MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Bratmon | 2025-08-22 00:12:38+00:00
> It's easy to fall into a trap where your Banana class becomes a GorillaHoldingTheBananaAndTheEntireJungle class(to borrow a phrase from Joe Armstrong), and nothing ever gets freed because everything is always referenced by something else.

Can you elaborate on this? I'm struggling to picture a situation in which I have a gorilla I'm currently using, but keeping the banana it's holding and the jungle it's in alive is a bad thing.
by otterley | 2025-08-22 00:12:45+00:00
> in exchange for you not taking a short-cut writing it in the first place.

This “short cut” language suggests that the quality of the submission is going to be objectively worse by way of its provenance.

Yet, can one reliably distinguish working and tested code generated by a person vs a machine? We’re well past passing Turing tests at this point.
by rchaud | 2025-08-22 00:12:53+00:00
You're conflating managerial economics with macroeconomics. CEOs at publicly traded companies aren't hired to enhance the long-term productive capacity of the firm ("growing the economy"); they're there to calm investor nerves and make the stock sexy. Those only have a very slight correlation to the overall health of the economy. Microsoft grew revenue and profits under Steve Ballmer, but the stock stayed flat, so he had to go.

It'd be great if public companies could grow market share by beating competitors by with better prices or service, but that takes long-term strategic planning and no surprises from government, activist investors, suppliers and employees. CEOs don't have that kind of time, so they reach for familiar tools: restructuring (mass firings), selling off parts, and yes, share buybacks, because these tools move the needle that matters. During their quarterly earnings calls, they answer to Wall Street analysts, who represent the interests of shareholders, not employees or economic policymakers.

As for "economic illiteracy", the very concept is nonsensical. Every economy is structured differently and what's "sensible" changes over time. If you asked a US economist whether they thought zero interest rate policy (2008-2022) was a good idea, they'd think you were talking about a communist society with a desperate government trying to manufacture growth. But this is how every western economy largely operated after the Great Recession. They'd probably take a dim view of venture capital as well, considering its portfolio strategy ignores operational profit targets in favor of IPO windfalls. That's how you end up with abominations like SPACs, where companies can go public with a fraction of the financial transparency that would otherwise be required.
by sifar | 2025-08-22 00:13:24+00:00
My 4a didn't have the battery issue due to GrapheneOS, however, it the screen died recently (twice), so I got a pixel 9 with GrapheneOS. But yeah, it is uncomfortable to use the phone with one hand - I miss the small sized 4a.

On the other hand, it would be fun to explore these on device SLMs on a more capable phone with extra ram/storage.
by therealpygon | 2025-08-22 00:14:25+00:00
I’m not sure how you got that 2.2% of 18.5 trillion in GDP attributed to labor is 61 billion, so I’d agree that math doesn’t seem accurate.

Additionally, you seemed to have pulled the cherry-picked quote and compared with the “current” impact and ignored the immediately following text on latent automation exposure (partially extracted for quote) that explains how it could have a greater impact that results in their 2.3t/39m estimate numbers. Seems odd to find those numbers in the report but not read the rest of the same section.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-08-22 00:14:46+00:00
>if American progressivism wasn't so economically illiterate

Economists by and large tend to be academically and principally in support of many progressive positions so I'm not sure your statement can be read any other way than "I don't like perspectives that disagree with my primed and preconceived beliefs"

Which is an exceedingly common phenomena in a post-truth world. But it's quite obvious; just want to point that out to you.

For decades, professional American economists vote for the democratic party at a rate greatly exceeding the general population and profess support for ideological progressive positions that is also at a notable rate higher than the general population.

You know, there's also something to say about how people invoke the term "economics" in their own personal posts as some sort of grandstanding dog-whistle but we'd be here for hours.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-22 00:15:13+00:00
Applied ML is truly blessed by being incredibly empirical.

