MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GlibMonkeyDeath | 2025-07-18 20:10:56+00:00
If you want an excellent short story that explores what happens when the ability to recognize human beauty can be modified, I recommend this from Ted Chiang:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liking_What_You_See:_A_Documen...

I had to keep reminding myself that it was written in 2002.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-18 20:11:07+00:00
On one hand, the distro developers can’t really prevent people from, say, hitting their computers with a sledgehammer or something. So to some extent, the users have to be trusted.

But, maybe it would be best not to have “yay” available. Using something like AUR without reading the package build files is… pretty bad, right? And it is bad for the community, because if there is a convention of doing that sort of thing, it makes the AUR a good target for attacking.
by qsort | 2025-07-18 20:11:10+00:00
I agree, but with the caveat that it's probably a bad time to fall asleep at the wheel. I'm very much a "nothing ever happens" kind of guy, but I see a lot of people who aren't taking the time to actually understand how LLMs work, and I think that's a huge mistake.

Last week I showed some colleagues how to do some basic things with Claude Code and they were like "wow, I didn't even know this existed". Bro, what are you even doing.

There is definitely a lot of hype and the lunatics on Linkedin are having a blast, but to put it mildly I don't think it's a bad investment to experiment a bit with what's possible with the SOTA.
by malcolmgreaves | 2025-07-18 20:11:14+00:00
> In my personal experience I have found that when an experienced programmer who really seems like they should know better is making some weird sounding arguments about how type systems decrease their productivity and don't prevent enough bugs to be worth it, they seem to usually be complaining about the lack of row polymorphism (or the closely related structural subtyping) in popular statically typed languages, just without having the technical vocabulary for it.
by Viliam1234 | 2025-07-18 20:11:21+00:00
> What about the cognitive overhead of writing a for loop? You have to remember what's in the array you're iterating over, how that array interacts with maybe other parts of the code base, and oh man, what about those pesky indices! Does it start at 0 or 1?

I am old enough to remember people complaining about having to write a semicolon at the end of each line. Or declare a variable...
by johnisgood | 2025-07-18 20:11:23+00:00
I find it odd to call a specific Linux distribution blazingly fast.

Gentoo with make.conf (/etc/portage/make.conf[1]) having "CFLAGS="-O3 -march=native -flto"" means that Gentoo, a Linux distribution, is performant?

[1] It is not a good idea to build everything with LTO or PGO enabled because not all packages support LTO / PGO cleanly. Do it on the basis of per-package.
by ghaff | 2025-07-18 20:11:31+00:00
If the lawyers and the financial analysts need Windows Office for certain uses let them use them. But I'd note that the first edition of a book I wrote a while back had a Sharepoint workflow and had moved away by the second edition.

The licensing/support is cheaper carries some weight. But Windows to Linux mostly didn't win a lot of fights on the desktop. But Google Docs for collaboration and general simplicity does win over a lot of companies.
by cnst | 2025-07-18 20:11:59+00:00
I think a bigger issue is that AI is being used to censor footage from the owners of the camera themselves. There's been stories about gunshots being censored from the owners of the camera by Ring.

Why would you pay for a security device, which would prevent you from having access to your own security data in case of a security incident?

Honestly, this is one of the many reasons I'd never get a Ring. Quite frankly, I don't even understand why they're so popular given that the hardware is quite subpar, dependability/reliability is dismal, the subscriptions are mandatory, and alternatives from all the other brands are so plentiful. Even Blink, even though it's also owned by Amazon, has a better rep and feature set (2-year battery life, local recording, super small size compared to Ring, to name a few features, although reportedly it still requires an internet connection at all times).
by linsomniac | 2025-07-18 20:12:13+00:00
>Isn't the whole promise of AI tools that they just work?

No, not at all. Like with pretty much any development tool, you need to get proficient with them.

>what skill am I missing out on

At this point, it seems like pretty much all of them related to generative AI. But, the most recent of them that I'll point at is: tooling tooling tooling, and prompting. But the specific answer (to answer your "exactly") is going to depend on you and what problems you are solving. That's why on tries not to fall behind, so you can see how to use tooling in a rapidly evolving landscape, for your exact circumstances.

