MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thangalin | 2025-07-18 20:00:34+00:00
* https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html

* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9...

Here are some of my Markdown documents:

* https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf (99% pure)

* https://pdfhost.io/v/4FeAGGasj_SepiSolar_Highlevel_Software_...

* https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/28/typesetting-markdow...

A lot is possible with Markdown, especially with pandoc extensions.
by nadis | 2025-07-18 20:00:43+00:00
This quote really stood out to me in the analysis:

"But beyond that, the blowup about “slowdown from AI” isn’t warranted by the strength of this evidence. The biggest problem I keep coming back to when trying to think about whether to trust this “slowdown” estimate is the fact that “tasks” are so wildly variable in software work, and that the time we spend solving them is wildly variable. This can make simple averages – including group averages – very misleading. We have argued as much in our paper on Cycle Time. In that study, cycle time is roughly analogous to gathering up a bunch of “issues” and looking at the length from start to finish. We observed over a large number of developers (11k+) and observations (55k+), and our paper describes many, many issues with issues – for instance, we acknowledge that we don’t have a huge amount of context about team practices in using tickets or the context that would let us better divide up our “cycle times” into types of work. Nevertheless, we describe some important things that run counter to the industry’s stereotypes. For instance, that even within-developer, a software developer’s own past average “time on task” isn’t a very good predictor of their future times. Software work is highly variable, and that variability does not always reflect an individual difference in the person or the way they’re working."
by scubbo | 2025-07-18 20:01:45+00:00
That would be true if I was making a argument of criticism of a certain person or class-of-people, but I'm not. I'm describing my observations about the frustrations that AI-skeptics feel when they are bombarded with contradictory messages from (what they perceive as) "the pro-AI crowd". The fact that there are internal divisions within that group (between those making absurd claims, and those pointing out how correct tool use is important) does mean that the tool-advisers are being consistent and non-hypocritical, but _it doesn't lessen the frustration by the people hearing it_.

That is - I'm not saying that "tool advisers" are behaving badly, I'm observing why their (good!) advice is met with frustration (due to circumstances outside their control).

EDIT: OK, on reading my previous comment, there is some assumption that the comments are being made by the same people (or group-of-people) - so your response makes sense as a defence against that. I think the observations of sources of frustration are still accurate, but I do agree that "tool advisers" shouldn't be accused of inconsistency or hypocrisy when they're not the ones make outlandish claims.
by AIPedant | 2025-07-18 20:01:45+00:00
FWIW I don't think this is quite true for domestic cats - cross-species collaboration is very common in carnivores. A famous example is the coyote and badger, which will team up to hunt prairie dogs: the badger chases them out of the burrows, the coyote catches them outside, and they split the meat 70-30 in acknowledgement that the coyote is larger and needs more food. Recently the same has been observed with ocelots and possums. It seems like most mammals are able to at least somewhat understand the mood and intentions of other mammals - note that we share facial expressions and body language.

OTOH feral cats are known for being highly social compared to other cats, forming large semi-collaborative colonies. And adult cats have much more difficulty socializing to humans than adult dogs, even if they don't have trauma/etc. I suspect the real story of cat domestication goes both ways: an unusually gregarious subspecies of African wildcat started forming colonies near human settlements and forming cross-carnivore collaborations with the humans who lived there. This was also true for dogs - it likely started with unusually peaceful Siberian wolves - but I believe cats were more "accidental." Humans have been deliberately creating dog breeds since antiquity, but with a tiny number of exceptions cat breeds are modern. I doubt ancient humans ever "bred" cats like they did dogs, it seems closer to natural selection.
by octaane | 2025-07-18 20:03:01+00:00
I actually know a little about this through my work. Cell-free DNA (CfDNA) Has been known about for a few decades, but has become more of a focus in recent years because of the advent of immunotherapies, which are often highly targeted drugs. CfDNA has also been used in "liquid biopsies" i.e, a simple blood draw, because it can help you profile the tumor and location of the cancer.

