MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by supportengineer | 2025-07-08 01:57:55+00:00
Over 10 years ago we were buying a lot of camping equipment. We had purchased some items from Amazon which looked good visually and they were from one of these mashing-on-the-keyboard brands like "kjhghjdfh". When we received the items they were of AMAZING quality. I wanted to purchase more items from this brand but of course, they were gone.

Strong brands are good for the consumer.
by dqv | 2025-07-08 01:59:41+00:00
> If you didn't care about status signaling you typically skipped the "new" label (which loses you tons of value right at signing) and bought used-whatever-the-rich-people-were-buying-but-upgraded-from.

This is describing a specific kind of person and it is not a general rule, at least not for the last 30 years. I would be surprised if it even applied to a plurality of people, but this all comes down to anecdotes anyway. The narrow examples I can think of are vehicles and, to a lesser extent, game systems. But anyone I knew who wanted to know the time would just buy a $20 Casio watch and, in that same vein, would buy whatever product is the equivalent of a $20 Casio watch in that particular product category.

Buying used anything is pretty time consuming (unless you do no research and just pick the first thing you see) and a lot of people want(ed) to save their money by saving their time (time is money as they say) buying a reasonably-priced new product.
by dekhn | 2025-07-08 02:00:24+00:00
Isn't it fun when you can take a game you play and write an implementation (both the game and the solver), thinking through all the details, and at the end, the solution is simple, elegant, and enlightening?

For many years I played Peg Solitaire, and after reading Norvig's AI:AMA, realized that Peg Solitaire was a fairly easy game to write a solver for. It wasn't that hard to write, but it turns out that I've only ever implemented recursion using function calls to implement a stack, rather than the iterative equivalent (using a python list as a stack, and a Set to save previously visited boards). Having the confidence of the working recursive version, and then reading up on iterative implementations, i was finally able to get a working iterative version (for some reason it's really unnatural-feeling to me) working.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-08 02:00:57+00:00
I'm not arguing that killing people at concerts is the most productive way to force change, or that it's overwhelmingly likely. But it does happen, and the insecurity around it drives modern hosts to secure their venue however they can.

If 9/11 was enough to throw America into a security tizzy, you can only imagine what kind of minuscule international threat would be enough to send America careening back towards the same policy today. I just don't think we'll live to see most of this rolled back.
by bartread | 2025-07-08 02:01:54+00:00
> And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.

Like you, this is the reality I choose to inhabit.

The Matrix was an incredible film, still stands as an incredible film, but that sequel tease at the end? Should have been a tease, or perhaps a prompt, for the viewer’s imagination only.

There are no sequels to The Matrix.
by xyzzy123 | 2025-07-08 02:01:56+00:00
Yeah the change they made was to auto shut off airdrop after 10 mins. It's just that it happened to roll out in China around the same time that many apps were banned and protesters were reported as using airdrop to pass messages.

But I mostly agree - they rolled it out worldwide later on because once you reason it through, disabling it when it's not actively used turns out to be the better default.
by thimabi | 2025-07-08 02:02:02+00:00
Right now, AI companies profit much more from wrappers, which pay API prices, instead of regular users, who pay loss-leader subscriptions. There’s little incentive for them to bother competing with wrappers today.

Over time, however, I do think most wrappers are doomed. Prices will inevitably equalize, and AI companies can rapidly capture a lot of market share with little effort — via custom bots, agents and the like. If a wrapper is nothing more than an optimized prompt and a beautiful UI, it will be crushed by the competition one day.

That being said, wrappers that implement proprietary algorithms can still thrive in the long run. Of course, if an app is that good, AI companies might eventually go after it anyway, regardless of how advanced the app is.
by OJFord | 2025-07-08 02:03:56+00:00
No it isn't. -t instead of -ed in general for many words is dialectal for one thing, more commonly retained (a Saxonism) in the West Country than elsewhere. Misspelled in particular though is distinctly American, everywhere in Britain uses misspelt.

