MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gond | 2025-07-19 17:15:21+00:00
> You are talking as if someone is actually looking at the problem. is that so? Because if there was such a feedback loop that you seem to think exists in order to correct this issue, then where is it?

Yes, the problem is known and actually worked on. There are several approaches, some being initiated on country level (probably because EU is too slow) some within the institution, as this one:

https://www.edps.europa.eu/data-protection/our-work/subjects...

No, I don’t think that institutionalised feedback loops exist there, but I do not know. I can only infer from observation that they are probably not in place, as this would, I would think, show up as “move fast and break things”.

> So we should not hold people accountable when they make mistakes and waste everyone's time then?

I have not made any direct remark to accountability, but I’ll play along: what happens by handling mistakes that way is accountability through fear. What is, in my opinion, needed is calculated risk taking and responsibility on a base of trust and not punishment. Otherwise, eventually, you will be left with no one taking over the job or people taking over the job who will conserve the status quo. This is the opposite of pushing things through at high speed. There needs to be an environment in place which can absorb this variety before you can do that(see also: Peter Senge’s “Learning Organisation”).

On a final note, I agree that the whole lobbying got out of hand. I also agree on the back-door issue and I would probably agree on a dozen other things. I am not in the seat of generally approving what the European Administration is doing. One of my initial points, however, was that the EU is not “the evil, dumb-as-brick-creator” of the cookie-popup-mess. Instead, this is probably one of the biggest cases of malicious compliance in history. And still, the EU gets the full, 100% blame, almost unanimously (and no comment as to what the initial goal was). That is quite a shift in accountability you just were interested in not to loose.
by exe34 | 2025-07-19 17:15:21+00:00
Being a dick isn't masculinity though. In fact the Inuits consider it childish.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/6855333...

Anger is a feeling, it's internal. Reacting externally with anger is a choice to be a dick. If you can't tell the difference, you have some growing up to do. Linus did.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-07-19 17:15:49+00:00
I feel increasingly tired of reading excuse after excuse when you bring up that AI tools simply cannot solve anything beyond extremely basic problems.

It's always a mix of:

1. "Wait for the next models", despite models having all but plateaued for the past 3 years,

2. "It's so good for boilerplate code", despite libraries and frameworks being much better suited for this task, and boilerplate code being actually rare to write in the normal lifecycle of a project,

3. "You need to prompt it differently", glossing over the fact that to prompt it so it can do what you want it to do accurately it would take longer than not to use AI at all,

4. And the worst: "We don't know how to use those models yet"

Maybe the real reason it doesn't work is because IT JUST DOESN'T FUCKING WORK.

Why is it so unfathomable that a next token generator is gonna suck at solving complex problems? It is blindingly obvious.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-07-19 17:15:54+00:00
Libre operating systems are coded to run on machines that conform to Microsoft's hardware standards and conformance tests (Windows HLK) that define Windows compatible hardware. Linux is shimming its way into Windows' boot process, not the other way around, even on machines sold with Linux from the manufacturer.

If you want to be clean on "a moral basis", whatever that means, the FSF would have to create their own hardware standard and persuade OEMs to adhere to it. Good luck.
by majormajor | 2025-07-19 17:16:00+00:00
> does nobody actually like computers anymore

I think this is a really interesting question and an insight into part of the divide.

Places like HN get a lot of attention from two distinct crowds: people who like computers and related tech and people who like to build. And the latter is split into "people who like to build software to help others get stuff done" and "people who like to build software for themselves" too. Even in the professional-developer-world that's a lot of the split between those with "cool" side projects and those with either only-day-job software or "boring" day-job-related side projects.

I used to be in the first group, liking computer tech for its own sake. The longer I work in the profession of "using computer tools to build things for people" the less I like the computer industry, because of how much the marketing/press/hype/fandom elements go overboard. Building-for-money often exposes, very directly, the difference between "cool tools" and "useful and reliable tools" - all the bugs I have to work around, all the popular much-hyped projects that run into the wall in various places when thrown into production, all the times simple and boring beats cool when it comes to winning customers. So I understand when it makes others jaded about the hype too. Especially if you don't have the intrinsic "cool software is what I want to tinker with" drive.

