MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GenericPoster | 2025-07-29 22:39:45+00:00
The world is a vastly easier place to live in when you're knowledgeable. Being knowledgeable opens doors that you didn't even know existed. If you're both using the same AGI tool, being knowledgeable allows you to solve problems within your domain better and faster than an amateur. You can describe your problems with more depth and take into considerations various pros and cons.

You're also assuming that AGI will help you or us. It could just as easily only help a select group of people and I'd argue that this is the most likely outcome. If it does help everybody and brings us to a new age, then the only reason to learn will be for learning's sake. Even if AI makes the perfect novel, you as a consumer still have to read it, process it and understand it. The more you know the more you can appreciate it.

But right now, we're not there. And even if you think it's only 5-10y away instead of 100+, it's better to learn now so you can leverage the dominant tool better than your competition.
by red369 | 2025-07-29 22:40:53+00:00
Just a rather long thought regarding the switching cost from Apple to Android - I rebooted my iPhone yesterday (not unusual for me) and my Safari was empty - no open tabs, no tab groups, no reading list, no history, nothing! I don't use iCloud for Safari so there wasn't much I could do. After trying a few suggestions I found online involving toggling iCloud on and off, I rebooted again, and got back the reading list and the tabs in tab groups, but no history or any open tabs which weren't in a group.

If my phone had died completely I'd have restored from a backup, but this isn't worth that. Realising how easily everything can vanish, and that there are almost no options to go digging around to find the underlying files made me rethink how much I trust the OS. And that made me look at exporting.

The export options from Safari are fairly complete (in the settings App, in the App section under Safari), and Apple have something similar to Google Takeout. The notes app can apparently work well with any IMAP server.

I wouldn't normally bother, but now I feel I can't trust the OS to manage this stuff I'm motivated.

Anyway, my thought is that once you have this stuff setup robustly without completely trusting the phone or iCloud to just handle everything, that's one aspect of switching completely taken care of.

I would never normally bother, but now I feel I can't rely on the OS to handle things I'm more motivated.

I realise that it must seem like I could have solved this (and still can) by just using iCloud backup/sync. I intentionally chose not to use that for reasons that I'm not convinced really stack up, so I won't go into (vendor lock-in, flakiness, stories of vanishing data, etc.).

Anyway, just thought I'd point out that exporting might be able to take care of the data side a lot better than you might be expecting, and you might be able to just slowly transition, e.g. export all notes, import into another location, tick one off the list.

iCloud export: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108306

Edit: Ah, just thinking more about it now, I realise now that while there is a Mail export option, there is nothing for messages in either Download Your Data, or direct from the phone. That's rough.
by zvmaz | 2025-07-29 22:41:00+00:00
The fear of asking stupid questions is real, especially if one has had a bad experience with humiliating teachers or professors. I just recently saw a video of a professor subtly shaming and humiliating his students for answering questions to his own online quiz. He teaches at a prestigious institution and has a book that has a very good reputation. I stopped watching his video lectures.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-29 22:41:04+00:00
> If we come together as a species and fix our major problems before we kill the planet, then we have thousands of years to get space right; and when we do, we won't be bringing our massive problems with us.

That’s the sticking point. I don’t have any faith that this can or will happen. When considering all of the different parties vying for power at any given point, it seems impossible. There’s just too much self-interest from too many powerful forces involved.

There’s a non-trivial chance that we will never come together, even on a millennial time scale. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we either drive ourselves to extinction or go out along with the inner solar system when the sun becomes a red giant without it having ever occurred.
by dakiol | 2025-07-29 22:41:09+00:00
I started my career working with Apache, jquery, mysql, and php. Moved to Angular and Java. Then Go, k8s, postgres and a large etc. Back to php. Kotlin. Some python. Some serverless…

And that’s just the tangible stuff. Not to speak about DDD, TDD, clean code, cicd, debugging, and a large etc.