So many crackpots get filtered by "oh, if your new theory is so good and powerful, then show a small scale system built on it". This hard filters 99% of crackpots, and the remaining 1% usually builds something that performs within a measurement error of existing systems.

Grand Theories Of Everything don't have such a filter. There is no easy demonstration to perform, no simple experiment to run that would show whether string theory has merit. So we get very questionable theories, and then a lot of even more questionable theories, and then crackpots and madmen as far as eye can see.

The curse on physics isn't that it has crackpots. It's that the remaining unsolved problems are incredibly hard, the space of solutions is vast, and there isn't enough experimental data coming in to quickly weed out the obviously wrong ones.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-22 00:15:45+00:00
The Bjarne quote is basically sales pitch for a recurring rationale to make C++ worse and worse. It was, I suppose, not unreasonable to assume Bjarne was sincere the first time, but that was a long time ago. Here's how it goes:

1. “Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out”

2. However just subsetting the language to get at the smaller one would not be a cleaner language. Instead we must first make a superset language, adding features, then we can subset this new language to reach our smaller but cleaner C++

3. Step one, superset will land in C++ N+1. Planning of that "subset of a superset" will need to wait until we've completed that work.

4. C++ N+1 is an even clunkier behemoth. Rinse and repeat.

I don't understand why people who've seen this happen more than once would stick around. You're not going to get the "smaller and cleaner" language after step two, there is no step two, it's just going to be step one again and then step one again, and then step one again, forever.
by roscas | 2025-08-22 00:16:29+00:00
Last time I checked, Facebook also comes installed on all smartphones, including Chinese makers. If you remove the app, there are still 3 more hidden services. This might come in handy, if you loose car keys or your wedding ring, you just call FB, they will tell you where they are. But it only takes to have an ios or android. Google will 100% know where you are, who you talk to and what you do. What does it matter Russia does it or China? It is the same thing. Well Google already knows that even if you dont have a computer on the pocket.
by jrholmes | 2025-08-22 00:17:05+00:00
I’ve found that communication skills can make or break even the best coders. Writing clean code is one thing, but if you can’t explain decisions, share context, or align with teammates and stakeholders, projects drift and good ideas get lost.

Curious if others here have seen companies actively train engineers in communication, or if it’s still something people are expected to figure out for themselves?
by musicale | 2025-08-22 00:17:11+00:00
> driver of an SUV on West Hudson Boulevard

Tall, heavy vehicles that make pedestrians and cyclists invisible:

https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-safety/new-suvs-hav...

https://www.theautopian.com/full-size-suvs-are-twice-as-like...
by charcircuit | 2025-08-22 00:17:20+00:00
>Expecting Unicode to contain a codepoint for every single rendering variation

It's not just rendering variations. While they are etymlogically related they are made with different strokes and are incorrect to substitute for one another.

Technically Unicode has a variant selector that can be used for selecting between variations of the characters, but this does not have sufficient adoption. So that means pretty much everything has to annotate what language it is written in so it can be rendered correctly, else the system has to check the system settings to guess what language the user likely wants to see things rendered as.
by eru | 2025-08-22 00:18:55+00:00
> Sure it’s a big hill to climb in rethinking IP laws to align with a societal desire that generating IP continue to be a viable economic work product, but that is what’s necessary.

Well, AI can perhaps solve the problem it created here: generated IP with AI is much cheaper than with humans, so it will be viable even at lower payoffs.

Less cynical: you can use trade secrets to protect your IP. You can host your software and only let customers interact with it remotely, like what Google (mostly) does.

Of course, this is a very software-centric view. You can't 'protect' eg books or music in this way.
by oceanplexian | 2025-08-22 00:19:43+00:00
If machines can iterate faster than humans, we'll need machines to do the reviewing; that means the testing/QA will be done perhaps by machines which will operate on a spec similar to what Amazon is doing with Kilo.