So the split in reactions to articles like this falls on those lines, I think.

If you like cool computer stuff, it's a cool article, with someone doing something neat.

If you are a dev enthusiast who likes side projects and such (regardless of if it's your day job too or not), it's a cool article, with someone doing something neat.

If you are in the "I want to build stuff that helps other people get shit done" crowd then it's probably still cool - who doesn't like POCs and greenfield work? - but it also seems scary for your day to day work, if it promises a flood of "adequate", not-well-tested software that you're going to be expected to use and work with and integrate for less-technical people who don't understand what goes into reliable software quality. And that's not most people's favorite part of the job.)

(Then there's a third crowd which is the "people who like making money" crowd, which loves LLMs because they look like "future lower costs of labor." But that's generally not what the split reaction to this particular sort of article is about, but is part of another common split between the "yay this will let me make more profit" and "oh no this will make people stop paying me" crowds in the biz-oriented articles.)
by 999900000999 | 2025-07-19 17:16:11+00:00
What's a genetic "problem" ?

In some Asian countries modifying your eyes to look white is a common practice. You could easily end up with biracial people editing out some of their more ethnic features for the next generation.

Not to mention their might be some mistakes along the way. You can't git reset --hard a human.

As imperfect as humans are, that's what makes us human.

Now if as a consenting adult you want to modify yourself, laser eye surgery, etc, go ahead.
by newscracker | 2025-07-19 17:17:00+00:00
The support is only for the EWS protocol (MS Graph will probably come next year). You can enable it in beta by going to Config Editor (this is primarily for advanced users), searching for the preference "experimental.mail.ews.enabled" and setting it to true.

You would have to manually add the account. Currently only mail is supported. No calendar support.

See https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/07/thunderbird-monthly-dev...
by seec | 2025-07-19 17:17:13+00:00
That's a bullshit myth. Actually, CoreAudio is implemented in such a way that the minimum latency is 2 samples when you can go down to 1 with some drivers on Windows.

Macs are "good" for audio, because audio people tend to do nonsense with their softwares (a lot of pirated stuff that they don't even know how to install properly) and macOS makes it harder to put the system in a problematic state.

But it doesn't have that many advantages in comparison to a well-managed system apart from some specific audio utilities (that can be quite useful/good, that much I can agree with).

In other words, Macs are good for noobs, and the stereotype of Apple users being pretty bad with computers is usually not completely wrong (the average Windows user isn't better really but they are not so narcissistic and arrogant about their choice of computers).
by phtrivier | 2025-07-19 17:17:37+00:00
Because there is no way to understand why you're accepted or not in a given training program.

The system looks like it mimics what exists (or at least, what existed 25 years ago) in "Grande Ecoles" (Elite Engineering schools like Polytechnique, Centrales, Normale Sup), etc... - you make "wishes" to enter that or this program, and you're offered a spot in some of them and denied the spot in others.

However, the huge difference is that the algo in Grande Ecoles is pretty clear: there is an entrance exam that serves as a competition. The exam is precise enough that you're going to be graded relatively evenly no matter where you live, and the examinators don't know you. In the end, you get a ranking.

Then, depending on how selective they are, each training program is basically going to offer a spot to the first N people who wanted to join, ranked by the score at the exam. Very harsh if you miss the training of your dreams for half a points, but pretty simple to understand.

Parcoursup, on the other hand, gives zero information about why you're accepted or not. It's very different from receiving a letter from Yale telling you "sorry, your grades are not good enough, your applying essay did not mention diversity / freedom / whatever, etc...")

People fill the blanks with rumors ("they don't take people from this city", "they don't take people with that last name", etc...), heuristics ("it's better to be the first of a bad class in a countryside high school than being the fourth in a very good class in the cities"), conspiracy theory ("someone hacked the system to remove my kids names", etc...)

Kids don't have a point of comparison, parents usually only face the kafkaesque system once, so it's hard to build a reformer base, and the system changes every two years anyway. (Which is the glimmer of hope: it might converge to something halfway decent in the long run.)

