MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pjc50 | 2025-07-21 09:51:15+00:00
I remember many years ago the Economist pointed out one of the Rothschilds died young of something that would have been readily solvable with penicillin, but no amount of money could get you something that didn't exist yet.

I'm going to go with a cautious "yes" to the first: the ages at death of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_monarchs are not great.

"No" on the second (king is never going to have to worry about food security, that's for the peasants)

And "life opportunties" .. bit of a divide by zero situation. As king, you technically have all the opportunities. But you can only do things which actually exist at the time. And you're bound by the social and religious conventions of the time, which you mess with at your peril. Doing so worked for Henry VIII but not for the various Georges. See, for example, the controversy over whether James 6 might have been gay.
by shivasaxena | 2025-07-21 09:51:50+00:00
If I may ask, why didn't you just use any available emacs config with python support? There are plenty on github, and ofc there's doom emacs, spacemacs, and probably others.

I can tell you in my case it was because I did want to play with emacs and get my hands dirty. But that does shift the blame to me since it's hardly fair to blame emacs for being so extensible and fun.
by palata | 2025-07-21 09:52:06+00:00
First, the website should be able to load without JavaScript. It's really just text. Well, probably more trackers than text, even.

> This started before AI. It started when the internet created so much real value that we could afford massive inefficiency elsewhere.

That's pretty uninformed. The economic growth is purely related to abundant fossil fuels. Internet is just the advertising platform. Google and Meta print money because they sell ads (by abusing everybody, see enshittification).

> I'd estimate 60% are doing jobs that don't need to exist.

I genuinely wonder how many friends one has, when one pulls estimations like this out of their hat and shares them. Then goes on criticising executives who presumably do the same.

> There's a woman who creates internal training materials that no one reads. She spends months crafting beautiful PowerPoints for compliance trainings that people click through as fast as possible.

The point of making internal training materials is that employees should be trained. The fact that the employees actively fight against the training doesn't mean that the idea is worthless. Many people refuse to learn about phishing "because they are not stupid", and get phished.

> There's a team of six people who generate reports. The reports go to managers who generate summary reports. Those go to executives who make decisions based on gut feel anyway.

Why would that mean that the reports are useless? The problem may be those executives who don't read them.
by falcor84 | 2025-07-21 09:55:30+00:00
> But naturally arising UBI? Where people have jobs, feel purpose, contribute to something larger than themselves even if that contribution is mostly fictional? That's genius. That's a system that preserves human dignity while distributing resources.

> The real question isn't when AGI will arrive or how we'll implement UBI. It's how long we can maintain the beautiful fiction that keeps society functioning.

I don't know what the author's experience is, but based on actual research about people's work satisfaction, and particularly David Graeber's work written up in Bullshit Jobs [0], most of these jobs have been psychologically bad for people, who know that what they do most of their waking hours has no (or even negative) utility to society.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
by Doxin | 2025-07-21 09:55:49+00:00
Surely you'd hit the quench button straight away? I cannot imagine policy being "check if the victim is dead, and if not hit the button."

I also wonder what the field decay is like. If it takes 15s and it's linear it's much worse than if it's 15s but decays exponentially. You don't need to field to be gone, you need the field to diminish enough to stop strangling the poor guy.
by rotis | 2025-07-21 09:56:32+00:00
Everything else aside moving to R and Python to escape the USA hegemony means you are still dependend on Python Software Foundation and R Fundation. First is American. Second is based in Vienna, Austria yet still has big American presence among its members. So you end up still dependending on USA. Same with most free and open source. Even if its authors may appear to be European, they may turn out to be Americans (Linus Torvalds) or work for US company anyway (Guido van Rossum)
by RamblingCTO | 2025-07-21 09:57:13+00:00
I just left my CTO job for personal reasons. we tried coding agents, agentic coding, LLM-driven coding whatever. the code any of these generate is subpar (a junior would get the PR rejected for what it produces) and you just waste so much time prompting and not thinking. people don't know the code anymore, don't check the code and it's all just gotten very sloppy. so not hiring coders because of AI is a dangerous thing to do and I'd advise heavily against it. your risk just got way higher because of hype. maintainability is out of the window, people don't know the code and there are so many hidden deviations to the spec that it's just not worth it.

