MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skerit | 2025-08-11 14:49:40+00:00
I like using Claude-Code, it can be a real timesaver in certain cases.

But it's far from perfect. Really difficult things/big projects are nearly impossible. Even if you break it down into hundred small tasks.

I've tried to make it port an existing, big codebase from one language to another. So it has all of the original codebase in one folder, and a new project in another folder. No matter how much guidance you give it, or how clear you make your todos, it will not work.
by Quarrel | 2025-08-11 14:49:45+00:00
> government cannot make laws or regulations without consulting those affected by them how much of a hardship it constitutes to them

This is at best disingenuous.

There is no general requirement on government to consult. It is often referred to in various Acts, which are binding. There is a common law expectation that if the government has made a clear promise to consult that they have to.

But since the Glorious Revolution, parliament has proved to be supreme. It may have to be explicit in the laws it passes, but it can literally overrule itself as needed. Pesky EU human rights legislation is just a mere vote away from being destroyed.
by cyprien_g | 2025-08-11 14:49:52+00:00
I'm a long-time GitHub Copilot subscriber, but I have also tested many alternatives, such as Cursor.

Recently, I tried using Claude Code with my GitHub Copilot subscription (via unofficial support through https://github.com/ericc-ch/copilot-api), and I found it to be quite good. However, in my opinion, the main difference comes down to your preferred workflow. As someone who works with Neovim, I find that a tool that works in the terminal is more appropriate for me.
by fouric | 2025-08-11 14:50:15+00:00
As someone who loves Lisps, I still have to disagree on the value of the s-expression syntax. I think that sexps are very beautiful, easy to parse, and easy to remember, but I think that overall they're less useful than Algol-like syntaxes (of which I consider most modern languages, including C++, to be in the family of), for one reason:

Visually-heterogeneous syntaxes, for all of their flaws, are easier to read because it's easier for the human brain to pattern-match on distinct features than indistinct ones.
by mschaef | 2025-08-11 14:50:28+00:00
After trying text files and other apps, I wrote my own about ten years ago and have been using it ever since. ( https://famplan.io - I'm starting to turn it into something other people might use.)

I tend to agree with the idea that simpler is better, but a single text file wasn't quite enough. I like being able to see my lists on multiple devices, I tend to like to have multiple lists for different purposes, and it's also very useful to have shared lists for coordinating with my family and others.

The experience of using this has taught me a few things about how to use these lists effectively:

1. Using a list is like writing a journal - you need to be intentional about explicitly working to make it part of your routine. (Part of this is committing to record tasks that need to be done and then committing in some explicit way to actually doing those things.)

2. It needs to be fast, it needs to be easy, and it needs to be present. Anything else gets in the way of point 1.

3. It's important to track when you need/want to do, but lists of things to do can be overwhelming. (It's useful to have at least a few ways to ignore items when you can't or don't want to deal with them. I handle this by having multiple lists, and also having a snooze feature to ignore items for a while.)

4. You need to have a way to handle items or tasks that go on for a while. (You need to make a call, but have to leave a message, and are waiting for a callback... etc. These are places where you need to take action to push something along, but the action doesn't result in a complete task, so you need to revisit it later.)

This is going to sound odd coming from someone who wrote a tool for the purpose, but the key here is really to pick a system (any system) and then actually use it. Spend too much time developing the system, then all you've done is give yourself something else to do.
by the__alchemist | 2025-08-11 14:50:34+00:00
This is an excellent point that will immediately go off-topic for this thread. We are, I believe, committed, into a mire of CG content enveloping the internet. I believe we will go through a period where internet communications (like HN, Reddit, and pages indexed by search engines) in unviable. Life will go on; we will just be offline more. Then, the defense systems will be up to snuff, and we will find a stable balance.
by freejazz | 2025-08-11 14:50:55+00:00
>This is childish and does nothing for the discussion. It's not about me. I'm not claiming to be an authority, nor am I using myself as one.

If it's not about you why did you reference yourself as an authority twice? Calling me childish is projecting.

