MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Ralfp | 2025-08-05 16:01:06+00:00
You don't need to watch Netflix series. There is a transcript of entire conversation between Stockthon and David Lochridge where the former scolds the latter for taking his safety concerns outside of company and firing him:

https://media.defense.gov/2024/Sep/20/2003550726/-1/-1/0/CG-...
by podgietaru | 2025-08-05 16:01:25+00:00
I like living in a world where I know that people who have spent actually time on nurturing a talent get rewarded for doing so, even if that talent is not something I will ever be good at.

I don't want to live in a world where these things are generated cheaply and easily for the profit of a very select few group of people.

I know the world doesn't work like I described in the top paragraph. But it's a lot closer to it than the bottom.
by morpheos137 | 2025-08-05 16:01:43+00:00
What does it really mean to know something or understand something. I think AI knows a great deal (associating facts with symbols), confabulates at times when it doesn't know (which is dishonestly called hallucination, implying a conscious agent misperceiving, which AI is not), and understands almost nothing.

The best way to think of chat bot "AI" is as the compendium of human intelligence as recorded in books and online media available to it. It is not intelligent at all on its own and its judgement can't be better than its human sources because it has no biological drive to sythesize and excel. Its best to think of AI as a librarian of human knowledge or an interactive Wikipedia which is designed to seem like an intelligent agent but is actually not.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-08-05 16:01:53+00:00
Ahh, so you are the one who gets to decide what is a 'worthy' human activity. I'm glad I ran into you here. Humans are meant to be creative? What about dumb people? People with mental disabilities? People who don't want or have the ability or talent to write stories or paint pictures? Their labor was made redundant long ago by machines, and you are fine with that. There were plenty of people who's life consisted of providing labor. They had a role in society, they had a valuable contribution. People's clothes were clean because of them, ditches were dug which saved thousands of lives from malaria. You don't see their contributions as 'worthy', so just replace them so you can save some money. But when the machines start coming for what you want to do with your time, where you find your self worth, now it's a tragedy and it's a choice between the machines and human dignity itself?

I think a machine might be able to help you come up with a philosophical perspective that doesn't just cast yourself at the pinnacle of human worth.
by andrewla | 2025-08-05 16:01:54+00:00
tl;dr: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14

If you decide to stick with google, change your search to be web-only by default, by entering "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14" as your default search engine.

This does cut out the AI summaries as well as most of the infobox cruft. On the other hand it also cuts out the convenient unit conversion and calculator stuff, and for local results you have to navigate to maps, etc. But the inconvenience here is worth it because the amount of spam you get on the main search page has grown to the point of absurdity.

The result quality has, alas, significantly decreased as Google has shifted its focus away from that, but with this change it is nice and snappy and mostly works.
by rwmj | 2025-08-05 16:02:04+00:00
What you say is true, but I'd also like to ask (people in general) if you have to design a memory map for MS-DOS that doesn't have the 640K limit, what would you do? Your constraints are:

- The total address space is 1MB, and that's a CPU architectural limit (which is only "broken" many years later, and in a rather unsatisfying way).

- You need somewhere to map the RAM, and because of CP/M quasi-compatibility, that needs to start at address 0.

- The CPU starts executing code at 1MB minus a few bytes, so your system ROM must go right at the top of address space.

- You need memory windows for the system ROM, options ROMs and 2x framebuffers.

- Bank switching adds extra complexity and 74xx logic chips on a motherboard which is already very busy.

Given these constraints, the 640K limit for RAM, with framebuffers and ROMs mapped at 0xA0000, is the only thing that makes sense.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-05 16:02:09+00:00
>At the same time it's recognised now that Germany and Japan both had very limited prospects of victory in WWII.

I'd beg to differ about this being widely recognized. For Japan perhaps, but even they could have considerably forestalled their eventual defeat if they'd done a few logical things better, or won the battle of Midway (which they should have won numerically and tactically, if they'd been a bit more careful with their encryption and estimation of U.S naval force disposition), or prioritized their targets at Pearl Harbour more carefully, or maybe better, not even bothered to attack it in the first place while performing the rest of their conquest of Asia.

