MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by immibis | 2025-07-05 16:52:17+00:00
That's pretty much exactly why. The EU is structured in a way where various groups keep proposing things and the elected representatives keep voting against them. There's no law saying they can't keep proposing the same things that keep getting rejected, so, they do.

We have this exact same post multiple times a year, where an EU body proposes a bad encryption law and everyone gets angry about how authoritarian the EU is. And then everyone forgets about it before the elected representatives get to vote on it and they vote to reject it, but that doesn't get to the front page so it doesn't give everyone the opposite emotions.

Also, end-to-end encryption is a challenge to law enforcement - idk why you think that's a meme. If they could just spy on all citizens 24/7, they could solve crime so much more easily! (Now that's a meme)
by alganet | 2025-07-05 16:53:13+00:00
I don't understand your point.

I think AI companies are afraid to be a huge flop, of throwing huge amounts of money in the trash, of being publicly exposed for chasing a pipe dream.

They're paranoid that some foreign state is compromising their efforts (never the problem, the issue is that LLMs suck), they're paranoid that adoption is being dragged down by developers afraid of losing jobs (never a problem, the issue is that LLMs suck), and so on.

From this point, there are only two outcomes. Either the biggest advancement in tech (cure cancer, solve democracy, etc) or the biggest failure (everyone invested in an useless toy). No one is interested in a disappointing miracle, and all the hype is the responsibility of the companies themselves.

I think they're scared of being in this position, and making unreasonable decisions based on that fear.
by sfn42 | 2025-07-05 16:53:19+00:00
I don't generally keep the entire thread in mind when reading and responding to comments.

If I spend a lot of time in an area I learn it and don't need gps to navigate it, however I might use gps just to find specific addresses as I don't usually memorize every street name. I also usually find that Google maps chooses perfectly sensible routes anyway, I don't see much point in trying to second guess it. Oh maybe I can save a minute or two or save a few kilometers by avoiding a highway, honestly who cares? I certainly don't. It will usually offer multiple route alternatives anyway, your ideal route or something close to it is probably among them.
by samcat116 | 2025-07-05 16:53:58+00:00
> Would the EU allow Visa or Mastercard to impose such exclusion rules on merchants who want to accept their credit cards? Definitely not.

I mean Costco has been doing this for many years and people seem ok with it? It's somewhat annoying but I get enough value out of Costco that myself and I think many are happy with the tradeoff.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-07-05 16:54:07+00:00
Others didn't mention but restaraunts are top tier. Obviously I miss the steakhouses most, and TexMex and Mexican (both different, both great in the city), but there is a huge amount of great ethnic food as well (Vietnamese, Thai, Indian, etc) as well. Most cities I've moved to since have been a downgrade. I'm not even sure if NYC was an upgrade in that respect (prices are part of the equation).

Other than that I agree with the other comments.

If I had to distill it down, it caters to both the Nouveau Rich lifestyle, and the upper middle class suburban lifestyle exceptionally well. If you want to build a business, go out regularly to bars and restaraunts and have an active social life, show off your Aston Martin valet parked in front of the restaurant, etc, it's an easy city to exist in. If you want to pretend to be that, a great many people enjoy that lifestyle as well. Likewise for the McMansion with a pool lifestyle in the outer areas.

That's a good chunk of DFW. Now add to that that it's a big, lively city and there is of course some cool areas and culture that transcends Lamborghinis (you may have to search a bit), and there's enough there to sum up to a city with more appeal than many.

That said, many will look straight down the middle and say "it's a gaudy hot concrete wasteland, and you wouldn't be wrong. I certainly saw it that way for the most part.

Back to the food though, I really do miss it. I hypothesize that the mcmansions out in the suburbs (the vast areas full of people who work at the many corporate headquarters in the city and buy for work rather than love of a neighborhood) are full of people that literally don't cook at home. The restaurant ratio to population is off the charts.
by Fogest | 2025-07-05 16:54:52+00:00
He is concerned about the politician of the FBI, yet it has already been used as a political weapon long before Trump's current reign. Did FBI not raid journalists involved in covering the Hunter Biden laptop story and attempt to aid in covering this up? That's one large example of the past politically charged actions from the FBI that occurred prior to Trump against the "right".

