MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fuzzy_biscuit | 2025-08-10 23:41:21+00:00
I don't take issue with the naming but with the names that feel a bit beyond my ken. "Erased" makes sense when explained but not before. "Reified" is a word I simply do not use so it feels like academia run amok.

Regardless, I recognize myself as the point of failure, but those names do strike me as academia speak, though better than some/many. <shrug>
by rezmason | 2025-08-10 23:42:51+00:00
At first glance, I thought this was some new TC39 JavaScript syntax proposal.

This is a cool site. I thought I'd look for a page about my favorite syntactic phenomenon, "what all", and not only did I find it, but also they changed the "Who says this?" section header to "Who all says this?"

https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/what-all
by dbaman | 2025-08-10 23:43:01+00:00
Yep I can confirm the bug is fixed.

Nice UI btw, plus good use of AI for scoring/summarization.

I wrote something kinda similar that scrapes HN (using Firebase) for particular keywords I'm interested in. It gathers all hyperlinks mentioned in comments and uses NLTK to summarize. Kind of a curated HN reading list.

I'm currently working on using an LLM for the summaries.

Your project has given me a few ideas for mine. Thanks!
by PKop | 2025-08-10 23:43:32+00:00
He can use the time in school to push further and advance beyond his current knowledge regardless of the level of difficulty of intro or whatever courses. At the end he will have the degree which is valuable for most other jobs even more than it is for Programming, including government jobs especially...and if you are worried about job opportunities, college will be one of the best starting paths to get foot in the door with internships and on site interviews, recruiting events etc. I don't see it being easier outside of university than inside it. Have him scour every opportunity for career events and internships.

He could always join the Army and have college paid for partially or fully at state school depending on years of service. I did this. Aside from the money it is a great experience for a young man, something most won't have and he can get paid while doing it. It will help for hiring at least for government jobs as well.

I think it is a huge mistake to believe AI will take CS jobs to a significant degree any time soon. I think if it does it will take other jobs as much or more. So not worth optimizing for that way.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-10 23:43:34+00:00
Your comments are citing this blog post and arxiv preprint.

You are also misrepresenting the literature. There are many papers about LLMs and productivity. You can find them on Google Scholar and elsewhere.

The evidence is clear that LLMs make people more productive. Your one cherry picked preprint will get included in future review papers if it gets published.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-08-10 23:46:20+00:00
Smart phones are a pinnacle product that combines materials science, supply chain management, electronic engineering, product design, graphic design, operating system design, application development, computer science, quantum electro-optics, digital signal processing, communication theory, satellite communication, and marketing - all in a small handheld device.

Not only are they absolutely miraculous, but they're commodity products that make the miracle seem routine and mundane.
by MuffinFlavored | 2025-08-10 23:46:24+00:00
Could you help me understand why the remaining 5% is not bit-for-bit reproducible? For example... if you download a tar of sources pinned to a version, and you run `./configure` and `make` in some kind of container and it doesn't embed some kind of timestamp... why are 95% reproducible and some aren't? Would like to learn/understand.
by SamvitJ | 2025-08-10 23:46:30+00:00
Yes. I got a computer science degree, and would get one again today. Assuming you are able to finish the degree, no major has better ROI. As AI automates more and more types of work over the next few decades, computer science, the language of automation, will become more important, not less. A computer science degree teaches you the fundamentals (easy to miss in self study), builds discipline, exposes you to cutting edge topics, and opens doors to the best jobs in the industry.

Yes, it's possible to make it without a degree, but it makes things a lot more difficult. Don't second guess it. Do it!

Also, no reason to dread the intro classes IMO. Given his experience, it shouldn't be hard for him to ace them and race on ahead to bigger and better things. I learned some interesting things in intro CS, despite also coming in with prior programming experience.

