MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hilbert42 | 2025-08-02 14:38:37+00:00
"(cyclists do it even more often I'd say, but at lower speeds)."

The behavior of cyclists where I am is a particular problem. Unlike motorcyclists, they're unlicensed and don't even have to know the rules of the road, and it shows.

Trouble is, during an incident between a cyclist and a car driver the sympathy vote is in the cyclist's favor. Especially so in recent times where cycling is seen as 'green' and environmentally friendly and with many cities making car drivers feel as if they're guilty pariahs.

To give you some idea how bad this problem has become where I am (Sydney, Australia) is to consider the street where I live.

It's a one-way street (as it's narrow) but recently the Council has made it two-way for cyclists and painted bicycles on the street to indicate thus—for motorists it's still one-way.

The lunacy of this decision is obvious even to those with a room-temperature IQ. For starters, drivers (usually visitors) often mistakenly drive the wrong way down this street and it's been the situation for years (from street arrangements and local geography it seems the logical way to go, and the sineage is poor and hard to see).

It gets worse, there's a sharp bend in the road so two vehicles approaching from either side cannot see each other and there's nowhere to pull off in an emergency!

Oh, I also must point out that when the Council painted bicycles on the street to indicate their right to two-way usage it also upgraded the far-from-obvious street sign indicating one-way by adding "bicycles excepted" but did nothing to make the sign more obvious. (Words fail me!)

Lunacy has no limits, now consider the same head-on situation between a cyclist and a vehicle, it's a miracle no one has been killed to date (but the change is recent—there's much time to go).

Right, the trendy and electorally savvy, many-term Council has the ear of cyclists and no doubt this dangerous change was the result of cyclists' lobbying.

Not if but when someone is killed then who's to blame? Even if a motorist is found not to be at fault (i.e. driving in the right direction) and is completely exonerated then he/she will have to live with the knowledge that he/she was the driver of a vehicle that killed a cyclist.

What amazes me is that cyclists want this dangerous situation to continue to exist, it seems that sheer convenience takes precedence over their safety in both their minds and that of the Council. More to the point, cyclists seem to have overwhelming confidence in their ability to avoid an accident.

Even more amazing is that this situation can exist in this overly safety conscious, horribly risk averse society.

From my perspective it's high time this nonsense stopped. The first thing would be license cyclists—if nothing else, they'd at least know the road rules.
by qcnguy | 2025-08-02 14:38:51+00:00
Yeah but I think when it was introduced it wasn't a thing you could use separate from the rest of UWP. What changed in Win10 was you could use WinRT APIs from regular Win32 apps too. They started breaking UWP up into independent pieces.

Or not. I haven't thought about this stuff for years. Definitely possible I forgot the ordering of things.
by llaxsll | 2025-08-02 14:39:25+00:00
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by Krasnol | 2025-08-02 14:40:25+00:00
You need to be greedy and selfish to be really successful in this system and being successful in our system begins in school and ends at your workplace where it spoken out loudly and clearly for you to learn. If you are successful, you can buy more things for yourself. Maybe even a few things others not only, don't have, things they might not be able to get at all because they're unique. You don't even have to do anything with those things. Just put them in storage and let them generate you even more money so you can buy even more things.

As someone who grew up under Socialism, this system we have here in the West is a paradise and hell in one.
by impossiblefork | 2025-08-02 14:40:54+00:00
There is definitely a bubble though. Tesla has 28 times larger market cap than other well-run competitors, for example, and there's a bunch of other firms with similarly crazy numbers.

AI is great and it's the future, and a bunch of people will probably eventually turn it into very powerful systems able to solve industrially important maths and software development problems, but that doesn't meant they'll make huge money from that.
by slau | 2025-08-02 14:41:10+00:00
Fully agreed. I t-boned a car that cut me off, doing approximately 60-80 km/h. My shoulder dented the car's roof through the door frame. I went flying through the air and landed on my back, on cement-cast stones protruding slightly from the cement (the decorative edge of the roundabout).

