MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kashunstva | 2025-08-12 08:56:23+00:00
> Once you accept that doing the morally sound thing costs money, the question becomes what is the most good you could do with that money.

Relative to the topic of this thread, providing access to LLMs at a loss would not be at the top of my list of ways to right moral wrongs either. But more broadly, taxing the rich costs nothing, unless one believes that Reagan economic theory is backed by actual empirical evidence. Some actions in civic life are done for symbolic reasons. People doff their hats and apply their right hand to their precordium for symbolic reasons. We can progressively tax all to symbolize something about economic fairness and opposition to the winner-take-all ethos.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-12 08:56:34+00:00
You guys(I'm not from US) are confused because you thought gaming economy and chasing global economic optima gives you everything, and it didn't quite do so. That's because economic theories don't consider purposes or political importances of a product, it'll tell you it's stupid to make your own nuclear missiles when you can get a bulk discount from China. And you're looking for a different framework that works better than that.

The USA was unique in that it was always outspoken with patriotism, and to lesser extent with classical nationalism than usual. Maybe the US is reaching some stage where it grows its own proper form of good-old ethnic nationalism, whether it's a good thing or not...
by DrScientist | 2025-08-12 08:57:20+00:00
Of course not - you are confusing competition with theft.

It's the difference between you writing a piece of competing software and taking my market share, versus you stealing my software and selling it as your own.

Or you attempting to write a competing best seller versus copying mine wholesale and selling under your own name on Amazon.

One activity is ultimately creative destruction that pushes society forward - the other is simply destructive free riding.

ie theft involves no creation of value.

Now the situation with tech companies is that there is theft, but also value add ( like somebody stealing your book and putting a better cover on it online ).

Just because there is some value add doesn't forgive the theft.
by ncruces | 2025-08-12 08:57:40+00:00
And yet, I see P1434R0 seemingly trying to introduce new undefined behavior, around integer-to-pointer conversions, where previously you had reasonably sensible implementation defined behavior (the conversions “are intended to be consistent with the addressing structure of the execution environment").

https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2019/p14...
by ricardobeat | 2025-08-12 08:57:58+00:00
This is a common story in the startup world. Outsiders are able to break free from the mould; its harder to innovate when everything you do is already shaped by best practices, and your career is highly dependent on your peers’ approval. Doing things differently is a high risk move that few are willing to make.

Incidentally, Ray Kroc, the guy who made McDonalds the $200B company it is today, didn’t know anything about running a restaurant. His closest experience was selling blenders.
by ahartmetz | 2025-08-12 08:59:16+00:00
Show me that quiet, 16 core, 5 GHz, 128 GB RAM laptop that's actually pretty cheap, too.

I do need the CPU performance, that computer is used to compile C++ code. The RAM is for local LLMs - not fast enough to be practical most of the time tbh, but I like to experiment anyway.
by ChrisKnott | 2025-08-12 08:59:23+00:00
Both the use of “founder” and “the” are inaccurate and misleading (I notice you’ve switched to “a” without comment). He was a government adviser 20 years ago that was central to the work of creating Ofcom. How is he closely related to the running of Ofcom, today?

The conspiracy theory is your suggestion he is deriving some kind of financial benefit to Carnegie via Yoti - what is the basis for this? (I agree it would be a conflict of interest, though not hypocritical).
by zelphirkalt | 2025-08-12 09:00:43+00:00
You do understand that org-mode is plain text, yes? You are basically losing nothing, if you write an org mode file. You don't even have to use org syntax. The point is you can and you can do things faster, if you do. Like inserting a new heading, or changing the order of text blocks, or inserting a quote or a table.
by mythz | 2025-08-12 09:01:37+00:00
> How is Rider v. VS?

Rider is far better than VS for everything apart from Desktop UI Apps and perhaps Blazor WASM hot reloading, which is itself far behind the UX of JS/Vite hot reloading, so I avoid it and just use Blazor static rendering. Otherwise VS tooling is far behind Intellij/Rider for authoring Web dev assets, inc. TypeScript.