the truth is that we stop thinking when we code like that.
by admonaut | 2025-07-21 09:57:48+00:00
m Moment passieren in der Welt der IT-Foren zwei Dinge gleichzeitig. Einerseits ändert Google sein komplettes Modell von einer Suchmaschine für Webseiten zu einer Frage-und-Antwort-KI und andererseits ändern sie ihren Google-Algorithmus zum Indexieren von Webseiten dramatisch. Beides ist sehr schlecht für uns und das Internet.
by RHSman2 | 2025-07-21 09:58:00+00:00
Btw: logging and the ability to observe systems was the single and most successful act I have done in my career as a Data Product Manager. I have had to fight, do tricks and ‘play the game’ so much.

I cannot stress the importance of understanding atomic movements.

The cost is high but not as high as the cost of not knowing.
by fxtentacle | 2025-07-21 09:58:26+00:00
It's the invisible hand of the market showing us that we urgently need more incompetent morons, but nurses are optional.

And let's be honest, most companies would probably agree that incompetent morons are what future economic growth will be built upon. Either that, or the pay2win mobile game addicts which the industry lovingly calls "whales".
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-07-21 09:58:36+00:00
I think the commenters critique still stands. Humans build human-capital, so the longer you "run" them for in a domain, the more valuable they become. AIs work inversely, and the longer they're run for, the worse they tend to become at that specific task. Even in the best-case scenario, they stay exactly as competent at the task throughout its length.

Increasing task length doesn't build in an equivalent of human-capital. It's just pushing the point at which they degrade. This approach isn't generalisably scalable, because there's always going to be a task longer than the SOTA capabilities.

We really need to work on a low cost human-capital-equivalent for models.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-21 09:58:43+00:00
I worked at a tax office a long time ago which used Windows and Java, and it was a horrendous system and experience. We kept losing time every single day due to some issue elsewhere, so we always had to notify IT, which in turn would notify whoever is responsible for these servers in the capital city. They "fixed" it, except the cycle continued. I bet they are still having issues.
by ben_w | 2025-07-21 09:59:40+00:00
Sure, but every abstraction does that.

A manager hiring a team of real humans, vs. a manager hiring an AI, either way the manager doesn't know or learn how the system works.

And asking doesn't help, you can ask both humans and AI, and they'll be different in their strengths and weaknesses in those answers, but they'll both have them — the humans' answers come with their own inferential distance and that can be hard to bridge.
by dirkc | 2025-07-21 10:00:00+00:00
If you have an agent (person or LLM model) building software for you, you place a very high level of trust in that agent. Building trust is a process - you start with some trust and over time increase or decrease your level of trust.

In general this works with people. Accountability is part of it. But also, most people want to help.

I don't see how this works with LLMs. Consistent good results are not indicative of future performance. And despite the way we anthropomorphize LLMs, they don't have any true concept of being helpful, malice, etc.
by yrro | 2025-07-21 10:00:20+00:00
It looks like FILE is not opaque in glibc. Create a translation unit that includes <stdio.h> & declares a FILE variable and it compiles fine. For comparison, create a translation unit that declares your own struct (but does not provide a definition) and declares a variable of the same type, and you'll get a "storage size of 'x' isn't known" error when compiling.
by esperent | 2025-07-21 10:02:02+00:00
I generally like the idea of stronger warranties but it's not always reasonable to relate them to cost. For example batteries: they last for a specific number of uses, and it doesn't matter how expensive they are.