It seems that his problem is that he does not agree with it now being used against the "side" he stands with, rather than that he disagrees with it being used politically at all. I'd agree that it often is used for political purposes, but I would not agree that this only started in Trump's current term. It's been used by both sides in this way.
by kace91 | 2025-07-05 16:55:16+00:00
Both the translation and the original news are like one paragraph long with 0 context or source.

It’s also quite ridiculous, I’m from Madrid and pixels seem to be the phone of choice for most of my (non tech) friends.

Pixels used to be quite unknown, as most people go for budget Chinese brands, now they’re getting popular. “Get an iPhone-level camera for 300 bucks” is a massive selling point.
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-05 16:55:40+00:00
Back in high school a few kids would be tempted to insert a sentence such as "I bet you don't actually read all these papers" into an essay to see if the teacher caught it. I never tried it but the rumors were that some kids had got away with it. I just used it to worry less that my work was rushed and not very good, I told myself "the teacher will probably just be skimming this anyway; they don't have time to read all these papers in detail."
by rbanffy | 2025-07-05 16:55:58+00:00
The Amiga is a very interesting case. It started out extremely capable, with a complex architecture with multiple coprocessors tightly coupled to memory and the CPU.

As time passed, that complexity made it more difficult to build newer, better Amigas that were compatible with the software already written for it. All its unique features - graphics, 2D acceleration, audio - made it complicated to improve the machine. The PC, on the other hand, was very easy - you could throw out your CGA card and get an EGA or VGA, the same way you could plug in a generic sound card and get MIDI and PCM audio, along with an IDE port for a CD-ROM.

If the value proposition held, it could have survived longer, but this business of getting a new computer in order to get better video output gets expensive very quickly. I had EGA on my 10MHz XT-compatible and it was great.

Commodore was stuck in the 8-bit home computer model - mostly non-upgradable machines. This was the 1000 (it had a little upgradability), the 500, the 600, and the 1200. The 2000, 3000, and 4000 were seen as their professional counterparts, but they were all saddled by being compatible with games written for their built-in video and audio hardware that was quickly becoming inadequate compared to PCs.

Sadly, Atari didn't have as much custom hardware it would need to evolve, but still never quite made the leap from their self-contained machines to more modular ones that'd make it easier to compete with PCs. When they did, they opted for the VME bus instead of something simpler (such as a 16-bit ISA bus).

Impressively, near their deaths, both made PCs, but the PCs didn't share anything with their proprietary jewels. Both companies should know much better.
by ramesh31 | 2025-07-05 16:56:00+00:00
Do you want to learn computer science or do you just want to get a job in tech? Because those are two very different things.

Learning CS means starting with the math, particularly for folks long out of school (the famous quote, "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes"). If that doesn't sound fun then you probably just want to spend your time with coding tutorials instead. CS is... a science. Software is engineering.
by Wilsoniumite | 2025-07-05 16:57:02+00:00
I've faced this problem for almost every task in my life, from the creative stuff already mentioned too less obvious things, like socializing (Seeing what you said wrong without knowing how you could have said it better). Because of this, the only things I have been able to bear "practicing" are ones that are outside of any public view. Ones were my taste was nonexistent. Code is one of them. We don't see much code (good or bad) in public, and so it's one of few areas where my taste could only improve after I saw the failures in my own work after I had produced it, rather than during.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-07-05 16:57:10+00:00
PCP is certainly not going to be the one doing the colonoscopy.

maybe they’d do the stool sample or some silly blood test if you are extremely insistent and can somehow demonstrate a risk factor.

I’ve dealt with a few PCPs and they seem less informed about their own area than a 30 sec google search.