I switched to Rider/VS Code long before moving to Linux, which I'm happy to find works just as well in Linux. Not a fan of JetBrains built-in AI Integration (which IMO they've fumbled for years), but happy with Augment Code's Intellij Plugin which I use in both Rider and VS Code.
by notashlynx | 2025-08-12 09:01:38+00:00
I get where you’re coming from. I don’t think UBI is just an “AI future” thing though. Even without AI, we’ve already got a system where wealth is concentrating at the top, and AI just puts that process on fast-forward.

I’ve been lucky enough to use AI daily since ChatGPT went viral, and even from that position of privilege it’s hard not to notice how uneven the benefits are. The people who can adapt quickly or are already in high paying roles will figure out how to use it to make more money. Meanwhile, a lot of folks who could really use a safety net won’t even get the chance to learn the tools before they’re left behind.

And honestly, even AI fluent people are struggling. I know people who use AI fluently for job hunting and still can’t find work, let alone a well paying role. Even I was struggling to find a job in tech a few months ago. If that’s the situation in AI heavy markets, can't even imagine what it’s like in parts of the world where most people haven’t even heard of AI.

So yeah, I agree with you that UBI won’t happen anytime soon. But I also think that if the big players wait until AI has already “disrupted everything” to start talking seriously about it, the gap will be so wide by then that it’ll be almost impossible to close.
by _zeso | 2025-08-12 09:01:47+00:00
Restricting activism to exclusively “legal avenues” is what allows the slow erosion of our freedoms and rights. The rights you enjoy today would not exist if they weren’t fought outside of the legal frameworks of their time. This law is the perfect example of how rights are not guaranteed and need to be constantly fought for.

If they were to block the UK that would just be them no longer “doing business” in the UK, which you seem to agree is perfectly acceptable?

You seem to think that the Wikimedia Foundation exists outside of a political context but the reality is their sheer existence is political and always will be.
by vkou | 2025-08-12 09:02:05+00:00
> Constitution is pretty clear on that question.

Given that all three branches of government seems to be moving in lockstep on it, (with the military, the secret police, and the police all behind them), you are right - it is clear on that question.

It's clear to all them that, no, anything he does goes, and no, the 14th doesn't actually mean anything.

That's not how I parse it from a cursory reading, but who am I to nay-say the king?
by MoreQARespect | 2025-08-12 09:03:09+00:00
This problem can be solved by making documentation a natural side effect of the actual work.

One way is by recording video calls where the decisions are made with transcriptions which can be interpreted by LLMs.

Another is generating docs from tests.

Yet another is making a rule that answers to code review questions must be turned into code comments.

There's also a huge amount of untapped potential for turning conversations in slack into documentation.

The issue with wikis, etc. is yea, that it isnt a side effect of the work itself. It is work, and thankless work at that.
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-12 09:03:20+00:00
Yep, LLMs tend to get into weird snags like this, usually with either niche or state of the art stuff.

I tried to get a game prototype up and running with https://spacetimedb.com - GPT-5 was clearly working with outdated information and couldn't get anything done. It just reverted back to things that didn't exist (commands had changed, their arguments were different).

Same project, same GPT-5. This time it went in weird circles when I tried to use Deno as the backend. First it understood how to import Phaser to Deno, then it forgot. Then it remembered. Then it forgot. All within the same conversation with us trying to get SOMETHING on the browser =)
by dileeparanawake | 2025-08-12 09:03:24+00:00
It’s so interesting have asked this myself a lot. So firstly - it think this would be an excellent use of AI but the barriers are;

1. Political - CEOs have significant purchasing power. 2. Obfuscation - engineering is (relatively tightly defined) but being a CEO is often more fluid and a lot of the decision making is wrapped in stuff like ‘gut’ instinct. There’s no docs for a CEO. 3. Cultural - we treat CEO’s like art and idolise their value instead of looking at them like a node, that aggregates organisational data flows. To me a CEO is a little like a model router - but with more politics.

I think there’s a huge opportunity to replace CEOs but I think like in engineering that doesn’t happen in one shot - it happens by devolving responsibilities.

