MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EGreg | 2025-07-04 08:13:55+00:00
I will answer your question directly, after having explained the core issue.

Mysql and Postgresql does in fact have push. It is called replication. The protocol is documented. So, much like a webhook with HTTP protocol, you can ingest changes on a table with a php long-running client and then simply update your apcu cache entries if they are still being stored, and matching that row. And all your PHP processes (managed by php-fpm or FrankenPHP or whatever) will benefit from that atomic apcu update.

There is nothing that says only another mysql server can be a mysql replication client.

Boom, solved. Even in your case. Note that the SQL database did in fact expect you to open a socket, and then it writes its log to that socket. That’s all the streaming events you need.

But now you’re gonna say “but but no you cant have a long running PHP client, we’re talking about a shared hosting environment where the host disables your ability to run a long PHP service that opens a socket”. Well, look. Most of the difficultu is that you’re intentionally trying to use the most clunky architectures just to “prove” that “cache invalidation is really hard.”

Shall we continue with Naming next? :)
by Aissen | 2025-07-04 08:15:39+00:00
This is why it's good to have automated tooling that can do semantic changes on your language and standard library use. Go has `go fix` even if it was only used in pre-1.0 days AFAIK. It is never lost because this type of tooling can be used as the foundation for linters, refactoring tools, etc. Is there such a solution in Zig?
by close04 | 2025-07-04 08:15:54+00:00
> That’s why no one cares about your false equivalency.

It's more because people especially in the US are so partisan and self-centered right now that anything that even remotely sounds like it doesn't fully match their views leads to brain shutdown and autopilot rage mode.

That's why it takes 3 very clear explanations for you to understand but still not quite (understanding takes effort and brainpower, but anyone can mash the trigger for free). That's why you can start by saying "you are right" and end with "but nobody cares because the 'publicans/libs". And that's why things are going the way they are over there.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-04 08:16:18+00:00
> When you're a beginner, it's totally normal to not really want to put in the hard work. You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. Of course a machine where you can just say "a picture in the style of Pokémon, but of my cat" and get a perfect result out is much more tempting to a 12 year old kid than the prospect of having to grind for 5 years before being kind of good.

Fair point; I think this feeling is exacerbated by all the social media being full of people looking like they're good at what they do already, but it rarely shows the years of work they put in beforehand. But that's not new, compare with athletes, famous people, fictional characters, etc. There's just more of it and it's on a constant feed.

It does feel like people will just stop trying though. And when there's a shortcut in the form of an LLM, that's easy. I've used ChatGPT to write silly stories or poems a few times; I look at it and think "you know, if I were to sit down with it proper I could've written that myself". But that'd be a time and effort investment, and for a quick gag that will be pushed down the Discord chat within a few minutes anyway, it's not worth it.
by quonn | 2025-07-04 08:16:18+00:00
> pretty damn hard sending money in the EU too

You literally enter an IBAN and the transfer will appear in the other account the next day. And if you need the money in the target account immediately (within 10 seconds) you can do it, too, by checking a checkbox for a small fee and that fee will drop to ZERO across the EU in October 2025.
by rincebrain | 2025-07-04 08:16:55+00:00
People who argue over "does this follow the rules" are missing the point.

In a tabletop setting, the rules are there to facilitate the shared experience, whatever it might be. If you have a table that enjoys 6 hours of rules lawyering, great, have fun. If you have a table where every so often you have to stop them from shoving the rules lawyer in a locker and throwing them in the marianas trench, great.

But the key point is, it's a shared sandbox and everyone is supposed to find it engaging, without actively ruining each other's experiences, and anything else is more or less secondary. The interesting part is more or less the human fuzziness and collaboration of it.

I was once in a tabletop one-shot where the DM had premade character sheets for all of us. I noticed almost immediately that there was a tac nuke on mine, and when I asked, the DM admitted that they had accidentally left it on there from the thing it was copied from, and let me keep it.

An hour or two later, when the oneshot had devolved into people all taking potshots at each other from cover, our mission having rapidly unraveled, I pressed the big button on the thing nobody else in the party knew I had, the DM sighed and informed everyone that not only were we all dead, but a significant fraction of the city we were in was now gone.

In many environments, that would have been actively hostile to the other players' enjoyment, and gotten me banned from the table, but in this case, it was both very funny for everyone and not the end of the oneshot, because then on our next bodies, we all rapidly had to switch to fighting to get everyone else blamed for what just happened without admitting anything any of us weren't supposed to know.