My skills don’t degrade. Each thing I have learned in the past helps me when learning the next hot thing. These “outdated” skills are an investment, not a waste; they are what makes me being a software engineer with X years of experience.
by bpbp-mango | 2025-07-29 22:42:08+00:00
> Perhaps the most popular Linux file system, Ext4, is also getting many improvements. These boosts include faster commit paths, large folio support, and atomic multi-fsblock writes for bigalloc filesystems. What these improvements mean, if you're not a file-system nerd, is that we should see speedups of up to 37% for sequential I/O workloads.

nice to see ext4 still getting improvements
by skybrian | 2025-07-29 22:42:27+00:00
It depends where you're coming from, I suppose. The web is pretty popular. Web developers are more familiar with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and with various visualization libraries in the JavaScript ecosystem. I quite like Observable Plot [1].

I'm not familiar enough with Python or Jupyter to know how you would build similar visualizations with them. What would you use?

[1] https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/plot-gallery
Ask HN: Whats your best workflows to draft legal agreements without lawyers?
by philippb | 2025-07-29 22:42:47+00:00
I just got an insane bill from a lawyer for drafting an agreement. I was wondering if some of you have a great workflow for drafting legal agreements with AI that are good enough to have a lawyer just review it? My background is CS, so it's hard judge myself and I feel ChatGPT doesn't give enough details.
by viccis | 2025-07-29 22:42:56+00:00
I agree that poor test takers are easily distracted, and this is the reason that "word problems" are heavily emphasized in preparation for tests like the SAT or state proficiency exams.

But in general I do not think these models are claiming at being good at replicating the performance of a distracted or otherwise low performing pupil. I think they should be evaluated against humans who are capable of completing word problems containing context that is not inherently necessary to the math question. The reason those tests I mentioned use these word problems is that it's a way to evaluate someone's ability to think in abstract mathematical terms about everyday situations, which obviously involve lots of unimportant information the person must choose to consider or not.

tl;dr: I think a reasonably competent high school student could answer the apple and cat question, which is absolutely a reasonable bar for an LLM to clear. If university students are failing these questions, then they have not been taught test taking skills, which should be considered a mathematical failure just as unacceptable as that of the LLM, not a mitigating similarity for the latter.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-07-29 22:43:00+00:00
I actually can see an argument for age verification, if it could be truly guaranteed to apply only to porn.

The constitutionality of the current laws was upheld on the basis of treating age verification for access to porn as an incidental burden, and thus warranted only intermediate scrutiny.

My (naïve?) hope is that any future mission creep will be rejected by the Supreme Court under strict scrutiny, especially as it extends into general and political speech.

However, once you have the legal and technical frameworks in place, mission creep is almost inevitable, and it could easily take years of litigation to resolve.

“Think of the children” has always been the thin end of a wedge used by those looking to incrementally dismantle inconvenient civil liberties.

All that said, we’re in a much better position in the US under the first amendment. The UK’s “online safety bill” is already targeting a myriad of forms of political speech, and is just the latest example of the significant shift towards the curtailment of free speech across Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
by WorldPeas | 2025-07-29 22:43:55+00:00
I've run vscode over ssh via tailscale before and it was pretty good, I'm mostly connecting to a remote using rustdesk however, that also requires a "dummy" hdmi to operate. The only thing it needs to make it perfect would be if there were officially supported forwarded web browsing windows in vscode. I wish apple would actually let us use "our" usb-c as.. usb-c
by hinkley | 2025-07-29 22:44:10+00:00
Some of that design is about keeping pedestrians from going head-first through your windshield if you hit them. With the SUV the top of the hood is above the center of mass of the hypothetical pedestrian, whereas the sedan is below, and so they have to encourage the flying human to slide over the roof instead of go teeth first into your back seat.

That it helps with bugs is more of a happy coincidence.
by dgunay | 2025-07-29 22:44:13+00:00
I've commented elsewhere on lack of buy-in from stakeholders as a huge pitfall.

On a technical level, cucumber is also at odds with the need for a test suite to be easily maintainable. What I mean is that each test (especially e2e tests) will want to do some setup/initialization. This is usually expressed as step definitions.