They’re basically L6 tech support…
by edanm | 2025-07-05 16:57:26+00:00
I've been programming professionally since around 2003. I'd say I caught the late-stages OOP craze (or maybe after-craze) though not really the origin or rise of OOP. My first job was in a C++ codebase, and I spent a lot of time learning the OOP design patterns (or really, the "how do we make C++ behave well" patterns).

That said, the rise of OOP is probably measured in a decade or two. It eventually "spawned" whole new programming languages, that eventually got a lot of popularity. But this is over a much longer time-frame than how quickly we went from no such thing as AI coding, to (now) coding agents. It also didn't affect the entire industry in the same way - hell, some people were still writing assembly in the 80s as the OOP craze was winding up. I don't have actual stats, but I imagine coding agents are far more ubiquitious across far more industries/languages/stacks, for more quickly.

> In my list I didn’t even mention the internet, the web, smartphones, and the cloud, all of which had a very broad effect on programming and programmers,

The internet (or maybe the web) I'd say was probably the more transformative thing. Cloud affected a lot of things too but not quite as much and didn't make quite as big a difference to the day-to-day work. I deployed things pre-cloud and post-cloud (though honestly mostly during the early-stage cloud), and there wasn't such a big difference.

Look, at the end of the day you can't just compare AI to other technologies blindly and say "well they were big hypes, this is the same". By actually looking at what it's doing and how it's affecting things, it's fairly clear it has a much bigger impact on the day-to-day work of programming, as opposed to anything else you mentioned.

I'm not saying this is the end of development, for all I know this will mean more developers! But I think software development will look fundamentally different in 5 years in a way that is far more widespread than in any other of these changes.
by ryanjamurphy | 2025-07-05 16:57:31+00:00
Just jumped to HN to share this post and saw that OP had raced me to it. Stéphane's reflections are heartfelt and well-written and, despite his melancholy, compel me to join him and keep building, too.

The bit about the pigeon's name was funny, too!

I love myNoise and hope it continues forever. Guess I'll donate again soon!
by dixie_land | 2025-07-05 16:58:08+00:00
I think coyotes can get desensitized to humans.

I live in a rather rural area in King county and we have packs of coyote that hunted down a deer one winter, and is generally weary of humans and dogs (the neighborhood has 2+ dog per household on average).

Then the past weekend we played a round of Golf at Newcastle and a pack of coyote pups pop up in broad daylight and one of them lied down to watch us tee off then left when we're done. It was very cute and we had to fight the urge to pet them like puppies
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-05 16:58:13+00:00
> Gangs are being deported

Lots of evidence showing the hard police work of pursuing gangs is being substituted for the easier task of deporting tax-paying migrants. I don’t have any particular issue with the latter. But it’s incorrect to claim this administration is pursuing gangs; its deals with Bukele have essentially freed multiple members of MS13’s leadership.
by nico | 2025-07-05 16:58:27+00:00
I respectfully disagree. I have about the same years of experience as you, and now also 1-2 years of AI-assisted coding

If you stay on top of the code you are getting from the AI, you end up molding it and understanding it

The AI can only spit out so much nonsense until the code just doesn’t work. This varies by codebase complexity

Usually when starting from scratch, you can get pretty far with barely even looking at the code, but with bigger repos you’ll have to actively be involved in the process and applying your own logic to what the AI is doing

If the code of what you are building doesn’t make sense, it’s essentially because you let it get there. And at the end of the day, it’s your responsibility as the developer to make it make sense. You are ultimately accountable for the delivery of that code. AI is not magic, it’s just a tool
by kcplate | 2025-07-05 16:59:13+00:00
> How did Bongino find out about this private friendship? I honestly don’t know.

So this dude literally worked for THE US domestic intelligence gathering agency and he has no idea how they found out about his friendship to someone who has been all over the news for 9 years for his investigative targeting of the current president?