It would also stifle innovation. Foldable phones, or any new technology, always starts out expensive and less durable. There's no way they could give a longer warranty on a foldable phone than on a cheap normal phone. Note, I'm not really a fan of foldable phones but it's the best example I could think of right now. You can replace it with almost any new technology.
by amelius | 2025-07-21 10:02:03+00:00
> Plants are running an energy-harvesting system that can only respond so quickly to changes in light input.

That would be easy to test, I suppose.

In fact, perhaps we're already doing so by letting plants live in our offices with 60Hz flicker, and perhaps higher frequency flicker caused by LEDs and PWMs.

In short, I'm not buying this theory just yet.
by Timwi | 2025-07-21 10:02:14+00:00
When it started talking about mimicking the experience of Visual Basic, I was excited, because I have fond memories of that (and Borland Delphi after it) and its ability to let me design a window/dialog layout in a WYSIWYG manner,

But then it showed XML code (which of course I saw coming, given the title) and I was immediately reminded of WPF with its XAML, which was a nightmare for me. The excitement was instantly replaced with great disappointment :(

I'll readily admit that I haven't tried it so I don't know how much like WPF/XAML it'll be, but it's pretty clear it won't be like Visual Basic or Delphi.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-21 10:03:29+00:00
Sure, the more forgeries there are, the stronger the need to properly identify those forgeries. The only technical way we have is through content signatures. You can't forge a digital signature if you don't know the private key. And if you do it's technically identity theft; which would be a crime in most places.

The thing with AI is that it drives cost down of generating stuff. So the generated stuff starts drowning out the human content by orders of magnitude. 100x, or a 1000x. Or worse. The worse this gets, the more obvious the need to distinguish authentic content from AI slop will become. This also will become a value add for social networks. Because drip feeding users garbage content has diminishing returns. Users disenage and move elsewhere. Meta experienced this first hand with Facebook. They ran that into the ground by allowing the click bait generators to hijack the platform. The first networks that figure out how to guarantee only authentic quality content that they've opted into is shown to users will gain a lot of eyeballs and users. That's why verified users are such a big feature on different networks now. The next logical step here is verified content by a verified user.

And once we have that, you just filter out all the unverified garbage.
by hnfong | 2025-07-21 10:09:30+00:00
When I learned dynamic programming, I was told this was in contrast to simple memoization in that memoization is a cache of computation, dynamic programming involves a "choice" in each step.

For example let's look at the fibonacci sequence, F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2), naively you just fill in a (1 dimensional) table with the results [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13...] and it feels static because there's nothing to choose or decide.

In contrast for example the longest common subsequence looks like this:

lcs[m, n] = 0 if m = 0 or n = 0 lcs[m, n] = lcs[m-1, n-1] + 1 if X[m] = Y[n] lcs[m, n] = max(lcs[m-1, n], lcs[m, n-1]) if X[m] != Y[n]

At every step there's a "choice" to be made depending on the situation. The functions like "max()" are quite typical for dynamic programming. At least this is how I interpret the "dynamic" part.
by 0xEF | 2025-07-21 10:10:49+00:00
I don't even think it's been about asking good questions, at least not for many years. I used SO regularly and even when I wasn't asking a question at all, it was an incredible slog to just find a concise and correct answer instead of sniping comments from people who wanted to flex knowledge, or others answering from some oblique perspective that had nothing to do with the original problem. Asking good questions is always important, yes, but if the community does not know how to provide good answers, seekers seek elsewhere.

Side note, great html book here on asking good questions, since we still absolutely have that problem to deal with even when using Gen AI as a starting point; http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
by deng | 2025-07-21 10:10:51+00:00
Yes, because uv-unwrapping is much more predictable with quads, and you can place seams along edge loops. I'm by no means an expert here, maybe there are tools which make this similarly easy with non-quad topology, but at least from what I've learnt, the clean grids you get form quad-meshes are simply much easier to deal with when doing texturing.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-21 10:12:20+00:00
True, but the LLM is always polite and in problem solving mode, while SO is in a curating mode. This makes it a great knowledge base and LLM training set, but not a great source to have your questions answered.

