MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-08 09:13:41+00:00
it's 2025. As another article put it: this is "The Rise of 'Whatever' ". Mediocrity flourishing, grifters exploiting the mediocrity and people too tired or dejected to push back against the mediocrity. AI is a grifters' and coporate's wet dream; it was never about making quality technology to improve everyone's life.

There's many ways to address this, but most solutions fall far outside of tech.
by shakna | 2025-07-08 09:13:44+00:00
"Logs" is what is in the order.

If OpenAI have already been violating your rights, by putting private information into the logs, then your beef is with them, not the courts for preserving data.

> Accordingly, OpenAI is NOW DIRECTED to preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis until further order of the Court (in essence, the output log data that OpenAI has been destroying), whether such data might be deleted at a user’s request or because of “numerous privacy laws and regulations” that might require OpenAI to do so.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.64...
by dmurray | 2025-07-08 09:14:21+00:00
> Sure, courts have the power to subpoena for a lot of stuff. I don't really see the concern though: courts also can redact a lot of sensitive information when it releases the case (see Epic v. Apple, lots of unannounced titles and deals we learned of, and just as many redacted).

It's not the public reading the information I'd concerned about, it's every data-hungry corporation that manages to file a lawsuit.

The courts put a lot of trust in lawyers: they'll redact the sensitive information from me and you, but take the view that lawyers are "officers of the court" and get to make copies of anything they convince the court to drag into evidence. But those officers of the court actually work for the same data-harvesting companies and have minimal oversight regarding what they share with them.
by fuzztester | 2025-07-08 09:15:08+00:00
>I think it's partly because we all just have way too much to do. Every day. All day. And the harder you work, it seems the more you have to do.

Yeah(, right). Or rather, yeesh. Or maybe, yikes!

>we all just have way too much to do. Every day. All day.

... in the richest country in the world, which some inhabitants there also call the greatest nation in the world.
by j-pb | 2025-07-08 09:15:59+00:00
I disagree; Elegant software is explicit. Tbh I wouldn't mind if we got rid of derives tomorrow. Given the ability of LLMs to generate and maintain all that boilerplate for you, I don't see a reason for having "barely enough smarts" heuristic solutions to this.

I rather have a simple and explicit language with a bit more typing, than a perl that tries to include 10.000 convenience hacks.

(Something like Uiua is ok too, but their tacitness comes from simplicity not convenience.)

Debug is a great example for this. Is derived debug convenient? Sure. Does it produce good error messages? No. How could it? Only you know what fields are important and how they should be presented. (maybe convert the binary fields to hex, or display the bitset as a bit matrix)

We're leaving so much elegance and beauty in software engineering on the table, just because we're lazy.
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-08 09:16:42+00:00
There are some major hints that this is indeed the case.

I've seen a simple ARC-AGI test that took the open set, and doubled every image in it. Every pixel became a 2x2 block of pixels.

If LLMs were bottlenecked solely by reasoning or logic capabilities, this wouldn't change their performance all that much, because the solution doesn't change all that much.

Instead, the performance dropped sharply - which hints that perception is the bottleneck.
by jhugo | 2025-07-08 09:16:59+00:00
> we cannot just require all generic parameters to be Clone, as we cannot assume they are used in such a way that requires them to be cloned.

No, this is backwards. We have to require all generic parameters are Clone, as we cannot assume that any are not used in a way that requires them to be Clone.

> The reason this is the way it is is probably because Rust's type system wasn't powerful enough for this to be implemented back in the pre-1.0 days. Or it was just a simple oversight that got stabilized.

The type system can't know whether you call `T::clone()` in a method somewhere.
by aa-jv | 2025-07-08 09:17:48+00:00
I agree with you, its not so peculiar as one might think. (Disclaimer: been writing software for Unix since before POSIX...)

This design choice reflects the POSIX philosophy of minimizing overhead and maximizing flexibility for system programming. Frequent calls to write(), for example, would be hindered by having to reset errno with each call/check of write() return value - especially in cases where a lot of write()'s are queued.