So there are certainly tabletop settings where the table vibe is going to be that pitching a solution like the Peasant Railgun is going to fit, and there are certainly cases where even proposing it is going to get you moved down a tier or three on the DM's "do I want them at my next game" internal counter. You just need to not be so bad at reading the room that you actively spoil other people's fun.
by OvbiousError | 2025-07-04 08:17:26+00:00
> Bitcoin failed as a currency because the people who got most invested in it do not care about currency

As far as I understand, bitcoin is fundamentally unusable as a currency. Transactions are expensive and limited to ?7k? every few seconds. It's also inherently deflationary, you want inflationary currency, you want people spending, not hoarding.
by saubeidl | 2025-07-04 08:17:34+00:00
In related news:

* Data centers powering artificial intelligence could use more electricity than entire cities [0]

* Google’s emissions up 51% as AI electricity demand derails efforts to go green [1]

* AI is poised to drive 160% increase in data center power demand [2]

It is a doomsday cult in the most literal sense.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/23/data-centers-powering-ai-cou...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/google-em...

[2] https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-...
by rasur | 2025-07-04 08:18:29+00:00
Emacs user here, and the whole "electric-mode" stuff (for matching parens or other balanced pairs of things) I find really quite useful. And closing a pair is usually something like shift+enter, which is quite simple (but also - at least in Emacs - generally completely configurable). I think the benefits outweigh the pitfalls, personally.

Can't speak to other editors though.. I don't want to sound like I'm trolling, but they generally feel quite clunky, compared to Emacs (ducks, runs ;p )
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by EGreg | 2025-07-04 08:19:18+00:00
See the thread below. Caches only become stale if you refuse to implement any sort of push architecture. And even then, frequent batch-polling with etags will quickly resolve it. (eg right after you used N entries, poll to see which of the N have changed).

Bloom filters, Prolly trees etc can speed the batch polling up. But push architecture obviates the need for it prevents caches from being stale, it’s called eventual consistency.

(Well, of course unless there is a network partition and you can’t communicate with the machine holding the actual source of truth then yeah, your local cache will be stale. And to catch up on missed updates you will need to request all updates since a certain marker you saved. If the upstream had a ton of updates since your marker and can’t send the entire history since your marker then you might have to purge your cache for that specific table / collection, yeah.).
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-04 08:20:01+00:00
> People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is.

No it's not (like OP's article says). With a calculator you punch in 10 + 9 and get 2 immediately, and this was 50+ years ago. With an LLM you type in "what is 10 + 9" and get three paragraphs of text after a few seconds. (this is false, I just tried it and the response is "10 + 9 = 19" but I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect). With a microwave you yeet in food and press a button and stuff happens the same way, every time.

Sure, if you abstract it to "doing things in an easier and lazier way", LLMs are just the next step, like IDEs with built in error checking and code generation were since 20 years ago. But it's more vague than press button to do a thing.
by aredox | 2025-07-04 08:20:04+00:00
>Also, making your own website is kinda hard? You have to, like, learn things.

That seems snarky ("you don't want to learn things") when the reality is that the problem, the finite ressource that is the bottleneck, is _time_.

This is also why hyperlinks are underused: few people go through every single one of the words in their last post to try to add appropriate hyperlinks.
by matsemann | 2025-07-04 08:21:25+00:00
> and it’s wrong often enough

How is it ever wrong, though? If I insert a (, and then a {, and the editor appends so that it's ({}), that's always ?correct. Can it ever not be.

Maybe because on a Norwegian keyboard { is a bit awkward, but I like it. Then even if we're 5 levels deep with useEffect(() => {(({[{[ I can just press ctrl+shift+enter and it just magically finishes up everything and put my caret at the correct place, instead of me trying to write ]}]})) in the correct order.
by MrDrMcCoy | 2025-07-04 08:22:17+00:00
I don't know that customers have really cared that much about console hardware for several generations. They care about their games working well enough to be enjoyed, and only upgrade when they have to for the next game to work at all. Bad behavior like this just means people like me are going to boycott them until the games can be emulated on something better. I would even be willing to pay an emulation tax if it meant I could get legitimate copies and use them as I please within reason, and I know I'm not alone in that.
by pm215 | 2025-07-04 08:22:38+00:00
I think there's still a difference even if you look at it as "supervising a bunch of juniors". I'm happy to review the output of a human in that case because I believe that even if they got some stuff wrong and it might have been quicker and more interesting for me to just do the thing, the process is helping them learn and get better, which is both good in itself and also means that over time I have to do the supervision and support part less and less. Supervising an LLM misses out both of those aspects, so it's just not-very-fun work.
by b112 | 2025-07-04 08:23:04+00:00
There are a lot of variables here, and one is the sun. The other is time.

We can certainly, even without genetic engineering breed crops more suited for shorter growing time frames.