>The FTC hasn't once acted on Tesla's marketing. That's tacit approval at this point.

Asinine logic.

>Relying on lawsuits from crash victims, based completely on unclear or lack of regulations, is far from the ideal situation. It's only a Tesla problem insofar they make up the vast majority of miles driven with this kind of ADAS. The NHTSA just isn't keeping up.

Who is relying? Tesla is doing what they want. No one is forcing them to sell this dreck.
by api | 2025-08-11 14:51:27+00:00
I think millennial cancel culture falls under the "fear of rapid change" heading.

Before the Internet went big and mainstream we were in an era I've heard termed managerial democracy. Big media was able to largely regulate the Overton window. Social activists were able, by getting into big media via the path of the universities, to push things like racism and homophobia out of the Overton window and keep them out. This largely worked, creating the illusion (and I now firmly believe it was an illusion) that these things were dying or dead. I remember growing up in the 90s and thinking racism was something maybe a few old geezers in the South believed. "Sure grandpa, the South will rise again, now lets get you your meds."

Personally I see this as well-intentioned, but that's because I think racism is a low form of primate tribalism.

Then the net came along and made it so any yahoo with a few bucks could post. Couple that with algorithms that tend to elevate controversial (thus engaging) content, and racism and all the other banished isms vaulted back onto the stage. They were never dead IMHO, just out of polite discourse. I didn't realize that growing up but I sure see it now.

Lefty cancel culture was an attempt to repeat the purge of those things from big media with the Internet and it didn't work and couldn't work. I did and still do sympathize but I think it's pissing into a hurricane.

Of course there's plenty of right wing cancel culture too that we're seeing now. That's a different beast. Cancel culture historically is a creature of the right. The left form is probably a brief historical aberration brought about by the conditions I outlined above. I'm hearing lefties admit defeat on this right now, and some question whether it was a good idea to try.

Racism won't be dead until people actually change their hearts and minds. Controlling the discourse just means you don't hear about it.
by observationist | 2025-08-11 14:51:54+00:00
People shouldn't be benefiting from those assumptions, especially flawed assumptions positing basic competence and good faith. Governments, agencies, organizations, and companies are dealing in personal, valuable information that they have no clue how to handle or secure, and we keep seeing massive leaks and breaches, incompetence, lack of care, apathy, and even outright malice.

You shouldn't be trusting your data with anyone, short of NASA, probably (and they won't be asking for it.)
by al3rez | 2025-08-11 14:52:10+00:00
i realized either it's pen & or paper or .txt this was a 10+ year experiement and i wasted alot of time finding and building workflows and none of them sticks more than .txt file (i also had a more automated version of it in macos using .txt file and macros that time blocked my calendar but it was too restrict)

nothing falls my mind i can just add #note #<project> #idea or whatever consistent tagging or subnotes i can do the todo.txt and it'd be easier to even feed it to chatgpt/or what everllm to even remind of my most important ones in the future and send me notification in telegram or something.
by pama | 2025-08-11 14:52:11+00:00
It is the other way around. If the data is causal and presented in the causal order, it is impossible to beat the loss of a pure auto-regressive model because it has the correct probability distribution for the dataset. Language data is mostly causal (as words follow in the context of previous words when they are spoken/written). Most of the remaining additional info in the extreme oversampling of the same data via diffusion models should be there by using fill-in-the-middle or order-reversal strategies with AR models as well and with significant compute savings during training.
by hiq | 2025-08-11 14:52:38+00:00
Can you expand on which org-mode features you like for this use case?

On the top of my head, among the useful features I'm familiar with, you can:

* nest tasks

* set deadlines

* set priorities

* filter ~arbitrarily

* have as much content as you want per item (in comparison with todotxt with is one line per item), including non-text like images

* have statuses other than todo and done (like waiting)

What else do you use that makes you particularly like this setup?

Org-mode is this thing I've been trying to use for a while, but it never sticks because I'm just too used to vim and plain text. Once in a while I look for a killer use-case, hoping it'd make me stick to it, to no avail so far.
by Findeton | 2025-08-11 14:53:03+00:00
It's sad because Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in part to debunk Mercantilism. Smith wasn't right on everything, but he was right to criticize Mercantilism.

