MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aaronbaugher | 2025-07-16 18:52:26+00:00
I've found that they struggle with understanding time and dates, and are sometimes weird about numbers. I asked Grok to guess the likelihood of something happening, and it gave me percentages for that day, the next day, the next week, and so on. Good enough. But the next day it was still predicting a 5-10% chance of the thing happening the previous day. I had to explain to it that the percentage for yesterday should now be 0%, since it was in the past.

In another example, I asked it to turn one of its bullet-point answers into a conversational summary that I could turn into an audio file to listen to later. It kicked out something that converted into about 6 minutes of audio, so I asked if it could expand on the details and give me something about 20 minutes. It kicked out a text that made about 7 minutes. So I explained that that was X words and only lasted 7 minutes, so I needed about 3X words. It kicked out about half that but claimed it was giving me 3X words or 20 minutes.

It's the little stuff like that that makes me think that, no matter how useful it might be for some things, it's a long way from being able to just hand it tasks and expect them to be done as reliably as a fairly dim human intern. If an intern kept coming up with half the job I asked for, I'd assume he was being lazy and let him go, but these things are just dumb in certain odd ways.
by pegasus | 2025-07-16 18:52:46+00:00
It's unlikely he sees or even perceives what he's doing as a grind, but rather something akin to an exciting and engrossing chase or puzzle. If my mental model of these kind of Silicon Valley types is correct, neither is he likely to be in it for the money, at least not at the narrative self level. He most likely was "feelin' the AGI", in Ilya Sutskever's immortal words. I.e. feeling like this might be a once-in-a-million-years opportunity to birth a new species, if not a deity even.
by nullify88 | 2025-07-16 18:53:32+00:00
Not just that. ISPs are often subject to certain data retention laws. For Denmark (And other EU countries) that maybe 6 months to 2 years. And considering close ties with "9 eyes" means America potentially has access to my information anyway.

Judging by Cloudflare's privacy policy, they hold less personally identifiable information than my ISP while offering EDNS and low latencies? Win, win, win.
by Tronno | 2025-07-16 18:53:36+00:00
Not everyone "misses" the point. People can take what they want and choose to discard the rest. Consider, for example, watching beach volleyball not for the thrill of the sport but to ogle the players. That they're also engaged in serious competition is not lost on anyone - the audience just doesn't care.

Some authoritarians also like vigilante violence and find it in The Punisher. Some racists also like futuristic fiction and find it in Star Trek. The rest of the work don't fly over their heads - it is willfully ignored because it doesn't match their worldview.

Many people are perfectly capable of getting e.g. the moods, visuals, themes, ideas conveyed by poetry, and it simply doesn't match their taste. That doesn't make them morons, and to imply otherwise is snobbery.
by tines | 2025-07-16 18:53:43+00:00
Very cool, I wish the author good luck! I've been writing a compiler in Rust for a few months now and I absolutely love it. The ways it solves most of the problems it addresses feel like the "right" way to do things.

There are some things that feel a little weird, like the fact that often when you want a more complex data structure you end up putting everything in a flat array/map and using indices as pointers. But I think I've gotten used to them, and I've come up with a few tricks to make it better (like creating a separate integer type for each "pointer" type I use, so that I can't accidentally index an object array with the wrong kind of index).

Rust is one of those languages that change how you think, like Haskell or Lisp or Forth. It won't be easy, but it's worth it.
by DonHopkins | 2025-07-16 18:53:48+00:00
Here are some honest and scientifically accurate product warnings:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/warnings.html

And here are some classic X-Windows warnings from a flyer distributed at the first X Window System Conference:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/x-window...
by saintfire | 2025-07-16 18:54:06+00:00
Obviously everyone has their own experience but any Arch(-based) distro I've used has just worked out of the box following a simple Calamares install.

I've had nothing but bad experiences with Debian installs and I'm curious if this is where a lot of issues are coming from when people switch to Mint or Ubuntu when they hear it's the "beginner distro"
by pegasus | 2025-07-16 18:54:06+00:00
You make it sound like your choice is somehow the righteous one. I'm not convinced. What's wrong with a hiring help, as long as it's well selected? And anyway, usually the help would take care of various errands to free up mom so she can focus on her baby. But maybe they have happily involved grandparents. Maybe he was working part-time. Or maybe there's some other factor we're completely missing on right now.
by ctoth | 2025-07-16 18:55:05+00:00
> In simpler terms, CCusage is a relatively-accurate barometer of how much you are costing Anthropic at any given time, with the understanding that its costs may (we truly have no idea) be lower than the API prices they charge, though I add that based on how Anthropic is expected to lose $3 billion billion this year (that’s after revenue!) there’s a chance that it’s actually losing money on every API call.