I walked out of the hospital a couple of days later. I wouldn't have been walking then, nor today, if it wasn't for the protective shoulder pads and spine protection in my jacket. It took about 18 months of physiotherapy to stand and walk normally again, but still.

Edit: I realise this is a POV with n=1, but it convinced me.
by qcnguy | 2025-08-02 14:41:25+00:00
Wow that's not at all extraordinary. That's the core of the reason they're paying giant fines. The Ivy Leagues have for years been using admission policies that are designed to reduce the number of Jews, Asians and whites they admit. It's always been illegal but the Democrat administrations never enforced the law because they liked what the colleges were doing. Now there's a new administration that doesn't and wants them to stop. That's the whole story behind what happening, I thought it was well known but apparently there are people who didn't get the story so far?
by slackpad | 2025-08-02 14:41:36+00:00
Really agree with the author's thoughts on maintenance here. I've run into a ton of cases where I would have written a TODO or made a ticket to capture some refactoring and instead just knocked it out right then with Claude. I've also used Claude to quickly try out a refactoring idea and then abandoned it because I didn't like how it came out. It really lowers the activation energy for these kinds of maintenance things.

Letting Claude rest was a great point in the article, too. I easily get manifold value compared to what I pay, so I haven't got it grinding on its own on a bunch of things in parallel and offline. I think it could quickly be an accelerator for burnout and cruft if you aren't careful, so I keep to a supervised-by-human mode.

Wrote up some more thoughts a few weeks ago at https://www.modulecollective.com/posts/agent-assisted-coding....
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-08-02 14:41:50+00:00
> I take this as a contrarian signal that Meta has hit serious roadblocks improving their AI despite massive data advantages

Just a thought:

Assuming that Meta's AI is actually good. Could it rather be that having access to a massive amount of data does not bring that much of a business value (in this case particularly for training AIs)?

Evidence for my hypothesis: if you want to gain a deep knowledge about some complicated specific scientific topic, you typically don't want to read a lot of shallow texts tangentially related to this topic, but the few breakthrough papers and books of the smartest mind who moved the state of art in the respective area. Or some of the few survey monographs of also highly smart people who work in the respective area who have a vast overview about how these deep research breakthroughs fit into the grander scheme of things.
by techpineapple | 2025-08-02 14:42:01+00:00
> Did you not notice a trendline of technological improvement of AI?

No, in fact I noticed a series of AI winters. In all things, progress is famously _not_ a straight line.

Also I find it interesting that your argument seems to boil down to “I’m smart because line goes up, you’re dumb because you think line goes down.” Everyone Clearly can see what would happen if line went up, I just; looking at the broad history and totality of factors(that I’m aware of) don’t think it’s inevitable.

“You can’t stop progress”

We literally stop progress all the time, every time we choose not to invest in something, crypto progress slowed from its height, Vr progress, green energy, I’d argue it’s relatively few technologies that progress forever.
by bonoboTP | 2025-08-02 14:42:02+00:00
Somewhat unrelated, but I also noticed chatgpt now also sees the overwritten "conversation paths", ie when you scroll back and edit one of your messages, previously the LLM would simply use the new version of that message and the original prior exchange, but anything into the future of the edited message was no longer seen by the LLM when on this new, edited path. But now it definitely knows those messages as well, it often refers to things that are clearly no longer included in the messages visible in the UI.
by siva7 | 2025-08-02 14:42:20+00:00
If you have to pay someone (like an a.i.) to not be lonely, that won't solve your loneliness. This is a business transaction meant to illicit emotions (yours) by faking emotions (over a.i.: a computer machine can't have emotions but can only pretend to have), nothing else. Some people will fall for it. The opportunities to abuse millions of these people emotionally and financially are endless. And they will be abused on industrial scale.
by meindnoch | 2025-08-02 14:42:48+00:00
Americans believe diet and exercise "doesn't work". The reasons are twofold: on one hand, this is coming from the fat acceptance / body positivity movement, which needs people to believe that diet and exercise are futile, and being fat is just a fact of life, like being tall or short. They want people to believe that being fat is a disability, or even an attribute of diversity that we ought to accept and celebrate. On the other hand, American food products make it unnecessarily hard to consistently meet your caloric deficit, which makes people wrongly conclude that diet and exercise just doesn't work.
by ncr100 | 2025-08-02 14:42:57+00:00
One wonders if this is merely the age of information, and during "the before times" the rich people really sucked too.

