MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nerdjon | 2025-08-21 12:05:29+00:00
> it appears it answers my question

"Appears" to me is the key word here, how do you know that what it said was true?

It will very confidently "answer" your question in a way that is convincing but if you actually try to click through you may find that the answer is straight up wrong.

I feel like most of the time that I am looking up something that is not niche but also not a major thing it does this and at best useless at worst actually harmful since people won't click through for the real information.

The biggest problem being that these systems can be right enough times that you gradually start trusting it and stop checking. Which is what google wants, if you have to check its work in the first place why does it even exist.

Edit:

Yesterday I tried using one of these research tools because I was curious and it was low priority so figured why not. I was looking for an open source solution to a problem. I specifically mentioned one that I had seen but I was cautious because it seemed to have been abandoned so was looking for others. It confidently told me how wrong I was about thinking it was abandoned despite the last commit being in early 2024 (it even said 2024 in the report) and even before that was clearly slowing down.

Now thankfully in that case it actually told me in the report the 2024 part which clearly told me how bad the report was going to be, but that is clearly bad and tainted the entire research.
by jeremyjh | 2025-08-21 12:06:03+00:00
The paid version of Intellij has never lost anything. Pretty much everything the specialized IDEs can do, Intellij can do too, though maybe some features lag. CLion, Rubymine etc are just less expensive specialized versions.

I'm sure the free version has lost some things.

Its been a long time since I used CLion but it was the best C++ IDE by a huge margin.
by imtringued | 2025-08-21 12:06:11+00:00
>When I first encountered RESTful web services using JSON the ability to easily invoke them using curl was such a relief... (and yes, like lots of people, I went through a phase about being dogmatic about what REST actually is, HATEOAS and all the rest - but I've got over that years ago).

I'm not dogmatic about this. People don't understand what REST is. REST is some completely useless technology that absolutely nobody needs. Using the right words for things isn't dogmatism, it's being truthful. The backlash from most people comes from Fielding's superiority complex where he presents REST as superior, when it is merely different, different in ways that aren't actually useful to most people, and yet people constantly give this guy a platform by referring to his obsolete architecture, earning them the "well actually"s they deserve.
by arcticbull | 2025-08-21 12:06:52+00:00
He's really not. Facebook is an extremely well run organization. There's a lot to dislike about working there, and there's a lot to dislike about what they do, but you cannot deny they have been unbelievably successful at it. He really is good at his job, and part of that has been making bold bets and aggressively cutting unsuccessful bets.
by Sammi | 2025-08-21 12:07:26+00:00
1. Don't allow foreign media 2. Don't allow foreign comments on local media

The issue is the willingness to suffer to consequences of enforcing these rules. A society at war might be willing to, but a society at peace wants to prioritize personal freedom, which is very much at odds with the draconian rules necessary to enforce the rules above.

I guess step one is for us to realize and accept that we are all at a media war with adversarial foreign powers. It's true.
by Timwi | 2025-08-21 12:07:48+00:00
No mention of C#, which of all the languages I've seen makes the best distinction for what he wants: structs/“value types” = data, classes/“reference types” = objects. He briefly mentions that Java is in the process of adding that; C# has had it since version 1. Now, 15 versions later, C# has acquired all the modern features from all paradigms of programming, including type inference, record types, and an incredibly full-featured pattern matching system. Java is laughably lagging behind.

He also praises async/await as a revolutionary leap forward for programming languages, but without a mention of the language that invented/pioneered it (that's right, it's C#, in version 5).

Now, I'm not going to sit here and claim that C# is perfect for all purposes. It has made mistakes which have to live on due to backwards compatibility. The mutability of structs is, in my opinion, one such mistake. But even so, of all programming languages I've seen, C# fits this author’s ideas like hand in glove.

