MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitwize | 2025-07-29 20:40:03+00:00
You explained and elaborated very well on why I've always thought the PC was doomed to win. By the early 1990s, IBM compatible hardware was not under the control of a single company anymore. It was an ecosystem which could survive the death of any one company, and where innovation can be driven forward by any of its participating companies. Suddenly the Amiga's custom chips don't seem so sexy anymore; before 1995, PCs were rocking high-res video cards with their own blitters and sound hardware capable of CD-quality sound, in multiple channels sometimes (see Gravis UltraSound). The main proprietary link was now in software, to wit: Windows, but when Linux came along Windows was no longer the sole linchpin.

So I think you're right. There's no universe in which the Amiga was a serious contender. Every company is at risk of management blunders or changing market tides, and the scene is littered with the corpses of proprietarily integrated platforms that fell with their parent companies: not just the Amiga but Atari ST, SGI, Sun, DEC, Lisp machines, etc. The PC ecosystem outlasted them all and just kept going on, delivering the advantages those systems had in a cheaper, more accessible package.

The sole exception was Apple. I think Apple won in the long run by subsidizing Mac development with iPod/iPhone/iPad sales, and what this means is yet another market turn away from general purpose computing and toward devices that only run approved curated "apps" and are discarded rather than upgraded. Maybe Commodore could have anticipated this back in the day, but it would have been against the Amiga spirit I think.

I still love my Amiga 500. What it can do was amazing in the late 1980s, and I'm content to appreciate that for what it is.
by ayewo | 2025-07-29 20:40:19+00:00
That's easy. It's due to a psychological concept called: transfer of learning [0].

Perhaps the most famous example of this is Warren Buffet. For years Buffet missed out on returns from the tech industry [1] because he avoided investing in tech company stocks due to Berkshire's long standing philosophy to never invest in companies whose business model he doesn't understand.

His light bulb moment came when he used his understanding of a business he understood really well i.e. their furniture business [3] to value Apple as a consumer company rather than as a tech company leading to a $1bn position in Apple in 2016 [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_learning

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33612228

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/16/warren-bu...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/08/billionaire-investor-warren-...
by SkyPuncher | 2025-07-29 20:40:27+00:00
The study you're referencing doesn't make that conclusion.

It concludes theres a learning curve that generally takes about 50 hours of time to figure out. The data shows that the one engineer who had more than 50 hours of experience with Cursor actually worked faster.

This is largely my experience, now. I was much slower initially, but I've now figured out the correct way to prompt, guide, and fix the LLM to be effective. I produce way more code and am mentally less fatigued at the end of each day.
by IshKebab | 2025-07-29 20:40:31+00:00
It definitely depends heavily on how well represented the subject is on the internet at large. Pretty much every question I've asked it about SystemVerilog it gets wrong, but it can be very helpful about quite complex things about random C questions, for example why I might get undefined symbol errors with `inline` functions in C but only in debug mode.

On the other hand it told me you can't execute programs when evaluating a Makefile and you trivially can. It's very hit and miss. When it misses it's rather frustrating. When it hits it can save you literally hours.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-07-29 20:40:35+00:00
I thought the bar was that you had to prove that it doesn't discriminate which a is much higher, I thought this is what drove many settlements.

Personally I would rather limit all price discriminations to a simple predictable and publicly inspectable customizable formulae. It's like the finance guys who exalt the virtues of increased liquidity but that disappears the moment you try to use it. Similar for the extra complexity for price discovery.
by WastedCucumber | 2025-07-29 20:40:46+00:00
I just want to mention that the cat-related example of the author's CatAttack method (table 2) changes the answer from 8 to, of course, 9.

Unfortunately, this is, if I'm not mistaken, in fact the only cat-related CatAttack in the paper, the other methods being financial advice and a red herring. I was eapecting more cat facts, but instead I remain thoroughly disappointed and factless.
by amelius | 2025-07-29 20:41:56+00:00
I don't agree with that definition. For a given model I want to know what I can/cannot expect from it. To have a better understanding of that, I need to know what it was trained on.