>I think I'm a reasonably good communicator in both voice and text, so what skill am I failing to train by not using LLMs right now?

You know how to achieve something you will use different words with different people? You don't talk to your spouse the same way you talk to your parents or your children or your friends or your coworkers, right? You understand that if you are familiar with someone you speak to them differently if you want to achieve something, yes?
by mikert89 | 2025-07-18 20:12:30+00:00
The big secret is that they could detect cancer very early in most people, but the health care companies don't want to pay for the screening. You can pay out of pocket for these procedures. I was told this by a cancer researcher

EDIT:

Adding these caveats:

1. There is a ton of nuance in the diagnosis, since most people have a small amount of cancer in their blood at all times

2. The screenings are 5-10k + follow up appointments to actually see if its real cancer

3. All in cost then could be much higher per person

4. These tests arent something that are currently produced to be used at mass scale
by rorylaitila | 2025-07-18 20:12:52+00:00
I'm in an adjacent area, cataloging my huge collection of periodicals for my vintage ad collection (adretro.com). The biggest thing that helped me that I didn't see you mention but maybe I missed it: taking book cover photos to populate the inventory. OpenAI vision can easily extract the book, author and meta data. This speeds up the data entry considerably. I scan a whole box of periodicals and upload a zip of all the images. My software extracts the info. So for yours, if I just take photos of all the books on a shelf, it could handle the rest.
by akerl_ | 2025-07-18 20:12:58+00:00
It seems like you may not be familiar with Arch?

No, makepkg doesn’t run in a sandbox. The system tries to stop you from running it as root, but otherwise all validation of the trustworthiness of the pkgbuild and any sandboxing of the build process are left up to the user. This is part of why pacman, the 1st party package manager, does not fetch from the AUR.

Likewise, it would be generally against the Arch ethos to have the default behavior of the package manager interact with a 3rd party service. If a user wants that action, they’d need to perform it themselves.
by potatolicious | 2025-07-18 20:13:20+00:00
It is birthplace, so if you were a Bengladeshi national but were born in CH, you would fall into the Swiss queue (which is the "everyone else" queue).

If this is you, congratulations, this is the shortest possible line. Though, if you were Bengladeshi-born I think you may actually be in the same queue? The queues are India/China/Mexico/Phillipines/Everyone Else.
by sshine | 2025-07-18 20:13:25+00:00
I've met many people smarter than myself who object to all of those.

One professor thought syntax highlighting was a distraction.

Lots of colleagues used vim/helix instead of IDEs.

I haven't met anyone who refused version control from an intelligent standpoint.

The most reasonable objection to AI from people who don't hate it are:

I just don't know how it could help me; it's not as skilled as me at my job, and I'm already doing fine.
by lawstudent967 | 2025-07-18 20:13:26+00:00
I’m a midlife career changer about to start law school at 45 after 20 years in tech, and right now I am trying to figure out if criminal defense or immigration is the field I want to pursue since I have relatively equal passion for each but neither keeps me up at night so to speak. What would you say I should be thinking about to reach answers that I am more likely to be happy with in terms of the choices that will determine the major contours of my career as an attorney? Or am I asking the wrong question and should instead be asking something else entirely?
by wvenable | 2025-07-18 20:13:54+00:00
I do read my migration scripts generated from an ORM to make sure my source code is correct.

Liquibase starts with "Write your database change code in your preferred authoring tool in SQL, YAML, JSON, or XML." So instead of just having my ORM generate that and I just have to read them to ensure correctness, I have to manually write change scripts instead? I don't see how that's is comparable.

Liquibase could certainly come in after I have some SQL scripts generated from my ORM and do whatever it does.
by butterisgood | 2025-07-18 20:14:02+00:00
It's kind of true...

I can do a lot of things asynchronously. Like, I'm running the dishwasher AND the washing machine for laundry at the same time. I consider those things not occurring at "the same time" as they're independent of one another. If I stood and watched one finish before starting the other, they'd be a kind of synchronous situation.