For example, if trade imbalances were so bad, we should sink any ship that comes into the US as this reduces trade imbalances (absurd example from Bastiat btw).
by devmor | 2025-08-11 14:53:33+00:00
This article seems fun, and it's interesting, but I was waiting for the point and it never came.

The author didn't do anything actually useful or impactful, they played around with a toy and mimicked a portion of what it's like to spin up pet projects as a developer.

But hey, it could be that this says something after all. The first big public usages of AI were toys and vastly performed as a sideshow attraction for amused netizens. Maybe we haven't come very far at all, in comparison to the resources spent. It seems like all of the truly impressive and useful applications of this technology are still in specialized private sector work.
by bee_rider | 2025-08-11 14:53:38+00:00
Did you get a chance to use it? I’ve only just come across this table now, so I haven’t bad a chance to actually try and use it for anything, so I wouldn’t be able to evaluate the usefulness.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this table is satisfying for our brains as a vaguely technical and interesting thing, but I’m not sure how useful it really is. In general the compiler will be really creative in reordering instructions, and the CPU will also be creative about which ones it runs parallel (since it is good at discovering instruction level parallelism). So, I wonder if the level of study necessary to use this information also requires the level of data that is available in the detailed table.

I have not done much caring about instructions, it seems very hard. FWIW I have had some success caring about reducing the number of trips to memory and making sure the dependencies are obvious to the computer, so I’m not totally naive… but I think that caring about instruction timing is mostly for the real hardcore optimization badasses.
by extraisland | 2025-08-11 14:54:09+00:00
> Management are management. They do managementy things. They do not develop. We, developers, do. For some things, we hold ourselves up to certain standards. Why not for site performance?

I've just explained why. What part didn't you understand?

> Do you write tests? They also are something that doesn't directly bring money

I do (I like to know my code works). That doesn't mean other people will.

Much like site performance unless there is an emphasis on quality, then many developers won't bother writing tests.

I've had people copy and paste tests, then jig the code around so they got the green tick in the IDE. The feature didn't work at all. The test was complete nonsense. I have colleagues that put up PRs where the code doesn't even compile.
by StellarScience | 2025-08-11 14:54:43+00:00
I find AI helpful when coding in unfamiliar languages or topics, as it generates initial code that roughly works, that I can then iterate on.

Even so, I have to constantly hound the AI to write concise code, to reuse code, to consolidate duplicate code blocks. When I ask it to remove the useless comments, it also removes the useful comments, so I have to goad it back into adding back individual helpful comments.

I had AI write some Python unit tests and it showed me how to mock, which I had never done in Python. That's great! But when I examined the tests, they were so "white box" and brittle that almost any change in implementation would break the tests.

When coding in a familiar language (C++), I tried turning on the auto-AI assistant (for our one project where security rules allowed it) and while I was impressed that it would auto-complete whole blocks of text based on my actual code base, not once was I able to accept those blocks as-is.

So for me at this point AI is at best a net +2% productivity improvement, though I surely have lots to learn about other ways in which it could be useful.
by Bender | 2025-08-11 14:55:01+00:00
A massive Wyoming data center will soon use 5x more power than the state's human occupants - but no one knows who is using it

In other words, the same amount of power as any other AI datacenter. It does make for a good headline though. Wyoming has less people state wide than big cities outside of the state. Cheyenne, the state capitol has only 65,132 residents.

- Population of the state of Wyoming: 587,618 (2024)

- Population of the city of Oklahoma City: 702,767 (2023)

- Population of the city of Los Angeles: 3.879 million (2024)
by petepete | 2025-08-11 14:55:17+00:00
I do this too, but with a text file per day.

I have my 3 favourite bindings from vimwiki in my config and have used this 'system' for years without any problems.