(Ironically, I'm not sure if deliberately ironically, you 'mispelt' both, fwiw.)
by Qwertious | 2025-07-08 02:04:03+00:00
IMO the best use for excess summer solar for winter use is directly storing heat in a heat energy storage system (HESS, a fancy word for a bunch of sand/rock wrapped in a meter or two of insulation). Dump in the heat through resistive heating, use the heat directly for heating in winter. Batteries are expensive, but thermal mass is literally dirt cheap and scales up expoentially well thanks to the cube-square law. Just store and use the heat directly!
by theptip | 2025-07-08 02:04:05+00:00
This might end up being less of an issue.

If I am coding, I want to stay in the flow and get my PR green asap, so I can continue on the project.

If I am orchestrating agents, I might have 10 or 100 PRs in the oven. In that case I just look at the ones that finish CI.

It’s gonna be less, or at least different, kind of flow IMO. (Until you can just crank out design docs and whiteboard sessions and have the agents fully autonomously get their work green.)
by chasd00 | 2025-07-08 02:04:12+00:00
I don’t usually complain about movies but rebirth was pretty bad. I can’t think of a single role that was cast well. The convenience store scene was the kitchen scene in the first one all over again, the ventilation shaft scene was right out of alien, and the big bad dinosaur was a rancor from Jedi crossed with that dragon from Willow. The random family thrown in the mix randomly was so tedious I was actually rooting for the two daughters to get eaten so there would be a reason for the R rating. Not a fan.
by montagg | 2025-07-08 02:04:28+00:00
I think you’re describing the principle/agent problem that people have wrestled with forever. Oppenheimer comes to mind.

You make something, but because you don’t own it—others caused and directed the effort—you don’t control it. But the people who control things can’t make things.

Should only the people who can make things decide how they are used though? I think that’s also folly. What about the rest of society affected by those things?

It’s ultimately a societal decision-making problem: who has power, and why, and how does the use of power affect who has power (accountability).
by anitil | 2025-07-08 02:04:31+00:00
I'm not sure what the solution is here - some forums put people in a 'probationary' state for a while where they either can't post or have extra scrutiny. There's some spoiling of the commons going on here that I can't quite put my finger on.

Separately, why are companies using this? Surely this is counter productive to their marketing efforts? Or maybe am I wrong and any attention is good?
by xnx | 2025-07-08 02:06:18+00:00
> And epanet-js is a tool that you can run in a browser - full simulations with a WASM-based engine. It’s competing with expensive old-school software that costs $16,000 a year, runs exclusively on Windows, is priced by “pipes”, and uses the same engine, EPANET. This is so much better in comparison. A radical improvement.

I have absolutely no use for epanet-js, but this is so cool. Exactly what free software is supposed to do.
by gcanyon | 2025-07-08 02:06:26+00:00
I'm not sure what time frame you're talking about, but I lived in Bangkok from 2019 to 2021, and Chinese tourists were all over the place then. That said, the mall next to my apartment no longer has the Incredible Hulk standing in front of it, so maybe you're right and the american influence is fading. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by resize2996 | 2025-07-08 02:06:38+00:00
Just to add my own anecdata: My experience with Pixel/GoogleFi support has been some of the worst customer support I've ever experienced, and I have given them boatloads of money.

source: I used to do vendor relations for a large public org where contractors (medium tech companies) would routinely try to skirt the line on what they had to deliver. I would rather deal with them than GoogleFi, because in that situation there was a certain point where I could give up and hand it off to our lawyers.
by bb88 | 2025-07-08 02:09:33+00:00
The problem with security is that it's all stick based, not carrots. Nobody gets a raise for following good security practices -- just firing, fines, and jail time. Meanwhile "mass paranoia" masquerades as "security best practices".

The janitor example you bring up is a great example. A decade ago Frontline had a report on female janitorial staff being raped [0]. Instead of providing job security, wage security, and physical security to allow workers to do their job without fear, we threaten them to "be secure or else."