Edit: the scenario he describes of putting a large array or other static data structure directly into the code is also better supported by modern C# compilers. For small structures you still get the element-by-element-adding bytecode, but there's also a serialization format that can bake large objects directly into the assembly.
by tortillasauce | 2025-08-21 12:08:04+00:00
Anubis works because AI crawlers do very little requests from an ip address to bypass rate-limiting. Last year they could still be blocked by ip range, but now the requests are from so many different networks that doesn't work anymore.

Doing the proof-of-work for every request is apparently too much work for them.

Crawlers using a single ip, or multiple ips from a single range are easily identifiable and rate-limited.
by bitexploder | 2025-08-21 12:08:05+00:00
Ehh. You don’t get FB to where it is by being incompetent. Maybe he is not the right leader for today. Maybe. But you have to be right way, way more often than not to create a FB and get it to where it is. To operate from where it started to where it is just isn’t an accident or Dunning-Kruger.
by kotaKat | 2025-08-21 12:08:14+00:00
It’s “face detection blocking” built into the camera/display. Otherwise, the video footage is just straight sent as ONVIF to the main DVR for whatever processing is done there (which could be a lot more nefarious).

Wren Solutions / Costar seem to be the main vendors of these “public view monitors” — such as the PVM10-B-2086.

https://6473609.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6473609...

“Face Detection Boxes (Neon Green, Front and Side Detection)”
by bazzargh | 2025-08-21 12:08:28+00:00
Absolutely you can. The places in France and Spain I've flown to just suggest you bring your own pedals, so they match your shoe cleats; they'll fit them before your hire. You can usually bring your own saddle too. It's far more convenient than bringing the bike.

I've also done it the other way, my main bike has S&S coupling so I could bring it aboard the Eurostar. For touring I prefer my own bike, because I have the racks set up for my panniers, but when I do that, I prefer travelling by ferry/train.
by kube-system | 2025-08-21 12:08:42+00:00
Depends on where you are at. Shrinkage runs around 1.6% on average in the US, but it can vary quite a bit by location. If you are in a rich quiet suburb, you will probably not see it. If you are in a rough neighborhood, or a very dense urban area, you probably will.

I have lived in neighborhoods where theft is unheard of, and I have lived in neighborhoods where I checked to make sure each item hadn't been opened before putting them in my cart.
by timsh | 2025-08-21 12:08:49+00:00
This whole online safety act thing gives me goosebumps.

I’d lived most of my live in Russia until migrating in 2022 and I’m pretty familiar with what it means when the gov starts messing with digital censorship.

If you’re not aware, it’s getting systematically harder and harder to browse the free web in Russia despite 50%+ of population using “some” VPN app.

And I’m not even talking extremist / anti-russian resources that the government turned against originally, but most of the independent websites that use CloudFlare free tier, for example. Because cloudflare enables proxying and a couple other IP-masquerading techniques by default, to effectively block a single website you have to block the entire cloudflare IP range and DNS - which is >20% of the web.

As for the VPNs, most of the common protocols and frameworks (eg OpenVPN) are already banned + detected via DPI, and people have to get into more and more sophisticated setups like VLESS+Reality (= most of the non-technical people can’t set it up by themselves or even buy a subscription to such thing).

“Simple” shadowsocks, originally popularized in China to fight the great firewall are already almost rendered completely useless.

And it will get worse. The gov service which is responsible for blocking has a very high budget + some pretty neat tech to help them cut off more and more ways to bypass the censorship.

This is the future of any state that gets into this game. The future where you might have to become very proficient in networking and use some “shady” stuff like Tor to just read a blog post about Linux.

It doesn’t matter what it starts with - fighting anti-gov propaganda or, for god’s sake, porn (the least harmful thing for the kids in this horrible ai-post-capitalism world that we live in) — once the regulators get the feeling of power over the free web, every lobbyist, organization and party will come for a part of the web that you personally might enjoy, or even earn living from.
by rgavuliak | 2025-08-21 12:09:10+00:00
I don't think it's about perfect predictions. It's more about going all in on Metaverse and then on AI and backtracking on both. As a manager you need to use your resources wisely, even if they're as big as what Meta has at its disposal.