Feel free to send me a message if you have any questions.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-08-10 23:47:30+00:00
Benchmarks that execute code are to some degree the only thing where you can automate testing at scale without humans in the loop, but even that has its caveats [1]. Regardless, when your output is natural language text (as is in this case), there is simply no viable alternative to measure accuracy economically. There is frankly no argument to be had here, because this is simply not achievable with current technology.

[1] https://openai.com/index/introducing-swe-bench-verified/
by tayo42 | 2025-08-10 23:49:09+00:00
Yes, college helps with the internships neccesaray to get a foot in the door. Otherwise there's nothing to differentiate your self from other applicants.

A masters degree ime is neccesaray for any of the most interesting fields of cs work from what I've noticed or will help alot.

Also 130k is unessesary. Go to community College, transfer credits to public university to finish the degree.

If the intro classes are to easy it's an opportunity to tutor for money too. This also goes on your resume
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-10 23:49:29+00:00
It's reasonable to expect people to know how to use their tools well.

If you know how to set up and sharpen a hand plane and you use them day in and day out, then I will listen to your opinion on a particular model of plane.

If you've never used one before and you write a blog post about running into the same issues every beginner runs into with planes then I'm going to discount your opinion that they aren't useful.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-08-10 23:49:37+00:00
I think they are using Insurance as a predictive indicator of how terrible things are. So you are largely agreeing.

IE:

1. insurance spreads a hurt across a society, using money as an instrument.

2. If insurance doesn't work anymore then the hurt is too large for society!

This linking of 1 and 2 may not be entirely true due to insurance not necessarily being a perfectly efficient "spreader" across society. But I think in practical terms it is close enough.
by heavyset_go | 2025-08-10 23:49:54+00:00
Even if there aren't backdoors, things like this[1] affecting AMD Zen CPUs, where microcode signing keys changed and thus the firmware needs to be updated to allow the new keys, would prevent machines from using new microcode updates.

[1] https://github.com/divestedcg/real-ucode?tab=readme-ov-file#...
by k310 | 2025-08-10 23:50:39+00:00
Let me say one thing that works for me on iOS. I use an app called Sheriff that I instruct to enable or disable (the default is to enable) javascript and cookies on a per website or per domain basis.

Set it, forget it. If something screws up, I open the app and change it. I think of it as a javascript and cookies firewall, in terms of interaction.

https://primatology.xyz/sheriff
by fleabitdev | 2025-08-10 23:50:45+00:00
Reactivity works by replaying code when its inputs have changed. Events can make this very expensive and impractical, because to properly replay event-driven code, you'd need to replay every event it's ever received.

When we replace an event stream with an observable variable, it's like a performance optimisation: "you can ignore all of the events which came before; here's an accumulated value which summarises the entire event stream". For example, a mouse movement event listener can often be reduced to an "is hovered" flag.

Serialising program state to plain data isn't always easy or convenient, but it's flexible enough. Reducing all events to state almost solves the problem of impure inputs to reactive functions.

Unfortunately, reactive functions usually have impure outputs, not just impure inputs. UI components might need to play a sound, write to a file, start an animation, perform an HTTP request, or notify a parent component that the "close" button has been clicked. It's really difficult to produce instantaneous side effects if you don't have instantaneous inputs to build on.

I can't see an obvious solution, but until we come up with one, reactive UI toolkits will continue to be ill-formed. For example, a React component <ClickCounter mouseButton> would be broken by default: clicks are delivered by events, so they're invisible to React, so the component will display an incorrect click count when the mouseButton prop changes.
by xqb64 | 2025-08-10 23:50:46+00:00
This comment really caught my attention.

I have considered enrolling in a university precisely for the same reason, but I never would have thought that something like that would be considered "valid".

I guess I'm full of questions for you, but in short:

- Where are you coming from and what is your target destination?

- Have you made 101% sure that this way of studying would be acceptable to the employers in your prospective destination country?

- Does one need $20-25K up front, or is there a payment plan?