If I were China, I know straight where to go!

[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/rape-on-the-night...
by slwvx | 2025-07-08 02:09:52+00:00
I think that the Miyawaki Method would work just as well to start a large forest. Here's a possible path

* Secure the large area of land

* If your budget is limited, plant a few small areas in the Miyawaki Method to get healthy ecosystems started

* In future years, as you get more money, plant more areas, or just wait for the forest to spread from the Miyawaki areas.
by zbentley | 2025-07-08 02:10:25+00:00
> Instead of "the balance is the sum of the transactions", execute several transaction writes (to the database) and read back the resulting balance

Er, doesn’t this boil down to saying “not testing database end state (trusting in transactionality) is faster than testing it”?

I mean sure, trivially true, but not a good idea. I’ve seen lots of bugs caused by code that unexpectedly forced a commit, or even opened/used/committed a whole new DB connection, somewhere buried down inside a theoretically externally-transactional request handler. Bad code, to be sure, but common in many contexts in my experience.
by ldeian | 2025-07-08 02:11:26+00:00
> Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. Then I change the API so that its code works.

“Sometimes” being a very important qualifier to that statement.

Claude 4 naturally doesn’t write code with any kind of long term maintenance in-mind, especially if it’s trying to make things look like what the less experienced developers wrote in the same repo.

Please don’t assume just because it looks smart that it is. That will bite you hard.

Even with well-intentional rules, terrible things happen. It took me weeks to see some of it.
by alright2565 | 2025-07-08 02:11:34+00:00
On that page, I clicked on the "Build and Price" button. All that page contains is their SUV models.

I then checked the 5 dealers closest to me. At these 5 dealers, there are only a total of 3 base model cars in inventory, all last years' model: 18k, 18k, and 20.6k

The explanation is obviously the chicken tax and fat profit margins on their larger SUVs.
by westurner | 2025-07-08 02:11:51+00:00
The market - actual customers - is probably the best benchmark for a product.

But then outstanding liabilities due to code quality and technical debt aren't costed in by the market.

There are already code quality metrics.

SAST and DAST tools can score or fix code, as part of a LLM-driven development loop.

Formal verification is maybe the best code quality metric.

Is there more than Product-Market fit and infosec liabilities?
by geoctl | 2025-07-08 02:12:32+00:00
As for (1) zero trust architectures don't really expose complete subnets to users, they only expose individual resources and enforce access control at each of these resources individually. As for (2) As I said above, this can actually be done with Octelium if your VPNs are able to run as SOCKS5 proxies. You can create as many Services, each representing a separate VPN/exit node SOCKS5 proxy, and then use Octelium's stable private DNS to connect to the different SOCKS5 proxies/Services depending on your domain-based rules.
by losvedir | 2025-07-08 02:12:44+00:00
Can any young person confirm that the original Jurassic Park is actually good?

Now that I'm approaching middle age, I can't help but note that a lot of pieces like this are written by similar people who likely have a lot of nostalgia (like me). Like, of course Jurassic Park from my childhood is going to be better than whatever recent stuff came out when I was an adult.

But is it actually better? I, like any human, am very good about justification and defending a position after the fact that I didn't rationally reason myself into beforehand. So all the highbrow technical explanations in this article could very easily be done just to defend the movie they liked as a kid.
by quacked | 2025-07-08 02:13:03+00:00
I highly disagree that Andor feels highly detailed or lived-in; it's like acting school charades level depictions of rural people, imperial bureaucrats, high society parties, etc. This is especially bad in season 2.

I agree from a writing standpoint these are very interesting lines to follow, but the execution is just severely lacking. I don't think the writers have really ever met or spent time with farmers, infantrymen, tech bros, politicians hicks, tough guys, pilots, etc.
by codingdave | 2025-07-08 02:14:28+00:00
The AS/400 is more recently branded as the IBM iSeries, and while it may have been from 1988, it has been and continues to be updated and maintained. Just as Costco's apps on the systems are surely updated and maintained.