Over time, an undisciplined team may write several slightly different but effectively identical step definitions. They may also combine multiple steps into bigger steps because usually a spec writer doesn't want to exhaustively define every piece of setup, they just want to write "Given all 200 pieces of input data and mocks are magically in the right place..."

I was able to wrangle the specs into composability using Rule and Background blocks, but at that point we were just programming tests with a shitty layer over the actual code.
by nomel | 2025-07-29 22:44:43+00:00
https://finance.harvard.edu/financial-overview

Looks like they received $1 billion in private + government grants, so upper end would be 15%?

> The University ended fiscal year 2024 with an operating surplus of $45 million compared to $186 million in fiscal year 2023, on an operating revenue base of $6.5 billion.

Wow!
by perching_aix | 2025-07-29 22:46:40+00:00
Right, saying that only programmers who don't solve genuine problems and instead merely follow trends and treat it as fashion (and are thus no true scotsman) care about syntax, implying their opinion doesn't count, is definitely not a no true scotsman fallacy. It totally doesn't suggest that true scotsman heed the notion that syntax doesn't matter, and that so by definition, anyone else is just some goober following the cargo cult, so they don't count. [0] /s

And so no,

> Saying that a certain kind of Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge is very different from saying that no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.

I categorically disagree that these would be meaningfully distinct claims, as the "[only] a certain kind of Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge" bit specifically invokes the implicit disqualification of said Scotsman from being counted as a True Scotsman.

> not the only example of it from that source

Pretty ironic of you to say that.

[0] the literal definition of the no true scotsman fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
by angadh | 2025-07-29 22:47:28+00:00
Usually that’s what I typically do in talking with Claude but my first vault is so haphazard at this point that it’s a bit of a lost cause.

This prompt to find contradictions was merely to see where the contradicting notes are, as a little toy experiment.

I still have to annotate this post as it allows me to see what I do and don’t agree with Claude on.

However, this half-baked “AI slop” post is making me reflect on my style of working with my site; it usually gets little traffic so I put whatever I want on there but clearly someone has it in their feed and posted one of the less interesting posts here IMHO.
by cindyllrn | 2025-07-29 22:47:57+00:00
I think that "revenge" for some would rank high on their list of life priorities

Higher than helping others in need

Higher than self-preservation, even

I'm okay with that

I don't necessarily endorse "revenge", but I would never go out of my way to stop it either

Perhaps from your perspective, it would even be fun

I would never stop someone from having fun
by palata | 2025-07-29 22:47:59+00:00
Sure, and I do believe it is significantly worse than the IPCC is "estimating". There are many reasons why the IPCC is very optimistic.

But the result is the same: the IPCC says that we are pretty much screwed, and climate scientists say that this is an optimistic view. How does that hurt the credibility of the IPCC? The IPCC is still saying what the scientists want: we have to change, and quick.

It could lose its credibility if it said "climate change is not that big of a deal", but that's not - and by a long shot - what the IPCC is saying.
by 8note | 2025-07-29 22:48:10+00:00
> However, any time you're dealing with Big Tech, even if they have no particular animus towards you, they may suddenly be unavailable (to you) without explanation, for an extended period of time

this risk goes for any 3rd party, at least the ones that follow sanctions compliance or suspicious activity monitoring. if your name shows up on a denied party list, it's illegal for anyone to tell you why they arent talking to you anymore.
by sangeeth96 | 2025-07-29 22:48:47+00:00
> Sony said in its complaint that it declined an offer from Tencent to collaborate on a new "Horizon" game last year.

Wow.

Didn't realize it was such a blatant ripoff until today when I looked at the trailer. The world, outfits, machines, the heroine and even the friggin' music: https://youtu.be/vi-jR03vkPY
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-07-29 22:49:10+00:00
A patent definitionally only has market value (i.e. a value to be taxed) if it's something people want.