I mean demotion due to the friendship…or perhaps he is just not the brightest bulb in the bureau?
by 123yawaworht456 | 2025-07-05 16:59:29+00:00
I'm as pro-AI as it gets (or, more broadly, pro- people doing whatever the fuck they want with consenting computers), but I fully acknowledge that generative AI output is soulless slop.

that being said:

1. most of human generated media is soulless slop too.

2. the gen-ai is out of the bottle. it is hubris and delusion to believe that it can be wished away. for every redditor, journalist, and social media influencer tilting at that windmill, foaming at the mouth in impotent rage, there are tens of thousands of people who think it's useful and neat. with the current US administration being much more friendly to it than the previous one, with China rapidly catching up, with the sheer amount of capital behind it, gen AI is here to stay.
by masswerk | 2025-07-05 16:59:33+00:00
Yes, variable names are 2 bytes, in their stored memory location in RAM. As these must be 7-bit ASCII bytes, the sign-bits and their distribution over these two bytes is used to encode the type. And all simple variables take 7 bytes of memory in total, regardless, whether the remaining 5 bytes are actually needed to store the data or not.

sign-bits type (payload) 0 0 ... floating point number (1 byte exponent, 4 bytes mantissa) 1 1 ... integer (2 bytes) 0 1 ... string (1 byte length, 2-bytes pointer to location) 1 0 ... FN function (2 bytes pointer to BASIC, 2 bytes pointer to parameter variable)

In a program (the BASIC text), though, variables names are stored in full and in plain ASCII, at whatever length of characters.
by bboygravity | 2025-07-05 16:59:53+00:00
The root cause of the problem is that it's easier to make personalized stuff with server/backend (?cloud?) than without maybe?

Example: I made a firefox extension that automatically fills forms using LLM. It's fully offline (except OPTIONALLY) the LLM part, optionally because it also supports Ollama locally.

Now the issue is that it's way too hard for most people to use: find the LLM to run, acquire it somehow (pay to run it online or download it to run in Ollama) gotta configure your API url, enter API key, save all of your details for form fulling locally in text files which you then have to backup and synchronize to other devices yourself.

The alternative would be: create account, give money, enter details and all is synced and backedup automatically accross devices, online LLM pre-selected and configured. Ready to go. No messing around with Ollama or openrouter, just go.

I don't know how to solve it in a local way that would be as user friendly as the subscription way would be.

Now things like cars and washing machines are a different story :p
by pxc | 2025-07-05 16:59:56+00:00
Computer science is a formal science with empirical elements, as much as I'd like to think of it as a branch of mathematics. I'm not sure what to make of "software engineering" or "software development", academically, but it doesn't really seem to be applied engineering; software engineering students don't study general engineering and then apply it to software, and finally layer some software-specific focus on top. And most developers are still nominally trained in "computer science" rather than "software engineering" or "software development" anyway!

Rather than engineering, the academic discipline of software engineering grows out of computer science, which was born as an area of interest in mathematics. It shows! Because most developers who prepare for their jobs by their choice of major in school typically study computer science, let's consider a typical curriculum: a tiny bit about how hardware works, a small amount of "low-level" software stuff in a class where students work in assembly language, some management science-ish stuff (typically part of the software engineering classes, focused on the development lifecycle, development methodologies, etc.), and a little bit about "design patterns", which is engineering-y but often more qualitative than quantitative in nature. You can often get cross-listed credit for some electrical and computer engineering electives, but they're very much optional. (And many schools don't even have a software engineering program per se, only a computer science program.)

To the extent that software engineering even is a theoretical discipline that can be "applied" on the job, it doesn't share much, ancestrally or methodologically, with engineering. The most they really have in common is that they are broadly speaking puzzle-solving disciplines that often rely heavily on fairly sophisticated formal reasoning.

> Most developers would struggle quite a bit to read typical theoretical computer science papers.

This is probably true, though, perhaps especially because even those who study computer science as undergraduates don't aim to be computer scientists. Their emphasis is reflected in their electives, and they don't continue to study computer science once they join the workforce.