Thanks if you decide to answer, and I wish you a good luck.
by magarnicle | 2025-08-10 23:52:05+00:00
I reckon that all these "productive" takes on smartphones don't really solve the issue, they end up being too "dumb". The one big thing that makes smartphones addictive is not all the apps: it's the big beautiful piece of glass at the front.

The screen is what makes smartphones addictive. You can tell just by looking at the history of them. So my ideal productivity device would be a smartphone underneath - full android, great cameras, decent processor - but the screen would be small and rubbish. Let me do everything I want to do, just make it unpleasant to do it unless I really need to.
by ajross | 2025-08-10 23:52:49+00:00
> Meanwhile, the only PCs I know of that survive time quite as well

Nah, everything works forever, it's just that no one cares. My younger child retired a 3770K Ivy Bridge box last year that I'd bought at or near release in 2012, so ~11 years of steady use.

People fetishize Apple hardware, but the truth is that modern electronics manufacturing is bulletproof up and down the assembly lines.
by yodsanklai | 2025-08-10 23:54:51+00:00
I recently had the following experience. I vibe-coded something in a language I'm not super familiar with, it seemed correct, it type-checked. Tests passed. Then reviewer pointed many stylistic issues and was rightfully pissed at me. When I addressed the comments, I realized I would not have made those mistakes had i written the code myself. It was a waste of time for me and the reviewer.

Another thing that happens quite often. I give the task to the LLM. It's not quite what I want. I fix the prompt. Still not there. Every iteration takes time, in which I lose my focus because it can take minutes. Sometimes it's very frustrating, I feel I'm not using my brain, not learning the project. Again, loss of time.

At the current stage, if I want to be productive, I need to restrict the use of the LLMs to the tasks for which there's a high change that it'll get it right in the first try. Out of laziness, I still have the tendency to give it some more complex tasks and ultimately lose time.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-08-10 23:54:51+00:00
The idea is to move variables from the body of the function to the argument list and rewrite the call sites to match.

That decreases the size of the closure (and increases the size of the code, and of however you're passing arguments).

Do it repeatedly though and you end up with no free variables, i.e. no closure to allocate. Hence the name, the lambda (closure) has been lifted (through the call tree) to the top level, where it is now a function (and not a lambda, if following the usual conflating of anonymous function with allocated closure).

Doesn't work in the general case because you can't find all the call sites.
by sjoedev | 2025-08-10 23:55:34+00:00
My experience using LLMs is similar to my experience working with a team of junior developers. And LLMs are valuable in a similar way.

There are many problems where the solution would take me a few hours to derive from scratch myself, but looking at a solution and deciding “this is correct” or “this is incorrect” takes a few minutes or seconds.

So I don’t expect the junior or the LLM to produce a correct result every time, but it’s quick to verify the solution and provide feedback, thus I have saved time to think about more challenging problems where my experience and domain knowledge is more valuable.
by reactordev | 2025-08-10 23:55:42+00:00
PCI lanes just aren’t there yet which is why the soldered memory approach to shorten the gap and increase the speed. The memory the framework desktop uses doesn’t come in slotted form (LPDDR5X).

You absolutely can (and should) build your own for slightly cheaper. Just find the fastest DDR5 CUDIMMs you can paired with the fastest memory bus mobo.
by jasonfarnon | 2025-08-10 23:55:53+00:00
Same here. It sounds like you even started when I did, ca. 2006. Starting from the blackberry era to my current pixel I've tried to do something similar with my cell phones, but I never usually program in that environment so I never got it off the ground. When LLMs got good a couple years ago getting a screenshot task up and running on my android was one of the first things I tried, but it's been a pain. Apparently Android has been putting in guards against that type of application for security/privacy reasons.
by johnfn | 2025-08-10 23:55:55+00:00
I tend to be sus of usePrevious. Not saying it doesn't have a place, but often times it's cleaner to just write the diffing code you want directly in the handler. For instance, say you have a text field, and if the value changes you want to autosave. I would just put that right in the onBlur - `if (e.currentTarget.value != text) { autosave(e.currentTarget.value) }`. If you want to debounce, I would debounce the method, not the value.