But, I also "don't care". I think of things being organized concurrently by the fact that I've got an outermost orchestration of asynchronous tasks. There's a kind of governance of independent processes, and my outermost thread is what turns the asynchronous into the concurrent.

Put another way. I don't give a hoot what's going on with your appliances in your house. In a sense they're not synchronized with my schedule, so they're asynchronous, but not so much "concurrent".

So I think of "concurrency" as "organized asynchronous processes".

Does that make sense?

Ah, also neither asynchronous nor concurrent mean they're happening at the same time... That's parallelism, and not the same thing as either one.

Ok, now I'll read the article lol
by deadbabe | 2025-07-18 20:14:52+00:00
Don’t you ever let people make you think you have to tirelessly follow some tech progress or stay on top of things all the time.

Progress is like a bus. You can just get on board at any time. You’re not going to fall behind. And staying up to date doesn't keep you “ahead” of anyone.

Doing things is what gets you ahead, and if you don’t feel like doing something right now, don’t worry about, do something later, and you’ll be ahead of people who aren’t doing anything at that moment.
by websap | 2025-07-18 20:15:45+00:00
As someone currently on the H1B program, and working in tech for the past 10 years, how do I navigate the current climate in the US? Especially when sentiment around H1B workers is at an all time low - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606374 ?

I love working in the cutting edge of tech, but no other part of the world has been able to replicate this model the way Bay Area, SF, Seattle, and now NYC has. Great companies, ambitious people, new emerging tech, and large compensation.

Are there other countries where YC sees companies originate from and they prove with a path to citizenship for software engineers?
by cb321 | 2025-07-18 20:16:08+00:00
At those time scales, you would be better off using `tim` ( https://github.com/c-blake/bu/blob/main/doc/tim.md ) than hyperfine { and not just because that is your name! Lol. That is just a happy coincidence by clipping one letter off of the word "time". :-) } even though being in Nim might make it more of a challenge.
by TheMagicHorsey | 2025-07-18 20:16:09+00:00
Never attribute malice where incompetence is a sufficient explanation.

Microsoft isn't intentionally obfuscating the docx. Docx is a shit-show because hundreds upon hundreds of Microsoft business initiatives, executive pet projects, and ancient compatibility rules have all collided to make a giant pile of dung.

If LibreOffice is worried about what docx does to their productivity ... you should see the fucking engineers lamenting INSIDE Microsoft about what it does to their friggin productivity.

This horseshit isn't anyone's plan. This horseshit is an emergent phenomenon like a fucking termite hill in your back yard ... where no single termite is responsible or knoweldgeable, but all of them together made a pile that breaks your lawnmower.
by vidarh | 2025-07-18 20:16:24+00:00
Unless humans exceed the Turing computable, the human brain is the existence proof that a sufficiently complex Turing machine can be made to replicate human thought in a compact space.

That encoding a naive/basic UTM in an LLM would potentially be impractical is largely irrelevant in that case, because for any UTM you can "compress" the program by increasing the number of states or symbols, and effectively "embedding" the steps required to implement a more compact representation in the machine itself.

While it is possible using current LLM architectures might make encoding a model that can be efficient enough to be physically practical impossible, there's no reasonable basis for assuming this approach can not translate.
by chamomeal | 2025-07-18 20:16:32+00:00
I mean I didn’t find out about Claude code until like a week ago and it hasn’t materially changed my work, or even how I interact with LLMs. I still basically copy paste into claude on web most of the time.

It is ridiculously cool, but I think anybody developer who is out of the loop could easily get back into the loop at any moment without having to stay caught up most of the time.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-18 20:16:40+00:00
> And thirdly, folks in the C suite became convinced that AI is going to replace software engineers so they've quite hiring them.

I think this is the real reason for much of the layoffs.

The other reason is simply that the market isn't punishing layoffs. You get rewarded as a CEO for laying off employees and saying "It's because AI makes them obsolete"
by tines | 2025-07-18 20:16:40+00:00
Can you explain more instead of linking a paper? I felt like the definitions were alright.

