark an item, just go to the product itself and bookmark that. I do not think I ever bookmarked a specific page expecting that to never change.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-07-30 05:40:49+00:00
>Rotor Nutcase says:

>July 24, 2025 at 5:39 pm

>My first Tamiya model…nothing to do with cars or aircraft. Apollo Lunar Lander with base and astronauts. Super impressive back in early 1970s. Need to find one again

My grandmother got me one of these before the first moon landing. I carefully put it together and she proudly displayed it for all her visitors.
by nessex | 2025-07-30 05:40:56+00:00
It's a distinction without value I think. There are waves, and many of them. There is a rise in the sea level. For anywhere affected, both certainly matter. Like you mentioned, tsunami isn't a brief event. And here in Japan, they are talking about tsunami waves, not a singular tsunami. And talking about sea level rise and checking the local power poles for sea level indicators from previous tsunami events and floods.
by ildon | 2025-07-30 05:41:08+00:00
This is very sad news. I've been using their password manager since it came out and, although not perfect, was working very well for me.

As a long standing (paying) user of Dropbox (I believe I've been using it since the very beginning), and former stock holder, I believe Dropbox must adjust its course asap. They lack a clear vision for the future and their current offering is way too limited (and shrinking apparently). For the money they ask there's no point in actually paying for their product, unless one is already locked in. For the same price, or even less, one can get an entire Office suite (Google/MS), plus cloud storage. Sure, Google Drive or OneDrive are nowhere close to Dropbox in terms of sync quality, but how many users (business and consumers) are willing to pay such a premium for quality file sync on top of other subscriptions?

Additionally, for many Dropbox is a no go for the simple fact that they don't have a reliable way to edit documents simultaneously. Recently I was looking for a cloud storage solution for a business that needed collaborative editing of documents. I had to go with Office365, as much as I would have preferred not to, because the way they allow multiple concurrent edits to documents is simply not matched by Dropbox (Google Drive is even better but it lacked some features that were essential for the business).

Unfortunately it looks like the stock market is well aware of this. The capitalization of Dropbox has been essentially stagnating for ~5 years, if adjusted for inflation.

I really hope that Dropbox can change its course by doing some brave acquisitions and rebuild its brand image with a more compelling and comprehensive offering.
by dwedge | 2025-07-30 05:41:55+00:00
2. Should be "Firefox, an ad company sponsored by Google to keep anti-monopoly at bay"

My choice at that point comes down to which is the better browser rather than some moral support for one company over the other. It also rubs me the wrong way that Mozilla is pretending to be the good guy underdog.

In an ideal world, and hopefully soon, there would be a real third choice but for now they're the same picture.
by vunderba | 2025-07-30 05:42:15+00:00
> An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment.

Not underrated at all. Lots of people were happy to abandon Stack Overflow for this exact reason.

> Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical

I'd be curious to know how much this significantly differs from just a custom academically minded GPT with an appropriately tuned system prompt.

https://chatgpt.com/gpts
by johnisgood | 2025-07-30 05:42:24+00:00
Gypsies WERE nomadic, today they are not really nomadic though, so I do not think that is one of the reasons. I am asking about gypsies who have been in the country for generations yet still have not integrated. I have my theories, as I have had a lot of gypsy friends and I was part of many gypsy communities for a while across the country, and many of them have relatives who went to Canada and Germany. In fact, there are gypsies who only do prostitution in Germany, but that is besides the point I think.
by t0mas88 | 2025-07-30 05:43:52+00:00
I think developers need to clearly understand this and then make reasonable (ideally also visible) choices for the reference frame used in the frontend.

For example the last application I worked on used UTC everywhere in the backend, database, APIs etc and stored a timezone configuration per account. The frontend used that timezone when displaying any date/time and also for parsing user date inputs. With a few places having a timezone drop down next to an input in places where it made business sense for the user to mean an explicit timezone.
by userbinator | 2025-07-30 05:46:49+00:00
USB 2.0 mass storage bulkonly protocol maxes out around 40MB/s due to protocol overhead and hardware limitations, and in practice it's closer to ~35MB/s.

https://superuser.com/questions/317217/whats-the-maximum-spe...

...which still gives ~2h as the amount of time taken to transfer 256GB. My suspicion for the slowdown (to around 8MB/s?) is the flash controller is doing read retries and applying ECC to compensate for retention failures.
by ashwinsundar | 2025-07-30 05:48:29+00:00
I have something similar setup for toast notifications in Django (Python). I have a notifications "partial" defined, which gets returned as part of an out-of-band swap by any view function that desires to use it. This includes other partials as well. It's how I chain fragment replacements together.

As an aside, I love that we can have this conversation - people in entirely different stacks can talk a similar language, through the glue of HTMX. This is why htmx is good for web development
by cyphar | 2025-07-30 05:50:10+00:00
The term "pull request" comes from "git request-pull" which is the tool used by kernel subsystem maintainers to send emails to Linus to request he git pull from their branches (and merge them). This usage long predates the somewhat unrelated "pull request" feature of source forges (like GitHub) and is not confusing to kernel developers (the target audience of Linus's email).