Right, I'm aware there's a spectrum from bullshit patent owners to non-bullshit patent owners. Why would you write a tax code to punish the latter while doing effectively nothing to the former?

You're fixating on the existence of bullshit patents which no one disputes. The question is whether this policy is a sensible way to address that, and you continue not to substantiate (or even articulate) any of your disposition toward that.
by viccis | 2025-07-29 22:49:25+00:00
It's ridiculous. People in here are acting like adding some trivia about a cat would destroy most peoples' ability to answer questions. I don't know if it's contrarianism, AI defensiveness, or an egotistical need to correct others with a gotcha, but people just LOVE to rush to invent ridiculous situations and act like it breaks a very reasonable generalization.
by easton | 2025-07-29 22:49:39+00:00
> Certainly, and this technology won't help or hinder them any more than a good old fashioned textbook.

Except that the textbook was probably QA’d by a human for accuracy (at least any intro college textbook, more specialized texts may not have).

Matters less when you have background in the subject (which is why it’s often okay to use LLMs as a search replacement) but it’s nice not having a voice in the back of your head saying “yeah, but what if this is all nonsense”.
by tptacek | 2025-07-29 22:49:45+00:00
I haven't told you anything about what I think about this conflict and don't intend to, but if you can't read what I'm saying (even as you disagree with it) without casting me as a character amongst your adversaries, that's all the more reason to believe you should maybe dial it back on this topic.

At any rate: my participation in this thread has stopped being useful, and so here's where I'll bow out. Thanks for listening!
by usefulcat | 2025-07-29 22:50:02+00:00
That only works with concerts because of severely constrained supply. There's only one Taylor Swift, and she can only perform so many times each year. Yes there's probably no shortage of artists in general, but they're not interchangeable (certainly much less so compared to airlines). The air travel market is, therefore, not nearly as constrained.

I dunno, ticket reselling might not be strictly better, but it seems unlikely to be worse and at the very least it would be nice to have the option of selling your ticket if your plans change. As it is, you generally either have to pay extra in advance for that privilege, or just eat the loss. Either way it's great for the airlines, therefore not great for consumers.
by searine | 2025-07-29 22:50:31+00:00
2025 funding news

"At least 350 Harvard medical grants were terminated by the Trump administration." https://abcnews.go.com/US/350-harvard-medical-grants-termina...

"At Grim Town Hall, Harvard Medical School Leaders Tell Staff to Expect Layoffs and Far-Reaching Cuts" https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/16/trump-hms-cuts/

"Snapshots from front lines of federal research funding cuts" https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/07/snapshots-of-...
by dredmorbius | 2025-07-29 22:51:38+00:00
For an excellent compendium of what early computer discussion networks (or "conferencing systems" as they were often called at the time) were like, as well as a bunch of technical background on the actual data networks and protocols of the time, I'd highly recommend John S. Quarterman's The Matrix, first published in 1989. That is, it predates the World Wide Web, and was only about six years after "The Internet" largely (weasel-word conspicuously noted) replaced "ARPANET" as the designation for the widely-used (amongst university, government, military, and some tech-company) public networking protocol and system based on TCP/IP. Late-breaking news about the effect of computer networks on notable political protests in China are included in the forward.

At the Internet Archive (and apparently from Kahle's own personal collection): <https://archive.org/details/matrixcomputernet00quar/page/n3/...>

I'd begun using Usenet at about the same time as the book was published, and can't personally attest to the information jibal's giving, but will vouch that their account is far more accurate than that to which they're responding.
by everyone | 2025-07-29 22:53:15+00:00
Yeah, I've been a game-dev forever and had never built a web-app in my life (even in college) I recently completed my 1st web-app contract, and gpt was my teacher. I have no problem asking stupid questions, tbh asking stupid questions is a sign of intelligence imo. But where is there to even ask these days? Stack Overflow may as well not exist.
by vimredo | 2025-07-29 22:53:26+00:00
For Linux to gain 5% marketshare, I really doubt it "barely works" on a "limited set of hardware that it was designed for". It can run headless on basically anything better than a Pentium, and it mostly just works on average hardware (except fingerprint sensors and Nvidia). I've had no problem with Linux on all my hardware, and I have a feeling the last time you looked at it was 2013.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-29 22:53:40+00:00
That's true — there are certainly a lot of variety now, especially with 3D printing and garage kits. The "long tail" has definitely been kind to the esoteric modeler.