> Asynchrony: the possibility for tasks to run out of order and still be correct.

> Concurrency: the ability of a system to progress multiple tasks at a time, be it via parallelism or task switching.

> Parallelism: the ability of a system to execute more than one task simultaneously at the physical level.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-07-18 20:16:46+00:00
I strongly agree with this sentiment and found the blog's list of "high signal" to be more a list of "self-promoting" (some good people who I've interacted with a fair bit on there, but that list is more 'buzz' than insight).

I also have not experienced the post's claim that: "Generative AI has been the fastest moving technology I have seen in my lifetime." I can't speak for the author, but I've been in this field from when "SVMs are the new hotness and neural networks are a joke!" to the entire explosion of deep learning, and insane number of DL frameworks around the 20-teens, all within a decade (remember implementing restricted Boltzmann machines and pre-training?). Similarly I saw "don't use JS for anything other than enhancing the UX" to single page webapps being the standard in the same timeframe.

Unless someone's aim is to be on that list of "High signal" people, it's far better to just keep your head down until you actually need these solutions. As an example, I left webdev work around the time of backbone.js, one of the first attempts at front end MVC for single pages apps. Then the great React/Angular wars began, and I just ignored it. A decade later I was working with a webdev team and learned React in a few days, very glad I did not stress about "keeping up" during the period of non-stop changing. Another example is just 5 years ago everyone was trying to learn how to implement LSTMs from scratch... only to have that model essentially become obsolete with the rise of transformers.

Multiple times over my career I've learned lesson that moving fast is another way of saying immature. One would find more success learning about the GLM (or god forbid understanding to identify survival analysis problems) and all of it's still under appreciated uses for day-to-day problem solving (old does not imply obsolete) than learning the "prompt hack of the week".
by kybernetikos | 2025-07-18 20:16:53+00:00
>> one doing the job ten use to.

> This would increase employment ceteris paribus.

This might be true, but if it is, the one "doing the job ten use[d] to" would not actually being doing the same kind of work at all, and so therefore might not be the same people or even same kind of people. Even if we do Jevons ourselves out of this situation, it might still spell employment disaster for mid level coders, while increasing employment for product managers.
by favorited | 2025-07-18 20:17:22+00:00
Even though markitdown is a Microsoft project, it's just a thin wrapper around a bunch of 3rd party Python packages. For example, to go from docx to Markdown, it uses mammoth to convert docx to HTML[0], then uses markdownify to convert the HTML into Markdown[1].

[0]https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/blob/da7bcea527ed04c... [1]https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/blob/da7bcea527ed04c...
by jd3 | 2025-07-18 20:17:54+00:00
> What is especially remarkable, however, is how quickly the Fox News report appeared and then vanished. Internet sources say that when someone stumbles upon evidence of a possible conspiracy, such as the ones noted above, most journalists say it’s nothing but trouble to pursue it. Even if leads are developed, editors tend to ignore them. Some make it clear that such leads can hurt the writers professionally. Eyewitness reports regarding the Israeli peddlers from authoritative sources, however, make the story of the Israeli squads impossible to dismiss.

https://www.wrmea.org/2002-may/israeli-trainees-and-mossad-a...
by Someone | 2025-07-18 20:18:09+00:00
> The designers of NFS chose to make a distributed system emulate a highly consistent and available system (a hard drive),

> The original NFS protocol is stateless,

The protocol is, but the underlying disk isn’t.

- A stateless emulation doesn’t know of the concept of “open file”, so “open for exclusive access” isn’t possible, and ways to emulate that were bolted on.