I tend to agree with your overall assessment - your React code is not doing well if you're encoding events into state. That's why I try to avoid it! But I may be oversimplifying.
by liamdgray | 2025-08-10 23:55:57+00:00
"Abstract A model of associative memory is studied, which stores and reliably retrieves many more patterns than the number of neurons in the network. We propose a simple duality between this dense associative memory and neural networks commonly used in deep learning. On the associative memory side of this duality, a family of models that smoothly interpolates between two limiting cases can be constructed. One limit is referred to as the feature-matching mode of pattern recognition, and the other one as the prototype regime. On the deep learning side of the duality, this family corresponds to feedforward neural networks with one hidden layer and various activation functions, which transmit the activities of the visible neurons to the hidden layer. This family of activation functions includes logistics, rectified linear units, and rectified polynomials of higher degrees. The proposed duality makes it possible to apply energy-based intuition from associative memory to analyze computational properties of neural networks with unusual activation functions - the higher rectified polynomials which until now have not been used in deep learning. The utility of the dense memories is illustrated for two test cases: the logical gate XOR and the recognition of handwritten digits from the MNIST data set."
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-08-10 23:56:02+00:00
I haven't seen a single ad in Windows 11 since I turned off whatever settings those were that I don't even remember because it was over 2 years ago. I was initially worried by the FUD that spreads about how these settings will get undone with various updates, but it's never happened. This doesn't sound like aggressive advertising to me. It took me longer to find an article explaining how to get rid of the ads in the Ubuntu motd.

The worst thing that's happened to me with a Windows update was that I lost the ability to use the old style alt-tab behavior in 24H2, but that led me to "Alt-Tab Terminator" which works fine.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-08-10 23:56:07+00:00
>> Who would want to use a distributed key-value cache as a rate limiter?

> Who would want to? APISIX apparently

There is a difference between using a technology for which it is intended (APISIX) and what it may use as an implementation detail (Redis).

For example, many services use a persistent store such as MySQL or PostgreSQL in their implementation. This does not imply either are sufficient to completely replace the functionality provided by said services.
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-10 23:56:08+00:00
>There are nearby towns with housing that is substantially cheaper, within a 30 minute bus ride if you really need to get to Boulder for some reason.

That's great! But if you have no place to store your clean (or dirty) clothes, or to shower, how many landlords are going to rent to you? How many employers are going to offer you a job?

Those are not rhetorical questions.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-10 23:56:47+00:00
Just so I don’t come off as elitist, I graduated from a no name state school in the south with a degree in computer science. But that was in the 90s.

My perspective though is going to come from someone who worked at Amazon (AWS) in 2020-2023 and mentored a couple of interns who got return offers the next year.

Companies aren’t recruiting for the most part from tier 2 schools and it’s hard to get an internship.

I was also looking for a job in late 2023 as someone who was experienced, credentialed, networked, etc.

The market for developers sucks right now. I would have probably had a hard time finding a job if it weren’t for my network and a couple of niches where I’m one of the industry experts.

When I submitted my job to hundreds of jobs as a Plan b, I heard crickets there are a lot of people chasing few jobs and to a first approximation, no one wants entry level developers. It’s getting worse as AI improves.

Anecdotally, there are projects I lead now that I would have needed at least one entry level developer to do the grunt work that I can just do myself using ChatGPT.

I would even go as far as saying if he doesn’t go to one of the top schools that companies recruit from, don’t even bother with a CS degree.

Get a degree in something else and maybe take some CS electives if he can’t get a degree from a top school.

What that something else is? I have no idea.
by chrisco255 | 2025-08-10 23:57:14+00:00
The conquest of north America was largely done by smallpox. As soon as the Europeans arrived, it doomed 95% of the population, who had been spared countless plagues and viruses that swept through Asia, Africa and Europe over the millenia. This fractured many tribes and collapsed their numbers to a point where they had no meaningful polity, maybe a few hundred to a few thousand at most.