So if we accept the premise that Costco runs on software from 1988, then we must also say that Linux-based systems run on software from 1991. Or shall we take this ill-advised path even further and say that Macs run on software from 1969?
by freejazz | 2025-07-08 02:14:41+00:00
What sort of things do you think people do that it is often the case that there is a genuine question of whether or not the use was fair?

>You have to do it in order to get into court and find out of you're allowed to do it (a ridiculous prerequisite to begin with), and then if it goes against you, you have to pay punitive damages?

Nobody made you undertake the questionable fair use. If you're gonna fease, you better not malfease.
by dingnuts | 2025-07-08 02:16:52+00:00
if LLMs are ever able to write the kind of code I write for work, I'm going to move to management. spending 100% of my time reviewing AI slop and writing tests is the opposite of what I want. I want to define behavior quickly and have AI do the boring parts; you're letting the computer do the fun bit and spending your entire life doing the shit part, and paying for the privilege.

fuck. THAT.
by Glyptodon | 2025-07-08 02:18:01+00:00
For my entire post college life (think financial crisis +) the difference in price between new and used cars has been inconsistent, erratic, and extremely hard to evaluate. While it's true that cars eventually depreciate enough to be cheaper, I have 2012 model year that's probably worth < 20% of what it was new even with reasonable mileage, when I look at used cars less than 5 years old and without a ton of miles, most models that are considered reliable or remotely popular seem to sell above 80% of new model sticker price, and often are marked at or above new sticker at car lots. Choosing between, say a new Coralla vs. a used Camry seems far removed from what I remember in my youth, which is that for model pairings like that maybe your new vs used model overlap would be another mark or maaaybe something like a Yaris, and you'd be like "buying new is for rubes." But today, you have to spend several days of part time work to figure out something like "a new model a, or b, in price range x or a used model c or d with sub n miles in price range z will have similar TCO, let's see what's out there..."

I think there's a reason that that Slate truck seems interesting to some people, and why people think stuff like the Maverick that has gone from a reasonable deal to a questionable one but still remains popular.

That said, I think it's true that most new car buyers are mostly buying expensive cars and that there aren't many cheaper cars despite evidence that they'd sell. So what I'm curious about is that means 5 years from now people will have to sell them at an increased rate of depreciation or they'll just keep them longer.

In the worst case this seems on the verge of cars being driven out of middle class hands (or houses going from two car to one car) if the median income relative to average car price grows more.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-07-08 02:18:28+00:00
But we aren't moving up a layer of abstraction here

We are operating at the same level of abstraction, just with tools to generate high volumes of inconsistent quality of it for us

Edit: It would have to produce a lot higher quality a lot more consistently for me to seriously consider moving up to the "LLM prompt" abstraction layer permanently. As it is I think I'm just better off writing the code myself
by Jotalea | 2025-07-08 02:20:10+00:00
I agree. Using AI for development is addictive, once you start you cannot stop. It has harmed me, stunting my skills; just like the lack of exercise leads to physical decline, my coding muscles atrophied due to the lack of practice this dependency caused. And since tech is my only real strength, and I'm not what you'd call "successful", feeling stuck at the one thing I'm supposed to be good at makes me feel useless, makes me feel like a burden. And the worst thing? I'm unable to get back on track. I've tried getting back to coding manually, but I simply can't do it anymore. Last time I programmed anything without using AI was in 2023, on a Scratch project, simply because AI could not write Scratch blocks.

But at least I can now ship (shitty) code a lot faster.
by bhaktatejas922 | 2025-07-08 02:21:33+00:00
"Creating models that learn developer biases" has a great ring to it - maybe we should make that our mission statement. Thats exactly what we're doing with our models. The Next-Edit completion model especially resonates with this

now if you meant one step further and meaning the literal single developer, that's probably best serve in context - albiet with a model that's learned developer biases
by thinkmachyx | 2025-07-08 02:22:13+00:00
I really appreciate your reply — it's an honor to hear from someone with such deep experience in the field. Your insights from decades of working with CAD and kernels are incredibly valuable, and it means a lot that you'd take the time to share them here.