Adult-me recently took to designing a kit for a NASA "Space Tug" that never existed (only proposed "artist's renderings" from the 1970;s) [1]. It is so esoteric that no one made a kit for it — I had to learn to use Blender, ha ha.

I just wish more kids were into modeling.

[1] free to download: https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/Space-Tug_3DModel
by perching_aix | 2025-07-29 22:54:35+00:00
It's no true scotsman if you just resolve their indirection: no true scotsman would care about syntax, because a true scotsman is someone who doesn't care for such a thing - otherwise, they're people who GP finds to be of low value, and thus their opinion doesn't count, as they're no true scotsman, not true programmers.

It's why I called it an outright textbook example: it's an appeal to purity, where purity is determined in a circular way - the very definition of the no true scotsman fallacy, as far as I could find and understand it.
by sudhirb | 2025-07-29 22:54:57+00:00
I remember being somewhat sold on this story by the PinePhone, but it seems like it might not be possible to buy one new nowadays.

Having just looked up the PinePhone again for the first time in a while, it does look like the Ubuntu Touch project is still alive and kicking, and compatible with some modern commercially available phones!

The main thing preventing me from having a non-standard Android phone/distribution as a daily driver is access to mobile banking apps - I'm yet to check for myself but as I understand, having an unlocked bootloader means that banking apps will consider the device "compromised" and will not work.
by stolencode | 2025-07-29 22:55:03+00:00
It's amazing that none of you even try to falsify you claims anymore. You can literally just put some of the code in a search engine and find the prior art example:

https://www.web-leb.com/en/code/2108

Your "AI tools" are just "copyright whitewashing machines."

These kinds of comments are really ignoring reality.
by dang | 2025-07-29 22:55:10+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14350293 - May 2017 (251 comments)

Maru OS becomes an open source project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12373251 - Aug 2016 (26 comments)

Maru OS – Your phone is your PC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11873444 - June 2016 (2 comments)

Maru turns Android smartphones into portable PCs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11037937 - Feb 2016 (73 comments)
by newZWhoDis | 2025-07-29 22:55:37+00:00
We moved away from webflow because it was slow (got the nickname web-slow internally).

Plus, despite marketing begging for the WYSIWYG interface they actually weren't creative enough to generate new content at a pace that required it.

We massively increased conversion rates by going full native and having 1 Engineer churn out parts kits/kitbash LPs from said kits.

Scale for reference: ~$10M/month
by blackguardx | 2025-07-29 22:56:36+00:00
I have a B.S. and M.S in EE. In undergrad, I took a class where we had to solve a different problem using a new analog circuit each week. At first, we could only use BJTs, resistors, and capacitors. Eventually, we made 555 timers from discrete transistors and "unlocked" that IC for future use. At some point we were allowed to use opamps and other ICs as well.

This class was the hardest class I have ever taken in my life but it really gave me an intuitive understanding of analog electronics that I still have 20 years later.

I don't there there is any quick substitute for just putting in the work. All these posts about AI learning are the same. The magic isn't AI, but the motivation to learn. The AI might help some folks get more excited about the process, though.
by some_furry | 2025-07-29 22:56:40+00:00
Shoring up the security of FOSS is not "killing FOSS slowly".

Closed source software doesn't get to benefit from the goodwill of the open source software community, which includes independent security researchers as well as orgs like P0.

I guess our disagreement can be distilled down to one question:

Why would an emphasis on closed source products help FOSS, and why would an emphasis on FOSS help closed source?

Because this seems backwards to me. Maybe it makes sense in public relations where vibes are more important than substance and nobody thinks for more than 100 milliseconds?