Before PR's existed we passed around code changes via email. Before containers we installed software on bare metal servers. And before search engines we used message boards. It's not unfathomable that the whole idea of how we contribute and collaborate changes as well. Actually that is likely going to be the /least/ shocking thing in the next few years if acceleration happens (i.e. The entire OS is an LLM that renders pixels, for example)
by aresant | 2025-08-22 00:20:48+00:00
Feels like a mixed bag vs regression?

eg - GPT-5 beats GPT-4 on factual recall + reasoning (HeadQA, Medbullets, MedCalc).

But then slips on structured queries (EHRSQL), fairness (RaceBias), evidence QA (PubMedQA).

Hallucination resistance better but only modestly.

Latency seems uneven (maybe more testing?) faster on long tasks, slower on short ones.
Ask HN: Non-Smart TV Recommendations?
by behnamoh | 2025-08-22 00:21:12+00:00
I don't want a trojan horse in my living room, I want a good ol' TV that's good at just being a screen. No "smart" features but great image quality.

PS: I'm also open to smart TVs that can be "jailbroken" or severely restricted to remove all their "smartness".

My use case: Watch shows streamed from my laptop via HDMI, play games, etc.
by astrange | 2025-08-22 00:21:53+00:00
TSMC already manufactures chips in the US, much of their value add comes from European companies like ASML and Zeiss, and the fundamental technology EUV was invented in the US.

> and homeschool kids for 15 hours per day with the world’s best educational resources

Taiwan doesn't have the world's best educational resources - what language do you think they're written in?

Btw, when they did try to do this, they ended up with a national epidemic of myopia and had to make the kids go outside.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/01/shortsighted-t...
by escapedmoose | 2025-08-22 00:21:59+00:00
I have the same experience. Until 30 I was one of those people who schedules every hour of their life, used habit trackers religiously, set SMART goals and recorded metrics of how I spent time. I got settled financially/professionally/personally and over the past few years have dropped the old productivity methods. This year I decided to drop the last of them entirely, with great results. Focusing on the moment at hand and following my instincts has made me a lot happier so far, and is still leading to great opportunities.

Maybe it works because we kept our heads down until we were settled, and loosened up after gaining enough experience to develop good instincts? Interesting to hear someone else has taken a similar path with similar results!
by gpm | 2025-08-22 00:22:00+00:00
Yeah, that's the gas turbine thing. The first-stage (which generates the majority of the power) isn't boiling water, but extracting energy directly from pressure from burning the gas in a jet-engine like fashion.

The coal/nuclear like natural gas is what is labelled as "Steam Turbine" in the chart in this article: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61444

Looks like it's already a small minority.
by eru | 2025-08-22 00:22:17+00:00
In many places that's a fairly recent development: publishing pirated IP used to be much more of a legal problem than consuming it.

Also publishing pirated IP without any monetary gain to yourself also used to be treated more leniently.

Of course, all the rules were changed (both in law and in interpretation in practice) as file sharing became a huge deal about two decades ago.

Details depend on jurisdiction.
by ajross | 2025-08-22 00:22:39+00:00
Seems like that would be a good anecdote to cite and not "I read it once on some forum", no? I mean... come on. Yes, it's possible it went down like that in a way that confirms all your libertarian priors about government overreach or whatnot.

But given the sourcing, my money is on "Some rube got roped into taking 'payment' as part of a laundering scheme and was left holding the bag". Real fraud is rampant and pervasive. Libertarian fantasies are usually just that.
by potatolicious | 2025-08-22 00:23:32+00:00
> "I think they're trying to say AI generated code-pushers are often getting fuzzy on speccing out the behavior guarantees of their own software."

I agree, and I think that's the root of the years-long argument of whether programmers are "real" engineers, where "real engineering" implies a level of rigor about the existence of and adherence to specifications.

My take on this is though that this unseriousness really has little to with AI and entirely to do with the longstanding culture of software generally. In fact I'd go as far as to say that pre-LLM ML was better about this than the rest of the industry at-large.