Soap box:

Having A LOT of money can suggest to a person that Everyone Else's Rules Do Not Apply To ME. Because they don't, largely. The trick is not letting that idea infest your mind with fallacies, such as YOUR Rules Do Not MATTER.
by IgorPartola | 2025-08-02 14:43:03+00:00
I’d like to offer an alternative explanation than AI to this. Shit is just too damn expensive. If you want to go hang out with friends it will cost you $4-8 for a cup of coffee. A dinner starts at $50/person. A trip to an amusement park is over $100 easily. The median individual income in the US currently is just over $65k/year or about $32.50/hour. That means half the workforce makes less than that. When an 8oz cocktail costs you an hour of your life because you work for minimum wage, you’d rather stay home and watch TikTok.

But it’s not about the price of going out. It is about the crushing stress of surviving in this economic climate that is leaving people absolutely no energy to go and socialize. Whenever the average personal economy swings back towards “can afford to live in this country” again, people will socialize again. Until then everything will be in decline except stock trading and investment in AI projects.
by lioeters | 2025-08-02 14:43:17+00:00
> Discover the art of crafting extremely small JavaScript programs. In this talk you’ll learn principles and techniques behind crafting compact yet powerful scripts that are shorter than this description! Dive into the captivating world of minimalist coding, where we use these scripts to conjure art, games, tools, and a myriad of intriguing experiments.

Transcript: https://gitnation.com/contents/javascript-haikus-my-adventur...
by hackpit | 2025-08-02 14:43:37+00:00
Hard to beat Wile E. Coyote, ACME products, and the diligent effort to capture the Road Runner. But it was more about that Saturday morning for 1 hour was the only time we as kids were allowed to watch TV. Then it was "Go outside and come back at 5:00 for dinner, don't be late."
by dmit | 2025-08-02 14:44:10+00:00
Heheh, it was mostly a reference to my [and mostly others'!] experiments with encoding human languages in a programming language. There are some pretty neat ideas there to explore, like the difference between Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) and Object-Subject-Verb. Or postfix languages (e.g. Forth) mapping to some human languages.

In this particular example, having a subsequent part of an expression rely on prior parts would usually be accomplished at runtime in most languages. But some (like Idris) might allow you to encode the rules in the type system. Thus the rabbit hole.
by miek | 2025-08-02 14:44:22+00:00
I experienced a similar situation and decided from then on to get a second adult involved before assisting a stranger's kid.

In my situation, a girl was stuck at the top of the highest climbing fixture I've ever seen at a public playground. She was crying for a couple minutes without aid, so I walked over to tell her that I'd try to find her parent. The mother sprinted over and yelled to leave her daughter alone, then left the playground w/ her daughter.
by audinobs | 2025-08-02 14:45:43+00:00
Market fundamentalism is what happened.

Information wants to be ? How naive.

Information wants to be commoditized, but that process is amoral unless I am getting a cut as a rent seeker.

If I am getting paid then it is just a form of darwinism and to think otherwise is to be anti-science.

If someone else is getting paid then obviously whatever we are talking about is a great injustice.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-02 14:45:46+00:00
Your body is a machine that burns calories. Give it less calories and it will burn its calorie stores.

You are right that there are a lot of scams that complicate this fact as much as possible to get money from you.