In my field, we all think that CfDNA testing will eventually become a standard thing that will go along with your annual physical's blood test, because it has predictive/preventative abilities.
by etrez | 2025-07-18 20:03:02+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. Multiple posts are planned on that topic. For parts 1 and 2 (so far the only ones existing) I preferred explaining the context and the remarkable simplicity of the BZip2 format. In part #4, I will try to show why the customisable types in Ada fit so well compression software. Be patient: writing articles about writing software takes much more time than writing the software itself! In the meantime, there is a short preview of that in recent presentations - notably FOSDEM 2025: https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5148-adve... , last slide.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-18 20:03:57+00:00
> dashcam video of a masked ICE agent (or similar, they don't have uniforms or proper identification) leaping out of a car and pointing a gun at someone who photographed the car's license plate

We're unfortunately waiting for one of those ICE agents, on camera, to pull the trigger and kill or brutally maim someone doing nothing other than filming, or worse an innocent bystander. It doesn't seem like our political system or even high court currently have the coherence to deal with evil in less-stark terms.

(To my knowledge, there isn't a firearms proficiency requirement for ICE agents. And a basic rule of firearm safety is you don't point your gun at anything you don't eventually want to get shot.)
by mtmail | 2025-07-18 20:04:05+00:00
Failed hardware is not expected to be replaced

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/microsoft-confirms-the...

"In 2018, it deployed [the underwater datacenter] off the coast of Scotland, submerging 855 servers and leaving them underwater for just over two years. In that time, only six underwater servers became inoperable, compared with eight of the 135 servers left to run on dry land. That's a 0.7% subsea loss compared with a 5.9% loss on land."
by positron26 | 2025-07-18 20:04:15+00:00
GCC was one subject of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The development process was changed to more closely mimic Linux and the original GCC steering committee was dissolved. Cygnus had a big role in GCC becoming an industry fixture for its hayday. Eventually the lack of big revenue meant that the license became an annoyance that industry could deal with by nurturing Clang and LLVM with acceptable quantities of money. In FSF orthodoxy, they were supposed to lose that fight.
by pickles1337 | 2025-07-18 20:04:21+00:00
Thanks for the feedback and for posting your cat! <3

There were a few reasons I implemented the likes the way I did. Partially because the implementation is simpler, but also because I wanted to avoid any sort of competitive nature that social media tends to have. The button was originally intended to just be there to spam for fun and to make the app more interactive. I also never expected more than like 5 people to ever see this app so I wasn’t really thinking in terms of how it would scale to more users haha.

I definitely see your point and will keep your ideas in mind for future iterations! Thanks again :)
by jonathantf2 | 2025-07-18 20:05:41+00:00
EXO or on-prem? We see a lot of authentication errors and sync issues, so much so that we block the "Apple Internet Accounts" EA since it stops the users from adding it in the first place on tenants we manage.

One particular well documented issue that first cropped up about 5 years ago that I still see to this day is the spam of calendar invite acceptance e-mails (so much spam that the user gets outbound blocked). Only happens if the user accepts a calendar invite using the iOS calendar client, MS couldn't identify an issue and Apple didn't wanna hear about it.
by canucker2016 | 2025-07-18 20:05:50+00:00
Jobs had control of the hardware and the software.

Gates (well, the MS programmers) had to make the software work on the PC hardware of the time (CGA/EGA video cards including non-square pixels and terrible colour palette, see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100625-00/?p=13...)
by jgeada | 2025-07-18 20:06:16+00:00
Except that factorization is exactly what is needed to break encryption, and so knowing what QC can do in that realm of mathematics and computing is exactly the critical question that needs to be asked.

And a reminder that in the world of non-QC computing, right from its very roots, the ability of computers improved in mind boggling large steps every year.