The other thing - Peter's principle is that people rise until they hit a level where they can't perform anymore. Zuck is up there as high as you can go, maybe no one is really ready to operate at that level? It seems both him and Elon made a lot of bad decisions lately. It doesn't erase their previous good decisions, but possibly some self-reflection is warranted?
How do bootstrapped companies decide product road maps?
by marklittlewood | 2025-08-21 12:09:27+00:00
A friend is writing a book about how bootstrapped founders decide their product roadmap. It's going to be very interesting - I've seen some early research. It's fascinating.

They're looking to interview some more founders to include in the book.

Are you the founder of a software company that is:

Bootstrapped (or mostly bootstrapped) Profitable Stable Mature Well-run Around 15 to 50 employees (give or take)

Will put link to LinkedIn post in comments and if you want to take part, get in touch.
by marcyb5st | 2025-08-21 12:10:12+00:00
Note: I was too young to fully understand the dot com bubble, but I still remember a few things.

The difference I see is that, conversely to websites like pets.com, AI gave the masses something tangible and transformative with the promise it could get even better. Along with these promises, CEOs also hinted at a transformative impact "comparable to Electricity or the internet itself".

Given the pace of innovation in the last few years I guess a lot of people became firm believers and once you have zealots it takes time for them to change their mind. And these people surely influence the public into thinking that we are not, in fact, in a bubble.

Additionally, the companies that went bust in early 2000s never had such lofty goals/promises to match their lofty market valuations and in lieu of that current high market valuations/investments are somewhat flying under the radar.
by neuronic | 2025-08-21 12:10:16+00:00
Good call in this case specifically, but lord this is some kind of directionless leadership despite well thought out concerns over the true economic impact of LLMs and other generative AI tech.

Useful, amazing tech but only for specific niches and not as generalist application that will end and transform the world as we know it.

I find it refreshing to browse r/betteroffline these days after 2 years of being bombarded with grifting LinkedIn lunatics everywhere you look.
by wolvesechoes | 2025-08-21 12:10:53+00:00
"In the context of software vs other sub-disciplines, the big difference is in the cost of iterating and validating."

People forget that software is used in those other disciplines. CFD, FEA, model-based design etc. help to verify ideas and design without building any physical prototype and burning money in the real lab.

You can do some strain and stress analysis on a virtual bridge to get a high degree of confidence that the real bridge will perform fine. Of course, then you need to validate it at all stages of development, and at the end perform final validation under weight.

The thing is that people building engines, cars, planes, sensors, PCBs and bridges actually do so, largely because they are required to do so. If you give them freedom to not do that, many of them will spare themselves such effort. And they understand the principles of things they are working on. No one requires any of that from someone that glued together few NPM packages with a huge JS front-end framework, and such person may not even know anything about how the HTTP works, how browser handles the DOM etc. It's like having a mechanical engineer that doesn't even understand basic principles of dynamics.

There are industries that deal with the software (i.e. controls design) that have much higher degree of quality assurance and more validation tools, including meaningful quantitative criteria, so it clearly is not a matter of software vs hardware.
by rs186 | 2025-08-21 12:11:13+00:00
If you just look ar similar discussions on HN, you'll see that these models often don't even answer the specific question you ask but just give you random nonsense. I'd rather see an honest "I don't know" instead of complete gibberish.

I'm not going to use any small model that has a chance of dialing 911 when asked to send a text message to a friend.
by marcooliv | 2025-08-21 12:12:26+00:00
Me too, 99% of the times I'm not using Google to search for super critical information, so even if we have some flaw in the Overview in general I feel that it's better then the work that I would do for 30 minutes to get a similar conclusion ( with failures as well, not because I'm human that I dont make mistakes just because I'm able to open 8 tabs per google search ).
by piva00 | 2025-08-21 12:12:56+00:00
> Like do people here really think making some bad decisions is incompetence?

> If you do, your perfectionism is probably something you need to think about.

