MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mycentstoo | 2025-08-31 13:57:34+00:00
I believe choosing a well known problem space in a well known language certainly influenced a lot of the behavior. AIs usefulness is correlated strongly with its training data and there’s no doubt been a significant amount of data about both the problem space and Python.

I’d love to see how this compares when either the problem space is different or the language/ecosystem is different.

It was a great read regardless!
by lewisjoe | 2025-08-31 13:58:23+00:00
This touches an important debate on user interfaces. Chat/human language based AI vs GUI augmented AI.

OpenAI started with chat based AI but have since then realized "text only" doesn’t scale for serious business needs. We see openAI pivoting towards richer interfaces like "Canvas" that offers richer editing interface (GUI) with AI as an embedded collaborator.

There’s even news floating around that OpenAI is building a Google Docs / Microsoft Word competitor.

Now, take Microsoft. Microsoft owns some of the most serious business products ever like Office Suite. Microsoft however is working back towards a chatbot experience to an extent that they’ve even renamed their entire online office suite as Microsoft Co-pilot 365 - which makes little sense as a name for an office suite :)

But the bigger question is which approach is right? Maybe there isn’t a single right approach. Maybe that’s why Google is being Google and travelling both ways.

They’re building Gemini, Gemini Canvas as well as already owning an office suite and working towards integrating AI capabilities into their office editors.

We are living in interesting times!
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-31 13:59:15+00:00
As a user interface, sure, another … branch?

Plenty of "creatives" I think are still going to be hands-on-mouse(stylus) in the coming decades.

I'm not sure that collaborative computing follows. Like when DropBox famously debuted and perhaps some were touting "cloud computing", Steve Jobs called it a "feature", not a platform. (Or words to that extent.) He was deflating the concept a bit too much in my opinion but perhaps the truth was somewhere in between.
by jameshart | 2025-08-31 13:59:41+00:00
That is peculiar. Brief internet search turned up a Reddit post where someone had a sample of typed text with the same odd typography: https://www.reddit.com/r/typewriters/s/f2CIY0TCm3

The suggestion that it may have been a striker from a bilingual - cyrillic typewriter that was mixed in is an interesting possibility; someone transcribing diplomatic telegrams in WWII may indeed have need of access to Cyrillic typewriters…
by fulafel | 2025-08-31 13:59:46+00:00
"Years" is technically correct I guess - recent EPRs have taken 18 years from license to grid. Hinkley C 2012-2031 (projected). Flamanville 3 2006-2024. Olkiluoto 3 2005-2023. This is way too much latency. Every little bit helps of cours but it's hopeless optimism to think nuclear meaningfully helps the climate disaster for the foreseeable future.
by znpy | 2025-08-31 13:59:57+00:00
My grandfather from the south of italy. He died at 85, used to smoke two packs a day until about three days before dying (he wasn't allowed to smoke in the hospital). He did not die from any form of cancer, he died for an intestinal blockage. I don't remember the details, it's been many years ago. From what he told me he started around age 8, stealing his father's tobacco.

The thing is, these stories rarely show the full picture (and they hardly can).

For example: my grandfather was very active for an old person, he kept working in his coutryside until the age of 78-79. That meant a lot of moving around, lifting large buckets of fruit in spring and summer or huge sacks of olives in autumn and winter. At age 75 he was probably way more active than the average user of this forum. He wasn't "fit" by modern beauty standards, but nonetheless he was "functionally" fit.

As far as I know, he started working in the countryside when he lost his father around age 13 (society was different back then) to support his family (his mother and his younger sister).

Btw he still developed senile dementia roughly around the time he stopped working in the countryside.

Smoking alone is a risk factor (and a huge one) but that factor usually has to be put into context.

EDIT Just to disambiguate: I'm not defending smoking, in any way. My main point is that "full picture" is often missing from the "they smoked and lived" stories.
by VoidWhisperer | 2025-08-31 14:00:04+00:00
Does this also apply if someone were to do the following: Receive encrypted transmission -> unencrypt it -> need to pass it on, so re-encrypt it and pass it on?

I would imagine that the paraphrasing wouldn't be necessary in this case because it isn't quite as useful to compare two encrypted versions of the text versus an encrypted version and an unencrypted version (also I feel like there is some risk of a game of 'telephone' in that the meaning would change bit by bit to the point of having a different meaning over time, even if not intentionally)
by kaptainscarlet | 2025-08-31 14:00:19+00:00
I've also had a similar experience. I have become too lazy since I started vibe-coding. My coding has transitioned from coder to code reviewer/fixer vey quickly. Overall I feel like it's a good thing because the last few years of my life has been a repetition of frontend components and api endpoints, which to me has become too monotonous so I am happy to have AI take over that grunt work while I supervise.
by snapplebobapple | 2025-08-31 14:00:39+00:00
The thing with synology is they do the basic stuff but they also do two things I haven't found a viable, open source alternative for: 1. o365 backup. There used to be corso, which looked promising but still needed ag ui frontend to be viable, but the entire team got bought by someone and abandoned the project.

2. agent based full machine backup. I can install the agent on a machine (but especially a windows machine) and it just backs up on my schedule and works, plus is easy to convert the resulting backup image to a vm to load on the synology or my proxmox cluster. There are lots of moderately to very expensive proprietary solutions that do this, but I am unaware of any decent opensource options.

Are you guys aware of anything that solves these two use cases well and is opensource?
by bgwalter | 2025-08-31 14:00:52+00:00
I don't think computation is democratized when most of the barely usable models are in the hands of mega corporations.

Computers have been way more accessible in the DOS era, when travel agents could effortlessly handle console programs. In that era more people had some idea of the basics of computing, there was more diverse and open hardware.

Nowadays people know how to click to upload a video to YouTube, which means they are just sharecroppers. If the upload sequence is replaced by another middleman like "Open""AI" who will store and monetize your data, you are a sharecropper of "Open""AI" and YouTube.
by gcanyon | 2025-08-31 14:02:02+00:00
Wow, and I thought I was suited to long distance :-) I definitely tend to row longer -- from 5Ks to an hour -- but I can't say I don't feel it.

Sanity-checking: what pace are you setting? Or: what distance are you covering in 45 minutes? The Concept2 has almost no floor, so it's possible you almost aren't exerting yourself.
by Levitz | 2025-08-31 14:02:08+00:00
This is incoherent babble. Not in a figurative or metaphorical way, you are not making sense and this kind of discourse is exactly what ensures that the far right will occupy most governments in Europe in some 10-20 years time, which I'm absolutely not looking forward to.

>America integration doesn’t exist.

This premise

> The American strategy has always been leave people alone to keep living in their own culture.

Contradicts this. You can't have both of those things. you EXTRA can't have them when you further talk about American culture in the same goddamned line.

> Europe has a cultural entity doesn’t exist.

This premise

>The way Islam has been managed is an issue in itself. People deserve to be able to practice their cult freely and in good condition but most European countries have refused to take charge of the question

Contradicts this.

And to be completely honest, this ending:

>Plenty of political parties in Europe have strong visions for the future. Some of them are linked to social justice and preserving the environment, things you obviously dislike. The fact you can’t understand something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist however.

Straight up makes me think you are not serious at all and straight up trolling. But in the off chance you aren't, I mean it when I say you are the problem you want to fight against.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-08-31 14:03:15+00:00
> Do you want a dysfunctional soviet central party planning committee?

I did not write the parent of your comment but I went back to re-read it and I didn't see any hints of central planning. In fact, the parent proposed no solution, it only pointed out a process of continued monopolization which, if unchecked, would lead to something resembling the monopoly of the late Soviet central committee over their economy.

In a sense, your comment inverted the meaning of the parent.
by taway789aaa6 | 2025-08-31 14:03:29+00:00
> Third, notice that the only remaining multiplication is a multiplication by 4. Because 15 is one less than a power of 2, multiplying by 2 modulo 15 can be implemented using a circular shift. A multiplication by 4 is just two multiplications by 2, so it can also be implemented by a circular shift. This is a very rare property for a modular multiplication to have, and here it reduces what should be an expensive operation into a pair of conditional swaps.

> Aside: multiplication by 16 mod 21 is the inverse of multiplying by 4 mod 21, and the circuits are reversible, so multiplying by 16 uses the same number of Toffolis as multiplying by 4.

I couldn't really find anything explaining the significance of this. The only info I found said that "4 mod 21 = 4" (but I don't know if it was AI slop or not).

Is "multiplying by 4 mod 21" something distinct to quantum computing?
by DrewADesign | 2025-08-31 14:03:41+00:00
In my experience, most US tech workers see the non-tech US like most of the US sees the rest of the world: they intellectually understand that they’re a small piece of the pie, but living within an attention and influence bubble subconsciously makes people feel like the center of the universe. This can make average people feel superior and above average people feel exceptional.

Like in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, where all of the children are above average.
by westoncb | 2025-08-31 14:03:58+00:00
lol no problem. In reality though there's kind of a funny story behind it because I suspect the way I ended up using them so much is similar to how ChatGPT did. When I got into writing I studied grammar, then decided to read a bunch of classics and analyze their usage of punctuation in general until I had a good understanding of every bit of it. Then, in order to practice, I'd apply what I learned to anything I was writing at the time whether journal notes, conversations on AIM/IRC etc. That latter step meant I was translating a lot of casual/natural speech into a form that also had a high level of 'correctness'. And if you faithfully translate natural speech into 'correct'ly punctuated sentences, you end up using a lot of em dashes. Because ChatGPT/LLMs are tuned for natural/authentic style, as well as for a high degree of 'correctness,' you get today's state of affairs. Just a theory.
by danielscrubs | 2025-08-31 14:04:12+00:00
From my experience working culture is just strongly aligned with incentives. Put a Norwegian in Silicon Valley and suddenly he gets equity, his manager is a former developer (not an finance/hr person), his visa is dependent on work, his salary is top 5% and he is well respected.

Seen plenty of Americans that got comfy in the nordics (also efficient but 40 hours max).

Also seen other countries politicians change rules that directly affected how hard people work. It’s not rocket science and programming is one of the most fun jobs to be doing so plenty would jump at the opportunity.

Instead I see people go home and try to code something at home to increase their salaries.
by jalapenos | 2025-08-31 14:04:27+00:00
I think you want them to be meaningfully different, for whatever reason, but at the end of the day, they both come down to "if I did the thing you already did, and that you laid claim to through some form of artificial statutory fabrication of rights, you can sue me".

Whether that means me exploiting having heard your song by playing your song myself, or exploiting your invention I examined by building it myself, they both come down to: statutory fabrication of fictitious "you can't do because they did already" rights, that at common law could have (rightly) only been achieved through keeping the thing a secret (e.g. still present to this day in say trading algorithms, and in software through the now ubiquitous SaaS model) and contacts (i.e. NDAs) flowing from that.
by netfortius | 2025-08-31 14:04:59+00:00
For me it's not an either-or scenario. I use my Kindle when I'm bed, my Calibre e-reader (or preview, if pdf) on my MBP, and Moonreader+ on my Android phone. I'd say the ratio of usage goes like 10-15% for the Kindle, 25-35% MBP, and the majority of time Moonreader. I wish I could find a way to sync book status and highlights across the three platforms, but...
by nullc | 2025-08-31 14:05:31+00:00
Collaborative projects don't work on pure engineering. There are significant resource management components that basically amount to therapy, psychiatry, and side show entertainment because the most critical resources are human minds.

Excellent engineering management largely isolates engineers from having to deal with this non-engineering stuff (except for the subset that is specifically for their own personal benefit)-- but open source tends to radically flatten organizations that produce software, such that every contributor must also be their own manager to a great degree.

In a well run project you don't necessarily have to be good at or even interested in all the more socially oriented components of the project organization. But if you're not you must be willing to let someone else handle that stuff and go along with their judgements even if they seem suboptimal from the narrower perspective you've adopted. If you can't then from a "collaborative development as a system" view you're a faulty component that doesn't provide the right interface for the system's requirements (and are gonna get removed!). :)

Another way to look at it is that it would be ideal if every technical element were optimal at all times. In small systems with well understood requirements this can be possible or at least close to possible. But in big complex and poorly scoped systems it's just not possible: We have imperfect information, there are conflicting requirements, we have finite time, and so on. The system as a whole will always be far from perfect. If anyone tried to make it all perfect it would just fail to make progress, deadlock, or otherwise. The management of the project is always trying to balance the imperfections. They know that their decisions are often making things worse for a local concern, but they do so with belief that over time the decisions result in a better system overall. Linux has a good reputation in large part due to a long history of making good decisions about the flaws to accept or even introduce, which issues to gloss over vs debate to death.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-31 14:07:06+00:00
Color printers need color inks for tracking dots. Get a laser, they're clog free as a bonus.

If your printer is already severely clogged and that is a major contributor to chronic ink level issues for your printer, apply few drops of isopropyl alcohol onto each of ink drawing ports(do NOT use acetone and/or ethanol; liquid form PFAS is better in narrow technical sense, IIRC). It will dissolve everything unwanted and its positive effects seem to last years, while being effectively harmless to electro-mechanical systems.
by zksijdjd | 2025-08-31 14:07:43+00:00
Most Americans want a country that benefits Americans. High skilled immigrants:

1. Take jobs an American would otherwise fill, which would not be a problem except 2. The economy disproportionately benefits the capitalist class (billionaires). Bringing over immigrants to boost the economy doesn’t help the median American, and it creates competition for natives

I’m not undervaluing it. Im saying it provides no value for the majority of Americans. And this on a purely economic axis - social and cultural angles are arguably all negative.
by Someone | 2025-08-31 14:08:16+00:00
> I've solved multiple continuous value problems by discretizing, applying combinatorics to the techniques, and then taking the limit of the result

But taking the limit of a sequence of rationals isn’t guaranteed to remain in the rationals (classic example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_problem. Each partial sum is rational, but the limit of the partial sums is not)

So, how does that statement rebut “You can't do rigorous calculus (i.e. real analysis) on rationals alone.”?
by mike_hearn | 2025-08-31 14:08:44+00:00
I didn't say it didn't "let" you. I said it's not supported, as in, the Linux vendors don't consider that to be a feature of the OS that you should actually use.

