MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nis0s | 2025-08-21 18:10:05+00:00
I don’t think it’s appropriate to use anonymity to criticize published research.

My guess is that because of the (assumed?) politics of the people involved, the anonymous author could have been a target because of their nationality or ethnicity.

I think the problem is that this field is poorly understood by 98% of the commenters, so it’s impossible to decide who is wrong or right based on the science alone, so even neutral parties like Sabine Hossfender are now getting their comeuppance for being on the “wrong” side of political groupthink.

It’s hard to trust people when anonymity is involved.
by PhantomHour | 2025-08-21 18:10:07+00:00
> I can’t think of another career where management continuously does not understand the realities of how something gets built.

This is in part a consequence of how young our field is.

The other comment pointing out other engineering is right here. The difference is that fields like Civil Engineering are millenia old. We know that Egyptian civil engineering was advanced and shockingly modern even 4.5 millenia ago. We've basically never stopped having qualified civil engineers around who could manage large civil engineering projects & companies.

Software Development in it's modern forms has it's start still in living memory. There simply weren't people to manage the young early software development firms as they grew, so management got imported from other industries.

And to say something controversial: Other engineering has another major reason why it's usually better understood. They're held to account when they kill people.

If you're engineering a building or most other things, you must meet safety standards. Where possible you are forced to prove you meet them. E.g. Cars.

You don't get to go "Well cars don't kill people, people kill people. If someone in our cars die when they're hit by a drunk driver, that's not our problem that's the drunkard's fault." No. Your car has to hold up to a certain level of crash safety, even if it's someone else who causes the accent, your engineering work damn better hold up.

In software, we just do not do this. The very notion of "Software kills people" is controversial. Treated as a joke, "of course it can't kill people, what are you on about?". Say, you neglect on your application's security. There's an exploit, a data breach, you leak your users' GPS location. A stalker uses the data to find and kill their victim.

In our field, the popular response is to go "Well we didn't kill the victim, the stalker did. It's not our problem.". This is on some level true; 'Twas the drunk driver who caused the car crash, not the car company. But that doesn't justify the car company selling unsafe cars, why should it justify us selling unsafe software? It may be but a single drop of blood, but it's still blood on our hands as well.

As it stands, we are fortunate enough that there haven't been incidents big enough to kill so many people that governments take action to forcibly change this mindset. It would be wise that Software Development takes up this accountability on it's own accord to prevent such a disaster.
by bpt3 | 2025-08-21 18:10:16+00:00
> I do not recognize that. That is the point of my argument.

And my point is that you're going to continue to be frustrated and disappointed by refusing to use the same terminology for a topic as everyone else.

> A large portion of economics is rich people trying to justify their own greed as being moral.

Nope, but that view explains most of your reasoning.

> Classifying goods as "essential" vs. "non-essential" is a way of telling poor people what they're allowed to have, and always has been. A good goes from "non-essential" to "essential" only when rich people are worried they'll get guillotined if the poor don't have access to it.

Good lord. Which of these is more essential for human life? Food, or a luxury car? Basic medicine, or a trip to a casino? No one is stopping "poor people" from buying things from either category, but people clearly prioritize one over the other when funds are limited.

> I'm aware that it has a definition in terms of what people are able to stop purchasing when their income goes down, or how consumption relates to income levels in general, but the former is a problematic definition for many reasons, and the latter does not actually coincide particularly well with the categories of goods people list off when they think of "essential goods". Humans in real life just don't respond to changing conditions the same way the little econs in your head do; they way you've decided they "should".

So you do acknowledge the actual definition, you just refuse to accept it because you'd rather rage against the machine? Have fun with that.

> Ever heard that humans don't "behave logically"? Yeah, that's economists with overly simplified models being annoyed that (mostly) poor people don't act the way that they've decided poor people should act. See the trend?

Rich people also don't behave logically, for the record. It's almost like this class war you're describing is a figment of your imagination.

> Ask four economists write out a list of "essential goods" and you'll get five different lists. That is not how definitions work. Ask four mathematicians whether something is a Commutative Ring or not and they'll all agree. That's a definition. "Essential" does not have a definition. Its meaning shifts depending on which group the author of the Wall Street Journal op-ed you're reading wants to villainize this time.

Congratulations on your discovery that economics is not a hard science.

You already said that essential does have a widely agreed upon definition above, so the rest of this rant seems odd.
by falcor84 | 2025-08-21 18:10:24+00:00
What's your issue with "half baked ideas"? Would you prefer that we go back to the 80s when everyone baked in a garage and only released fully-baked code? I don't remember things being better then.