I've had the good fortune to be working in this realm since before LLMs became the buzzword - most ML teams had well-quantified model behaviors! They knew their precision and recall! You kind of had to, because it was very hard to get models to do what you wanted, plus companies involved in this space generally cared about outcomes.

Then we got LLMs, when you can superficially produce really impressive results easily, and the dominance of vibes over results. I can't stand it either, and mostly am just waiting for most of these things to go bust so we can go back to probabilistic systems where we give a shit about quantification.
by autoexec | 2025-08-22 00:24:11+00:00
The news intentionally pushes stories to make people afraid, but I think that's only part of the problem. There's a ton of well-earned distrust in the institutions which are supposed to protect us. Our "justice" system is corrupt from top to bottom. Agencies that should be working to protect the public are instead helping corporations exploit them. Even our representatives don't actually represent us or our interests and vast numbers of people already don't see any point to voting in a clearly rigged system while the rest are gerrymandered and disenfranchised by it.

For most of American's history each generation was better off than the previous one, but that's no longer the case. People's standard of living is in decline. They are forced to watch their children struggle in ways they never had to. The things that made people feel safe and stable and part of a community like homes and jobs with pension plans are out of reach for most people. More and more people are sliding into poverty.

All of this leads to a situation where people increasingly feel that they have to look out for themselves and that makes people fearful and distrustful.
by NoFunPedant | 2025-08-22 00:25:30+00:00
Addressing the problem at the source would be a broad-based political movement that demanded enforcement of the First Amendment and a restoration of constitutional norms. That kind of political movement isn't a pipe dream -- two political scientists have extensively studied how nonviolent popular movements have overturned dictatorships: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240678278_Why_Civil...

Democracy did not come to exist because our rulers graciously granted it, but because the people demanded it and fought for it. Our current abandonment of democracy is not happening because the rulers have so much power, but because we the people continuously grant them power through our own inaction. A broad-based political movement could successfully halt the slide toward fascism and restore democracy.

I am sure many people will dismiss this idea as naive. I would ask them to consider two possibilities: (1) Maybe the perception that political action is futile is not a rational judgment based on facts, but a cultural prejudice based on a fashion for cynicism. (2) A widespread perception that political action is futile is a necessary condition for authoritarian government. People who believe that political action produces practical results are more likely to engage in political activity that restrains the power of elites.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-08-22 00:25:44+00:00
RealPlayer in the late 90s turned into (working) Napster, Gnutella and then the iPod in 2001, Podcasts (without the name) immediately after, with the name in 2004, Pandora in 2005, Spotify in 2008. So a decade from crummy idea to the companies we’re familiar with today, but slowed down by tremendous need for new (distributed) broadband infrastructure and complicated by IP arrangements. I guess 10 years seems like a long time from the front end, but looking back it’s nothing. Don’t go buying yourself a Tower Records.
by 1659447091 | 2025-08-22 00:27:03+00:00
> the idea of going on a shopping expedition with a gun is absolutely foreign to me

If you ever visit Texas take a look around the entrances to stores, shops, restaurants, bars etc. You should see large white signs with a "gun-buster" and a 30.0* code. or a large "51%" symbol in red. It would be incredibly rare to see a person with an open carry gun thou

30.05 is to tell people that "constitutional carry" (carry without a LTC) is not allowed on the property. A person with a License to Carry may carry on the property.

30.06 says a LTC person may not conceal carry on the property.

30.07 says a LTC person may not open carry on the property.

The 51% lets people who carry know that the establishment has a liquor/beer permit and receives 51% of income from sales of alcohol. Meaning it's a felony to bring a firearm onto the premises. The others are misdemeanor trespass

Then you may see a reminder 46.03 sign at places like schools, sporting venues etc as a reminder that weapons (not just guns) are not allowed.
by Infernal | 2025-08-22 00:27:04+00:00
I think the comment you're replying to agrees with you - it makes more sense with the last two quoted sentences swapped. I could be wrong but this interpretation seems consistent with the rest of the comment.