Or .. a library function like fopen() might internally call multiple system calls (e.g., open(), stat(), etc.). If one of these calls sets errno but the overall fopen() operation succeeds, the library doesn’t need to clear errno. For instance, fopen() might try to open a file in one mode, fail with an errno of EACCES (permission denied), then retry in another mode and succeed. The final errno value is irrelevant since the call succeeded.

This mechanism minimizes overhead by not requiring errno to be reset on success.

It allows flexible, efficient implementations of library and system calls and encourages robust programming practices by mandating return-value checks before inspecting errno.

It supports complex, retry-based logic in libraries without unnecessary state management - and it preserves potentially useful debugging information.

You only care about errno when you know an actual error occurred. Until then, ignore it.

This is similar to other systems-level things that can occur in such environments, for example when setting a hard Reset-Reason or Fail-Reason register in static/non-volatile memory somewhere, for later assessment.

IMHO, the thing thats most peculiar about this is that folks these days think of it as weird/quaint - when in fact, it makes a lot of sense if you think about it.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-08 09:18:25+00:00
> Egypt was pretty centralized from the beginning and their gods were not based on cities.

I don't think this is really accurate; you can often tell where an ancient Egyptian was from by the choice of god honored in his name. The gods very much are localized to particular places.

> "El" means mountain

"El" means "god"; this one couldn't be more clear-cut. If someone told you it means "mountain", you should dismiss anything else they might say.
by smokel | 2025-07-08 09:18:39+00:00
With ball-point ink, I think (but haven't checked recently) that there is unfortunately no safe option.

Some contemporary artists sell digital prints, but if you are selling the real deal, at least ensure that it does not sit in full sunlight all day, because it will fade quickly.

In most museums original prints and drawings are often exhibited for short periods in darkened rooms. I think this takes away from the pleasure, and I prefer to see my art as perishables, which one can enjoy for a few years. An additional problem is that paper is terribly fragile stuff. Framing it (acid free paper) properly (with acid free tape) helps, but can be very expensive and will affect the aesthetics of course.

Some collectors of printmaking art store everything in a drawer and take it out once a year to enjoy it with a good glass of wine.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-08 09:18:44+00:00
> note also the use of "Logos" [λόγος] in John 1:1, which has echoes in such concepts as Tao [道]

Well, 道 is used to translate the Biblical Word because (a) it is the native Chinese word for what is right, and also (b) it is, unrelatedly, also a verb meaning "say", but that's just a pun. The 道 of morality is not a word or anything related to a word. It's a path, the correct path through life.
by stefan_ | 2025-07-08 09:18:59+00:00
Maybe instead of making up absurd conspiracy theories about "the right judge" and "very strange news" you should recognize that this is proceeding as any other civil suit and that if you want to have privacy in the personal data you unload with OpenAI and other untrustworthy parties, you should call your representative to change the law.

Until then all your "nuclear bomb sized" chats are effectively the same as the dinner bill for Sam courting Huang to get more of those GPUs.
by Kamshak | 2025-07-08 09:19:53+00:00
It's more expensive than Gemini flash which can actually write pretty decent code (not just apply a diff). Fast AI edit application is definitely great but that's pretty expensive

Morph v3 fast: Input: $1.20 / M tokens, Output $2.70 / M tokens

Gemini 2.5 Flash: $0.30 / M tokens, Output $2.50 / M tokens

(Source: OpenRouter)
by doubledamio | 2025-07-08 09:21:04+00:00
To me, every profession—from software engineering to farming—has its complexities, yet most professionals can explain what they do in clear terms. When academics say they can’t offer a basic explanation, it often feels like an attempt to protect their status or avoid the effort—if not a kind of intellectual arrogance. Yes, the topics are challenging—you don’t need to throw in quantum buzzwords to convince me—but simplifying your work isn’t “dumbing it down”; it often sharpens your own understanding too.
by bux93 | 2025-07-08 09:21:13+00:00
The justice systems hasn't always been quite like this. It's not business as usual for some lawsuit to force a SAAS provider to turn over every scrap of data they stored, even the deleted data, on the off chance it might contain something infringing.