> Or please reply to me with your exact perfect predictions of how AI will play out in the next 5, 10, 20 years and then tell us how you would run a trillion dollar company.

It's the effect of believing (and being sold) meritocracy, if you are making literal billions of dollars for your work then some will think it should be spotless.

Not saying I think that way but it's probably what a lot of people consider, being paid that much signals that your work should be absolutely exceptional, big failures just show they are also normal flawed people so perhaps they shouldn't be worth million times more than other normal flawed people.
by UncleMeat | 2025-08-21 12:13:19+00:00
I think that meta is bad for the world and that zuck has made a lot of huge mistakes but calling him a one hit wonder doesn't sit right with me.

Facebook made the transition to mobile faster than other competitors and successfully kept G+ from becoming competition.

The instagram purchase felt insane at the time ($1b to share photos) but facebook was able to convert it into a moneymaking juggernaut in time for the flattened growth of their flagship application.

Zuck hired Sheryl Sandburg and successfully turned a website with a ton of users into an ad-revenue machine. Plenty of other companies struggled to convert large user bases into dollars.

This obviously wasn't all based on him. He had other people around him working on this stuff and it isn't right to attribute all company success to the CEO. The metaverse play was obviously a legendary bust. But "he just got lucky" feels more like Myspace Tom than Zuckerberg in my mind.
by im_lince | 2025-08-21 12:13:25+00:00
Totally agree with this. Code review is quickly becoming the most important skill for engineers in the AI era. Tools can generate solid code, but judgment, context, and maintainability come from humans. That’s exactly why we built LiveReview(https://hexmos.com/livereview/) — to help teams get better at reviewing and learning from code they didn’t write.
by watwut | 2025-08-21 12:14:13+00:00
Both sides are the same. Trump and his supporters are the same as people who are their targets .... because it is the same tribalism.

> As I've said elsewhere in this thread, the comments here actually support the beliefs of Trump's base, which is "the world hates us, only pretends to be nice to us when we help make them rich, and power is the only currency that matters."

When you are t like Trump does, yes you will loose the affection and respect.

And besides, Trump and his fans both see those who are friendly to them as suckers to take advantage of.

Your wish to be a bully and simultaneously treated like a friend is extremely unrealistic. And not just that, it is a loosing proposition.
by crote | 2025-08-21 12:15:25+00:00
From a device manufacturer's perspective, it is mainly a safety and reliability issue.

The form factor might be (mostly) standardized, but the cells themselves are not. There's a huge amount of variation between them, and using a cell improperly can quickly lead to some very nasty fires.

This means user-replaceable bare cells go right out the window, and you're left having to build a custom protection circuit for the cells you want to use - which means you essentially end up with custom batteries.

The solution might be a standardized way for the cell to communicate its health and capabilities to the device using it - but good luck getting the industry to adopt it. It provides no immediate benefit to the consumer while making the product more expensive, so they'll only do that when the government forces them to.
by wiredfool | 2025-08-21 12:15:35+00:00
I had a Star SG-10, labeled as "Epson Compatible". (Mostly)

The Near Letter Quality was essentially double struck by making a second pass at a slight offset, with the corresponding increase in noise and print times.

There wasn't support for the printer in AppleWorks, so my first useful program was a BASIC thing that you could set the font in the printer and then reboot into AppleWorks to use either the 10 cpi, 12, 17(condensed) or the NLQ setting.
by gf000 | 2025-08-21 12:15:37+00:00
I do agree that the article could be summarized as "value types vs reference types, a language should have both".

But your idea of Java is pretty dated - it has type inference, full algebraic types (records and sealed classes), pattern matching (switch expression - though many of its more advanced features are TBD/experimental yet).