- In a stateless system, you cannot open a scratch file for writing, delete it, and continue using it, in the expectation that it will be deleted when you’re done using it (Th Unix Hater’s handbook (https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf) says there are hacks inside NFS to make this work, but that makes the protocol stateful)

> It didn't require every existing tool, such as ls, to deal with things like the server rebooting while listing a directory

But see above for an example where every tool that wants to do record locking or get exclusive access to a file has to know whether it’s writing to a NFS disk to figure out how to do that.
by dingnuts | 2025-07-18 20:18:27+00:00
this is just ridiculous. you can get up to speed with SOTA tooling in a few hours. A system prompt is just a prompt that runs every time. Tool calls are just patterns that are fine tuned into place so that we can parse specific types of LLM output with traditional software. Agents are just a LLM REPL with a context specific system prompt, and limited ability to execute commands

none of this stuff is complicated, and the models themselves have been basically the same since GPT-2 was released years ago
Show HN: Draggy – menu bar companion to clippy (better pbcopy)
by nberkman | 2025-07-18 20:19:43+00:00
You download files in your terminal but need to drag them to web upload fields. Switching to Finder kills flow. Draggy makes clipboard files draggable - copy any file → click menu bar → drag anywhere.

Part of a terminal clipboard suite that replaces pbcopy:

- clippy: Copy files from terminal that paste as actual files (not just contents)

- pasty: Copy file in Finder → `pasty` → file appears in current directory

- draggy: Makes clipboard files draggable for upload fields

Example workflow:

# download directly to clipboard curl -sL https://picsum.photos/300 | clippy # Click draggy in menu bar # Drag to web form, Slack, email

Recent downloads with interactive picker:

clippy -i # choose from recent files clippy -r # copy most recent download clippy -r 5m # all downloads from last 5 minutes

Also includes MCP server - Claude Code can place text directly in your clipboard:

claude mcp add clippy /opt/homebrew/bin/clippy mcp-server

Install:

brew install neilberkman/clippy/clippy # CLI tools brew install --cask neilberkman/clippy/draggy # Menu bar app

Technical: CLI tools are Go with Objective-C bindings. draggy is Swift/SwiftUI with zero background activity - only checks clipboard when clicked.

Note: First launch shows macOS security warning (not code-signed). Run: `xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Draggy.app`
by notatallshaw | 2025-07-18 20:19:56+00:00
> that's like suggesting someone complaining about security issues should fork libxml or openssl because the original developers don't have enough resources to maintain their work.

I disagree with this analogy, both those libraries have complex and nuanced implementation details which make forking difficult to work in a compatible way. PyPI does not, you can host a simple index with existing libraries and have 100% compatibility with all Python package installer tools.

And YET, openssl has been forked by companies a bunch of times exactly because it lacks resources to do significant security analysis of it's own code.

> for pypi that means raising funds that we can contribute to.

PyPI accepts funds, feel free to donate.

> so instead of arguing that the PSF doesn't have the resources, they should go and raise them. do some analysis on what it takes, and then start a call for help/contributions. to get started, all it takes is to recognize the problem and put fixing it on the agenda.

This is all already being done, it appears like you haven't done any research into this before commenting on this topic.
by bayindirh | 2025-07-18 20:20:27+00:00
I also went through a very generalist CS course, that we call Computer Engineering, which covered from hardware to software plus math, physics, chemistry.

I was already a nerd when I was attending the university. My chance was my instructors and professors let me roam free and convert every assignment to a rabbit hole. Poisoned by demoscene earlier, I was already an elegance/performance freak before even I got graduated, and this made me dive into unknown territory head-on instead of being afraid of it.

I have written a compression algorithm from scratch for graduation, then written a multi-agent trading system for M.Sc. project. For Ph.D. I have written a BEM based material simulation which was able to saturate the system very effectively, reaching practical IPC limits of the processors it ran on.
by asdff | 2025-07-18 20:20:37+00:00
I'm surprised at this point apple still lets prototype hardware offsite with apparently no telemetry/location tracking/logging. Seems like they have a storied history of stuff like this. I looked up the old prototype iPhone 4 left at the bar story and apparently that isn't the only time that has happened with their prototypes, happened with other prototype iPhones as well. Not like you'd be testing prototype hardware at a bar or Mexican restaurant I don't think...

Ironically this case in particular would have been solved if the employee actually ate their own dogfood and used faceid.