As for Germany, it could have outright won the war. No debate at this point has settled that this isn't so. Indeed, at several key points Germany emphatically had both means and opportunity to secure its total hegemony at least over Europe and its surroundings in a way that would have resulted in a Nazi-version alternative to the dual superpower bipolar world that instead existed between the USSR and USA after 1945.

Fortunately this didn't happen, since as bad as the USSR was (especially under Stalin) I'd hate to imagine an alternative in which the other hegemonic nuclear power is one built on the even more murderously fanatical legacy of Hitler, Himmler or Heydrich and the rest.
by dpoloncsak | 2025-08-05 16:03:06+00:00
How does the type of transaction help determine fraud?

Are you saying it's because these games weren't properly flagged as an 'adult' transaction? When I buy Call of Duty from GameStop, is it flagged as an 'adult' transaction?

Also, didnt MasterCard directly say they're enforcing their existing guidelines against "unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.” ? It doesnt seem like it's just a coding issue....
by aw1621107 | 2025-08-05 16:03:13+00:00
As far as Safe C++ vs. profiles specifically, I don't think the conversation really ever got to the point of serious discussions of how soon the features could be implemented. My understanding is that there were bigger hangups about what direction to go in the first place as well as what "profiles" even meant.

> and I think it would be fair to consider alternatives at this point

I would assume those who could consider alternatives already have, and that those (still) interested in safe(r) C++ do so because the alternatives are insufficient for one reason or another.
by mxmlnkn | 2025-08-05 16:03:38+00:00
AI-overview was the straw that broke the camel's back for me recently. But I also suffered from dark mode issues for a long time. On almost every visit, it shows the outer background dark but the smaller search results background as white, and the search result text is still in light mode, ergo, it is not readable. After refreshing, it works, but this user experience is untenable for a trillion-dollar company. I changed to Startpage.com, though.
by spacedcowboy | 2025-08-05 16:03:43+00:00
From the article: “A poor craftsman blames his tools”. Indeed.

Software engineering is unique in that it is a creative science. It is up to the engineer to decide how to solve the problem within the strictures and constraints of the language employed, and if there's a subset of the language that you don't like, don't use it.

- You don't have to use any and every language feature.

- You don't have to just ignore errors, you can handle them every time

- You don't have to have global variables everywhere, you can use object-orientation with all its benefits for encapsulation etc.

- You don't have to use "dangerous" ways to get user-data. There are plenty of safe ways to do it.

- You don't have to write raw SQL in your code, you can protect against injection attacks.

- etc, etc.

"C" still has "goto". It's been "considered harmful" for several decades now, but it's still very much used in some circumstances (eg: device drivers in linux kernel modules) by very smart people.

PHP does not go out of its way to protect you from your own mistakes (similarly to C, in fact) its ethos is more about simplicity. You could argue that the sort of programmer needing that simplicity is precisely the person needing the smothering embrace of protective programming languages, but then that language would not be as simple and appealing as PHP is, and nowhere near as applicable to the beginner.

Better, IMHO, to let the beginner learn at their own pace, pointing out where and how they could improve things as time goes by. Said beginner is unlikely to be protecting the crown jewels, after all. It's far more likely to be a home-website containing pictures of Fido.

Having said all that about the beginner, PHP is a very capable language, and if you avoid the potholes, it's a very safe language too. I've personally sold software written in PHP to companies like Industrial Light And Magic and various post-production houses at $20k a pop, and about 60k lines of code. It wouldn't have been possible to do what we did in any other language I know of, and yes we did pass security audits...
by bazzargh | 2025-08-05 16:04:23+00:00
to me it doesn't look great that Perplexity use BrowserBase at all. I asked BB's doc bot if you can customise the user agent; it says you can't because it sets the user agent automatically _in order to bypass bot checks_.