There are a lot of corn hybrids, some mature fast, others far slower. Some require more sun, others less. For example, some of the faster growing varieties only take 60 days to mature, others 100+. But here's the thing. Those are 60 "good weather" days. As in not too much cloud, not too unseasonably cold or warm, reasonable amounts of rain and water, and so on.

As corn takes time to grow and mature, it doesn't matter how much sun you throw at it, it still only grows so fast. Up North, even if it's warmer, you still need enough sun too. Compressing the sun around the summer solstice doesn't help. Giving it 22 hour long days of sun doesn't just magically make the corn grow 2x as fast as an area with 11 hours of usable sun.

And the spring is still "rainy season". Some crops can't take too much rain.

Where I live, a local farmer grows traditional yellow corn, as some prefer it over newer, 'peaches and cream' hybrids. But some years? It just doesn't mature. Too much cloud, or other inclement weather (too hot, too cool, to much sun, etc) and being further north means there is little wiggle room in the growing season.

I guess my point is, Northern areas will require only certain crops. That's fine of course, and it will indeed feed people, but some crops won't be on the table.

One thing that may have already helped Russia, is the extensive work the Soviets put into breeding crops to grow further north:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/04/fruit-trenches-cul...

While I do not doubt the weather is more mild in Russia these days, it's also quite erratic. At least it is here in Canada. Some winters mild, then bam a winter of "old". So I wonder if the above breeds have given Russia a leg up on taking advantage?
by cess11 | 2025-07-04 08:23:19+00:00
I don't, I use static maps and aerial photos, and sometimes satellite photos. I also don't have a microwave oven, in part because they are highly unreliable depending on where certain molecules ended up in the bucket in the freezer and so on.

However, I do have a pressure cooker and a rice cooker that gets a lot of use. They're extremely reliable and don't use much electricity and I can schedule what they do, which is bulk cooking without me having to care about it while it happens.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-07-04 08:23:40+00:00
I think I share the conclusion, but coming at it from the other side.

The point of doing things is the act of doing them, not the result. And if we make the result easily obtainable by using an LLM then this gets reinforced not destroyed.

I'm going to use sketching as an example, because it's something I enjoy but am very bad at. But you could talk in the same way about playing a musical instrument, writing code, writing anything really, knitting, sports, anything.

I derive inspiration from other people who can sketch really well, and I enjoy and admire their ability. But I'm happy that I will never be that good. The point of sketching (for me) is not to produce a fantastic drawing. The point is threefold: firstly to really look at the world, and secondly to practice a difficult skill, and thirdly the meditative time of being fully absorbed in a creative act.

I like that the fact that LLMs remove the false idea that the point of this is to produce Art. The LLM can almost certainly produce better Art than I can. Which is great because the point of sketching, for me, is the process not the result, and having the result be almost completely useless helps make that point. It also helps that I'm really bad at sketching, so I never want to hang the result on my wall anyway.

I understand that if you're really good at something, and take pride in the result of that, and enjoy the admiration of others at your accomplishments, then this might suck. That's gotta be tough. But if you only ever did it for the results and admiration, then maybe find something that you actually enjoy doing?
by black_puppydog | 2025-07-04 08:24:11+00:00
On the other hand, if you're in climate science, what are you supposed to do? The science is pretty clear right now, what we lack is political action.

Yet when climate scientists stop using the carefully-weighed language of academia to demand actual, effective and efficient action now, they get scolded as activists, emotional, non-objective, etc...

This is just to say I can understand that people just want to contribute within their realm of possibilities.
by Ezhik | 2025-07-04 08:25:25+00:00
I feel it. We can debate AI over and over and over but my ultimate problem is not even the tech itself but the "whatever" part.

I'm a bit annoyed with LLMs for coding, because I care about the craft. But I understand the premise of using them when the end goal is not "tech as a craft" but "tech as a means". But that still requires having some reason to use the tech.

Hell, I feel the "tech as a means to get money" part for people trying to climb up the social ladder.

But for a lot of people who already did get to the top of it?

At some point we gotta ask what the point of SEO-optimizing everything even is.

Like, is the end goal optimizing life out of life?

Why not write a whole app using LLMs? Why not have the LLM do your course work? Why do the course work at all? Why not have the LLM make a birthday card for your partner? Why even get up in the morning? Why not just go leave and live in a forest? Why live at all?

What is even the point?
by juliangmp | 2025-07-04 08:25:50+00:00
Obligatory C is not a low level language: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479

I also have to disagree with C++ for micro controllers / bare metal programming. You don't get the standard library so you're missing out on most features that make C++ worthwhile over C. Sure you get namespaces, constexpr and templates but without any standard types you'll have to build a lot on your own just to start out with.