It's entirely possible the initial plan was completely different from the current implementation - or maybe there is a missing piece that never came to exists (replace the baccalaureate with a ranking exam ?)

Political opponents would tell you that it's on purpose to limit people entering university to lower the costs (I mean, we have pensionners to pay at home and abroad.) ; or that life is simpler if you're rich enough to enter private training program (where the algo for entry is "cash or check ?")

The one good things is, that, as far as I know, once you've gone through the hurdles, most universities, engineering schools, etc... are still very cheap in France (to the level that USA would call it "free" in comparison). Even the most elite ones.

The former system had drawbacks: you would basically register wherever your want to study whatever your want ; the first few classes of the university would be crowded beyond reason, and then half the student left when they discovered they did not really want to study psychology or history of art for a living, but, hey, that's youth ;)
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-19 17:17:44+00:00
Rick Beato posted a video recently where he created a fictitious artist and a couple of songs based on a few prompts. The results were somewhat passable, generic indie/pop music but as he said (I'm paraphrasing) "I didn't create anything here. I prompted a computer to put together a bunch of words and melodies that it knew from what other people had written."
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-19 17:17:54+00:00
Maybe Michelangelo was a bad choice, but I hope it's clear from my wording that I was using Michelangelo as an example and not saying anything specific his use of assistants compared to his peers. And David is a masterpiece not a minor work.

I don't see where the article says he worked alone on David. It does seem that he used a miniature (bozzetto) and then scaled up with a pointing machine. One possibility is he made the miniature and had assistants rough out the upscaled copy before doing the fine work himself. Essentially, using the assistants to do the work you'd do on a band saw if you were carving out of wood.

> I haven't really heard of famous authors using assistants for drafts instead of research (I don't mean commercial authors like Stephen King).

Restricting to non-commercial authors would narrow it down since hiring assistants to write drafts probably only makes financial sense if the cost of the assistant is less than the cost of your time it would take drafting.

Alexander Dumas is maybe a bit higher brow than Stephen King

> He founded a production studio, staffed with writers who turned out hundreds of stories, all subject to his personal direction, editing, and additions. From 1839 to 1841, Dumas, with the assistance of several friends, compiled Celebrated Crimes, an eight-volume collection of essays on famous criminals and crimes from European history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Dumas

But in general I agree, drafts are often the heart of the work and it's where I'd expect masters to spend a lot of their time. Similarly with the statue miniatures.
by cgriswald | 2025-07-19 17:20:28+00:00
I think that has been the state of affairs for awhile now.

I think your explanation for group 1 is true to a degree but have two other additional explanations: (1) Some element of group 1 is ideologically opposed. It might be copyright, or Luddism, or some other concern for our fellow humans. (2) Some are deluded into thinking there are only two groups and that group 3 people are all delusional.

Although it is probably an uphill battle I do think both groups 1 and 3 have things to learn from each other.
by pyman | 2025-07-19 17:20:49+00:00
For those of us outside the US, it's not hard to understand how regulations work. The US acts as a protectionist country, it sets strict rules and pressures other governments to follow them. But at the same time, it promotes free markets, globalisation, and neoliberal values to everyone else.

The moment the EU shows even a small sign of protectionism, the US complains. It's a double standard.
by kingstnap | 2025-07-19 17:21:02+00:00
You've put the

pub fn implBy(impl_obj: anytype) Logger

Function in a weird place. Normal practice is for the specific implementations to have a getLogger function to create the logger. For example, the allocators in Zig have you instantiate the top level and then call .allocator() on them to get the vtable + pointer to self.

It manages sanity a lot better, and the function implementations in the vtable can be private.
by johannes1234321 | 2025-07-19 17:21:18+00:00
There is code which is interesting to write, even if it isn't the area with clever algorithms or big architecture decisions or something.

But there is also the area of boilerplate, where non-LLM-AI-based IDEs for a few decades already help a lot with templates and "smart" completion. Current AI systems widen that area.