This seems to be the only secret sauce they offer; other than that it's just a headless browser farm. So perplexity saying "companies like Cloudflare mischaracterize user-driven AI assistants as malicious bots" is disingenuous at best; they chose to use a tool designed to mask their traffic and it blew up in their face?
by mkozlows | 2025-08-05 16:04:26+00:00
The thing that I keep wondering about: If the coding part is 2-5x more productive for you, but the stuff around the coding doesn't change... at some point, it'll have to, right? The cost/benefit of a lot of practices (this article talks about code review, which is a big one) changes a lot if coding becomes significantly easier relative to other tasks.
by torginus | 2025-08-05 16:04:34+00:00
If it helps, if you look at the biology of human vision, you find out things like the width of your cone of sharp vision is about 2 degrees, or the size of your thumb held out at arms length.

Due to this physical limitation, what you 'see' in front of you, widely accepted as ground truth reality, cannot possibly real, its a hallucination produced by your brain.

Your brain, compared to the sensory richness of reality you experience around you, has very limited direct inputs from the outside world, it must construct a rich internal model based on this.

It's very weird (at least to me), that the boundary between reality and assumption (basically educated guessing) is very arbitrary, and definitely only exists in our heads.
by isametry | 2025-08-05 16:04:40+00:00
Even funnier is, it was obscenely bad for years, and then it made a sudden jump to “pretty darn good”. My headcanon is that someone high-up at Apple tried to search for a message, noticed how broken it was, and then assigned an entire engineering department to work on nothing else than iMessage search for two weeks.

This Reddit post suggests this happened in iOS 13 (so 2019): https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/d7wemx/underrated_ne...

Now it feels like a cheatcode, at least when it comes to verbatim searches (probably because the entire message database is now indexed, if I had to guess).

Seriously, try searching for the letter “e” and click “View All”. You will get effectively every message you’ve ever sent or received, in a single, reasonably scrollable list. For me it dates back to 2018.
by redundantly | 2025-08-05 16:05:02+00:00
I like Promox a lot, but I wish it had an equivalent to VMware's VMFS. The last time I tried, there wasn't a way to use shared storage (i.e., iscsi block devices) across multiple nodes and have a failover of VMs that use that storage. And by failover I mean moving a VM to another host and booting it there, not even keeping the VM running.
by JeremyNT | 2025-08-05 16:05:15+00:00
Even as a layman and AI skeptic, to me this entirely matches my expectations, and something like this seemed like it was basically inevitable as of the first demos of video rendering responding to user input (a year ago? maybe?).

Not to detract from what has been done here in any way, but it all seems entirely consistent with the types of progress we have seen.

It's also no surprise to me that it's from Google, who I suspect is better situated than any of its AI competitors, even if it is sometimes slow to show progress publicly.
by myrmidon | 2025-08-05 16:05:32+00:00
I'm very curious if there are any well-informed positive takes on Trumps climate policy.

Personally, I believe even Biden-era efforts were insufficient; but all the common arguments to do less against climate change that I encounter regularly fall into the following 3 categories:

1) Selfishness/Freedom at someone elses cost ("why should I suffer from restrictions just to mitigate negative externalities")

2) Poorly informed skepticism toward solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, frequently involving extremely implausible assumptions about production costs.

3) (Misinformed) dismissal of climate-change consequences ("a few degrees warmer won't hurt too much")

Currently I can't help but think that people will look back on this in a few decades and regard the whole position as obvious idiocy (similarly to the US waging war in Vietnam).
by kellyjackson5 | 2025-08-05 16:05:32+00:00
Rabbet (YC S17) | Sr. Software Engineer (Elixir/React) | REMOTE (TX, NC, CO) | Full time

Rabbet is hiring Sr. Software Engineers to help us streamline construction finances. We offer cloud-based software for commercial lenders and real estate developers to centralize construction finances, automate administrative tasks, and reduce the time spent managing draws.

Backend is in Elixir (Phoenix/Absinthe/postgres), frontend is React (mostly JS with more new stuff in TS). The company is ~20 people with 7 of us on the engineering team. Looking to add another 2-3 engineers over the next ~6 months.

We are fully remote, though we do require candidates to be in TX, NC, or CO (exceptions possible if you have several years of professional Elixir experience). We don't currently offer sponsorship.