QC records, other than the odd statistic about how many bits they can make, have largely not made any strides in being able to solve real world sized problems (with exception of those that use QCs purely as an analog computer to model QC behavior)
by ModernMech | 2025-07-18 20:06:27+00:00
I thought this as well, but I just got burned in a way that caused me to lose so much time: I was feeling lazy and allowed AI to write some code for me. It looked good and compiled so I committed and pushed it. Weeks later I experienced a crash that I couldn't pinpoint. After hours of debugging, I eventually realized the culprit was that bit of code created by AI from weeks ago; it used a function that was defined in my code in a way that wasn't intended, causing a panic sometimes and weird off-by-one errors other times. The offending function was only a few lines of code. Had I not been lazy and just took 10 minutes to write it, I would have saved myself a whole afternoon of frustrating debugging.

Lesson learned: being lazy with AI has a hidden cost.
by mertleee | 2025-07-18 20:06:30+00:00
Yep, I would've voted for Bernie and it's important for the greater population to understand that Trump and the GOP have basically done nothing to curb abuse of the LEGAL immigration system. Elon and Big Tech WANTS Trump to import infinity foreign labor to continue driving wages and opportunity down for American tech workers.

The fact that only a 3.5% remittance tax on non-digital payments was barely implemented is pathetic.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-07-18 20:06:49+00:00
The argument about concurrency != parallelism mentioned in this article as being "not useful" is often quoted and rarely a useful or informative, and it also fails to model actual systems with enough fidelity to even be true in practice.

Example: python allows concurrency but not parallelism. Well not really though, because there are lots of examples of parallelism in python. Numpy both releases the GIL and internally uses open-mp and other strategies to parallelize work. There are a thousand other examples, far too many nuances and examples to cover here, which is my point.

Example: gambit/mit-scheme allows parallelism via parallel execution. Well, kindof, but really it's more like python's multiprocess library pooling where it forks and then marshals the results back.

Besides this, often parallel execution is just a way to manage concurrent calls. Using threads to do http requests is a simple example, while the threads are able to execute in parallel (depending on a lot of details) they don't, they spend almost 100% of their time blocking on some socket.read() call. So is this parallelism or concurrency? It's what it is, it's threads mostly blocking on system calls, parallelism vs concurrency gives literally no insights or information here because it's a pointless distinction in practice.

What about using async calls to execute processes? Is that concurrency or parallelism? It's using concurrency to allow parallel work to be done. Again, it's both but not really and you just need to talk about it directly and not try to simplify it via some broken dichotomy that isn't even a dichotomy.

You really have to get into more details here, concurrency vs parallelism is the wrong way to think about it, doesn't cover the things that are actually important in an implementation, and is generally quoted by people who are trying to avoid details or seem smart in some online debate rather than genuinely problem solving.
by acdha | 2025-07-18 20:07:14+00:00
I specified the United Way to avoid confusion on that point. While the word nepotism originated from the Italian word for “nephew” referring to popes appointing their relatives, in modern English usage it more broadly includes friends as well. See for example the OED: “the practice among those with power or influence of favouring relatives, friends, or associates, especially by giving them jobs”.

If it helps, pretend that I wrote “cronyism” instead. My point was simply that it having a friendly voice at the board level is a large potential advantage which was only available to one of the vendors. While we cannot prove anything which wasn’t written down, it seems implausible to say it couldn’t have affected things – especially in an era where personal relationships carried more weight and there was less scrutiny of these sorts of things.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-18 20:07:18+00:00
It this recent? I thought “I use arch btw” was more of a thing… 5 or so years ago.

I switched away from Arch (to Ubuntu) as a sort of side effect of switching computers a couple years ago (desktop->laptop, though Ubuntu would “bring the batteries along” more conveniently). Ubuntu is fine I guess, but I really miss the stability of rolling release and the user-friendliness of not having too many built in programs.
by thorum | 2025-07-18 20:07:26+00:00
Beyond a basic understanding of how LLMs work, I find most LLM news fits into one of these categories:

- Someone made a slightly different tool for using LLMs (may or may not be useful depending on whether existing tools meet your needs)

- Someone made a model that is incrementally better at something, beating the previous state-of-the-art by a few % points on one benchmark or another (interesting to keep an eye on, but remember that this happens all the time and this new model will be outdated in a few months - probably no one will care about Kimi-K2 or GPT 4.1 by next January)

I think most people can comfortably ignore that kind of news and it wouldn’t matter.