So he's using their API prices as a proxy for token costs, doesn't actually know the actual inference prices, and ... that's your "good evidence?" This big sentence with all these "We don't knows?"
by uecker | 2025-07-16 18:55:17+00:00
It is a bit unclear to me why somebody who rejects C++ because "I once spent an entire year in the heaven of C++, walking around in a glorious daze of std::vector and RAII, before one day snapping out of it and realizing that I was just spawning complexity that is unrelated to the problem at hand." (which I can absolutely agree with!) is picking Rust from all options. If there is a language that can rival C++ in terms of complexity, it is Rust.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-16 18:55:40+00:00
>Interestingly lots of Danes have been asking the same question.

Such a bad faith argument in poor taste. What's there to keep asking? The answer is pretty simple: do you have invading soldiers, drones, bullets and artillery shells coming to kill you right now, YES or NO? YES - you're in a war, NO - you're not.

You can argue that maybe you're in a smoldering "cold war", but that's an entirely different kettle of fish compared to an outright kinetic war where you fight for your survival on a daily basis.

It's not that they're not in the same ballpark, they're not even in the same galaxy.
by Someone | 2025-07-16 18:55:53+00:00
I wouldn’t count on that. https://www.lifestyledaily.co.uk/article/2021/03/23/how-much... gives £209k as an estimate for heating the main house from Downton Abbey.

Now, Italy is a bit warmer than the UK, and most castles a bit smaller, but castles in Italy can be on colder mountaintops.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-16 18:56:07+00:00
The crystal emits no magnetism as a whole, despite the different internal states it can take, because adjacent atoms cancel each other out.

Because each half of the net-zero magnet is arranged differently inside the crystal there's still a good way to measure what state it's in. Or something like that, I can see the pretty graph but I don't know what measurement you'd do.
by vpShane | 2025-07-16 18:56:21+00:00
I recently switched to python as well, I went pure nodejs because JS is everywhere and its handy to know. Doing frustratingly, front and back end dev on personal projects gave me a lot of frustration and living in a firefox/chromium Console

I asked Gemini code to generate the same skeleton stuff I was coding in nodejs, and did it perfectly in 1/8 of the code required. python's been maintained for years and is honestly a really easy syntax.

for OS level things, python makes sense and is the defacto. right now I vibe code and skeletons and then determine what I want to add and add it manually.

I'm enjoying the switch, maybe not as hardcore of a dev as many of you but it gives me the fix of having an engineering mind and being able to test things on the fly since I live in a terminal anyways.

I agree with all the points. I do like however that I can do:

def functionHere(something: str, someNumberOrSomething: int)

Seeing all the "uv has made me want to use python again" posts got me in to it. glad I did.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-07-16 18:56:25+00:00
If it makes you feel any better as of 2005 or so Pitt's computer science degree still includes learning assembly language and the particular Turtle-Headed Sadist that teaches it at the Johnstown branch campus won't let you use hex opcodes for the first few weeks of the course so you're literally coding in unadorned 1s and 0s. I hated him for it. I hate him for it. But nothing compares to the dopamine pop I had when figured out how to do long division using only addition, subtraction, conditionals and jumps. Not that that's a groundbreakingly difficult problem, it was just one of my favorite "aha!" moments in my entire career.
by hellisothers | 2025-07-16 18:56:39+00:00
> Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words

Is this tru’ish? I’m not refuting it I’m just a little shocked this might be the situation we’re in. I know generally people now struggle to consume long form content but it even being able to read a story?
by ldjkfkdsjnv | 2025-07-16 18:57:01+00:00
o3 pro is really good, but the context is really constrained, so its hard to use and doesnt output enough. This makes it suitable for ideating on good abstractions, but cant really make broad sweeping changes. Grok will output a full file. If you use the o3 pro API, its actually great, but it gets really expensive.
by jplusequalt | 2025-07-16 18:58:01+00:00
>There is an apocryphal story about Euler in elementary school solving all the math problems that the teacher gave to the class in a jiffy, so the teacher tells him to sum up the numbers to a thousand to get him to stop pestering for more. The expectation was that Euler would go through the numbers "imperatively", like C, summing them up. Instead, what Euler did was discover the summation formula and solved it "declaratively" like Haskell, in one go, as an equation.

I've heard this story be accounted to Gauss, not Euler.
by jfengel | 2025-07-16 18:58:45+00:00
The ACA was external tech workers, a company called CGI Federal.

The government has some programmers, but the vast majority is done by contractors. That lets the executive branch claim to have reduced those dastardly government workers, and replaced them with upstanding, virtuous, competent, handsome private industry.

Even before the recent harrowing there weren't a lot of government programmers left. Government employees award and manage contracts.
by stillpointlab | 2025-07-16 18:59:01+00:00
You have no evidence for any of your claims (either for "impossibility" or degree of difficulty) and I strongly doubt your rationalization will stand the test of validation in reality.