I personally stepped down from the business stuff running startups and small companies because to me it feels like BS and into engineering so perhaps I’m biased.

When I ask my CEO mates they’re obviously dogmatically convinced they are irreplaceable.

But I think the devil is in the detail. I’m a relatively junior engineer and was crapping myself about ai taking every entry level job - until you get into it and realise there’s a lot more nuance. At least near term. Same for CEO’s.

I’d love a world where we can focus on engineering outcomes, not the political crap that weighs us down.

My TLDR is I think the main barrier is political, not pure engineering.

But I suppose / hope we can re-engineer the political, with effort.
by tsvetan_91 | 2025-08-12 09:04:12+00:00
Right now, I am trying to start optimising for SEO, and the first step I need to take is to get some backlinks. Do you have any advice on targeting directories and other websites that are more relevant to my niche - solo podcasters?

My website currently has a domain rating of 3 - https://www.podclips.pro/
by arielcostas | 2025-08-12 09:05:13+00:00
And as a casual Excel user (to get data from CSV, remove some rows, move few things around, etc.) it isn't even great. You can't open two files with the same name because Excel seems to have some "global state" between windows; to the point where you might be hitting Control+Z to undo some changes, and it's undoing stuff on the other spreadsheet without you noticing.

Doing something as "simple" as a LEFT JOIN of data requires having two separate documents (or one, but saved on your system), open them in the Power Query editor (if it's the same document you do it twice, once per table) which creates two "queries", and then you can either use one to join against the other, or create a third one "joining" them. In the end, you get three new sheets on your docs: the original tables and the merged one.

Then there's the annoyances: if you use Excel in English (US at least), apparently you get a CSV separated by actual commas "," (ASCII 0x2C) but using it in Spanish (Spain) you get it separated by semicolons ";" because commas actually separate number decimals. Meaning whenever I build a program that parses/writes CSV, I need to consider the chance it's using semicolons and commas instead of commas and dots. Not that it's non-standard: CSV doesn't specify a delimiter, but you could stick to the same format everywhere, or give an option to customise, or create "Tab-Separated Values" (essentially CSV with tabs separating values).

Another one is formulae, that also change based on language, and their arguments separator also changes. In en_US you'd use `=SUBTOTAL(109,B2:B7)` while in Spanish it's `=SUBTOTALES(109;B2:B97` (plural instead of singular, and semicolon instead of comma). Meaning any guide, documentation or tutorial in English requires me having to "guess" how the function is translated, and manually changing commas to semicolons.

With all this, I mean to say: Excel isn't even that great for the "normal" user. Or perhaps I'm too "power user" for this and just lazy enough to bother with it instead of using "proper" tools like Python or R.
by acdha | 2025-08-12 09:05:13+00:00
You’re conflating two different things. The number of guns in absolute terms doesn’t matter as much as availability to people who are inclined to commit crimes: a collector / prepper going from 10 to 11 guns affects the total count but doesn’t impact the crime stats the way an angry teenager going from 0 to 1 gun does.

This is why it’s misleading to talk about state-level stats without accounting for density: Idaho has a lower crime rate because it is mostly rural and has a single large city, which isn’t that big. Crime is a function of population, not land.
by hopelite | 2025-08-12 09:05:19+00:00
That seems the most plausible answer, especially in context of get revenue question.

Over the last ten years, the revenue must have dropped off heavily due to deaths, which will only be accelerating. That would make even just 100,000 users at $10 not a sustainable business model at an exponential attrition rate of avg 25% and zero growth. They probably squeezed every dollar out.
by pizlonator | 2025-08-12 09:05:57+00:00
I don’t buy the “it’s because of optimization argument”.

And I especially don’t buy that UB is there for register allocation.

First of all, that argument only explains UB of OOB memory accesses at best.

Second, you could define the meaning of OOB by just saying “pointers are integers” and then further state that nonescaping locals don’t get addresses. Many ways you could specify that, if you cared badly enough. My favorite way to do it involves saying that pointers to locals are lazy thunks that create addresses on demand.
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-12 09:06:02+00:00
The only major non-vanilla thing I had was Rectangle, couldn't live without it.