On the other hand, some LLM news is:

- Someone figured out how to give a model entirely new capabilities.

Examples: RL and chain of thought. Coding agents that actually sort of work now. Computer Use. True end-to-end multimodal modals. Intelligent tool use.

Most people probably should be paying attention to those developments (and trying to look forward to what’s coming next). But the big capability leaps are rare and exciting enough that a cursory skim of HN posts with >500 points should keep you up-to-date.

I’d argue that, as with other tech skills, the best way to develop your understanding of LLMs and their capabilities is not through blogs or videos etc. It’s to build something. Experience for yourself what the tools are capable of, what does and doesn’t work, what is directly useful to your own work, etc.
by AIPedant | 2025-07-18 20:08:04+00:00
No, it's a voluntary code of conduct so AI providers can start implementing changes before the conduct becomes a legal requirement, and so the code itself can be updated in the face of reality before legislators have to finalize anything. The EU does not have foresight into what reasonable laws should look like, they are nervous about unintended consequences, and they do not want to drive good-faith organizations away, they are trying to do this correctly.

This cynical take seems wise and world-weary but it is just plain ignorant, please read the link.
by sshine | 2025-07-18 20:08:11+00:00
The article uses "why" in the title, but does not follow through with an answer.

It sort of hints at one reason:

> The most common errors of misunderstanding are either underestimation (“it’s all hype that will blow over”) or overestimation (“I don’t need programmers anymore”). These patterns are rooted in a lack of a solid understanding of the technology and how it is evolving over time.

So if you don't at least find some middle ground between those two poles, you will make uninformed choices.

But I agree: It is safe to ignore AI for now.

I do sense that some people attach to AI because of a fundamental anxiety that it might transform society quickly and detrimentally, because that's part of the hype speech ("it will murder us all, it will make us all unemployed, it will turn us into slaves, maybe you can ride the dragon, and maybe you must").

---

> AI has not meaningfully improved productivity

This is contended.

As the article says, we are in one of the most polluted information environments.

People will say "It's absolutely useless" and "It has fundamentally changed my life."

So neither extreme can be taken at face value as representative; they're samples of a murky picture.

> The field changes so fast that you could completely tune out

It's not that fast, in my opinion. Last big steps:

- Transformer architecture (2017) - Larger models with greater performance (2020-) - Chain of thought (research in 2022, commercial breakthrough in 2024) - Agents (since forever, but 2022 for GPT-based agentic frameworks)

Other things happened; for example, DeepSeek making an architectural breakthrough and challenging the financial model of open/closed weights.

But most of the hype is just people trying to make commercial success on a few cornerstone breakthroughs.

In one to two years, maybe we can add one more major advancement.
by pphysch | 2025-07-18 20:08:39+00:00
Most(?) devs nowadays are introduced to database migration tools as a DX feature.

"Wow, 1-2 command and my app and database are in sync!"

In reality, migration tools are 100% about data loss prevention.

If you do not care about data loss, updating your schema is trivial, just drop everything and create. Dev environments should be stateless anyways, using separate data "fixtures" when needed.

Data loss itself is a highly nuanced topic. Some data is replaceable, some might be protected in a separate store. So I agree that ORMs should challenge the assumption that automatic migration tools need to be part of their kitchen sink.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-18 20:08:39+00:00
The 4th, the 8th, and the 9th amendments I'd say all should be applied in deportation actions.

