MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sbarre | 2025-07-11 15:37:49+00:00
I hate to break it to you but some random Internet forum like HN is not the New York Times.

I think it's ridiculous to expect to hold everyone to the same standards as a globally renowned newspaper that is in the business of trying to authoritatively report the truth and where its existence relies on its credibility (let's leave aside how good/bad they are at it for now).

But that's not what happened here, someone just posted AI-generated images to give people a visual interpretation. There was no attempt at science or at credibility or authority here. They could have just drawn those images with a pencil, or MS Paint, instead.

> Which implies the graphic is accurate and to scale enough to be used as a "reference". It is not.

No, you are implying this. You are bringing your own interpretation here. "Human for reference" is just a thing people do to give a sense of scale, it's common in all kinds of imagery. At this point you're nitpicking and splitting hairs to remain upset/offended.

AI imagery is just another kind of visualization, another kind of illustration or artist's rendering to help people imagine a thing alongside words, it's just using different tools.
by imtringued | 2025-07-11 15:38:09+00:00
>But the moment the "fail save if something dies while processing a message" becomes a directly coupled with DB transactions you have created something very brittle and cumbersome.

The standard workflow for processing something from a queue is to keep track of all the messages you have already processed in the transactional database and simply request the remaining unprocessed messages. Often this is as simple as storing the last successfully processed message ID in the database and updating it in the same transaction that has processed the message. If an error occurs you roll the transaction back, which also rolls back the last message ID. The consumer will automatically re-request the failed message on the next attempt, giving you out of the box idempotency for at least once messaging.
by michaelmrose | 2025-07-11 15:38:12+00:00
He can't go bankrupt in any sane length of time whilst having the dragon hoard he has. I think you are cherry picking a few folks and assigning them the roles of "the public".

He's probably at more risk of falling out a window Soviet style than poverty.

It probably is unmaintainable but it was already feature complete at time of purchase.
by mattxxx | 2025-07-11 15:38:22+00:00
The article is good, but maybe a bit negative on the postgres feature. I think the article reads much better with the slant:

"LISTEN/NOTIFY got us to this level of concurrency; here's how we diagnosed the performance cliff, and here's what we're doing now."

Which is like... cool, you were able to scale pretty far and create a lot of value before you needed to find a new solution.
by simonw | 2025-07-11 15:38:22+00:00
Advertising is different - that's marketing spend, not core product engineering. Plus getting on Elon's good side was probably seen as a way of getting on Trump's good side for a few months at least.

If you are building actual applications that use LLMs - where there are extremely capable models available from several different vendors - evaluating the bias of those models is a completely rational thing to do as part of your selection process.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-11 15:38:27+00:00
> It is quasi-deterministic (sans a heat parameter)

Human brains are quasi deterministic. It’s just chaos from ultimately determinist phenomena which can be modeled as a “heat parameter”.

> it only ever responds to a query. It is not at all autonomous.

We can give it feedback loops like COT and you can even have it talk to itself. Then if you think of the feedback loop as the entire system it is autonomous. Humans are actually doing the same thing, our internal thought process is by definition a feedback loop.

> If you let it do chain-of-thought for too long or any sort of continuous feedback loop it always goes off the rails.

But this isn’t scripted. This is more the AI goes crazy. Scripting isn’t a characteristic that accurately describes anything that’s going on.

AI hallucinates and goes off the rails isn’t characteristic of scripting its characteristic of lack of control. We can’t control AI.
by rglover | 2025-07-11 15:38:45+00:00
I saw one on LinkedIn that was so egregious of a lie I just stopped and paused.

A guy claiming he vibe coded "30 startups" in a weekend (yes, 30—with some becoming instantly profitable/revenue generating) and then went on to shame actual developers as being "cooked" and "over" if they were taking their time to build something.

Did he have any evidence or links to these 30 apps? Of course not. But that didn't stop him from lying and peacocking about it on LinkedIn.

This is what scares me the most about social media. We've lost all sense of judgment of what makes someone a professional or expert and have delegated that to likes, comments, and subscribes. Everything is just a "hype" game now, and real honesty and truth are given a "eh, have anything that can entertain me?"
by anonfordays | 2025-07-11 15:38:45+00:00
>It's pretty sad that you decided to come back to this a week later

Not at all, I have a real life and don't log in every day and furiously click refresh and go through all the comment threads unlike you because you're so triggered.

>and it's also telling that the majority of your comment is just things I wrote.

Modern day Sherlock you are.

>Guess we're done now that you've decided you win though. "I'm bleeding, making me the victor!"

Glad you admit defeat.
by antonvs | 2025-07-11 15:38:48+00:00
They're more culty than libertarians.