<leader>ww = go to diary home <leader>w<leader>w = go to today <leader>w<leader>d = go to list of days

https://github.com/peteryates/dotfiles/blob/master/nvim/.con...
by gnfargbl | 2025-08-11 14:55:25+00:00
The OSA is already written such that only very large sites are potentially caught by the most onerous rules (at least 7 million MAU for Category 1; at least 3 million MAU for Category 2B). Smaller sites are automatically exempted.

This isn't to say that the OSA is a universally good thing, or that smaller sites won't be affected by it. However, this request for judicial review wasn't looking to carve out any special cases for specific large sites in favour of smaller sites.
by MobileVet | 2025-08-11 14:55:46+00:00
This isn’t something I have actively thought about… but now that you bring it up, I am definitely concerned. If the APIs were deprecated, CarPlay would be useless as the auto manufacturers would not update their head unit.

The thread about an F150 with a known Bluetooth issue is a great example. Number one vehicle sold in the US for a LONG time, and yet no incentive to keep it working apparently
by AstroBen | 2025-08-11 14:55:58+00:00
I strongly believe using just a plain text files or overly basic tools makes your life more complicated, not less. I get a tonne of value out of OmniFocus

> “But what about mobile?” - The file syncs through Dropbox

Yup now you have to handle conflicts, or keep in mind which device you last edited on

> I use my calendar for time-specific stuff

Cool, the app I use just has a due date field that reminds me. I don't want the thing spread out over multiple places. I don't need to check my calendar every night for due dates and then add them to my list because it's already.. in my list.. with due dates..

> It’s searchable

Kind of? For basic searches I guess.. and only on a computer. Searching plain text files on mobile is hell

They seem to be inventing problems and then implementing a solution that doesn't actually solve them. Kept forgetting to check Things? How does a plain text file solve that?
by cnst | 2025-08-11 14:56:33+00:00
No, you're thinking about USB-A to USB-A, which is definitely prohibited by the spec. (Whereas USB-C to USB-C cables are most certainly not disallowed.)

What's disallowed is for a non-host to have USB-A, hence, USB-A to USB-A is impossible, because one side of the cable has to be connected to a "device" that's not acting in host mode.

Only the host is allowed to have USB-A.

This is exactly why USB-A is superior to USB-C for host-only ports on embedded devices like routers (as well as auxiliary USB ports on your desktop or monitor).

Generally, many modern travel routers have one USB-C and one USB-A port. Without any documentation or pictograms, you can be relatively sure that USB-A would be used for data, and USB-C is for power (hopefully, through USB-PD). Since USB-A couldn't possibly be used to power up the router, since USB-A is a host-only port.

USB-C is great for USB-OTG and the bidirectional modes, when the same port could be used for both the host and the peripheral device functions, like on the smartphones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_On-The-Go

If the port can ONLY be used in host-mode, and does NOT support Alt Mode, Thunderbolt, or bidirectional USB-PD, then USB-A is a far more fitting connector, to signify all of the above.
by ack_complete | 2025-08-11 14:56:42+00:00
The problem is that the built-in mechanism is often microcode, which is still slower than plain machine code in some cases.

There are some interesting writings from a former architect of the Pentium Pro on the reasons for this. One is apparently that the microcode engine often lacked branch prediction, so handling special cases in the microcode was slower than compare/branch in direct code. REP MOVS has a bunch of such cases due to the need to handle overlapping copies, interrupts, and determining when it should switch to cache line sized non-temporal accesses.

More recent Intel CPUs have enhanced REP MOVS support with faster microcode and a flag indicating that memcpy() should rely on it more often. But people have still found cases where if the relative alignment between source and destination is just right, a manual copy loop is still noticeably faster than REP MOVS.
by entuno | 2025-08-11 14:56:46+00:00
Those petitions aren't really worth anything - governments have ignored ones with over six million signatures before.