Well, maybe it's business as usual now. A lot of things that were previously considered obvious overreach by corporates and goverment are now depicted as "business as usual" in the US.
by tharkun__ | 2025-07-08 09:21:38+00:00
No regular developer will carefully review 50 changed snapshots. They'll stop doing a proper job of it after the third or fourth that looks like the same trivial unimportant change and miss the bug found by snapshot 37.

I do agree that a lot of people write bad tests meaning the test name does not properly describe what the test is supposed to be about so I can check the test implementation and assertions against intent. They also like you say assert on superfluous things.

The problem with snapshots is that it's doing the exact same thing. It asserts on lots of completely unimportant stuff. Unlike proper unit tests however I can't make it better. In a unit test I can make an effort to educate my peers and personally do a good job of only asserting relevant things and writing individual tests where the test name explains why "transitional has to be None".

Snapshots are a blunt no-effort tool for the lazy dev that then later requires constant vigilence and overcoming things humans are bad at (like carefully checking 50 snapshots) by many different humans VS a unit test that I can make good and easy to comprehend and check by putting in effort once when I write it. A good one will also be easy to adjust when needed if it comes time to actually need to change an assertion.
by gsck | 2025-07-08 09:22:10+00:00
I've made my fair share of mistakes at my current employer. Took down business critical infrastructure, dropped productions tables, accidently placing test orders for clients and not getting them cancelled quick enough

Not once have I ever been reprimanded for my actions (Out side of being the butt of a few jokes and having to write a few "sorry" emails), they aren't something to be proud off but I'm definitely a better developer now because of these mistakes.

Mistakes happen, that's life, important thing is how you deal with the issues.

After dropping the production table, I had the fun job of restoring the backups and then having to scour through logs to rebuild any missing information between the last back up and the incident. I have never felt anywhere near as sick in my life, that was a fun Monday.

When I dropped the table and realised what I had done I went to my boss with my tail between my legs and just said "I fucked up", he didn't get angry and just said well get to work fixing it and so I did.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-08 09:22:13+00:00
>But it really is.

it really isn't. Calculators don't steal from acuators. Actuators and calculators grabbed from nature. Microwaves didn't take from the fireplace.

People really want to pretend that LLM's aren't just storing massive amounts of other people's data with reckless abandon and pretend instead that it's like the car to a horse. Cars didn't need literal horsepower.

>It's ridiculous to think drawing will become a lost art because of LLM/Diffusal models when we live in a reality where powerlifting is a thing.

I agree that athletes are the last thing to be replaced by our robot overlords. If there's one cheatcode to the human element, it's charisma. And people bouncing balls real good is a trillion dollar industry that warps out entire civlization, from forming hobbies, to shaping what we find as "attractive".

That's more of a cultural thing than a practicality thing, though. People respect athletes. They do not apparently respect artists nor engineers, let alone blue collar work that turns out to be way more expensive to automate.
by poisonborz | 2025-07-08 09:22:23+00:00
Disregarding issues with politics or privacy, I find the rise of Chinese manufacturing quality astonishing. I ordered all kinds of consumer articles in the last 20 years and the improvements have been big and steady. In recent years they also leapfrogged on the service front, like how AliExpress offers Amazon-like return policy despite having fraction of the infra and the wares under tax sanctions. I see not only more chinese cars, but construction and medical equipment. Price/performance is always excelling.

One would think this would trigger some sort of revival and competing from US/EU industries, but not much had happened yet besides lobbying for sanctions.
by pyman | 2025-07-08 09:22:23+00:00
The most tech-savvy students built their own publishing system using ChatGPT. It lets others turn their message into a JSON object, tag it, and add it to the system, which then gets published and shared with everyone using Google Docs.