4th because of "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" A warrantless search and seizure seems to be pretty unconstitutional. (See: ICE rolling up to farms and home depots and arresting everyone brown there)

The 8th

> nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

It seems both cruel and unusual to imprison people in concentration camps without enough food or water. It further seems pretty cruel to send people to countries not of origin known to torture. (See SECOT and Alligator Alcatraz)

The 9th

> The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

This amendment is rarely applied which is a shame. It is the amendment that grants rights not listed by the constitution. It's what justifies the existence of human rights. It should not be controversial, but it seems like people should have the right to not be victims of genocide. Which is what mass deportation based on race ultimately is. (Homan is pretty open about race being the primary tool used to determine who's here illegally)

But beyond that, laid out in law is how deportation should function. That's where the actual process is laid out and that's what the executive is trying to avoid by rushing deportations.
by vineyardmike | 2025-07-18 20:08:40+00:00
This law was written in 2017 not 2022.

The 2017 tax cuts were big cuts, but the way the government budget process works, they want to minimize the “appearance” of deficit spending across a decade window. To do this, added a cliff in 2023 that would raise the taxes on tech companies to help offset the cost of their cuts. Side effect is that the next administration gets shitty economic news. Dec 2022 and January 2023 had lots of crazy layoffs, right on schedule.

The reason it was tech companies specifically is that they’re super wealthy and could (ostensibly) afford it. If you’ll notice, the law exempted software development in oil and gas companies. It doesn’t hurt that tech companies and employees leaned strongly democrat in 2017. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks the tech companies accepted the 2022 hiring mania knowing layoffs were eminent.
by nancyminusone | 2025-07-18 20:08:58+00:00
You can't get something from nothing. You have to apply an equal amount of context for whatever you want the output to do. Maybe you'll need to be specific enough that you might as well have just done it yourself.

If you don't do that, you will get A Thing, which may may not be what you want, which may or may not do what you want.

Describing what you want is non-trivial effort and a skill. Unfortunately, the Read My Mind button is still a long way off.
by butterisgood | 2025-07-18 20:09:13+00:00
Learned COBOL in the 90s as an undergraduate at university. Took it at the same time as PC Assembly language (woefully 16 bit).

I had less trouble with assembly than COBOL at the time I'm afraid.

They're both weird beasts, but once I learned the C calling conventions for assembly, I was able to make a lot more sense of the assembly.

COBOL is a world unto itself. I didn't hate it, but I didn't think I saw a career in it either.

I'm just glad I opted not to take RPG :-)
by analog31 | 2025-07-18 20:09:51+00:00
If your salaries exceed your sales by more than 5x, then it makes sense to deduct only 1/5 of those salaries this year, and save the rest of the deduction for later. That's in case your business lasts another year.

It's not just that the company is operating at a loss, but it has to be operating at a really big loss, such as a startup with a high burn rate.
by anonymousiam | 2025-07-18 20:09:52+00:00
I've seen lots of negative comments (and negative moderation) on HN toward content sourced from Fox News and The Washington Times (and other "conservative" outlets). This article seems to claim that those two employed the only journalists actually pursuing this story, and that other outlets (such as The Washington Post) were actively trying to discredit or sabotage their work.

I'm in the small minority that only gets news by reading, and the stuff I read comes from many different politically biased views. Do this for a while and you'll see that the bias is always present (one way or the other), but the news stories themselves still usually have (at least some) merit.
by rrrrrrrrrrrryan | 2025-07-18 20:10:10+00:00
On Android phone, the equivalent voice assistant (Gemini) handles the question gracefully. Regardless of what you think about Google, having a single-button LLM-powered voice assistant, deeply integrated into the phone's OS, is a very useful feature, and Apple is quite far away from developing a competing version of this. They'll have to buy it or go without.
by throwaway638383 | 2025-07-18 20:10:41+00:00
What is the current SOTA advice on what to do if 1) approached and asked questions by ICE, 2) detained by ICE; broken down by A) “I’m a US citizen”, B) “I’m not a US citizen, have legal status to be in the US”, C) “I’m not a US citizen, don’t have legal status to be in the US”?