And as for the js ecosystem craziness; while I agree that we went through a lot of craziness, I think it was necessary to arrive at the current relative stability around React and a handful of other frameworks in conversation with it. React in particular was originally released in 2013 and definitely benefitted from baking outside in the sun since then.
by sprobertson | 2025-08-21 18:10:26+00:00
As a simplified example:

(memory) [2023-07-01] My daughter is 10

(memory) [2024-05-30] My daughter turned 11 today!

System prompt: Today is 2025-08-21

User prompt: How old is my daughter?

The vector DB does the work of fetching the daughter-age-related memories, your system decides (perhaps with another LLM) if the question needs time-based sorting or something else.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-08-21 18:11:02+00:00
Self-checkouts are not the only place where facial recognition is used. Of course overhead cameras have long been present at actual staffed checkout counters. The new risk today is that every credit card POS device has a camera built into it as well. I go around and put little black stickers over them when I encounter them. These cameras are well-hidden and not disclosed at all.
by dmesg | 2025-08-21 18:11:13+00:00
I still don't understand what Anubis solves if it can be bypassed too easily: If you use User-agent switcher (i emulate wget) as firefox addon on kernel.org or ffmpeg.org you save the entire check time and straight up skip Anubis. Apparently they use a whitelist for user-agents due to allowing legitimate wget usage on these domains. However if I (an honest human can) the scrapers and grifters can too.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/

If anyone wants to try themselves. This is by no means against Anubis, but raising the question: Can you even protect a domain if you force yourself to whitelist (for a full bypass) easy to guess UAs?
by extraisland | 2025-08-21 18:11:58+00:00
> Unless games use some funky video codecs or kernel-level anti-cheat, a lot of the time they do just work with the click of a button.

He glosses over this but I suspect that is almost all the newer multiplayer games that are popular.

I was gaming on Linux from about 2020 to this year. I went back to Windows for gaming. It was either constant faffing or there was always at least one game that doesn't work that well. I don't want to spend an hour or messing with various launch options in Steam.

Performance is often claimed to be better on Linux than Windows. However it is highly dependant on the distro, kernel, GPU, game and whether you have particular magic settings configured. I am sure it is faster if you are running bazzite or one of the other gaming focused distros, but I run Debian on pretty much everything. So I just decided to use Linux for serious stuff and Windows for gaming.

Don't get me wrong it is loads better than it was, which was pretty much non-existent. But it will be fairly niche for quite a while yet.
by echelon | 2025-08-21 18:12:27+00:00
Do you pay people to pump your gas?

How about harvesting your whale blubber to power your oil lamp at night?

The nature of work changes all the time.

If an ad can be made with one person, that's it. We're done. There's no going back to hiring teams of 50 people.

It's stupid to say we must hire teams of 50 to make an advertisement just because. There's no reason for that. It's busy work. The job is to make the ad, not to give 50 people meaningless busy work.

And you know what? The economy is going to grow to accommodate this. Every single business is now going to need animated ads. The market for video is going to grow larger than we've ever before imagined, and in ways we still haven't predicted.

Your local plumber is going to want a funny action movie trailer slash plumbing advertisement to advertise their services. They wouldn't have even been in the market before.

You're going to have silly videos for corporate functions. Independent filmmakers will be making their own Miyazaki and Spielberg epics that cater to the most niche of audiences - no more mass market Marvel that has to satisfy everybody, you're going to see fictional fantasy biopic reimaginings of Grace Hopper fighting the vampire Nazis. Whatever. There'll be a market for everything, and 100,000 times as many creators with actual autonomy.

In some number of years, there is going to be so much more content being produced. More content in single months than in all human history up to this point. Content that caters to the very long tail.

And you know what that means?

Jobs out the wazoo.

More jobs than ever before.

They're just going to look different and people will be doing more.
by integralid | 2025-08-21 18:12:38+00:00
I wonder why the anime girl is received so badly. Is it because it's seen as childish? Is it bad because it confuses people (i.e. don't do this because other don't do this)?

Thinking about it logically, putting some "serious" banner there would just make everything a bit more grey and boring and would make no functional difference. So why is it disliked so much?
by chrisjj | 2025-08-21 18:12:47+00:00
> Actually I have/had a lot of these. They can only be used with triple a batteries and don't last long.

You must be mistaking this design for another one. This one was released only a few weeks ago, and specifically offers LiPo batteries:

"The PCB has space for a 2-pin JST socket that will allow you to plug in a standard LiPo battery, such as the ones supplied by Adafruit."
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-21 18:13:05+00:00
It's hard to predict. There's a nonzero possibility that in that world, developers would have rejected the Netscape scripting solution, embraced the alternative that VBScript support in IE briefly represented, and we'd either be in a world where Microsoft dominated the web because only their browser did the fancy stuff that web 2.0 ended up needing to support ecommerce... Or where a couple of mud-pit-fight court cases had resulted in a vbscript-alike being the lingua franca of web scripting because Microsoft lost their exclusive control over it.
by doorhammer | 2025-08-21 18:13:47+00:00
Yeah, I was a QA data analyst supporting three multi-thousand agent call-centers for an F500 in 2012 and we were using phoneme matching for transcript categorization. It was definitely good enough for pretty nuanced analysis.