Is this unusual? Can most nurses not only competently but effortlessly read and understand the research output of working medical scientists? Can a one-time biology major typically read and understand contemporary research on micro-organisms without "struggling quite a bit"?
by KetoManx64 | 2025-07-05 17:00:06+00:00
I do the opposite of all of these except that first one on the carnivore diet. And I'm in the best shape, mental clarity, and energy levels that I've ever had. Bloodwork is all within normal levels and my thyroid issue has been completely solved.

Nutrition is really not that complex. Our ancestors were eating primarily meat for 10's of thousands of years and we are here today because it provided them enough nutrients to have healthy children that then did the same thing.

A lot of the vegetables that you are recommended to consume have anti-nutrients that are doing more harm than good. Eg: oxilates (Spinach, Swiss chard, beet greens), Phytates (Whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds), Lectins (Beans, lentils, and some vegetables like potatoes and tomatoes), etc.
by vincekerrazzi | 2025-07-05 17:00:07+00:00
I found this book absolutely fascinating because it filled in a lot of gaps that traditional nutrition wisdom seems to ignore, or hasn’t adequately answered to my satisfaction.

Calories in calories out? Sure. But then why do genetically identical twins respond differently to the same food? A huge facet of this book is understanding the difference in effect between genetics, epigenetics and microbiome on our bodies.

It’s hugely focused on experimental results and meta analyses of the effects our micro biome has on us, and it’s compelling.

Anecdotally I’ve found a number of the suggestions in the book very helpful for my wellbeing.

Highly recommend the book, mostly because it’s a very different approach to a tired subject area.
by bombcar | 2025-07-05 17:00:16+00:00
In fact, they need to do something like this or it's simply a conspiracy or blackmail; I caught you breaking the rules so you need to give me something or I report you.

It's like a security guard leaving an "I see you, send me half the haul" card inside the vault; if caught and he claims it was "just a trap." we can be suspicious.
by dzaima | 2025-07-05 17:00:57+00:00
I haven't used CUDA (don't have nvidia gpu), but I've looked at examples of code before. And it doesn't look any more simple than CPU SIMD for anything non-trivial.

And pleasepleaseplease don't have locks in something operating over a 20-element array, I'm pretty damn sure that's just simply gonna be a suboptimal approach in any scenario. (even if those are just "software" locks for forcing serialized computation that don't actually end up in any memory atomics or otherwise more instructions, as just needing such is hinting to me of awful approaches like log(n) loops over a n=20-element array, or some in-memory accumulators, or something awful)

As an extreme case of something I've had to do in CPU SIMD that I don't think would be sane in any other way:

How would I in CUDA implement code that does elementwise 32-bit integer addition of two input arrays into a third array (which may be one of the inputs), checking for overflow, and, in the case of any addition overflowing (ideally early-exiting on such to not do useless work), report in some way how much was processed, such that further code could do the addition with a wider result type, being able to compute the full final wider result array even in the case where some of the original inputs aren't available due to the input overlapping the output (which is fine as for those the computed results can be used directly)?

This is a pretty trivial CPU SIMD loop consisting of maybe a dozen intrinsics (even easily doable via any of the generalized arch-independent SIMD libraries!), but I'm pretty sure it'd require a ton of synchronization in anything CUDA-like, and probably being forced to do early-exiting in way larger blocks, and probably having to return a bitmask of which threads wrote their results, as opposed to the SIMD loop having a trivial guarantee of the processed and unprocessed elements being split exactly on where the loop stopped.

(for addition specifically you can also undo the addition to recover the input array, but that gets way worse for multiplication as the inverse there is division; and perhaps in the CUDA approach you might also want to split into separately checking for overflow and writing the results, but that's an inefficient two passes over memory just to split out a store of something the first part already computes)
by seadan83 | 2025-07-05 17:01:08+00:00
All the same. There's a mixture of no-true-scotsman in the argument that (paraphrasing) "often they did not learn to use the tool well", and then this part is a strawman argument:

"They try to frame it in moral terms. But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete."