MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by abeppu | 2025-08-10 01:43:18+00:00
> WASPs were unusual in creating systems that saw openness to outsiders as a virtue

In your view, did that view of openness to outsiders as a virtue manifest in other ways? It's been a while since I had to study the period but the colonial northeast was perennially at war with the native population and French Canadian colonists. E.g. it seems Harvard was founded during the Pequot war. In that same year of 1636, Roger Williams set up Rhode Island because he had been banished from Massachusetts after being convicted of heresy. So in general, it seems like WASPs were founding schools in an environment where being native, French, or indeed the wrong kind of Anglo-Puritan was worth attacking. I'm not seeing the openness to outsiders.

> The first black Harvard student was admitted in 1847.

Harvard was founded in 1636, so it seems like they went a full two centuries with total segregation before it finally admitted _one guy_. Again, not so much a culturally inculcated openness to outsiders so much as a slightly imperfect execution of exclusion.

> But if you look at societies where African and Asian people have the power to exclude, those places aren’t very open to outsiders.

I'm trying to think of what a fair comparison would be. I do think there's a meaningful difference between a dominant/imperial power that (begrudgingly, slowly) allows room for its own citizens of diverse racial backgrounds, vs a previously colonized or dominated country making space for foreign powers.

So e.g. the oldest university in Asia is University of Santo Tomas, which was founded by the Spanish colonizers and is a Catholic university, and I think was under Spanish governance until the Philippine Revolution. Should the new fledgling country have made sure that it saved space for white students? I'm not sure whether they actually did, but I think that's a very different ethical question than, "should Harvard/Yale/Brown in New England built on native land with wealth substantially built off the triangle trade, admit BIPOC students?". The oldest "university" in the modern sense in China is Tainjin University, founded in 1895; i.e. they didn't have a university until a couple generations after the 2nd opium war. Should it have saved space for foreign students? The first "universities" in India were founded during British rule. Etc etc.

But where there _isn't_ a strong power imbalance, I would be curious to see historical examples of any group having an especially better or worse record on inclusion.
by etaioinshrdlu | 2025-08-10 01:44:35+00:00
Author here, was a bit surprised to see this here. I thought there needed to be a good zero-JS LLM site for computer people, and we thought it would be fun to add various other protocols. The short domain hack of "ch.at" was exciting because it felt like the natural domain for such a service.

It has not been expensive to operate so far. If it ever changes we can think about rate limiting it.

We used GPT4o because it seemed like a decent general default model. Considering adding an openrouter interface to a smorgasbord of additional LLMS.

One day, on a plane with WiFi before paying, I noticed that DNS queries were still allowed and thought it would be nice to chat with an LLM over it.

We are not logging anything but OpenAI must be...
by pron | 2025-08-10 01:44:57+00:00
We keep talking about completely different things. If we're talking about "features that can help reduce some bug" then C++ or Rust have some that Zig doesn't and Zig has some that C++ or Rust don't. Which ends up more pragmatic is an empirical question that's hard to answer without data, but certainly focusing only on what C++ has and Zig doesn't while ignoring what Zig has that C++ doesn't is a strange way to compare things (BTW, I've been programming in C++ for almost 3 decades, and I really dislike RAII and try to avoid it).

But if we're talking about memory safety - which is something very specific - then, for whatever it's worth, Zig is more memory-safe than C++ and Rust is more memory-safe than Zig.
by redhale | 2025-08-10 01:45:26+00:00
I have found that adding things to a todo (Todist) list called "want-to-buy" gives me the little endorphin boost / anxiety relief without spending any money. I periodically go through and delete stuff from this list after time has passed, and I'm always glad I didn't go through with the purchases. Rarely I will come across something I truly do still want, and will purchase it.
by 0x20cowboy | 2025-08-10 01:47:10+00:00
It's crazy, I've been trying to hire an architect to build a house for me, but I don't trust them (they're all liars) so I asked them to draw up blueprints in front of me and describe everything they are doing in great detail. I need to understand what they are doing. This building is important and I don't want a bad hire. They should be able to do this in 10-15 minutes. If they knew what they were doing, this request wouldn't be an issue.

Then I was trying to get someone to do my taxes. So I've been asking every applicant to do my taxes from last year so I can see if they really know what they are doing. I mean sure, they've done taxes for years, but these are my taxes. I've even tried giving them math puzzles around asset depreciation, but people just keep hanging up the phone.

And then, I wanted to add a wing added to my house and I've been trying to get these entitled contractors to come build a shed in my backyard so I can see if they really know how to use nail guns. I've heard people are just big'ol lairs lately, and I need to see how they work. I mean, sure these guys have built many houses in the past, but we have high standards here and only hire A players.

I've only been getting horrible candidates! No one is worth hiring! There is a huge shortage of qualified people.

If only there was a way to fix this.
by msgodel | 2025-08-10 01:48:44+00:00
That looks like it lets you manipulate some kind of notes object. I wouldn't really call that a text editor.

I don't think there's an app that lets you just edit arbitrary files which can be read by other apps or transferred to/from the watch with something like ssh, just these weird canned things that depend on network services run by Apple and/or the particular developer.
by solarkraft | 2025-08-10 01:50:09+00:00
My (not GP) intuitive answer would be hell no. Typescript messages are pretty hard to google and even parse manually and the LLM suggesting multiple approaches and ways to think about the problem does seem useful. It sometimes uncovers unknown unknowns you might never find otherwise.

I have had cases in which a web search and some good old fashioned thinking have yielded better results than using an LLM, but on average I’m pretty sure the LLM has the edge.
by reilly3000 | 2025-08-10 01:50:10+00:00
I feel his need to be right distracts from the fact that he is. It’s interesting to think about what a hybrid symbolic/transformer system could be. In a linked post he showed that by effectively delegating math to Python is what made Grok 4 so successful at math. I’d personally like to see more of what a symbolic first system would look like, effectively hard math with monads for where inference is needed.
by zukzuk | 2025-08-10 01:50:13+00:00
The cost of employment is not comparable to the cost of a particular good. Employment has much more complicated implications on the economy and on society. A minimum wage is set in part to prevent a desperate race to the bottom, and to (try to) ensure something approaching a living wage. It’s a blunt and often ineffective tool, but viable alternatives are scant. The free market won’t solve this one any more than it solves the problem of healthcare.
by bGl2YW5j | 2025-08-10 01:50:33+00:00
I reckon this opinion is more prevalent than the hyped blog posts and news stories suggest; I've been asking this exact question of colleagues and most share the sentiment, myself included, albeit not as pessimistic.

Most people I've seen espousing LLMs and agentic workflows as a silver bullet have limited experience with the frameworks and languages they use with these workflows.

My view currently is one of cautious optimism; that LLM workflows will get to a more stable point whereby they ARE close to what the hype suggests. For now, that quote that "LLMs raise the floor, not the ceiling" I think is very apt.

LinkedIn is full of BS posturing, ignore it.
by MortyWaves | 2025-08-10 01:50:37+00:00
Oh come on, why? What the fuck. Extremely frustrating as this is something I’ve been using for more or less ten years. The fact it can be used on whiteboards and paper is immeasurably useful.

These stupid decisions to force AI into everything while not replacing any of the existing functionality should be considered crimes. The point of Lens is that it takes almost perfect scans in place of a scanner, and correctly scans whiteboards too.

I’m guessing the people that decided to kill it off believe having “AI” summarising text in a document is somehow equivalent.

We truly are at peak of enshitification.

Adobe Scan looks promising.
by stephencanon | 2025-08-10 01:51:21+00:00
Yeah, we live far north of NYC where it gets much colder, and have never spent nearly that much on heating. Even when we lived in a converted barn from the 1930s with single pane windows and no wall insulation, the most we ever spent was about $500/month. Now (new construction, triple-pane windows, ground-sourced heat pump) it’s more like $80/month
by SkyPuncher | 2025-08-10 01:51:24+00:00
Yes and no. The broader business context translates well, but each model has it's own blindspots and hyperfocuses that you need to massage out.

* Business context - these are things like code quality/robustness, expected spec coverage, expected performance needs, domain specific knowledge. These generally translate well between models, but can vary between code bases. For example, a core monolith is going to have higher standards than a one-off auxiliary service.

* Model focuses - Different models have different tendencies when searching a code base and building up their context. These are specific to each code base, but relatively obvious when they happen. For example, in one code base I work in, one model always seems to pick up our legacy notification system while another model happens to find our new one. It's not really a skill issue. It's just luck of the draw how files are named and how each of them search. They each just find a "valid" notification pattern in a different order.

LLMs are massively helpful for orienting to a new codebase, but it just takes some time to work out those little kinks.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-08-10 01:51:34+00:00
Zero trust is a good concept turned into a dumb practice. Basically people buying Google's koolaid for this forgot about "defense in depth". Yeah, authenticating every connection is great, throwing a big effing moat around it too is better.

The other thing is most companies are not Google. If you're a global company with hundreds of thousands of people who need internal access, moats may be non-ideal. For a business located in one place, local-only on-premise systems which block access to any country which they don't actively do business with is leaps and bounds better.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-10 01:52:57+00:00
Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44683481 - July 2024 (222 comments)

Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40998549 - July 2024 (49 comments)
by xyzzy_plugh | 2025-08-10 01:53:32+00:00
That section of the policy simply describes how the system works. It's very valuable information for enterprise customers who are effectively their entire market revenue-wise. Think access logs, intrusion detection, and so on. I do not interpret their policies such that they are processing the information you added emphasis to beyond what is necessary to serve the customer. What evidence do you have to the contrary?

The irony of your post, which brings up Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, is certainly not lost on me. I'm also sure you could just ask apenwarr directly for clarification.
by count | 2025-08-10 01:53:33+00:00
You know, it is possible that other folks feel the same way, and that can be taken into consideration. The meeting we hold is scheduled at the very end of the work day. It's a fun way to decompress and chat about stuff with the team that isn't project related (there is a strict 'no project talk' rule - we have other times/meetings/mechanisms for that). It's wild that you automatically assume the worst.
by SkyPuncher | 2025-08-10 01:54:08+00:00
The ramp-up time with AI is absolutely lower than trying to ramp up without AI.

My comment is specifically in contrast to working in a codebase where I'm at "max AI productivity". In a new codebase, it just takes a bit of time to work out kinks and figure out tendencies of the LLMs in those codebases. It's not that I'm slower than I'd be without AI, I'm just not at my "usual" AI-driven productivity levels.
by miley_cyrus | 2025-08-10 01:54:08+00:00
This group is well known for bias, over and over through the years. Nothing they report should be taken at face value.

"A considerable amount of financial support for the Center comes from labor unions: According to federal reports, over the last 15 years it has received nearly $1.2 million in labor funding."

"The IRLE’s highest-profile researcher is Michael Reich, who co-chairs its Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics. Reich made a name for himself at a young age co-founding the Union for Radical Political Economics, with the stated goal of supporting “public ownership of production and a government-planned economy.”"

https://us.fundsforngos.org/news/nonprofit-accuses-uc-berkel... https://epionline.org/release/biased-uc-berkeley-research-te... https://epionline.org/release/biased-uc-berkeley-research-te...
by Groxx | 2025-08-10 01:54:17+00:00
yeah, tbh I think that even if they are the cat's pajamas and they end up taking over absolutely all text-based work everywhere and literally everyone agrees they're better at it than humans...

... the current state-of-the-art won't be what we use, and the prompts people are spending tons of time crafting now will be useless.

so I don't think there's all that much FOMO to F over. either the hype bubble pops or literally everyone in those trades will be starting over with brand new skills based on whatever was developed in the past 6 months. people who rode the wave will have something like 6 months of advantage...

... and their advantage will quickly be put into GPTs and new users won't need to learn that either ("you are a seasoned GPT user writing a prompt..."). unless you worry endlessly about Roko's Basilisk, it's kinda ignorable I think. either way you still need to develop non-GPT skills to be able to judge the output, so you might as well focus on that.
by js8 | 2025-08-10 01:54:21+00:00
Of course I would have been born, I was born in a communist country (Czechoslovakia). You think they couldn't make a fertilizer back then or something? Our country is capable of producing less today than it used to during that era. We were destroyed by capitalist financialization, the same problem that had the West lost to China economically. The thing that Marx has warned about..
by kaashif | 2025-08-10 01:54:41+00:00
Yeah, as a primarily backend engineer dealing with either weird technical problems Claude can't get quite right or esoteric business domain problems Claude has no idea about (and indeed, it may be only a few people in one company could help with) - Claude isn't that useful.

But random stuff like make a web app that automates this thing or make an admin panel with auto complete on these fields and caching data pulled from this table.

It is like infinity times faster on this tedious boilerplate because some of this stuff I'd just have never done before.

Or I'd have needed to get some headcount in some web dev team to do it, but I just don't need to. Not that I'd have ever actually bothered to do that anyway...
by jasoneckert | 2025-08-10 01:55:12+00:00
There's something thrilling about spinning up an old machine... it's like resurrecting a digital dinosaur. You're back in a time when systems felt strange and commands were different (especially on older UNIX). Everything was slower, but somehow more intentional. It's like stepping into Jurassic Park: you're not just using old tech, you're interacting with a living fossil. It's a glimpse into the DNA of modern computing, and it's a lot of fun!
by hedora | 2025-08-10 01:55:19+00:00
The Berkeley report doesn’t count number of jobs. It looks at pay and number of restaurants operating (both went up).

It could be that part time positions decreased but full time positions increased, along with hours per job position / total hours / hourly pay and restaurants operated. That’d be a good thing for everyone involved (except maybe the cardiovascular health of the customers), and is compatible with both studies’ conclusions.
by cnst | 2025-08-10 01:56:51+00:00
I try to combat the shopping addiction by ensuring for every purchase, (1), that the price is really good, (2), that the quality is actually really good, too.

For example, $149 for a great monitor is a great deal. But it has to be IPS, USB-C, DP 1.4, QHD or higher, 400nits etc. Normally, these retail for $599, so, I don't buy. Many monitors retail for $99, but they're FHD 250nits VGA crap.

Slickdeals.net is a nice website where you can find some of these deals. Keep in mind that even for really good deals, some people over there would still be unhappy and would still expect higher specs or lower price, so, you have to use your own judgement whether something is good or not. Recently missed a 32in 4K UHD monitor at 159.99 because it was a VA, and people complained too much that VA sucks, but the rest of the specs were just too good, and it sold out quickly; OTOH, I can now wait for a better deal!
by mdaniel | 2025-08-10 01:56:56+00:00
I'm firmly in the pro 2FA camp, but merely as a point of discussion: the Arc codebase is already so underwater with actual features that would benefit a forum, and if I changed my password to hunter2 right now the only thing that would happen is my account would shortly be banned when spammers start to hate-bomb or crypto-scam-bomb discussion threads. Dan would be busy, I would be sad, nothing else would happen

For accounts that actually mean something (Microsoft, Azure, banking, etc), yes, the more factors the better. For a lot of other apps, the extra security is occupying precious roadmap space[1]

1: I'm intentionally side-stepping the "but AI does everything autonomously" debate for the purpose of this discussion
by miley_cyrus | 2025-08-10 01:58:14+00:00
This group is well known for bias, over and over through the years. Nothing they report should be taken at face value.

"A considerable amount of financial support for the Center comes from labor unions: According to federal reports, over the last 15 years it has received nearly $1.2 million in labor funding."