The trouble with AI is when you are reaching the boundary of its capabilities. The trivial stuff it does well. For the complex stuff it fails spectacularly. In the in between you got to review carefully, which easily becomes less fun than simply writing by oneself.
by richardw | 2025-07-19 17:21:31+00:00
Scary part is: what if it’s inevitable? We don’t get to choose our environment, and toss one is forming around us.

A friend’s dad only knows assembly. He’s the ceo of his company and they do hardware, and he’s close to retirement now, but he finds this newfangled C and C++ stuff a little too abstract. He sadly needs to trust “these people” but really he prefers being on the metal.
by TFYS | 2025-07-19 17:21:33+00:00
I agree that plastics probably do have more positives than negatives, but my point is that many of our innovations do have large negative effects, and if we take them into use before we understand those negative effects it can be impossible to fix the problems later. Now that we're starting to understand the extent of plastic pollution in our environment, if some future study reveals that it's a causal factor in some of our diseases it'll be too late to do anything about it. The plastic is in the environment and we can't get it out with regulation anymore.

Why take such risks when we could take our time doing more studies and thinking about all the possible scenarios? If we did, we might use plastics where they save lives and not use them in single-use containers and fabrics. We'd get most of the benefit without any of the harm.
by theferret | 2025-07-19 17:22:03+00:00
I feel like we've been here before, and there was a time when if you're going to be an engineer, you needed to know core equations, take a lot of derivatives, perform mathematical analysis on paper, get results in an understandable form, and come up with solutions. That process may be analogous to what we used to think of as beginning with core data structures and algorithms, design patterns, architecture and infrastructure patterns, and analyzing them all together to create something nice. Yet today, much of the lower-level mathematics that were previously required no longer are. And although people are trained in their availability and where they are used, they form the backbone of systems that automate the vast majority of the engineering process.

It might be as simple as creating awareness about how everything works underneath and creating graduates that understand how these things should work in a similar vein.
by wavemode | 2025-07-19 17:22:37+00:00
To be frank, I take precisely the opposite view. Most people solve novel problems every day, mostly without thinking much about it. Our inability to perceive the immense complexity of the things we do every day is merely due to familiarity. In other words we're blind to the details because our brain handles them automatically, not because they don't exist.

Software engineers understand this better than most - describing a task in general terms, and doing it yourself, can be incredibly easy, even while writing the code to automate the task is difficult or impossible, because of all the devilish details we don't often think about.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-07-19 17:22:42+00:00
> a plain helm install without any values rarely if ever gives you the deployment you need

works for me most of the time

> This is hardly unique to helm.

So what? The guy was asking what is nice about Helm vs Kustomize. Does Kustomize have rollbacks?

> In 2025 you should probably be using gitops

Gitops is literally just "hey I have some configs in Git and I run some command based on a checkout", i.e. infrastructure as code in a git repo. Gitops does not track live server metadata and deployment history. I don't get why people over-inflate this idea.
by estebank | 2025-07-19 17:23:00+00:00
Even for the monolingual Google employees it's not uncommon for them to travel to other locales, even as part of their job, so they would be on the receiving end of this "experience" too. We've had 2 decades of experience with this being an issue. One would think that they'd incorporate this "edge case" into their design process matrix by now.
by yencabulator | 2025-07-19 17:23:54+00:00
> Not sure how Nix doesn’t win the readability contest

Not sure how you can be serious.

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/d600f006643e074c2ef1d7...

buildGoDir() { local d; local cmd; cmd="$1" d="$2" . $TMPDIR/buildFlagsArray echo "$d" | grep -q "\(/_\|examples\|Godeps\|testdata\)" && return 0 [ -n "$excludedPackages" ] && echo "$d" | grep -q "$excludedPackages" && return 0 local OUT if ! OUT="$(go $cmd $buildFlags "''${buildFlagsArray[@]}" -v -p $NIX_BUILD_CORES $d 2>&1)"; then if ! echo "$OUT" | grep -qE '(no( buildable| non-test)?|build constraints exclude all) Go (source )?files'; then echo "$OUT" >&2 return 1 fi fi if [ -n "$OUT" ]; then echo "$OUT" >&2 fi return 0 }

(Do note the Nix escaping on top of the shell horrors.)