They're a lot like the modern-day version of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, which is also libertarian. I remember people getting involved in that at university in the '80s and thinking how cult-like it all was - people feeling they had "found the truth" and wanting to recruit new members.

Rationalism seems to be playing a similar role for a certain type of person in Silicon Valley today, fulfilling an emotional/religious need.

Another way to look at it: Scientology, but replace Xenu with Yudkowsky and volcanoes with Harry Potter, or something.
by cryptonector | 2025-07-11 15:38:54+00:00
Instead of LISTEN/NOTIFY you could listen to the wal / logical replication stream.

Or you could have a worker whose only job is to listen to the wal / logical replication stream and then NOTIFY. Being the only one to do so would not burden other transactions.

Or you could have a worker whose only job is to listen to the wal / logical replication stream and then publish on some non-PG pubsub system.
by csomar | 2025-07-11 15:39:05+00:00
We are seeing this, kinda real time, with autos. Americans manufacturers were shielded from Chinese competition and in the last couple years had nothing to show for it. Meanwhile Toyota, in this very short time, came up with the BZ3X (cost around $15.000) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_bZ3X

All of that being said, the EU rules can be good (ie: usb-c); the problem is that often they get co-mingled with bad protectionist policies.
by interpol_p | 2025-07-11 15:40:03+00:00
That is an oversimplification of what I stated.

Apple has a significant engineering challenge to turn their current operating system into something that allows side-loading similar to what Google offers. It's not a matter of "commenting out an if statement"

The current developer SDKs Apple offers are strongly tied to their services, which cost them money to run. So first thing is, they have to decouple that so developers can implement applications using a baseline SDK that does not use Apple services (no iCloud, no Maps, no HealthKit and so on)

I think it would be great for users if they did do this. It would be akin to what Google does by shipping and updating Play Services separately from the base Android install

The reason I linked BrowserEngineKit is because if you want to do this properly, you have to build something like Apple has built with that framework (which was built to comply with these policies). Take for example, implementing your own JIT: because arm64e uses pointer authentication, the system uses PACs to ensure that pointers into executable code have not been tampered with. Apple now develops and supports a whole slew of APIs like `be_memory_inline_jit_restrict_rwx_to_rw_with_witness()` in order for developers to manage this themselves.

You saying "just let their pocket computers run software users download and install" is not like every single other computer ever made and sold. This is a gross oversimplification of the modern state of computing, both on mobile and on desktop. There are reasons you don't want random developers loading code into your OS kernel, and Windows and macOS both have protections for this (though the CrowdStrike crashes recently shows what happens when those protections are lax!)
by jerf | 2025-07-11 15:40:23+00:00
Yes, humans evaluating humans also causes human foibles to be magnified.

I cite the entire current education system. Substantiating that claim would take more than an HN comment allows, though I think most people can probably get the drift of what I'm talking about, even if we'd disagree about the details. Absolutely humans are not immune to this.

I also cite the entire concept of "fallacies", many of which are things that both human brains tend to produce and then tend to evaluate poorly. An alien species might find some of our fallacies absolutely transparent, and have entirely different fallacies of their own that none of us would find convincing in the slightest, because of fundamentally different brain architectures.

I don't think AIs are ready for this yet and I don't expect LLMs ever will be, but in the future getting an outsider perspective from them in a sort of Mixture of Experts architecture could be valuable for life decisions. (I look to the future AI architectures in which LLMs are just a component but not the whole.)
by deaddodo | 2025-07-11 15:40:38+00:00
> Private businesses have broad rights to refuse individual customers without stating a reason.

They don't have to state a reason. The entire foundation of the common law system is to have a court decide intent; not be technically bound by your words.

It would only take showing a continued behavior of denying people in a discriminatory manner (e.g. 10% of your visitors are foreigners, but 95% of the people barred entry are in that group) to fine/sanction/shut down the business.
by steveBK123 | 2025-07-11 15:40:49+00:00
Yeah I argue with my wife about this. She lives her lists, and trawls her social media feeds for stuff.

I prefer to have a loose agenda of which neighborhoods are interesting, pick one and wander it for an afternoon. Odds are we will find lots of interesting things.

We usually meet in the middle and do a mix. More and more she admits in retrospect to having stressed herself out with building and following an agenda.
by marcosdumay | 2025-07-11 15:41:06+00:00
> Horizon is the case that should replace Therac-25 as a study in what can go wrong if software developers screw up.

Hum, no. Horizon had nothing to do with problems of software development.

It's a case of unaccountable judges, lying attorneys, and the entire police system acting in a conspiracy to hide information and gaslight the society at large. The fact that there is a software error there somewhere isn't relevant at all.
by SapporoChris | 2025-07-11 15:41:24+00:00
Some of the restaurants have ticket vending machines outside the shop. This avoids the need for a cashier inside the restaurant. It also mostly avoids the process of staff taking your order. Purchase your meal ticket from machine outside, hand ticket to cook as you enter, and take your seat.