"The IRLE’s highest-profile researcher is Michael Reich, who co-chairs its Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics. Reich made a name for himself at a young age co-founding the Union for Radical Political Economics, with the stated goal of supporting “public ownership of production and a government-planned economy.”"

https://us.fundsforngos.org/news/nonprofit-accuses-uc-berkel... https://epionline.org/release/biased-uc-berkeley-research-te... https://epionline.org/release/biased-uc-berkeley-research-te...
by jdefr89 | 2025-08-10 01:59:10+00:00
I think from the authors perspective, LLM hype has been mostly the same exact thing you’re accusing him of doing. People with very little technical background claiming AGI is near or all these CEOs pushing these nonsense narratives are getting old.. People are blindly trusting these people and offloading all their thinking to a sophisticated stochastic machine. It’s useful yes, super cool yes. Some super god like power or something that brings us to AGI? No probably not. I can’t blame him. I am sick of the hype. Grifters are coming out of the woodwork in a field with too many grifters to begin with. All these AI/LLM companies are high of their own supply and it’s getting old.
by Barrin92 | 2025-08-10 01:59:28+00:00
I spend a fair amount of time on open source and one thing I noticed is that in real pieces of software it doesn't look like all these 10x and 100x AI engineers are anywhere to be found.

VLC has like 4000 open issues. Why aren't the AI geniuses fixing these? Nobody has ever any actual code to show, and if they do it's "here's an LED that blinks every time my dog farts, I could've never done it on my own!". I'm feeling like Charlie in that episode of It's Always Sunny with his conspiracy dashboard. All these productivity gurus don't actually exist in the real world.

Can anybody show me their coding agent workflow on a 50k LOC C codebase instead of throwaway gimmick examples? As far as I'm concerned these things can't even understand pointers
by whoknowsidont | 2025-08-10 01:59:59+00:00
>How does the AI bypass the MCP layer to make the request

It doesn't. I don't know why the other commenters are pretending this step does not happen.

There is a prompt that basically tells the LLM to use the generated manifest/configuration files. The LLM still has to not hallucinate in order to properly call the tools with JRPC and properly follow MCP protocol. It then also has to make sense of the structured prompts that define the tools in the MCP manifest/configuration file.

It's system prompts all the way down. Here's a good read of some the underlying/supporting concepts: https://huggingface.co/docs/hugs/en/guides/function-calling

Why this fact is seemingly being lost in this thread, I have no idea, but I don't have anything nice to say about it so I won't :). Other than we're all clearly quite screwed, of course.

MCP is to make things standard for humans, with expected formats. The LLM's really couldn't give a shit and don't have anything super special about how the interact with MCP configuration files or the protocol (other than some additional fine-tuning, again, to make it less likely to get the wrong output).
by zaphar | 2025-08-10 02:00:58+00:00
To answer your serious questions, gRPC is actually not a bad choice if you are making at the beginning of your project. Migrating over to it is going to be a challenge if you were using something else because it's pretty opinionated but if you have a clean sheet that's what I would use. Cap-n-Proto or Thrift are also probably good choices. These are all solid RPC frameworks that give you everything you need for that out of the box at the expense of more complicated builds.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-10 02:03:03+00:00
I am currently having this debate at $DAYJOB, having come from a zero trust implementation to one using fucking Cloudflare Warp. The cost to your "just use a VPN" approach or, if I'm understanding your point correctly, use VPN and zero trust(?!), is that VPNs were designed for on-premises software. In modern times, the number of cases where one needs to perform a fully authenticated, perfectly valid action, from a previously unknown network on previously unconfigured compute is bigger than in the "old days"

GitHub Actions are a prime example. Azure's network, their compute, but I can cryptographically prove it's my repo (and my commit) OIDC-ing into my AWS account. But configuring a Warp client on those machines is some damn nonsense

If you're going to say "self hosted runners exist," yes, so does self-hosted GitHub and yet people get out of the self-hosted game because it eats into other valuable time that could be spent on product features
by ItsMonkk | 2025-08-10 02:03:49+00:00
If one of these fast food places shuts down, it's not like the lot is just going to sit vacant forever.

The primary effect of these types of laws is that businesses that employ fast food workers are less profitable, and thus when they compete against other businesses for a given lot, will bid less for the land. If the marginal buyer changes, it would have to do so to a business that relies less on minimum wage fast food workers.