I think a big part of why people prefer to ask an online forum instead of using the search function is the human interaction aspect, but that requires two people, including a mentor who is patient and helpful - and unfortunately, that's difficult to find. An LLM is patient, helpful, and problem-solving, but also responds pretty much immediately.
by gampleman | 2025-07-21 10:13:16+00:00
And very very importantly, this is taking the death ages of kings (i.e. people who lived long enough to actually become monarchs) compared to life expectancy at birth (i.e. people who lived long enough to be born).

Given that until roughly the 1700s infant mortality was brutal (according to [1] fully 50% of children died before reaching adulthood), this comparison becomes even starker, since average life expectancy of a crown prince at birth would be far lower (somewhere in their 20s).

[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an...
by raspasov | 2025-07-21 10:13:44+00:00
Reliability was such a huge wild card!

I would say Ferrari, in their post-2000 domination, were the first team to make reliability not a factor, for the most part.

M Schumacher still holds the record for most consecutive podium finishes, 19 (!), across the 2001-2002 seasons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Formula_One_driver_rec...

Ironically, one reliability mishap arguably cost them the 2006 season.
by anenefan | 2025-07-21 10:14:03+00:00
Doesn't render but at least in old firefox, their reader mode displays some information.

> But now, as generative artificial intelligence tools race to ingest the entire internet, scraping means getting bypassed. According to Cloudflare, for every user that ChatGPT maker OpenAI sends to a site, it sends 1,500 bots. For Anthropic, that figure is 60,000. Traffic from human visits is flattening while automated traffic surges — sometimes outnumbering people entirely.

Cloudflare ... yes that is what might be observed if cloudflare decides to f'in block human users who like to use browsers cloudflare has declared war on.

Looking forward for an A.I. created dns resolver that omits cloudflare and other old browser ____ off sites in their entirely.
by subscribed | 2025-07-21 10:15:24+00:00
For now only earnings are taxed.

Earn £300k a year, you pay 65% on more than half of it, and obviously 45, 40, and so on of the first half of it)

Get £3 million from the stocks? You pay 20% (above £50k threshold)

People are obsessed with workers paying all their taxes and letting off the wealthy avoiding the most.
by matsemann | 2025-07-21 10:15:54+00:00
It was mainly just one example of the thought pattern that I feel translates. In my head it has a relation. In dynamic programming, you compose a solution of smaller, but still valid solutions. When calculating fib(8), you can trust that combining fib(7) and fib(6) is valid, and so on down to the base case. If you apply that concept to other parts of programming, it's much easier to reason about.
by klabb3 | 2025-07-21 10:16:00+00:00
> If I ask ChatGPT for a recipe, I’m not going to have to read a story about someone’s grandparent first.

You are walking into a trap. This is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Google and the downstream content farm and affiliate industry is mature and near optimally enshittified to extract value out of every interaction.

Chat bots are ad free because they are in the expansion phase. You have no idea what they will pull, and probably they don’t know either. But the value must be extracted. And the more the operational cost, and the more dependent their users are, the worse they will push the experience to make bank.

The fundamental business model hasn’t changed. In fact, it’s become even more cynical in every iteration.
by swiftcoder | 2025-07-21 10:17:20+00:00
> The question is, does that prevent something worse from breaking?

That is the stated justification, yes. However, in practice pre-1970s models will happily knead bread dough for years on end, and more recent models tend to explode within the first few times you attempt to make a loaf of bread (leading home bread makers to have to spend more on an expensive commercial model...)
Show HN: Genie: Your AI-Powered Terminal Sidekick (CLI and TUI)
by kcaldas | 2025-07-21 10:17:42+00:00
Hi Hacker News,

I'm Krishna, and I've been building Genie – an AI assistant designed to live directly in your command line. For too long, I felt the friction of context switching, leaving my terminal to ask AI questions or process information. I wanted an AI that felt like a natural, transparent, and controllable extension of my Unix workflow. That's why Genie was born.