And they also ignored this one a few years back that had just under 700,000 signatures to "make verified ID a requirement for opening a social media account":

https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/575833

Ironically, the primary reason they gave for rejecting it was:

> However, restricting all users’ right to anonymity, by introducing compulsory user verification for social media, could disproportionately impact users who rely on anonymity to protect their identity. These users include young people exploring their gender or sexual identity, whistleblowers, journalists’ sources and victims of abuse. Introducing a new legal requirement, whereby only verified users can access social media, would force these users to disclose their identity and increase a risk of harm to their personal safety.
by nerdjon | 2025-08-11 14:57:01+00:00
It is quite concerning because SaaS isn't going away, (putting aside the questionable ethical side of an application like this) an application like this just is not possible outside of SaaS. It needs a server to centrally store information like this. If as a society we decide that something like this is valuable, there just is not another way to do it.

Sure before there would be leaks that would break trust, but generally it seems most of the time the basics were taken care of and often those leaks were because of phishing employees or other means of getting the information vs really basic security issues. Not a hard rule obviously, but still.

Now we have seen time and time again that these vibe coded systems lack even the most basic security fundamentals. That will continue to erode trust.
by horsawlarway | 2025-08-11 14:57:24+00:00
Bottles is absolutely fine for random exes...

Yes - it's not entirely preconfigured for you like the recipes in their catalogues, but most runners work just fine for general windows applications.

I have thrown several bottles together just to run plain ol' exe installers, and they absolutely work, in about the least effort you can put in for this sort of thing (entirely GUI based, mostly click 3 buttons and go).

ex - I have a bottle for running victron VEConfigure 3 to configure solar inverters. A bottle for running Carbide Create for Carbide 3D. A bottle for running windows CAD software. Lots of random things.
by pflenker | 2025-08-11 14:57:40+00:00
I remember a campaign to collect aol cds, which were a 90s form of physical spam, so that they can be dumped in front of their headquarters. I eagerly asked all my friends and family to pick up as many aol cds as they can and hand them to me. I missed a couple crucial details (as an excuse I was quite young): a) CDs are heavy, b) the headquarters aren’t even in Germany so I would have to send the CDs overseas, c) shipping heavy stuff is expensive, d) it’s easier to spread the word to everyone that they should collect stuff for you than it is to tell them to stop.

Took me a long while to get rid of all of them.
by lucb1e | 2025-08-11 14:58:02+00:00
Besides what's public knowledge, I tend to put a bit of stock in our intelligence agency calling for PQ adoption for systems that need to remain confidential for 20 years or more

edit: adding in some sources

2014: "between 2030 and 2040" according to https://www.aivd.nl/publicaties/publicaties/2014/11/20/infor... (404) via https://tweakers.net/reviews/5885/de-dreiging-van-quantumcom... (Dutch)

2021: "small chance it arrives by 2030" https://www.aivd.nl/documenten/publicaties/2021/09/23/bereid... (Dutch)

2025: "protect against ‘store now, decrypt later’ attacks by 2030", joint paper from 18 countries https://www.aivd.nl/binaries/aivd_nl/documenten/brochures/20... (English)
by hearsathought | 2025-08-11 14:58:17+00:00
Much of what was automated is physical labor which allowed workers to move into "service/intellectual" jobs. When tractors and dump trucks removed the need for masses of people to move dirt, it didn't create more jobs of moving dirt around since those jobs could also be tackled by more tractors and dump trucks. If AI is what all these "AI evangelicals" claim, then most intellectual jobs would be gone. And it won't create more service/intellectual jobs for humans because whatever new jobs are created would be tackled by AI.

> If you're a business that offers 3 services to the public and "AI" could automate one person's salary out of your payroll, why would do that as opposed to keeping your headcount and instead offer 9 services to the public generating more streams of revenue?

If AI could automate one person's job, why would you keep him? You can offer 9 services with one less person.
by toastercat | 2025-08-11 14:58:36+00:00
No actual SWE believes AI can do 30-50% of their work. For me at least, it can maybe do 5-10% of my work; this usually involves scaffolding some test cases, generating some quick documentation, and just plainly replacing the Google Search -> Stack Overflow flow.

Cursor and Claude Code are by themselves awful engineers, who at best just save me a lot of keystrokes.