I've been a Linux user for 25 years. You can reconfigure the OS to use additional repositories. It may or may not work, and only if there is a repository specific to both your distro and its version. But it's not a good idea.

In particular, OS upgrades are very likely to break. Being able to upgrade itself is a basic requirement of any modern OS. If your Linux distro corrupts itself on upgrade or fails to do so and you file a bug report you'll be told to remove any third party software because that's not supported.

This would be like if your Mac started crashing on boot because you downloaded a word processor from a website, and then Apple say "sorry, we only support apps coming from the app store". They don't do that, but Red Hat or Canonical will.
by Vinnl | 2025-08-31 14:08:56+00:00
Ah gotcha, yes, indirect replies would need to be forwarded or something.

(To be honest, I'm already surprised that Mastodon scaled as far as it did. I will say, if I had seen the state of the web's architecture 20 years ago today, I probably also would have claimed that it was inherently insecure and that there was no way to get it to be secure enough to scale to billions of users, so... I don't know, maybe people will keep finding duct tape solutions to make it work, worse-is-better-style.)
by bigbadfeline | 2025-08-31 14:09:24+00:00
> found a competitor, grow it e.g. with some like-minded funding, sell it at a premium. Wait for the clauses of the contract to run out, and rinse and repeat.

Unrealistic, that strategy has no history of success. MariaDB tried... still wimpy.

> The defensive acquisitions can work on domains with gravity effects to a degree, but those are domains are far from being the total market.

Not so. Market size and inertia, connections, red tape and political weight are always present, fundamental forces of "gravity". They are the total market, at least the part of it that matters.

More importantly, even if your strategy of "feeding the machine for personal gain" did work, it amounts only to feeding the machine without changing its nature or direction. That strategy can benefit few individuals but it can't fix any of the issues discussed here.
by koverstreet | 2025-08-31 14:10:19+00:00
No, I'm sorry but you're simply wrong.

bcachefs has a ton of QA, both automated testing and a lot of testers that run my latest and I work with on a daily basis. The patch was well tested; it was for codepaths that we have good regression tests for, it was algorithmically simple, and it worked perfectly to recover a filesystem from the original bug report, and it performed flawlessly again not long after.

I've explained my testing and QA on the lists multiple times.

You, like the other kernel maintainers in that thread, are making wild assertions despite having no involvement with the project.
by wongarsu | 2025-08-31 14:10:48+00:00
In many applications you are concerned about data you encrypt today still being secure 20 years from now. Especially if your threat model includes a malicious actor holding on to data in hopes of decrypting it later.

From the article it sounds like we will still be safe for 20+ years. On the other hand 15 was just extraordinarily easy, progress after 21 will be much quicker. And we never know which breakthroughs might come in the next decades that speed up progress.
by bradley13 | 2025-08-31 14:10:52+00:00
Genetics required. Natural evolution has zero interest in old people, so there has been no evolutionary pressure to extend lifespan. Possibly even the opposite.

We could apply that pressure, either through selective breeding over generations, or through direct genetic modification. Maybe we aren't quite there yet, but it won't be long.

Experiments on insects with selective breeding have easily tripled lifespans. How well that would transfer to mammals is hard to say, but a substantial increase is certainly possible.
by fluidcruft | 2025-08-31 14:10:52+00:00
Reproduction doesn't create whole new cells from nothing (except in the ship of Thesius sense). It's existing cells getting reprogrammed to do new things.

Reproduction does result in new matrix/scaffolding being built but the cells build that (and can rebuild it if so directed).

Of course some things "we" care about exist exclusively in the matrix (configurations of neurons, learned behaviors, memories, etc) so that could well be a limit for those parts of the body where we care primarily about preserving the matrix.

Anyway my point is that "reproduction" doesn't create whole new life, it's just a continuation.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-08-31 14:11:01+00:00
Whenever I read stuff like this, I tend to look not at the message ( because I already know what I think and have largely decided on what I think is reasonable ), but at the argumentation and language used. I do it for several reasons. It is a lot easier to find bandwagon people, shills and other undesirable content flagged, because, despite now having the ability to make the exact wording very different across media landscape, it is the exact same note across media landscape. But beyond that, it is also interesting to see shifts in words.

What I find increasingly interesting is that 'democratizing' is being used in a way that is sure to make this word become a pejorative and I can't help but wonder whether it is intentional.

edit: added missing sentence fragment
by boredemployee | 2025-08-31 14:12:21+00:00
Exactly. I'm the youngest in my family many aunts and uncles are already dead. those who still live are in a huge decline or completely lonely (sometimes both). Mom is in her late 70s and is in good shape, but she complains a lot about loneliness (even though I and my brothers visit her almost daily for a coffee or lunch). I think the joy of living ends with people around you dying.