For a (somewhat extreme) example, what if I use the model to write children's stories, and suddenly it regurgitates Mein Kampf? That would certainly ruin the day.
by hbn | 2025-07-29 20:41:59+00:00
The discussion I replied to was just regarding whether or not what the LLM did should be considered "engineering"

It doesn't really matter whether or not the original code was published. In fact that original source code on its own probably wouldn't be that useful, since I imagine it wouldn't have tipped the weights enough to be "recallable" from the model, not to mention it was tasked with implementing it in web technologies.
by dcminter | 2025-07-29 20:42:25+00:00
The use case for me is mostly hotel stays. When travelling for fun I don't particularly want the weight (and risk) of packing my laptop, but I would like to be able to play movies and music on the hotel TV. With a cheap light keyboard I could also do email and similar light admin things with the benefit of the bigger screen.

Until recently I was also travelling frequently for work with a heavy MacBook running a variety of Enterprise malware that would prevent me from doing any personal stuff with it - being able to use my own phone for light leisure activities that I normally do on the personal laptop would have been very useful for the boring hotel evenings. Adding another kg+ of laptop to the already heavy backpack was too annoying to put up with - my cheapo bluetooth keyboard and mouse weigh in at a much more acceptable 280 grams.

In short, there's a use case - but most phones are too locked down to take full advantage of the possibility.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-07-29 20:42:39+00:00
They made their point poorly but their argument is not fallacious. They are saying that the Americans who make the relevant decisions at Visa/Mastercard have their own reasons for making this decision and are probably not simply capitulating to a foreign special-interest group. (Of course, they could have more effectively gotten their point across by actually describing it.)

The point is that leaders at Visa/Mastercard probably think it's very convenient that Collective Shout exists because it lets them blame that group for their decisions. And it seems to have worked given how so many members of this not-uninformed audience refuse to look past Collective Shout to see that Visa/Mastercard made a decision to change their policy.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-29 20:43:29+00:00
> By my reading - there's a ton of red tape and paperwork.

It might help if you referenced the section what defines those requirements.

I don’t recall seeing anything that required such red tape unless there was special circumstances after the fact (for example, reporting child porn that was uploaded to your site, or responding to a police or court order).

But these kinds of rules exist for freedom of information et al too.

Maybe I’ve missed something though?

> Heck, there's a ton of work even getting to the point of understanding what work you need to do.

That is a fair point.

Unfortunately it’s also not novel to this legislation. Running any site that allows for public contributions opens one’s self to lots of different laws from lots of different countries. For some counties in the EU, Nazi content is illegal. Different countries have different rules around copyright. Then there’s laws around data protection, consent, and so on and so forth.

This law certainly doesn’t make things any easier but there has been a requirement to understand this stuff for decades already. So it’s a bit of a stretch to say this one new law suddenly makes a burden to run a site insurmountable.

However I do agree with your more general point that it’s getting very hard to navigate all of these local laws at scale.

> And dismissing the fear of life-changing financial liability as "being spooked" is not helpful.

It’s an unfounded fear though, so my language is fair. You’d use the same language about any other unfounded fear.

This is the crux of the point. People are scared, and I get why. But it’s completely unfounded. If people still want to discriminate against UK IPs then that’s their choice as they have to weigh up the risks as they perceive them. But it doesn’t mean it’s any likelier to happen than, for example, being in a plane crash (to cite another fear people overcome daily).