Now I've replaced it with a Hammerspoon script with some additions like setting my window layout based on where I am.

It's so much easier when you don't need to customise everything to the nines.

(I SO MUCH want to like and use Nix, but every time I've tried I've failed :D)
by londons_explore | 2025-08-12 09:06:19+00:00
I have literally hundreds of HP print heads from a project, many partly blocked or burned out (they burn if you send them the wrong signals, and like 10% of the time I hit 'break' on my debugger it burns a few jets out if they're firing at the time), and had a coffee sitting right next to my desk so thought "why not".
by dileeparanawake | 2025-08-12 09:07:33+00:00
Your point about measuring errors is an interesting one. I think definitely CEO’s / business leaders are very good at deflecting negative responsibility and aggregating positive outcomes. Not exclusively. I know several senior leaders who are very very competent. But I think in business it is typically easier to look good, than do good. Across most domains.

I think the ambiguity part is a bit of an illusion - lots of people who make good predictions on complex things, have good, informal, decision making models. But like an llm, a lot of their minds are black boxes, even unto themselves. Therefore hard to replicate.
by jongjong | 2025-08-12 09:07:57+00:00
I've used LLMs to generate code for a custom serverless framework which I wrote from scratch that it had never seen before. The framework follows some industry conventions but applied in a distinct way with some distinct features which I have not yet encountered in any other framework...

I'm willing to accept that maybe LLMs cannot invent entirely new concepts but I know for a fact that they can synthesize and merge different unfamiliar concepts in complex logical ways to deliver new capabilities. This is valuable on its own.
by safercplusplus | 2025-08-12 09:08:01+00:00
A couple of solutions in development (but already usable) that more effectively address UB:

i) "Fil-C is a fanatically compatible memory-safe implementation of C and C++. Lots of software compiles and runs with Fil-C with zero or minimal changes. All memory safety errors are caught as Fil-C panics." "Fil-C only works on Linux/X86_64."

ii) "scpptool is a command line tool to help enforce a memory and data race safe subset of C++. It's designed to work with the SaferCPlusPlus library. It analyzes the specified C++ file(s) and reports places in the code that it cannot verify to be safe. By design, the tool and the library should be able to fully ensure "lifetime", bounds and data race safety." "This tool also has some ability to convert C source files to the memory safe subset of C++ it enforces"
by pyrale | 2025-08-12 09:09:19+00:00
I suspect we'll see AI's claim to fair use be challenged even in the US. The claim to be transformative is mostly based on the "shape" of the information being delivered (i.e. the AI rephrases the information).

However, the transformative nature of derivative work is not only about its apparence. It also factors in whether the transformation changes the nature of the message, and whether the derivative work is in direct competition with the original work [1]. I suspect for e.g. news articles, there's a good case that people get information that way instead of going to the newspaper, which means the derivative work competes with the original. Also when it comes to reporting news, there's not many ways to make the message different that doesn't make the AI service bad.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol_Foundation_for_the...
by swinglock | 2025-08-12 09:09:26+00:00
It looks amazing for e-ink. You'd probably don't want this for video anyway, besides it's not even in color. I'm impressed that it works at all. For a lot of work though it could be amazing, depending on your environment.

Say you'd want to pop outside in the nice weather to do some programming. You quickly find why that wasn't as glamorous as you expected. But if you had a laptop with such a screen I would expect it to work great.
by romesmoke | 2025-08-12 09:09:51+00:00
Everyone has their values. It's OK if there's no universal system. I don't want to feel bad if a day passes and I haven't learned or done anything; I trust my intuition and experience to discern between peaceful and warlike periods. I'm all for doing hard stuff when needed; I'm all against the ideal of always; and yes, that ideal is tyrannical.

Life is not binary. Routines are not classified into hippie XOR hardcore. Not feeling bad for not improving yourself is a good sign of having actually improved. But that's just my opinion. Take care.
by anon-3988 | 2025-08-12 09:10:13+00:00
> It's so weird how fragile digital history is.