The idea of parameterizing geometric problem spaces and learning from how different kernels handle them is strikingly similar to what compiler researchers have done in CS: generating corner cases, analyzing compile errors, and training AI to self-correct. AI coding is used widely in the industry currently, with tools like cursor gaining huge popularity.

And the move to a text-based representation is what makes this all tractable — binary formats never gave us that level of observability or editability. With source-level CAD, it becomes much more realistic to analyze failures, share test cases, and eventually integrate AI tools that can reason about geometry the same way they reason about code.
by GMoromisato | 2025-07-08 02:22:35+00:00
I really feel for the Wachoskis. They couldn't not do a sequel, but they had nowhere to go--The Matrix was already perfect.

They couldn't recapture the key reveal of the Matrix. It would be like doing a sequel to "The Sixth Sense"--tag line: "He's Still Dead". And without that, it's just another action movie except "bullet time" is no longer innovative.

Their solution was to go deeper into the mythology and the larger world, but that was never going to be as fresh as the original.

I would have done a time-jump and have Neo be the mentor figure to a new Neo (a Neo-Neo). They'd still be fighting the Architect (and maybe Smith) and they'd still explore the larger world of Zion + Machine City, but the key reveal would be that Neo himself is just a program (like the Oracle).

But what do I know? I'm just a simple programmer.
by crooked-v | 2025-07-08 02:23:12+00:00
It's a result of greed and arrogance in the book. It's even called out with the framing that has Hammond claiming he's 'spared no expense' to the investors, even as Nedry's whole subplot kicks off because Nedry's already the low bidder and Hammond's threatened to sue him into bankruptcy if he doesn't do extra work for free.
by freejazz | 2025-07-08 02:24:50+00:00
Do you think that Anthropic did not have the option of getting legal advice before they decided to pirate libraries of books for their own commercial purposes?

I understand that some of these things might be confusing to you, but Anthropic is absolutely within the position of being able to afford attorneys and get good advice as to what they could legally. I hope you also understand that good legal advice isn't being told what you want so you can do the thing you want to do without any regard for what are likely outcomes.

With that in mind, what do you think the inconsistency is between ReDigi and Sony?
by Glyptodon | 2025-07-08 02:25:58+00:00
I hate dealing with cars and I hate status signalling, and car maintainence, and buying used and buying new are both miserable IMO, and don't have a clear front runner for comfortable low risk purchase that doesn't look like it's way too expensive (anchored by my concept of what cars should cost relative to median income).

My current >13 year old purchased new car has done better than my previous used car. But it's probably not because it was new, so much as because my previous Used car had high mileage and succumbed to the environment. And buying new felt super weird. But now I look at the market and no matter which you buy it seems miserable.
by Avicebron | 2025-07-08 02:26:42+00:00
I'm sure those will quietly end with anti-hero architect reflecting on his brilliance, marveling is his creation, reminiscing on the Ex Machina clip "that's the history of Gods" getting up, checking his phone to confirm his invitation to Lighthaven for the evening. Pan shot => Knowing smile, humble words out the door... audience sits up, tears glistening, "that could be me? A God." they internalize. Roll credits.
by hansvm | 2025-07-08 02:27:12+00:00
The usual trick is to use domain-specific knowledge to translate that asymmetry to uniformity.

E.g.: Suppose the data has high-order structure but is locally uniform (very common, comes about because of noise-inducing processes). Compute and store centroids. Those are more uniform than your underlying data, and since you don't have many it doesn't really matter anyway. Each vector is stored as a centroid index and a vector offset (SoA, not AoS). The indices are compressible with your favorite entropic integer scheme (if you don't need to preserve order you can do better), and the offsets are now approximately uniform by assumption, so you can use your favorite sphere strategy from the literature.