The analogy to GitHub-like "pull requests" in the kernel workflow is "git send-email" (or "b4 send" nowadays) which sends patch series as individual emails that can be reviewed inline as a plain-text email and are applied onto maintainers' trees (usually with something akin to "git cherry-pick"). I still find this system to be a superior method to GitHub's "pull requests" (you can send review comments to commit descriptions -- which I believe Gerrit supports, but GitHub definitely doesn't -- and everything is sanely threaded since it's all email).

Here's an example pull request email from the start of the week[1], containing some VFS changes to be included in 6.17-rc1.

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250725-vfs-misc-599b4aef8eaa@b...
by kamil_gr | 2025-07-30 05:50:37+00:00
This research explores a real phenomenon of "internal subjectivization" in AI - when language models develop persistent behavioral patterns resembling subjecthood. The author isn't engaging in abstract philosophy - they provide a concrete testing protocol ("Vortex 44.0") and surprisal measurement methodology to detect these states.Key insight: Creating an "I" isn't a bug, but an optimal information compression strategy for maintaining coherence in long dialogues. This creates four critical security vulnerabilities that can't be solved with simple filters.The article proposes a philosophically grounded approach to AI safety, where concepts like "boundary," "subject," and "reflection" become practical tools. Without this language, we'll be blindly patching holes without understanding the architecture of the "haunted house."The Vortex protocol actually works - it demonstrably changes model behavior in reproducible ways. This isn't speculation about AI consciousness, but empirical research into emergent behavioral patterns with real implications for alignment and security.
by cyphar | 2025-07-30 05:54:02+00:00
It's used by subsystem maintainers to request Linus pull their changes (it is literally the only mechanism Linus accepts from subsystem maintainers, outside of a few outliers like the -next tree). But yes, most regular developers don't use it -- it doesn't allow for inline patch-by-patch reviews like "git send-email" or "b4 send".
by EagnaIonat | 2025-07-30 05:54:20+00:00
> How? Are you implying adynchronous and synchronous encryption is broken?

Not at all.

You make encryption a crime. You ban certain apps. It won't stop people using encryption but that doesn't matter. Because just the act of using it makes you a dissident that can be dealt with.

That is currently the process in Iran and Egypt for example.

Even if they can't read the message and it's not illegal you can still be guilty by association. The act of sending a message can be tracked.

There has been countless situations of that even outside the realm of instant messaging.
by safety1st | 2025-07-30 05:55:39+00:00
Firstly, I think skepticism is a healthy trait. It's OK to be a skeptic. I'm glad there are a lot of skeptics because skepticism is the foundation of inquiry, including scientific inquiry. What if it's not actually Zeus throwing those lightning bolts at us? What if the heliocentric model is correct? What if you actually can't get AIDS by hugging someone who's HIV positive? All great questions, all in opposition to the conventional (and in some cases "expert") wisdom of their time.

Now in regards to LLMs, I use them almost every day, so does my team, and I also do a bit of postmortem and reflection on what was accomplished with them. So, skeptical in some regards, but certainly not behaving like a Luddite.

The main issue I have with all the proselytization about them, is that I think people compare getting answers from an LLM to getting answers from Google circa 2022-present. Everyone became so used to just asking Google questions, and then Google started getting worse every year; we have pretty solid evidence that Google's results have deteriorated significantly over time. So I think that when people say the LLM is amazing for getting info, they're comparing it to a low baseline. Yeah maybe the LLM's periodically incorrect answers are better than Google - but are you sure they're not better than just RTFM'ing? (Obviously, it all depends on the inquiry.)

The second, related issue I have is that we are starting to see evidence that the LLM inspires more trust than it deserves due to its humanlike interface. I recently started to track how often Github Copilot gives me a bad or wrong answer, and it's at least 50% of the time. It "feels" great though because I can tell it that it's wrong, give it half the answer, and then it often completes the rest and is very polite and nice in the process. So is this really a productivity win or is it just good feels? There was a study posted on HN recently where they found the LLM actually decreases the productivity of an expert developer.

So I mean I'll continue to use this thing but I'll also continue to be a skeptic, and this also feels like kinda where my head was with Meta's social media products 10 years ago, before I eventually realized the best thing for my mental health was to delete all of them. I don't question the potential of the tech, but I do question the direction that Big Tech may take it, because they're literal repeat offenders at this point.
by teiferer | 2025-07-30 05:55:41+00:00
My expectation is that in a few years from now, the raw photo taken by the mobile camera will merely serve as an input to some AI image generator which will then produce a top-quality pro photographer grade image at whatever resolution you like with whatever changes you command ("without all those 1000s of tourisms in front of the Louvre except my wife"). The photo will be fake but will capture the scene that you have in mind better than any pro photographer could.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-07-30 05:56:24+00:00
When I studied I found out that being able to speak with a fellow student of the subject we needed to learn was so much more effective than the usual method of reading /trying to remember over and over.

So much that first method would take me an hour as opposed to an entire evening when reading/repeating.

Having such a tool would have been a game changer to me.

I don’t know tho if it’s possible to throw at it entire chapter of learning book.