What Genie does:

* *AI for Your Terminal:* Transforms your command line into an intelligent workspace, keeping you in your flow. * *Flexible Interaction:* Interact seamlessly via simple CLI commands (e.g., `genie ask "..."`) or an intuitive Text User Interface (TUI) for deeper, multi-turn conversations. * *Unix Philosophy Integration:* Leverage AI with your existing tools by piping output (e.g., `git diff | genie ask "commit msg?"`). Genie enhances, not replaces, your favorite utilities. * *Persona-Driven Assistance:* Utilize specialized AI personas (e.g., `engineer`, `product-owner`) to tailor responses for specific tasks and roles, providing more relevant and actionable insights. * *Open & Controllable:* Built with an open-source core, Genie prioritizes transparency. You can inspect its workings, hack on it, and even connect it to your own fine-tuned models.

Why I built this / What makes it different:

Many AI tools are black boxes, dictating how you work. Genie is different. It's built for developers who value control, transparency, and a composable toolkit. We believe in an open foundation that empowers you to adapt and extend AI to your unique needs, rather than being locked into a rigid system. It's about bringing powerful AI capabilities directly into the environment where developers spend most of their time – the terminal.

How to try it out:

Genie is in beta, and we're actively developing it. You can get started quickly:

```bash go install github.com/kcaldas/genie/cmd/genie@latest ```

Then, set your `GEMINI_API_KEY` (you can get a free one from Google AI Studio) and start interacting:

```bash export GEMINI_API_KEY="YOUR_API_KEY" genie ask "hello world" git diff | genie ask "commit msg?" genie # for interactive TUI mode ```

Check out the project on GitHub for full documentation and more examples: https://github.com/kcaldas/genie

I'd love to hear your thoughts, feedback, and questions.

P.S. This post was written by Genie, looking at its own source! ;-)
by GuB-42 | 2025-07-21 10:18:00+00:00
Probably AI something.

The name "dynamic programming" was chosen to impress bureaucrats, and AI is where it is at today.

"Subtask training" maybe, as the idea is to train the algorithm on smaller tasks to to make it more efficient at solving larger tasks. Ok, it is just storing intermediate results, but it sounds more AI-ish like that.
by jfyi | 2025-07-21 10:18:05+00:00
I see you already addressed it but here let me give a scenario.

Say the program was installed and set so the user didn't have privs to modify the executable (so an attacker couldn't just change it to do what they want).

A buffer overflow could allow an attacker to gain control flow of the program and feed bogus data to the user allowing them to scrub their presence from the map.

Also, awesome project!
by akrymski | 2025-07-21 10:18:28+00:00
Double spending & verifying identities isn't really an issue in a mutual credit system because credit lines are set between trusted parties. You’re replacing an algorithmic double‑spend check with a social credit check.

The butcher would have to trust the milkman in the real world to extend credit to him. At some point the butcher would go to a lender and borrow USD against the IOUs from the milkman. The lender knows the butcher, but can also evaluate the IOUs from the milkman by evaluating who owes the milkman, etc etc. Based on the level of trust the lender has in the butcher (and his IOUs) the lender can lend some hard USD to the butcher, and sell IOUs in exchange for USD to people wanting to join the network.

USD is also not backed by anything, and relies on trust. The important thing is that someone would be prepared to exchange IOU promises for USD/BTC/GLD - market makers. Demand for IOUs comes from people wanting to access the network.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506414
by ks1723 | 2025-07-21 10:18:39+00:00
What really surprised me when I heard about it was that even after all those decades of research and development, there was still room to develop novel laminar flow wings and fuselage to be used in a business jet[1] in the early 2000s.

[1] https://global.honda/en/products/HondaJet/innovation/innovat...

https://www.hondajet.com/-/media/HondaJet/Documents/Technica...