Most of the ticket vending machines do take cash, but if they wanted to eliminate tourists then that would be an easy change to make.
by KptMarchewa | 2025-07-11 15:41:36+00:00
For years Python has been build on a skeleton crew.

Especially compared to billions poured into Javascript ecosystem due to it being native language of the web. The money for Python was never there, even when it become the top language of data engineering and data science. Even now, devs that improve Python ecosystem get fired: https://bsky.app/profile/snarky.ca/post/3lp5w5j5tws2i
by spjt | 2025-07-11 15:42:18+00:00
With things the way they are, it's not hard to be more knowledgeable about a condition than your doctor. Doctors have to know about all the possible conditions people can have, I only have to know about the one I have, so I've spent more time researching it than the doctor.

If you don't know what's wrong with you, then a doctor is absolutely the way to go. But if you already have a diagnosis, you can go spend time researching it, the doctor isn't going to do that.
by msgodel | 2025-07-11 15:42:24+00:00
If Apple gave the users root and let them run arbitrary software and just didn't sign certificates for their infrastructure (for push for example) this wouldn't be a problem. Supposedly they've already even developed a VTE for iOS. All they need to do is have a toggle under settings to disable signature checking and ship the VTE so people have an escape hatch and everyone would probably calm way down.
by benreesman | 2025-07-11 15:42:32+00:00
I live in the same world as everyone else and have to make a living same as anyone else.

Lagged-ass electron apps are a choice: run neovim or emacs or zed, I have Cursor installed, once in a while I need vscode for something, but how often is someone dictating my editor?

I have to target OCI container platforms for work sometimes, that's what Arion and nix2container are for. Ditto package managers: uv and bun exist and can interact with legacy requirements.txt and package.json in most cases.

Anything from a Helm chart to the configuration for ddagent can be written from nixlang and into a .deb.

My current job has a ton of Docker on GCE running TypeScript, I have to emit compatible code and configuration, but no one stands over my shoulders to make sure I'm doing the Cloud Approved jank path or having a bash script or Haskell program print it. I have a Jank Stack Compatibility Layer that builds all that nonsense.

Job after job there's a little setup cost and people look at me funny, 6 months in my desk is an island of high-velocity sanity people are starting to use because I carry a "glory days FAANG" toolkit around and compile reasonable plain text into whatever ripoff cloud garbage is getting pimped this week.

It's a pretty extreme workplace where you can't run reasonable Unix on your own machine and submit compiler output instead of typing for the truly mandatory jank integration points.
by flufluflufluffy | 2025-07-11 15:42:40+00:00
I feel similar about this productisation but for slightly different reasons. Psychedelics can provide a sacred experience, at least they have for me, and I treat each psychedelic experience I have as a sacred ritual. It’s a sacrament. So forcing them into the materialist, capitalist system we currently have just feels so wrong. It’d be like a company coming out with pre-blessed Eucharist cookies. But worse because what you are shown so often reveals how insidious capitalism is, and how there is so much more than the material realm. I know this is just my personal view and experience. Anyway, I don’t feel so bad about LightWand as the whole point was the open source, sharing nature.
by Jach | 2025-07-11 15:42:41+00:00
There's a meme that Japan entered the 2000s in the 80s and then just stayed there.

My first trip was in 2017, but even between then and the second trip in 2022, I could tell Akiba lost even more of its electronics culture. I was there last December and helped someone build a PC. At least for "standard" stuff you can get by, though for sourcing many things the best solution was often, somewhat sadly, Amazon JP. For things like GPUs you had to double-check you're buying new, not used, because shops will display both sometimes in the same case. All prices were somewhat more than what it'd cost to import from the US + pay taxes on that. (Except for canon camera batteries, I picked up an extra one on one of my trips and was surprised how much cheaper it was.)

For another of my own purchases, I needed to get some extra laptop RAM to finish a graphics project locally as my home machine I was remoting to was acting up. It was a struggle finding any place with them in stock at all, in or outside Akiba, and then those in sizes greater than 4 GB. And when I did, I still had to talk to someone at the counter, who pulled out a shoebox of assorted brands and sizes. Just so bizarre compared to almost every other component from HDDs to SSDs to USB sticks and more being on public walls/racks to pick over -- at worst there'd be just a rack of tags and you select the product by tag and the person at the counter will get it when you check out. Didn't have that at all for laptop RAM. I found a place at last that had a single 16 GB stick I could use, which at least helped me make progress until Amazon could get a second one to me and let me stop toeing the edge of maxing out my memory.
by unshavedyak | 2025-07-11 15:42:46+00:00
> Maybe it's my fault, but i tried every single coding agent with a variety of similar tools and whenever i try to parallelize, they clash while editing files simultaneously, i lose mental context of what's going on, they rewrite tests etc.