But rest assured, if you calculate your TDEE (many simple calcs online), and food scale your calories (everything you eat) to a diet -500 under your TDEE, you will lose weight (or you are a perpetual motion machine).
by ubermonkey | 2025-08-02 14:46:28+00:00
I'll chime in here and note that, until very recently, there wasn't an airbag system that really appealed enough to ME.

The affordable ones, now long in the tooth, required a tether. The nicer ones were built into vests that weighted more, were hotter, and sometimes required a subscription, meaning a billing error could result in a nonfunctional safety device. Um, no.

AlpineStars released one that was ALMOST right a year or two ago called the Techair 5. It was (is) accelerometer driven, so no tether, and while it has an app it doesn't require a subscription. However, it IS heavy, and it IS hot, and it DOES require that you mail it in to be serviced after a deployment, so that was still a no-go for me.

However, last year AStars released the updated TechAir 5 Plasma, which has all the goodness of the original TechAir 5 while also being materially lighter and cooler -- plus, the canister can be replaced by the end user. It's spendy ($800 or so), but I bought one immediately. I wear it more or less every time I get on the bike. I live in the American South, so when I say I'm not any hotter wearing it than I would be without it, you know it's vented well.

(In fact, I wore it on a 4-day road trip between where I used to live (Houston) and where I live now (Durham) 2 weeks ago. Was it a hot trip? Absolutely; I was riding a motorcycle in TX, LA, MS, TN, and NC in the summer. Did the airbag make me less comfortable? No.)
by baq | 2025-08-02 14:46:29+00:00
As someone who is programming computers for almost 30 years and professionally for about 20 by all means do some of it manually, but leverage LLMs in tutor/coach mode, with „explain this but don’t solve it for me” prompts when stuck. Let the tool convert the boring parts once you’re confident they’re truly boring.

Programming takes experience to acquire taste for what’s right, what’s not, and what smells bad and will bite you but you can temporarily (yeah) not care. If you let the tool do everything for you you won’t ever acquire that skill, and it’s critical to judge and review your work and work of others, including LLM slop.

I agree it’s hard and I feel lucky for never having to make the LLM vs manual labor choice. Nowadays it’s yet another step in learning the craft, but the timing is wrong for juniors - you are now expected to do senior level work (code reviews) from day 1. Tough!
by gonzobonzo | 2025-08-02 14:47:06+00:00
I don't really agree. Correctly prompted, you can get Sesame AI to sound very human like and push back/argue against ideas it "disagrees" with. The memory is also fairly decent.

Other LLM's can also do this pretty well (again, given the right prompts), but you're limited to text or somewhat mediocre speech.

And this is without the big companies putting much effort into companions. Once they do, things can be pushed much further.
by nine_k | 2025-08-02 14:47:31+00:00
Apache Windows when?

More seriously, a desktop UI toolkit is hardly a moat by now, especially a Windows toolkit, Windows having 3-4 very different look-and-feels mixed and shipped with the official distribution.

OTOH security and stability are things that Windows critically depend on to stay on the laptops and desktops in medical, governmental, and financial institutions, and on devices of executives.
by CooCooCaCha | 2025-08-02 14:47:41+00:00
None of what you described is a scam. Time and again, I’ve found the people who are critical of dieting aren’t doing it right… Which is hard for me to wrap my head around since weight loss boils down to one factor, caloric restriction.

You burn more calories than you eat and you lose weight. It’s that simple. All these tricks people use like glp-1 inhibitors and keto all serve the same goal of caloric restriction. GLP-1 reduces appetite which reduces calories, keto removes food groups from your diet and decreases hunger which reduces calories.

I’ve been dieting recently and lost 20 pounds just by diligently tracking and restricting my calories. 10 pounds lost in just the past month. In that time I’ve eaten bowls of pasta, pizza, gone out drinking, etc. All I do is accurately track everything I eat (everything), and if I have a less-strict day (like going drinking), I just eat less the next day to make up for it.

It’s simple, but it requires some discipline. That’s the real reason people have trouble dieting.
by WillAdams | 2025-08-02 14:47:50+00:00
The fibrous Trackpoint is still my absolute favourite.