I recently switched to Rust for a bare metal project and while its not perfect I get a lot more "high level" features than with C or C++.
by senko | 2025-07-04 08:25:57+00:00
That's one reading of that paper.

The other is that they intentionally forced LLMs to do the things we know are bad at (following algorithms, tasks that require more context that available, etc) without allowing them to solve it in a way they're optimized to do (write a code that implements the algorithm).

A cynical read is that the paper is the only AI achievement Apple has managed to do in the past few years.

(There is another: they managed not to lose MLX people to Meta)
by wiseowise | 2025-07-04 08:26:16+00:00
> I used to be the guy who could figure out obscure scripts by google-fu and rtfm and willpower. Now that skill has been completely obliterated by LLMs and everyone’s doing it- except it’s mostly whatever

And thank fuck it happened. All of shell and obscure Unix tools that require brains molded in 80s to use on a day to day basis should’ve been superseded by something user friendly long time ago.
by vidarh | 2025-07-04 08:26:19+00:00
It wasn't meant to mean more than showing that yours was just "just me and my friends", and it did that.

> at least I have the evidence of the extremely large and vibrant Amiga games industry.

And for the business use we have the evidence of the sales of the bigger models that were totally unattractive for games, the multiple magazines targeting business use, and the number of businesses built exclusively on selling solutions that were for a long time only available for the Amiga, like the Video Toaster.

Nobody has argued with you that games weren't important for the Amiga (but your thesis that the Amiga failed due to consoles falls apart when we consider that the Commodore subsidiaries that focused more on selling it as a games computer survived longer when Commodore failed), but that it was not nearly as singularly sold as a games machine. Even Commodore UK, which was perhaps the most gaming focused of the Commodore subsidiaries also got significant revenue from business use.

EDIT: I'd also add that there isn't like there haven't been extensive analysis on this, such as Brian Bagnall's book series on Commodore, or Jimmy Maher's "The Future Was Here". We know a lot about Commodore's internal issues and their finances that was not public knowledge at the time. Commodore was horribly mismanaged more than anything else, and there are many competing reasons that contributed to the fall of Commodore, and while the consoles certainly contributed too, there's not much evidence it was anywhere near the only, or main, reason.
by ipsum2 | 2025-07-04 08:27:18+00:00
I recently wrote some Javascript to automate clicking coupons. The website checks for non-human clicks using event.isTrusted. Firefox allowed me to bypass this by rewriting the JS to replace s/isTrusted/true, while Chrome Manifest V3 doesn't allow it. Anyway, Firefox might be the future of agents, due to its extensibility.
by zem | 2025-07-04 08:29:14+00:00
> The famous example of this is Chicken Tikka Masala, which is a British take on Indian food.

as an indian i have to push back against this myth a bit - chicken tikka masala might have been invented in the UK, but it's a variant on similar indian dishes (butter chicken in particular) that not only would be right at home in many restaurants within india, but actually is! i don't even consider it fusion cuisine; it was invented by a south asian chef who happened to be living in the UK at the time, and the flavour profile is as "authentically" indian as any of the other standard punjabi-inspired north indian restaurant classics.
by KaiserPro | 2025-07-04 08:29:32+00:00
Up until recently, I could, if I wanted to have a living doing VFX. I could, if I wanted to, craft new worlds, and get paid for it.

In two years, that won't be the case.

Its the same for virtually all other Arts based job. An economy that currently support say 100% of the people now, will at most be able to support 10-30% in a few years time.

> It's ridiculous to think drawing will become a lost art because of LLM/Diffusal

Map reading is pretty much a dead art now (as someone who leads hikes, I've seen it first hand)

Memorising books/oral history is also a long dead art.

Oral story telling is also a dead art, as is folk music, compared to its peak.

Sure _rich_ people will be able to do all the arts they want. Everyone else won't
by Y-bar | 2025-07-04 08:29:45+00:00
I initially downvoted you, but on second thought I’m actually a bit sympathetic to your argument. We see a similar pattern happening elsewhere. E.g. US citizens being round up by paramilitary forces and shuttled without due process to places which can almost be described as concentration camps. All for the stated crime of maybe entering the country improperly. The argument goes that they do not deserve anything else because they are ”illegals”.

Doing one bad thing does not necessarily justify other bad things done to you.

That said, I don’t like this cheating-enabling software either and think the world would be a better place without it.
by gigatexal | 2025-07-04 08:30:48+00:00
Much of my anger is actually for the minds behind project 20205 and the decades long effort by a cabal of people to basically create a king and dunk on the libs at the expense of everything America used to stand for.

I also legit hate the orange idiot in office now. But that’s maybe a me thing.

Also the eroding of the rule of law is very very disconcerting.