"Many software companies hire smart people as CPO, Product Director, or Head of Product because they have leadership skills, people skills, and some knowledge of the industry. Some companies go even further and promote an engineer with project management experience to Head of Product. But most have little to no background in business, marketing, economics, or product development."
by mc3301 | 2025-08-22 00:27:09+00:00
In my observation, reviews (in general) are different in Japan. Look at something simple like google maps reviews of restaurants or clinics. The bad reviews are often extremely personal and not really representative of what most people would experience.

"I really didn't want to speak with anyone or make eye contact, but the staff cheerfully greeted me and seemed to want to talk to me. One staff even looked at me from behind the counter while I was drinking my coffee." >> One star
by almostgotcaught | 2025-08-22 00:27:15+00:00
> it shouldn't break fundamental rules of the language

it doesn't? you simply don't understand what a match statement is.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-03-pattern-syntax.html

let num = Some(4); match num { Some(x) if x % 2 == 0 => println!("The number {x} is even"), Some(x) => println!("The number {x} is odd"), None => (), }

notice that x is bound to 4.
by yakattak | 2025-08-22 00:28:10+00:00
Game Informer is doing the same. I got the most recent copy and it was just a breath of fresh air. Articles written for their content, not to fill some quota or drive clicks. It was a month late (mostly stuff about SGF) but it didn’t matter. I got to read what these passionate writers thought of the games and demos there and that was a great read, even if it wasn’t “news”.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-08-22 00:28:48+00:00
No, not even sure how you arrived to that conclusion. The idea is that there are models out there that can run on small amounts of VRAM. If all it costs is charging your phone, as opposed to some subscription to some overvalued AI company, people will choose ‘free’ first. We have models that can google things now. They only need to know so much when online, and a specific subset when offline.
by westurner | 2025-08-22 00:29:01+00:00
Speculative execution > Variants,: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_execution

Transient execution CPU vulnerability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_execution_CPU_vulner...

Does RISC-V have speculative execution?

A RISC-V CPU out of graphene would be more efficient.
by kelnos | 2025-08-22 00:30:09+00:00
I think you're missing the point. I honestly don't think the rich people with hidden bank accounts really bothered those in power that much. Why would they; those people are their friends, in many cases.

People in power want more power. They want more control, even over average, law-abiding people. They want to moralize and tell you what you should be buying and consuming. Power over others is the goal; it's not incidental. The random Swiss bank account holder is the pretext, not the reason.
by potatolicious | 2025-08-22 00:31:30+00:00
> "because LLMs are not part of the probabilistic environment of the domain you're engineering; rather, you're injecting new probabilistic inputs into your system"

You do this as a process engineer also. You don't have to have a human operator inserting the stator into the motor housing, you could have a robot do it (it would cost a lot more) and be a lot more deterministic.

After the stator is in the housing you don't need to have a human operator close it using a hand tool. You could do it robotically in which case the odds of failure are much lower. That also costs a lot.

You choose to insert probabilistic components into the system because you've evaluated the tradeoffs around it and decided it's worth it.

Likewise you could do sentiment analysis of a restaurant review in a non-probabilistic manner - there are many options! But you choose a probabilistic ML model because it does a better job overall and you've evaluated the failure modes.

These things really aren't that different.
by baby_souffle | 2025-08-22 00:31:41+00:00
I got curious, dug through my notes.

> Zigbee SE

is the official name for the standard. Good luck w/ your Utility Company.

> Clamps would work, or the optical connection. But unsure if that's disabled.

If the optical connection isn't disabled, I'd go that route. Clamps are a _pain_ if the space is cramped or the installer did a poor job of keeping things tidy. The upside to clamps is that you get per-circuit and in real time. If you have a dedicated circuit for big appliances, integrating the clamp into Home Assistant is a cheap way to get a "is the dishwasher done?" signal, for example.