If you're interested, you can read more or apply here: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/rabbet/581ed4d8-d683-428c-88c5-1131.... You can also email me (Kelly, Engineering Manager) directly at kjackson@rabbet.com.
by dpoloncsak | 2025-08-05 16:05:39+00:00
But the code for an adult game already exists, right? M rated games have existed for years...even X rated. How did gamestop sell me GTA? Is there not sex scenes and violence in the game?

Also, didnt MasterCard directly say they're enforcing their existing guidelines against "unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.” ? It doesnt seem like a coding issue....
by ffsm8 | 2025-08-05 16:06:00+00:00
And I completely agree with that!

These are exactly the people that are going to stay, medium term.

Let's explore a fictional example that somewhat resembles my, and I suspect a lot of peoples current dayjob.

A Micro-Service architecture, each team administers 5-10 services and the whole application, which is once again only a small part of the platform as a whole is developed by maybe 100-200 devs. So something like ~200 micro services

The application architects are gonna be completely save in their jobs. And so are the lead devs in each team - at least from my perspective. Anyone else? I suspect MBAs in 5 yrs will not see their value anymore. That's gonna be the vast majority of all devs, that's likely going to cost 50% of the devs their jobs. And middle management will be slimmed down just as quickly, because you suddenly need a lot less managers.
by OutOfHere | 2025-08-05 16:06:04+00:00
That's complete nonsense and lies because Uber, Lyft, and some cloud service providers do not have any trouble holding on to user credit indefinitely. I absolutely can let my credit sit in them indefinitely. As such, expiring my credit is deception and theft, plain and simple. It is a practice done by lazy robber accountants. The services that do it right may not always offer a refund, but at least my credit doesn't expire.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-05 16:06:08+00:00
You're jumping ahead a bit... early motherboards didn't have drive adapters at all, let alone IDE or PATA. And it wasn't really limited to two by the board and expansion slots nearly as much as the physical form factor and cost. "Full-height" 5.25" drives are double the height of what you think of for say a CD drive bay or later floppy drive bays. There were two in the XT/AT cases that were common. Hard drives went from full-height 5.25 to 3.5" pretty quickly and there weren't many half height or otherwise short 5.25" hard drives. There was a "big foot" drive that sucked, that I recall though.

Most people I knew with computers prior to 1992 or so either booted from floppy or had less than 40mb hard drives. They were expensive. By the time I got more into the hardware (1994 or so), dual IDE was common (4 devices) and PATA transition was pretty seemless. The only reason I'm even aware of the difference is I worked at iomega for a while, and the IDE zip drive was IDE and not PATA.

Around 2001, I had a motherboard with dual PATA and another PATA that was via onboard raid controller. I had 4hdds, a cd burner and an ide zip at that time. The drives I had first used were the first IBM Deskstar drives... fast, but died very prematurely... the second died before I could RMA the first. I had switched from OS/2 to Windows 2000 (not ME) around that time. Then came SATA, and no more rounding pata cables.
by motorest | 2025-08-05 16:06:08+00:00
> Sure, but not every abstraction is premature;

How can you tell if what you're task to do is to duplicate a class?

The wisdom in WET is that it prevents the accidental complexity created by premature abstractions while not preventing the introduction of abstractions later. In the process, development work is also simpler and lower in risk profile because duplicating code only causes the introduction of an independent code path while preventing regressions. Naive interpretations of DRY are renowned to needlessly cause problems due to those mistakes.
by Uehreka | 2025-08-05 16:06:16+00:00
A lot of the negativity around this post is about the fact that there’s no demo and no open weights, which is Correct Negativity. Like don’t get me wrong, it would be cool for something like this to exist, but I’ve generally learned not to trust AI companies’ descriptions of their models until someone (or I) can actually get their hands on it and see if it’s usable at all. A description of a model that isn’t going to be released to the public isn’t very interesting to me.
by plandis | 2025-08-05 16:06:34+00:00
This mostly mimics my own experience. I’ve mostly gotten value out of handing off planned/scoped coding tasks to LLMs. It’s faster to have the LLM generate code and the quality is usually fine if the task is properly scoped.