———

That all said, maybe everyone blocking UK IPs could be a good thing. If everyone shows they don’t consider it safe to operate in the UK then our government might consider revoking this stupid law.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-29 20:43:30+00:00
Do you want people to read the thing or not. Giving the exact course name as the title guarantees very few people will read it. Telling the potential reader there's a class few people know about has a better chance. I think we can all agree that the point of any written text is for someone to read it at some point. How many books have titles that are descriptive of the contents and not something just to get you to at least pick it up and read the jacket? How many titles of movies or music albums as well? Just so as we are all clear that your attempt to be pedantic on a title definition was very much ignoring anything but something like a news headline
by szszrk | 2025-07-29 20:43:33+00:00
No. I'm just saying that "there are no HDMI devices near me" is weird and hard to achieve.

To use my phone as a desktop all I need is the phone itself. USB cable I most often already have to charge it. Phone works as a keyboard and mouse and I have large screen to browse web, play, watch videos. ZERO new devices, only things I already carry and a screen that is already there.
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-29 20:43:36+00:00
> The Open Source Initiative themselves decided a last year to relax their standards for AI models: they don't require the training data to be released.

Poor move IMO. Training data should be required to be released to be considered an open source model. Without it all I can do is set weights, etc. Without training data I can't truly reproduce the model, inspect the data for biases/audit the model for fairness, make improvements & redistribute (a core open source ethos).

Keeping the training data closed means it's not truly open.
by deltarholamda | 2025-07-29 20:43:54+00:00
You don't have to hold the stick, generally. For painting, yes, but you wouldn't have to when writing. It would just hold your hand up a little bit.

Maybe try a dowel with a glob of clay or something on the end and see?

The biggest crime to lefties is the fold-away half-size writing desk you see in lecture halls.
by dzikimarian | 2025-07-29 20:44:00+00:00
I think both cases pose similar risk from security standpoint. I'm not perfect, they aren't either. There's a lot of nuance about attack surface, available tech/resources, effort of average employee vs mine etc. But all in all let's call it roughly equal.

I just prefer to host by myself and I think it's perfectly reasonable alternative. Far from "utterly insane".
by bayindirh | 2025-07-29 20:44:19+00:00
Yes, metropolitan is not a “super sealer” which you can leave for a period, then pick up and write. It demands to be used regularly. It also doesn’t like to stand nib-up for long periods.

Because of it, I generally EDC it with a good, low maintenance inks, and try to use it very regularly. As an EDC pen, the nib balances its quirks.

Lamy 2000 and Pilot Custom 823 are two of the most patient pens I have ever used in that regard.
by lirena00 | 2025-07-29 20:44:23+00:00
yes, definitely I am with you at that point, they are a great way to do this without a doubt although I am a windows user (lol) and also even if it's very fast to toggle the color filters via shortcut keys. I don't think so that I will be willing to toggle it off when I visit any work-related website like GitHub, Figma and such so site exclusion of this extension works really great for me in that perspective.
by scheeseman486 | 2025-07-29 20:45:45+00:00
There's a rule I always follow when a developer does things like this: do they have a history of histrionics? In this case, yes, so I'm inclined to believe their personality is a major factor in whatever controversial decision that's been made. All emulator authors (and free software developers in general) deal with bogus bug reports and I'm sure they're annoying, but taking rash actions that end up deliberately inconveniencing people isn't an action taken to help a project, it's a tantrum.

Of course it's their project to do as they will, but I don't have any empathy for their problems with the community. At this point it's clear they're mostly self inflicted. Perhaps it's ego, a lack of emotional self control, impatience with others, but there are plenty of emulator projects that chug along just fine without constant news of the authors doing something stupid, in spite of dealing with the same irritations every day.
by rented_mule | 2025-07-29 20:46:22+00:00
Years later, when all memory of intent is long gone, I'd much rather work on a large code base that errs on the side of too much "throat clearing" than one that errs on the side too little. `sleep 1` tells what was written, which may or may not match intent.

Many bugs come from writing something that does not match intent. For example, someone writes most of their code in another language where `sleep` takes milliseconds, they meant to check the docs when they wrote it in this language, but the alarm for the annual fire drill went off just as they were about to check. So it went in as `sleep 1000` in a branch of the code that only runs occasionally. Years later, did they really mean 16 minutes and 40 seconds, or did they mean 1 second?