You are also completely moving the goal posts. My original comment was about the hubris of man to prevent processes that operate at a scale beyond his means. The processes that are driving forward the march towards AI are beyond your ability to stop. And now you are arguing (again, with no evidence) the relative difficulty of slowing it down (a much weaker claim compared to stopping it) vs. contributing to safe co-existence.

But in the interest of finding some common ground let me point out: attempting to slow it down is actually getting on board to my project (although, in a way I think is ineffective). It starts with accepting that it can't be prevented and choosing a way to contribute to safe coexistence by providing enough time to figure it out.
by reactordev | 2025-07-16 18:59:15+00:00
I was going to mention this approach as well. The problem with the OP is that it has assumption bias and the entire chain is based on that assumption. It’s novel. But the original idea was to more evenly distribute scores so you can find real relevance and I think 2AFC is better. But I don’t have time to verify and post a paper about it.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-07-16 18:59:48+00:00
> We are comfortable but utterly alone in our box, with no grandparents or extended family in sight.

This is how we started out too (mid 20s). Isolated rural area and no family. Both of us were youngest children and had never lived around babies. Not the highest odds to start with. We birthed at home and did cloth diapers - so that tells you a bit about our mindset then.

In our favor: This was >30years ago. It was possible to work multiple entry level jobs and scrape by. That's far from possible now.
by munificent | 2025-07-16 19:01:04+00:00
"Abelchia" is the charming medical term.

Interestingly, there is a relatively new treatment for it that involves injecting botox into the cricopharyngeus muscle. While the botox wears off relatively quickly, in many cases the cure is permanent.

It's like the muscles needs to learn how to relax and once they have, they retain that capability.
by evanelias | 2025-07-16 19:01:22+00:00
> The €1 house project seems to have been the brainchild of Vittorio Sgarbi, the Italian art critic and TV personality turned mayor of the small, rapidly depopulating town of Salemi, Sicily.

Not coincidentally, that's the same guy and same town that acquired the massive film collection from legendary NYC chain Kim's Video [1], ostensibly to create a cultural hub in Salemi, but instead they let the collection rot.

There's a documentary about it [2], but it's a bit insufferable at times, and you can basically get the gist from some articles [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim%27s_Video_and_Music

[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt24132144/

[3] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/kims-video-documentary-246...
by paul7986 | 2025-07-16 19:01:56+00:00
I now have developed a hate with a small sprinkle of love relationship with AI.

This past week I canceled my $20 subscription to GPT, advocated my friends do the same (i got them hooked) and just will be using Gemini from now on. It can create AI maps instantly for road trip travel routes to planning creek tubing trips and more. GPT does not do maps and I was paying $20 for it while Gemini is free? Bye!

Further and more important this guy says in his blog he is happy to help with the destruction of our (white collar) society that will cause many MANY financial to emotional pain while he lives high off the hog? Impending 2030 depression .. 100 years later Im unfortunately betting!

Now AI could indeed help us cure disease but if the major are destitute while a few hundreds or so live high of the hog the benefits of AI are canceled out.

AI can definitely do the job ten people use to yet NOW its just one person typing into a text prompt to complete the tasks ten use.

Why are we here..sprinting towards this goal of destruction let China destory themselves!!!
by dijit | 2025-07-16 19:02:45+00:00
You’re right that Rust is a ball of complication.

I am a fan of Rust but it’s definitely a terse language.

However there are definitely signs that they have thought about making it as readable as possible (by omitting implicit things unless they’re overwritten, like lifetimes).

I’m reminded also about a passage in a programming book I once read about “the right level of abstraction”. The best level of abstraction is the one that cuts to the meat of your problem the quickest - spending a significant amount of time rebuilding the same abstractions over and over (which, is unfortunately often the case in C/C++) is not actually more simple, even if the language specifications themselves are simpler.

C codebases in particular, to me, are nearly inscrutable unless I spend a good amount of time unpicking the layers of abstractions that people need to write to make something functional.

I still agree that Rust is a complex language, but I think that largely just means it’s frontloading. a lot of the understanding about certain abstractions.
by B4uler5 | 2025-07-16 19:03:32+00:00
If anyone reads this and like me fears the difficulty and complexity of rust, but still wants a language that is competitive in performance, works for system level programming as well as something more general purpose definitely give Swift a go.

Over the last year I’ve started to write every new project using it. On windows, on linux and mac.

It is honestly a wonderful language to work with. Its mature, well designed, has a lot of similarities to rust. Has incredible interop with C, C++, Objective-C and even Java as of this year which feels fairly insane. It also is ergonomic as hell and well understood by LLM’s so is easy to get into from a 0 starting point.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-07-16 19:03:44+00:00
Definitely, but having children when you aren't stable yourself and society isn't going to help out much could wind up in disaster. "Let's play life on hard/hell mode" doesn't really sound appealing to me.