Is it? Its very easy to produce (hence there's too many of them) and they are extremely fragile (bit rot, complicated format that no one knows how to parse etc). Seems to be this is inevitable. I personally think Youtube is going to start pruning their database in the next decade.
by 3036e4 | 2025-08-12 09:11:21+00:00
Latest Aseprite is still available with free (as in beer) source code to compile, even if it is a bit heavy on the dependencies these days, including requiring that you install a special fork of Skia iirc. I paid for it to get the pre-compiled binaries for Windows, but on Linux and OSX I always compiled it myself anyway. On FreeBSD, that is my desktop OS of choice now, I use the ancient open source version of Aseprite since that is what is most convenient to install (from the port). Maybe I should try Libresprite instead.

For my programmer art I also use old (Autodesk) Animator (in DOSBox) a lot. It is small and runs anywhere. Perfect for doodling on my phone, with some configuration to add various on-screen buttons in DOSBox. Small enough (less than 1 MB) that the entire application plus all configuration and saved working files can go into every source code repository where I want to edit some pixel art. https://github.com/AnimatorPro

Also have VGA Paint 386 installed in DOSBox everywhere. Have not used it much, but it seems good (probably more interesting for those that want something closer to a Deluxe Paint clone). https://www.bttr-software.de/products/vp386/

Then there is https://orama-interactive.itch.io/pixelorama that is open source and seems to improve at a good pace. I just never took the time to look very close.

Going to have a look at Tilf as well, to see if it is not too much work to get it to run in FreeBSD. Not being an expert in drawing anything, it helps to have many tools and switch between, as all tend to have something they do better (or easier) than the other ones.
by nicoburns | 2025-08-12 09:11:55+00:00
Can you still actually get a list of search results with the HTML web search?

I'm developing a new browser engine which has modern CSS features but no JS support, and we were testing with google.com (we can render the modern homepage), but as of mid last year they seem to:

- Hard require JS if you pretend to be Chrome

- Give you an ancient html-only form if you give a custom user agent, which works for "I'm feeling lucky" searches but still requires JS for the results page.
by gwd | 2025-08-12 09:12:08+00:00
Life is full of uncertainty. Learning to take calculated risks, where most attempts fail but a few ones pay off big, is an important life skill. Reading other people's behavior to infer hidden information is another one -- Jane Street apparently used to have people learn poker to learn how to infer hidden information from the behavior of other people buying and selling stocks, but invented their own game (https://www.figgie.com/) to teach the same skills more efficiently.

ETA: I would say, when poker is taught correctly, it should discourage anyone from the sorts of gambling which are problematic:

Problem 1: Wasting your money in situations where the odds are "with the house". This would include playing slot machines or basically anything at a casino, the lottery, or even 50/50 raffles (although I can see an exception for the last one).

Poker should teach you to only take bets where the expected value (value of winning * prob winning) is greater than the cost, which is not true in the above examples.

Problem 2: Getting sucked into betting more and more to make up what you've already lost. One aspect of long-term poker should be teaching you is how to manage this effectively.
by arielcostas | 2025-08-12 09:12:52+00:00
Do you really miss stuff in VS Code's core editor? I mean, coming to think about it, VS Code feels "feature complete", I haven't found in other editors features that I thought "wish I had this in VS Code". Not to justify the whole changelog being about Copilot (isn't it supposed to be a separate extension anyway?), but I guess it's either that or going for a while without updates, or really small changes you'd probably not notice
by ismailrohaga | 2025-08-12 09:12:58+00:00
to be honest i'm not too concerned even tho AI is doing most of my work. my company still hire software engineer, no sign of stopping, at least for this year.

with AI we can accomplish more, it's arguably easier to be a "10x" engineer. but to some extent with the cost of "quality".

i think AI is here to stay and i'm preparing for it. currently trying to find best way of utilizing AI in my work to be more efficient (i tried claude code back in nov24, to cursor pro, trae pro, now back to claude code). maximizing tokens. challenging myself with token limits but makes the best out of it.

but also to mitigate being "dumb" i tried to enjoy learning some low level programming lang while building something out of it (currently learning to build TUI)