The prompt they use to export the ChatGPT messages is:

---

Turn the following text into JSON format. The JSON should have three fields: "title", "prompt", and "data". The "title" should be self-generated, based on the main idea or theme of the input text. The "prompt" should be the exact prompt used to generate the "data" section. The "data" should be in markdown format, and it must include the original prompt as a section inside the markdown, followed by the input text. Keep any formatting like headings, bold, italics, and lists.

---

I asked them to include the prompt to preserve context so others can understand their thinking process and the goal behind the message.
by Aeolun | 2025-07-08 09:22:25+00:00
This feels incredibly weird. I and my team never wait on CI for very long because we just throw more machines at the problem. Supplying a whole team of SE’s with unlimited CI costs us the equivalent of 1/4th SE’s salary. We don’t use anything but Github’s built-in caching, and yeah, that’s the main thing making CI slower right now. Never more than 5 minutes though. We certainly never wait for machines to free up.
by godelski | 2025-07-08 09:22:31+00:00
I don't think the question is if humans are a machine or not but rather what is meant by machine. Most people interpret it as meaning deterministic and thus having no free will. That's probably not what you're trying to convey so might not be the best word to use.

But the question is what is special about the human machine? What is special about the animal machine? These are different from all the machines we have built. Is it complexity? Is it indeterministic? Is it more? Certainly these machines have feelings, and we need to account for them when interacting with them.

Though we're getting well off topic from determining if a duck is a duck or is a machine (you know what I mean by this word and that I don't mean a normal duck)
by bigDinosaur | 2025-07-08 09:23:01+00:00
It does, most notably perhaps for things like the Ents and large parts of the battle in RoTK (e.g. Army of the Dead, Oliphaunts). It just did so much practically that it's one of those films where it might be a bit difficult to delineate if you aren't looking closely, similar to films like Fury Road.
by middayc | 2025-07-08 09:23:51+00:00
One benefit can be more interactive development, or interaction with the embedded device. I think various forths were used on embedded systems also because of that.

And some projects just don't require much speed and benefit from a higher level lanuage. Reading a couple of sensors over I2C every few seconds, doing some "business logic" and serving data via a http server over wifi can be simpler to achieve in higher level language and the device will be idle for the most of the time anyway.

Micropython is a nice solution in that niche.

But for some projects you do want a lower level language if not for else maybe for lower battery consumption.
by ralferoo | 2025-07-08 09:24:17+00:00
Over half the UK adult population is married. According to the ONS, 61% of the population aged 16 or above is living with a partner. [1]

Unless the demographics of those with engineering degrees is significantly skewed towards singles, this feels like a very valid assumption. Of course, you might have access to better statistics by profession.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
Show HN: We built a tool to translate sustainability jargon into business speak
by gusbartholomew | 2025-07-08 09:25:46+00:00
We built a simple tool to help sustainability professionals explain their initiatives in plain business terms — tailored to departments like Finance, Ops, HR, or Legal.

It’s called the Sustainababble Translator

Why we built it: Sustainability teams often struggle to get internal buy-in because they speak in jargon (Scope 3, TCFD, regenerative, etc.) while the rest of the business speaks in KPIs, margins, and risk. We wanted to bridge that gap with something fast, fun, and useful.

How it works:

Input any sustainability initiative (e.g. “We need to decarbonize our supply chain under CSRD”)

Choose a department you're pitching to (e.g. Finance)

It returns a translation that explains the same point in language that department understands (e.g. cost reduction, risk mitigation, long-term profitability)

Built with:

Webflow frontend

Make.com webhook

OpenAI API (GPT-4 prompt with department context logic)

Why HN? We know lots of HN readers are building internal tools or navigating B2B change — and this approach could be useful in other domains too (e.g. HR tech, compliance, product strategy).

Try it out → https://www.leafr.com/sustainababble-translator

We’d love feedback, feature ideas, or even brutal critiques.
by 082349872349872 | 2025-07-08 09:26:04+00:00
Aha, I'd originally confused your D with the DISC Directness.