There are things we could do as a society to make this easier: socialized child care (like we do with school) for one thing. Better welfare, making it easier to go to college when you have kids, etc...

But we aren't really doing those, most definitely not doing those in the states, and even in other western countries with better social safety nets. If you want society to have more kids, maybe we have to socialize child rearing more than we do today?
by ecshafer | 2025-07-16 19:04:04+00:00
> Java, for its part, can also accumulate a lot of dynamic language-style performance losses to pointer chasing and run-time type lookups (and GC churn) if you're not careful about how you use generics.

The worst thing about Java is the average quality of Java programmer.The same could probably be said about Python. However I think that there are fewer Python programmers trying to write AbstractFactoryFactory than in Java. Java has a terrible culture of overly verbose, deep inheritance trees that make debugging and development worse, with worse performance.
by jodrellblank | 2025-07-16 19:04:07+00:00
> "Everything Everywhere All at Once are not lowest common denominator movies"

Is too. It's a stroppy teenage girl who is lol so random[1] and has discovered teenage nihilism because her mom doesn't understand her. It's written to be relatable to the stressed mom, the middle/highschool kid, the immigrant fighting government bureaucracy, and the "I wish my life was exciting" Waymond. It's sci-fi but not good quality deep sci-fi. It's a comedy but not full of jokes or skilled physical humor, mostly 'random' silliness. It's a drama but the characters are shallow 2D people with one attribute each, all done in a Disneyfied "bagel with everything!" style.

In the way that Bella in Twilight is a placeholder for the everywoman reader[2]. Compare The Substance which is beating you over the head with "Society treats ageing women badly" but is not a movie for everyone - the topic is of interest to fewer people, the nudity and the physical body horror and gore will turn away a large section of potential audience. There's not much action or chase scenes like Everything Everywhere tries to throw in, and there's no happy ending like EEAAO either.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-so-random-lol-so-random-so...

[2] https://theoatmeal.com/story/twilight
by physix | 2025-07-16 19:04:17+00:00
Read the comments here so far and I find that they are absolutely right to offer an AI layer that speeds up building apps on their db.

Once built, the solution is plain-old-runnable-code (PORC :-), as long as the business logic implemented doesn't exit to LLM. So I don't fret so much about the AI hype story here.

For anyone starting off building with new tech, an AI assistant is really helpful.
by xracy | 2025-07-16 19:04:24+00:00
This is just so far from the correct question that it's not worth trying to have a conversation about this. Policing doesn't make crime go away. More cops does not result in less crime.

You fix crime by addressing what caused people to break the law in the first place. But no one who supports this administration understands that, and so we will not be fixing any of the country's problems anytime soon.
by tines | 2025-07-16 19:04:31+00:00
The two are incomparable in both quality and quantity. The complexity of Rust comes from the fact that it's solving complex problems. The complexity of C++ comes from a poorly thought out design and backwards-compatibility. (Not to slight the standards committee; they are smart people, and did the best with what they had.)

Anothere way of putting it is, if you didn't care about backwards-compatibility, you could greatly simplify C++ without losing anything. You can't say the same about Rust; the complexity of Rust is high-entropy, C++'s is low-entropy.
by switchbak | 2025-07-16 19:05:02+00:00
I've had the misfortune of having Maven forced on me for Scala projects, I just can't agree with you. The overhead of starting the compiler so often is a killer, and makes your builds much slower. Unless there's been some improvement of Zinc/Bloop/Etc with Maven since I've used it.

I think I would prefer to use Mill than Maven (I haven't used Mill myself) ... going through the video tutorial, it's clear that it's also a very simple system without some of the ancient baggage of Maven (xml, too many plugins, etc).
by sumtechguy | 2025-07-16 19:05:10+00:00
Even something simple like www.google.com serves from 5 different DNS names. I have seen as high as 50. It is surprisingly snappier. Especially on older browsers that would only have 2 connections at a time open. It adds up faster than you would intuitively think. I used to have local resolvers that would mess with the TTL. But that was more trouble than it was worth. But it also gave a decent speedup. Was it 'worth' doing. Well it was kinda fun to mess with, I guess.
by codingdave | 2025-07-16 19:05:22+00:00
I had really hoped we were past the "landing page" concept at this point. Yes, if you can get people to pay, that validates the ideas, but a landing page is mostly a validation of the marketing, not the product. And it could be complete throwaway work because once the product hits user's hand, they will correct the details that are wrong, and your initial "landing page" is outdated instantly.

Better to talk to people and iterate on prototypes with a handful of pilot users until they are willing to pay, them expand beyond the pilot group. Not only it is real communication and iteration with users, we aren't spamming the world with "landing pages" of products that do not actually exist.