Actually writing software was only like 15-20% of my time though so the efficiency wins from having an LLM write the code is somewhat limited. It’s still another tool that makes me more productive but I’ve not figured out a way to really multiplicatively increase my productivity.
by mattpallissard | 2025-08-05 16:06:36+00:00
Every job on an HPC cluster should have a memory and CPU limit. Nearly every job should have a time limit as well. I/O throttling is a much trickier problem.

I wound up having a script for users on a jump host that would submit an sbatch job that ran sshd as the user on a random high level port and stored the port in the output. The output was available over NFS so the script parsed the port number and displayed the connection info to the user.

The user could then run a vscode server over ssh within the bounds of CPU/memory/time limits.
by mullingitover | 2025-08-05 16:06:51+00:00
> But actively letting it code (at least with gpt4.1 or gpt4o)

It's funny, Github Copilot puts these models in the 'bargin bin' (they are free in 'ask' mode, whereas the other models count against your monthly limit of premium requests) and it's pretty clear why, they seem downright nerfed. They're tolerable for basic questions but you wouldn't use them if price weren't a concern.

Brandwise, I don't think it does OpenAI any favors to have their models be priced as 'worthless' compared to the other models on premium request limits.
by adz5a | 2025-08-05 16:06:53+00:00
Is there a resource which compares Lisps (expressiveness, limitations, available special forms, ...)? I often read about lisp 1 and 2.0, clojure being a lisp 1.5 (because of the callable keywords if iirc).

Dabbling into llms I think that lisps could be very interesting format to expose tools to llms, ie prompting a llm to craft programs in a Lisp and then processing (by that I mean parsing, correcting, analyzing and evaluating the programs) those programs within the system to achieve the user's goal.
by at-fates-hands | 2025-08-05 16:07:10+00:00
I live in Minnesota, we get about 34% less sun than most of the southern states like Arizona or Florida.

Arizona - 3,800 hours of sunlight hours per year

Minnesota - 2,500 hours of sunlight hours per year

Ergo, I can't generate as much energy as someone who lives in a state that gets significantly more sunlight.

I would also add that setup and installation of even a small solar array has an ROI of around 10 years because I can't generate as much energy, therefore it takes longer for me to break even.

Right now in Minnesota:

The average cost of installing a 5 kW solar panel system in Minnesota is approximately $14,900 before applying the 30% federal tax credit, which can significantly reduce the overall expense. After incentives, the out-of-pocket cost can be around $13,860

Sorry, I'm not going to lay out 15K and then have to wait ten years before I break even. If you want to know why people aren't adopting solar, this is the reason. Its cost prohibitive for many, many people.

Does it make sense for people in those Southern states? 100%. For everybody else? Not so much.
by shortformblog | 2025-08-05 16:07:16+00:00
Maybe in the cosmic sense you are, in that they have a giant pile of money, and you contributed a few pennies to it, but this is not how accounting works. Your transaction and their ad budget are separate things.

Also, advertising does other things than tell you to buy something, and it doesn’t always take the form of banner ads. Apple, for example, does a ton of brand awareness advertising. Affiliate marketing often targets direct transactions. Maybe your goal is to simply start a relationship that might someday lead to a really big purchase.

Often, in the era of SaaS, people advertise to existing customers. Apple does this—they have a TV service and a music service and a cloud service.

There are plenty of reasons for them to advertise after you bought the original product.

But your original point was that customers bought the ads. Maybe they didn’t! Maybe they were given funding by a VC firm and the company decided it wanted to build an audience. Maybe they want to advocate for a political issue.

I think the biggest problem with your argument is that it has tunnel vision and sees advertising as this one dimensional thing, when in reality it takes many forms. Plenty of those forms are bad, but it is not as simple as “I bought a product, now I never want to see an Apple ad ever again.” Many businesses (Amazon, eBay) make most of their money off of customers they’ve already advertised to that they advertise to again and again.