Among the remaining tribes and the decimated numbers, many did in fact eventually integrate with Spanish, French, or English settlers, particularly the tribes that allied with them against another rival tribe, such as the Tlaxcalans who aided the Spanish in conquering the Aztecs, and subsequently integrated.

We hear the most and remember the most the tribes which warred the most fiercely (ie Commanche, Apache, Sioux, etc), however, we scarcely remember the tribes they themselves slaughtered, enslaved, and scalped, such as the Crow and Pawnee (who would ally with the US Army) . And some like the Iroquois were generally peaceful and continue to this day.
by rvz | 2025-08-10 23:57:15+00:00
> *EU politicians exempt themselves from this surveillance under "professional secrecy" rules. They get privacy. You and your family do not. Demand fairness.

That is what a scam looks like.

In fact it should be the opposite: Government officials should have even far less privacy since you're paying your taxes to them and you need that transparency on where the money is going.

As corrupt as they already are, this just tells you that EU politicians just want even more corruption.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-08-10 23:57:55+00:00
Wait But Why says it best: AI is in the "ha ha look at the funny robot that can do monkey tricks" phase.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol... (it's towards the end of the article)

Take a longer view. Google's AI slip ups are temporary and necessary when getting the product out, to be improved in the open. Tech companies did awkward stuff in the 90s and we loved it! It's cool that fail-in-the-open culture is back in!

Besides, the real search results are still shown. They are right there, below the AI slop.
by fwystup | 2025-08-10 23:58:43+00:00
Glad to hear it. Your NLTK approach sounds interesting — would love to hear more about it. BTW, I’m planning to improve my project’s documentation. Funny enough, under “consideration” it flagged itself: "Documentation quality is not explicitly high. The effectiveness of the LLM’s scoring criteria is subjective and not deeply explained." Sadly, that’s true.
by api | 2025-08-10 23:58:52+00:00
What’s funny is that I hear today’s conservatives moral panicking about kids apparently not having sex or breaking the rules like they used to. The narrative goes that they are too busy just staring at screens and being placated.

Conservatives. I hear conservatives saying this. That’s the wild part. In my teens the conservatives would have given anything for what they’re whining about now.

I don’t know how true this fun recession is. The stats say there’s a kernel of truth to it but it’s being exaggerated, and if you talk to young people they say it’s as much about the high cost of anything as digital distraction. It’s become crazy expensive to do things in the real world.
by topspin | 2025-08-10 23:59:07+00:00
> Is the problem truly down to physics

Yes. The "conservative attitudes" of JEDEC et al. are a consequence of physics and the capabilities of every party involved in dealing with it, from the RAM chip fabricators and PCB manufacturers, all the way to you, the consumer, and the price you're willing to pay for motherboards, power supplies, memory controllers, and yield costs incurred trying to build all of this stuff, such that you can sort by price, mail order some likely untested combination of affordable components and stick them together with a fair chance that it will all "work" within the power consumption envelope, thermal envelope, and failure rate you're likely to tolerate. Every iteration of the standards is another attempt to strike the right balance all the way up and down this chain, and at the root of everything is the physics of signal integrity, power consumption, thermals and component reliability.
by ashirviskas | 2025-08-10 23:59:12+00:00
The answers would be similar to the question "why is Javascript so popular". It was not fast to run, not safe, not optimized and poor in most areas except for being almost universal and having results faster either due to js developers availability, or due to it being a high level language, even if it did try to multiply a "dog" string by 2 sometimes in some spaghetti codebase. It got better, but even before that this formula was "delivery > quality". It's also why almost no one writes assembly for production. Or C, and we get tons of bloated electron apps.

(If it was not clear, I have no love for JS and I never really programmed in it, but you have to admit, it did allow us to have more stuff. Even if 99% of it should be torched by fire if evaluated purely from engineering perspective)