And then Java has virtual threads, which C# suddenly wants to add as well, that language is definitely on the same road as C++, and this "adding every conceivable feature" is not sustainable, it will crumble under its own way. Java is much more conscious of it, which I greatly value.
by safety1st | 2025-08-21 12:15:43+00:00
This is all a lot of smoke but no fire. There is no alliance and never will be beyond what is directly and immediately expedient. These countries would like to sell things to the US, aka they want it to run a trade deficit with them. They also would like the US to lend them military aid if they get into violent trouble with their neighbor. What does the US get out of this? What is the point? Who cares if they don't think America's a good ally? They're going to keep on marketing their shit to America, asking America for military support, and offering not much in return either way. As noted, the countries under discussion generally dislike each other a lot more than they dislike this particular US President who will be gone in 3 years anyway. All smoke. No fire. They will do nothing except agree to the tariffs, because there is nothing for them to do.

I think Trump should treat actual allies, like Japan or Canada, better. But India, Vietnam and China? Fuck em. Nothing against them particularly, in fact I have professional relationships with some good people in all three of those countries. But they are not allies and were never going to be, they were always just vendors. If they decide they don't like us and don't want to take our money (they won't decide this), fine. We can spend it elsewhere.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-08-21 12:15:45+00:00
>> Mr Zuckerberg has said he wants to develop a “personal superintelligence” that acts as a permanent superhuman assistant and lives in smart glasses.

Yann Le Cun has spoken about this, so much that I thought it was his idea.

In any case, how's that going to work? Is everyone going to start wearing glasses? What happens if someone doesn't want to wear glasses?
by research_pie | 2025-08-21 12:16:15+00:00
hey everyone author here, I'm really glad to see all the different life structures people have adopted.

not all strategies work for all brains unfortunately.

but the essence is this:

- untangle yourself from the claws of others' expectations

- imagine vividly someone you would feel proud to merge with in the near future

- distill that image into your very own crooked and muddy golden path

- act now and take control of your life

- periodically look back at the image you hold and course correct where your heart guides you
by arcticbull | 2025-08-21 12:16:28+00:00
Absolutely, not everything they do will succeed but that's okay too, right? At this point their core products are used by 1 in 2 humans on earth. They need to get people to have more kids to expand their user base. They're gonna throw shit at the wall and not everything will stick, and they'll ship stuff that's not quite done, but they do have to keep trying; I can't bring myself to call that "failure."
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-08-21 12:17:04+00:00
> IMHO Mark Zuckerberg is a textbook case of someone who got lucky once by basically being in the right place at the right time, but who attributes his success to his skill.

It is no secret that the person who turned Facebook into a money-printing machine is/was Sheryl Sandberg.

Thus, the evidence is clear that Mark Zuckerberg had the right idea at the right time (the question is whether this was because of his skills or because he got lucky), but turning his good idea(s) into a successful business was done by other people (lead by Sheryl Sandberg).
by Timwi | 2025-08-21 12:18:12+00:00
> int is different to Integer

Having separate types for these is the problem; not the boxing. C#/IL/CLR handles boxing in a way that doesn't exhibit the problem. If your code is dealing with integers, they are never boxed. They are only boxed when you cast to a reference type such as object. As soon as you cast back to int, you are unboxing.

Java exhibits the problem in a big way because it doesn't have true generics, so you can't have (say) a list of integers or a dictionary with integer values, so they must always be boxed, so you need a separate “boxed integer” type to maintain type safety. In C# you can just use unboxed integers everywhere.
by anArbitraryOne | 2025-08-21 12:18:53+00:00
How about this (choices are random): 1) Choose two bottles and one device 2) Measure the two. If they're the same, choose another device, if they're different, choose another bottle When bottles appear identical, make more measurements with different detectors on them (there's no way around doing that) When a device has accumulated n/2 0 or 1 measurements, the remainder are the opposite number (call this column constraint as per your table) When selecting the next detector, prefer the one that is closest to meeting the column constraint (otherwise choose randomly)

Sorry about the poor formatting of the algorithm but I'm typing on my phone and don't want to submit something AI generated

I was trying to figure out the runtime of this…it captures your best case scenario, and I think the worst as well, but what about the average?