Leaving clues about intent helps detect such issues in review and helps debug the problems that slip through review. Comments are better than nothing, but they are easier to ignore than variable names.
by wongarsu | 2025-07-29 20:46:34+00:00
Humans would get distracted by the statement. Moving from a pure-math context to a cat-facts context and back has context switching costs, and depending on the exact setting those can be quite relevant. If it was an academic test some people might even get stuck on the cat part, wasting lots of time trying to decipher what role it plays

And the paper isn't just adding random sentences, it's primarily about engineering the most distracting pointless facts to add to the problem. That would absolutely work against humans, even if for humans the exact sentence might look quite different
by yencabulator | 2025-07-29 20:46:34+00:00
I definitely do not enjoy the font choice in your first link. The Go font has been pretty good for me. My editor is configured to use "Go" (not "Go Mono"), I don't even notice when I switch from editing prose to editing code.

"Distinguishing similar characters" is just as much of a concern for me when I'm editing technical documentation as when I'm editing source code. Once again, the Go font has served me well. Previously I used some other humanist style font from from the Ubuntu people that had that classic IBM slash-through zero. Some fonts have overly-aggressive ligatures and such, but those fonts should not be used in any technical context, source code is not special.

Alignment is a non-issue because wanting alignment is bad. There, solved that ;-) Arbitrary diff noise over multiple lines because you added one line at the end is a problem, not a goal!

I interact with other programmers just fine. Your linked article seems to be re-engaging in the tabs-vs-spaces flamewar in an era of gofmt rustfmt et al. It's a total non-issue.

Give it two weeks.
by pardner | 2025-07-29 20:46:36+00:00
Saw your link, did your test and here's my feedback.

No "share" or "download" button in the app? Sure, "apps are cool" and all that - but what about folks who want to archive or share their health data? AFAIK literally no provision to share all those nifty biomarkers with my doctor (except many, many screenshots)?

Nowhere in the "how to get blood test" email instructions does it bother to mention a urine sample will also be needed. Kinda useful to know if you should not pee right before heading to the lab.
by tomhow | 2025-07-29 20:46:38+00:00
Previously:

Linux Performance Analysis in 60,000 Milliseconds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10652076 - Nov 2015 (11 comments)

Linux Performance Analysis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10654681 - Dec 2015 (82 comments)

Linux Performance Analysis in 60k Milliseconds (2015) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44070741 - May 2025 (1 comment)
by iLemming | 2025-07-29 20:46:52+00:00
You seem to have been frustrated with prescriptive programming advice and language evangelism, which is understandable. Yet it looks like you're conflating Hickey's design philosophy with language zealotry. The talk's core message about reducing accidental complexity remains valuable, even if the presentation style and some specifics, sure, can be characterized as debatable.

I can buy your vocabulary criticism - fair point, okay. Although vocabulary often can help crystallize concepts. Clojure's internal mutation - alright, accurate observation. Clojure uses mutation internally for performance while presenting an immutable interface. This does show pragmatism over purity. "Tooling doesn't fix bad coders" - true. No language or paradigm prevents bad code if developers don't understand the principles. Immutability isn't always best - correct. Even functional languages acknowledge this (IO monads, ST monad, etc.), but Clojure doesn't force immutability - it provides default immutability with escape hatches.

Now things that I can't agree with:

"Academic blabla" is outright dismissive. The talk addresses real architectural problems many developers face. The criticism of ORMs isn't just about "complexity" - it's about impedance mismatch, hidden performance costs, and leaky abstractions. These are well-documented issues. "Must be simple" is a misrepresentation of Hickey's point. He advocates for simplicity as a goal, not an absolute rule. Builder pattern equivalence is oversimplification. Persistent data structures offer different guarantees than builders (structural sharing, thread safety, etc.).
by empath75 | 2025-07-29 20:46:52+00:00
I generally will respond to stuff like this with "people do this, too", but this result given their specific examples is genuinely surprising to me, and doesn't match at all my experience with using LLMs in practice, where it does frequently ignore irrelevant data in providing a helpful response.