Paul's subaltern comment reminded me strongly of "Life of Brian": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4&t=92s

Re: Rao, I found that I had to deliberately read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization in small chunks with large breaks, because otherwise it all blurs together in terms of being a bunch of h saps being awful to each other. More specifically to his introduction, one can see big differences in the "tournament" between say 1250 and 1500: over that period they go from being a sort of open wargame with a racing-for-pinkslips feel played over the several km of hill and dale between villages, to a sport played in an enclosed pitch in front of an audience, limited to vetted entrants with the appropriate gear.
by louthy | 2025-07-08 09:26:37+00:00
> They're knowingly contributing to abuse of the discovery process to violate privacy

Are they? Are you speculating or do you know something we don’t?

It seems that if the NYT want to know whether ChatGPT has been producing copyrighted material, that they own, verbatim, and also understand the scale of the abuse, then they would need to see the logs.

People shouldn’t be surprised, that a company that flouts the law (regardless of what they think of those laws) for its own financial gain, might end up with its collected data in a legal discovery. It’s evidence.
by yccs27 | 2025-07-08 09:26:45+00:00
I can understand why Rust didn't implement an IO monad (even though I'd love it), but linear types seem like they would fit right in with the rest of Rust. Not sure why they didn't include them.

There's actually two different ways that Rust types can always be discarded: mem::forget and mem::drop. Making mem::forget unsafe for some types would be very useful, but difficult to implement without breaking existing code [1].

Btw, you are correct with linear types - Affine types allow discarding (like Rust already does).

[1] https://without.boats/blog/changing-the-rules-of-rust/
by WouterSpaak | 2025-07-08 09:27:16+00:00
I'm no physicist, but I've worked as a software engineer on energy (and drinking water, which EPANET simulates) infrastructure network design tooling for the last six or so years. It has been my understanding that simulating and validating multimodal network designs, which take into account electricity, gas consumption, district heating, is extremely difficult.

Municipalities definitely have systems that document where everything already is under the ground (though especially in Europe there are many older cities where the data of old pipes is lacking), but for designing new energy networks, an "everything" simulation and solving model is very, very complex.
by iainmerrick | 2025-07-08 09:28:03+00:00
"The guy"? There were two guys, Luis Alvarez and his son Walter Alvarez, a geologist. It wasn't just a case of a famous physicist meddling in a field he knew nothing about.

Edit to add: checking Wikipedia, I see that chemists Frank Asaro and Helen Michel are also credited as part of the core team, although it still gets called the "Alvarez hypothesis".
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-08 09:30:26+00:00
>How many musicians or artists are finding their need to explore similarly met by opportunities that simply didn’t exist in 2002?

Given the current job market: very few. They didn't become SWE founders, they were thrown into dead end jobs as a means to survive. At best, maybe they became music teachers to try and keep the spark alive.

The survivor's bias is pretty strong here.

>If art is expression than we should expect the people who might have wielded a brush or guitar to be building software instead.

everyone expresses differently. Too bad that not all expressions lead to a career that sustains oneself. If you really believe AI will take over programmming, what's the next frontier after building software?

Secondly, most software is product, not art. Most people aren't going to feel like they are expressing anything as they pump out CRUD widgets. That's just modern day pencil pushing.
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-07-08 09:30:32+00:00
> TypeScript works better for Figma's needs, then, over time, new features will be written in TypeScript instead. Indeed, looking at the breakdown of Figma over time would seem to reveal that is what has occurred; Wasm is still used for some per-pixel operations, where its greater control over data layout makes it a win, but the application is composed of relatively more JS than Wasm...

>...if you are building an organization to create a web experience, generally speaking, you would rather pull from the deeper pool of JS developers than the more rarified C++/Wasm skill set

This is ultimately answering the reason why above, but it's important to point out the most critical parts of Figma and the reason Figma is worth what it is are the WASM/GPU accelerated parts which make all the interaction snappy and fluid, even the multiplayer stuff is downstream from this.

But also because it's a huge company now and a lot of the developers they hire could never create those critical parts of course the rest of it will bloat out as developers justify their existence.