For folks who want more in-depth backstory, going all the way back to the beginning and the origin of the "ThinkPad" name see:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/483933.ThinkPad

I really wish that there would be a true heir to the mantle, and a return to some of the original ideas, esp. the early stylus models and variants such as the TransNote --- if Lenovo would do a version of their Yogabook 9i under the ThinkPad brand and use a Wacom EMR stylus and put a Trackpoint on the keyboard it'd be an instabuy for me --- as it is, I use a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 and only get a Trackpoint when using my docking setup w/

https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/pd026745-thinkpad...

(need to find time to buy an updated one (and a spare) w/ USB-C)
by jvanderbot | 2025-08-02 14:47:56+00:00
Well I think you've identified a task that should be yours. If the writing of the code itself is going to help you, then don't let AI take that help from you because of a vague need for "productivity". We all need to take time to make ourselves better at our craft, and at some point AI can't do that for you.

But I do think it could help, for example by showing you a better pattern or language or library feature after you get stuck or finish a first draft. That's not cheating that's asking a friend.
by lubujackson | 2025-08-02 14:48:27+00:00
I have no idea what this is going on about. But it is clearly much more convincing with (unchecked) references all over the place.

This seems uncannily similar to anti-COVID vaccination thinking. It isn't people being stupid because if you dig you can find heaps of papers and references and details and facts. So much so that the human mind can be easily convinced. Are those facts and details accurate? I doubt it, but the volume of slightly wrong source documents seems to add up to something convincing.

Also similar to how finance people made tranches of bad loans and packaged them into better rated debt, magically. It seems to make sense at each step but it is ultimately an illusion.
by perching_aix | 2025-08-02 14:48:31+00:00
Ah okay. That's a journey I'm currently also preparing to embark on, though from the other direction: I'm trying to generate "natural" language from program code. I already know it's pretty hopeless, but increasingly I feel like it's not really a choice anyhow, so I may as well finally have a go at it. Let's see :)
by nemomarx | 2025-08-02 14:48:45+00:00
The main effect of diet is that more muscle can slightly increase your BMR, and the other health benefits of being in shape. It does also increase calorie loss from activity at the margins, even if it's a pretty small effect. (maybe 100-200 more per day etc in my experience.)

None of this will help much without the diet, but it's not useless.
by qrios | 2025-08-02 14:49:17+00:00
Current "good enough" models like Mistral Small require GPUs like the RTX 6000 to achieve user-friendly response times. The model quality is good enough, especially for narrow-scope tasks like summarization and classification. If Moore's Law holds for a few more years, a mobile device will be able to run it on-device in around 8 years (Apple's A11: 410 GFLOPS vs. RTX 6000: 16 TFLOPS [1]).

This is under the assumption that we don't see any significant optimization in the meantime. Looking back over the last eight years, the probability of no progress on the software side is near zero.

For a breakthrough in the consumer market, running LLM on-device with today's capabilities requires solving one key topic: "JIT learning" [2]. We can see some progress here [3, 4]. Perhaps the transformer architecture is not the best for this requirement, but it is hard to argue that it is impossible for Generative AI.

Due to today's technical limitations, we don't have real personal assistants. This could be the Mac for Apple in the AI era.

[1] https://gadgetversus.com/graphics-card/apple-a11-bionic-gpu-...

[2] Increasing context size is not a valid option for my scenario as it also increases the computation demand linear.

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.06668

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18466

[Edit: decimal separator mess]
by sugarpimpdorsey | 2025-08-02 14:49:28+00:00
Bespoke malware is not a "backdoor". By that loose definition, every RAT out there is. They're so common they don't get fancy names anymore. This is clickbait.

The xz backdoor was such because it was stealthily slipped in with the vendor's original software, without their knowledge, and no further attack or action by the user was required to install it.

The Juniper backdoor a few years ago qualified per the same criteria.