I do think that people think far too much about 'happy path' deployments of AI when there are so many ways it can go wrong with even badly written prompts, let alone intentionally adversarial ones.
by kenjackson | 2025-07-29 20:46:56+00:00
“The deeper I go, the less it seems to be useful. This happens quick for me. Also, god forbid you're researching a complex and possibly controversial subject and you want it to find reputable sources or particularly academic ones.”

These things also apply to humans. A year or so ago I thought I’d finally learn more about the Israeli/Palestinians conflict. Turns out literally every source that was recommended to me by some reputable source was considered completely non-credible by another reputable one.

That said I’ve found ChatGPT to be quite good at math and programming and I can go pretty deep at both. I can definitely trip it into mistakes (eg it seems to use calculations to “intuit” its way around sometimes and you can find dev cases where the calls will lead it the wrong directions), but I also know enough to know how to keep it on rails.
by stared | 2025-07-29 20:47:11+00:00
> I love fireflies. But in recent years, they stopped coming for reasons I don’t know. No tiny, glowing dots in the dark like they used to. I miss them more than I expected.

Light pollution, and even more: pesticides.

Population of all insects fall dramatically.

"Three-quarters of flying insects in nature reserves across Germany have vanished in 25 years" - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/18/warning-...
by stego-tech | 2025-07-29 20:47:25+00:00
Bill Gates spoke of this context-aware OS at a lecture in the mid-00s. He specifically called out future phones (this was pre-iPhone era) that would have location context (work/home/mobile) and load secure, sandboxed datastores and profiles depending on that context. He also spoke at length about how desktop computers would transform into accelerators, like your gaming GPU at home or your additional processors and memory at your workstation. It was a grand vision of ultimate portability, with clear lines between work and personal lives enabled through technology.

Then he showed off the Fossil MSN watch, and suggested future iterations may do away with phones entirely and act as methods of identification for digital systems.

And then, like all things Microsoft, they abandoned the concepts entirely. Apple and Google cribbed most of the ideas for themselves in some form or another and saw wild success with them, though to date nobody major has really attempted to create that mobile vision Gates spoke of - other than Maru, and for a time, Google on Android.

It’s a shame, really. I like the idea of validating my public key via NFC from my Apple Watch to login to work machines or my home boxes (a la SSH). Seems like it’d be easier to wrangle in the long run, especially with job hopping being the norm.
by theothertimcook | 2025-07-29 20:47:32+00:00
“ I originally provided this an alternative to the broken AUR packages.

However, it seems that Arch users would rather use broken packages and keep complaining to me instead of their packager. I specifically forbid packages for DuckStation (see README.md), and there's no way to request removal of these packages without handing my details over to a distribution I want nothing to do with.

So this is step one. Next step will be removing Linux support entirely, because I'm sick of the headaches and hacks for an operating system that only compromises 2% of the userbase, and I don't even use myself. But I'm hoping the Linux community will be reasonable, because as someone giving up my free time and not being compensated in any way, I shouldn't have to deal with this.

Just grep the source for "wayland" and you'll see what I mean.”
by vidarh | 2025-07-29 20:47:56+00:00
I'm not convinced we'd have liked the direction with Hombre, but consider how the Amiga community did embrace PowerPC. It's clear a substantial portion of the community is willing to accept large breaks with the hardware. To me, elements of the OS are far more important, and I find my Linux environment gets closer and closer... I even have assigns of a sort...
by Hammershaft | 2025-07-29 20:48:23+00:00
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon

The reduction in windshield bug splats has more to do with the decline in insect populations.

EDIT: I originally said 75% decline over 30 years. Those are the results for studies in parts of Germany. We don't have solid data on global loss in insect populations.