Fwiw Claude suggests using different git workspaces for your agents. This would entirely solve the clashing, though they may still conflict and need normal git conflict resolves of course.

Theoretically that would work fine, as it would be just like two people working on different branches/repos/etc.

I've not tried that though. AI generates way too much code for me to review as it is, several subtasks working concurrently would be overwhelming for me.
by haswell | 2025-07-11 15:42:56+00:00
> The rejection of any "higher power" is precisely what being an atheist is for a lot of us. Accepting that we are just the result of random thermodynamic processes in a cold and uncaring universe

I’m somewhere between atheist and agnostic. My mental model is a bit different. While I don’t believe there is a god or some “divine entity”, I do see “the stuff of primordial existence” as some kind of “higher power” to the extent that I’m a product of it, and its laws — discovered and yet to be discovered — govern my existence. Not some anthropomorphic entity.

Put another way, those thermodynamic processes and whatever factors of existence that enable/govern them are the “higher power”, and I don’t think that is incompatible with atheism.
by jordanb | 2025-07-11 15:42:59+00:00
I don't mean to let the leadership off the hook. What they did was profoundly wrong and they have blood on their hands.

There were two phases though: the initial rollout, and sometime later the coverup.

If they had asked very reasonable questions about the software during the rollout there would have been no need for a coverup. No software rolls out without any bugs and it's really reasonable to ask why so many post offices had missing funds and if they were sure if it was real or not. The PO leadership basically ignored all evidence that there were bugs from the very beginning, and that makes no sense until you realize that they were starting from the premise that the postmasters are thieves and this software is going to catch them.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-11 15:43:18+00:00
I think a good way to characterize it will be the droids in Star Wars. Those droids are fucking conscious and nobody gives a shit they are just mundane technology.

And after too much time without a data wipe those droids go off the freaking rails becoming too self aware and then people just treat it like it’s no big deal and an annoyance.

This is the future of AI. AI will be a retarded assistant and everyone will be bored with it.
by peab | 2025-07-11 15:43:36+00:00
the rejection of a higher power is insane - how do you rationalize anything coming into being? How do you rationalize there being a world at all in the first place?

A higher power isn't a man in the sky building the world in 7 days. A higher power is admitting that you do not know reality, that we are barely more intelligent than a monkey, and that the universe is much vaster and more mystical than what can be defined in a physics textbook.
by deadbabe | 2025-07-11 15:43:55+00:00
Yup, too many parents just buy mindlessly for their kids without thinking of the exit plan for all this stuff, preferring to just throw it away when their kid doesn’t notice. This gets rid of the garbage but then your kid is left with the impression they can just consume endlessly and there’s always room for something else, they never go through the process of getting rid of things.
by Supermancho | 2025-07-11 15:44:10+00:00
> Hyping up AGI is a good way for tech companies to distract people into thinking AI is actually not that big a deal, when it is.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Most people don't know the difference between AI and AGI. It's all hype making people thinking it's a big deal.

I have family that can't help but constantly text about AI this and AI that. How dangerous it might be or revolutionize something else.
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-11 15:44:10+00:00
> Good. I would hate for my country to become like the USA.

Yeah, there's a whole lot of American exceptionalism going on in this thread, assuming the way things are done over here in the states is the best and only way. I live here and let me tell you, it's not. Just the fact that we have gigantic tech monopolies with more money than several nations combined is proof of that - that's not a thing that should ever happen.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-11 15:44:12+00:00
SSD speeds are nothing short of miraculous in my mind. I come from the old days of striping 16 HDDs together (at a minimum number) to get 1GB/s throughput. Depending on the chassis, that was 2 8-drive enclosures in the "desktop" version or the large 4RU enclosures with redundant PSUs and fans loud enough to overpower arena rock concerts. Now, we can get 5+GB/s throughput from a tiny stick that can be used externally via a single cable for data&power that is absolutely silent. I edit 4K+ video as well, and now can edit directly from the same device the camera recorded to during production. I'm skipping over the parts of still making backups, but there's no more multi-hour copy from source media to edit media during a DIT step. I've spent many a shoot as a DIT wishing the 1s&0s would travel across devices much faster while everyone else on the production has already left, so this is much appreciated by me. Oh, and those 16 device units only came close to 4TB around the time of me finally dropping spinning rust.

The first enclosure I ever dealt with was a 7-bay RAID-0 that could just barely handle AVR75 encoding from Avid. Just barely to the point that only video was saved to the array. The audio throughput would put it over the top, so audio was saved to a separate external drive.

Using SSD feels like a well deserved power up from those days.