Nix just comes from a culture of utter utter horrible code. It's my daily driver, but I am holding my nose.

https://github.com/NixOS/nix/blob/94ec9e47030c2a7280503d338f...

std::string rc = fmt( R"(_nix_shell_clean_tmpdir() { rm -rf %1%; }; )"s + (keepTmp ? "trap _nix_shell_clean_tmpdir EXIT; " "exitHooks+=(_nix_shell_clean_tmpdir); " "failureHooks+=(_nix_shell_clean_tmpdir); ": "_nix_shell_clean_tmpdir; ") + (pure ? "" : "[ -n \"$PS1\" ] && [ -e ~/.bashrc ] && source ~/.bashrc;") + "%2%" "dontAddDisableDepTrack=1;\n" + structuredAttrsRC + "\n[ -e $stdenv/setup ] && source $stdenv/setup; " "%3%" "PATH=%4%:\"$PATH\"; " "SHELL=%5%; " "set +e; " R"s([ -n "$PS1" -a -z "$NIX_SHELL_PRESERVE_PROMPT" ] && PS1='\n\[\033[1;32m\][nix-shell:\w]\$\[\033[0m\] '; )s" "if [ \"$(type -t runHook)\" = function ]; then runHook shellHook; fi; " "unset NIX_ENFORCE_PURITY; " "shopt -u nullglob; " "unset TZ; %6%" "shopt -s execfail;" "%7%", shellEscape(tmpDir), (pure ? "" : "p=$PATH; "), (pure ? "" : "PATH=$PATH:$p; unset p; "), shellEscape(dirOf(*shell)), shellEscape(*shell), (getenv("TZ") ? (string("export TZ=") + shellEscape(getenv("TZ")) + "; ") : ""), envCommand);
by unpaydijk | 2025-07-19 17:24:07+00:00
One thing this kind of thing severely hurts is a lot of devices, services are affected by local laws, units, concepts, brands sometimes severely altering their function.

- Searching for a guide on say a car infotainment system would be totally different here from someone explaining in the USA or germany. Now I see a ton of titles in my language, only to find out it's information is completely useless to me because a menu, button or whatever doesen't even exist.

- Recommendations on cooking advice become almost worthless since a grading system for flours is arcane, brands I've never heard of, compounded by some imperial units in the mix. A recipe turns into a research project

- when searching for non-native content I may avoid content in my language, since I know the subject is definitely not relevant anywhere near me, so perfectly valid content will be missed

Worse yet, sometimes physical products claiming to have localized manual will instead have used some very inferior version to google translate and give dangerous advice about safe handling of the device.
by lordnacho | 2025-07-19 17:24:35+00:00
The way I ended up paying for Claude max was that I started on the cheap plan, it went well, then it wanted more money, and I paid because things were going well.

Then it ran out of money again, and I gave it even more money.

I'm in the low 4 figures a year now, and it's worth it. For a day's pay each year, I've got a junior dev who is super fast, makes good suggestions, and makes working code.
by anonym29 | 2025-07-19 17:25:16+00:00
Our nature may push us towards evil, but we have a very real capability to choose to practice radical empathy instead, even before we have the certainty of knowing whether or not these ANN's really are conscious.

That said, I think asking 7 billion humans to be nice is a much less realistic ask than asking the leading AI labs to do safety alignment not just on the messages that AI is sending back to us, but on the messages that we are sending to AI, too.

This doesn't seem to be a new idea, and I don't claim to be the inventor of it, I just hope someone at e.g. Anthropic or OpenAI sees this and considers sparking up conversations internally about it.
by estebank | 2025-07-19 17:25:45+00:00
Do note that when rolling out features like these, they geoblock them, even on a per run basis, so it might be happening a lot throughout the world but it just hasn't reached your country. For an example, mobile YouTube in the US lets me minimize the video and multitask while still seeing a picture-in-picture window and the audio, while as soon as one lands on France that feature gets immediately disabled.