I'm not saying any given department should, by some objective measure, switch to LLMs and I actually default to a certain level of skepticism whenever my department talks about applications.

I'm just saying I can imagine plausible realities where an intelligent and competent person would choose to switch toward using LLMs in a call center context.

There are also a ton of plausible realities where someone is just riding the hype train gunning for the next promotion.

I think it's useful to talk about alternate strategies and how they might compare, but I'm personally just defaulting to assuming the OP made a reasonable decision and didn't want to write a novel to justify it (a trait I don't suffer from, apparently), vs assuming they just have no idea what they're doing.

Everyone is free to decide which assumed reality they want to respond to. I just have a different default.
by zamadatix | 2025-08-21 18:14:00+00:00
There are two separate problems, and they aren't mutually exclusive, but this post seems to be specifically about the latter case (if one believes the story, of course):

- The PM(s) are bad at listening to customers or turning customer feedback into a focused set of requirements.

- The engineer(s) are bad at following the requirements or going back to the PM(s) when the requirements aren't clear.

In the first the PM(s) can just lack understanding of what the product does or interest in why customers use it, can be overconfident in their ability to "see what the customer actually wants", or just actually want to build something else but are assigned to this product.

In the second, the engineer(s) can just lack understanding of what the product does or interest in why customers use it, can be overconfident in their ability to "see what the customer actually wants", or just actually want to build something else but are assigned to this product.

In either case, it results in the product not fitting the customer needs. I think there are better ways to solve either gap than just having the engineers join sales calls to hope it works out, but I suppose any approach is better than letting the problem sit.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-08-21 18:14:07+00:00
Physics has a surprising amount of drama for such a hard science, and I have a theory about that: Physicists, more than chemists or biologists, need more of a solid foundation in logic (of the Aristotle kind), and they really don't have it.

Take this article. It's incredibly, incredibly flawed, and that was evident to me after reading it for 10 seconds. The author immediately starts saying that Weinstein's Geometric Unity has a "lack of seriousness as a scientific theory". Says who? You? That's just begging the question. He also says "this engagement with legitimate science conceals a concerted effort to suppress criticism and mislead the public". But I guess the author doesn't know what "concerted" means because the blog post doesn't really show anything like that, as much as the author tries to force there to be some connection between unrelated content creators.

I also don't really believe the claim that Weinstein threatened a podcast with legal action, unless I see proof. After all, this is physics, a field rife with drama, so you can excuse me for not believing some random personality, who seems from the outside to be a Weinstein clone, trying to make a name for himself by making multiple videos claiming to debunk Weinstein's GU.

There's also a lot of "how dare you" and double-standards in this blog post. For example:

> claimed I am not acting in good-faith and that I’m trying to “bait” him, which are just additional examples of how Brian is going after the messenger rather than sticking to the science

But what if someone really is baiting someone? What if someone baited you? Would you "stick to the science" or make a blog post like this one?
by Citizen8396 | 2025-08-21 18:14:34+00:00
I have used encrypted DNS profiles on iOS to block them at the resolver level. However, the correct thing to do is to disable the feature in a configuration profile. You can also block them on macOS using Little Snitch or similar.

No, you sometimes can't use two apps on iOS that attempt to configure DNS and a "VPN" for local filtering purposes at the same time (the latter is often a glorified hosts list).

You absolutely can use encrypted DNS and/or a VPN (or Private Relay). None of these have bearing on using an application firewall or pf on macOS.
by joe_the_user | 2025-08-21 18:14:55+00:00
I remember the pre-AI Geico chat bot that I liked. I could call it once every six months and pay my entire balance with a few words. But then the company started leaning harder on monthly payments and the "pay entire balance" option was removed and I now must either laboriously speak-out the entire dollars and cents due or talk to a person.

What is to say that a lot of the functions that a customer service person does is getting people things they need and that the company resists giving to them. Which is to say that companies mostly need customer service agents because the company's raw impulses are so shitty they need someone with the slight independence of a customer service agent just to provide the services their customers need.

It's like why I never go to company websites despite being very web-savy. These websites only serve the company's idea of what I get and if I'm calling at all, it's because I need more than that.

Naturally, the point is an AI chat can't do customer service because it can't override policy, tell people tricks and similar things.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-08-21 18:14:55+00:00
Exactly, and just to add: browsers are where I draw the line in terms of security. If the OS is old, whatever, my router has a firewall and I trust the applications I install.

But my browser is running gobs of random Javascript from who knows where every day! I guess you could do the thing where you disable Javascript by default and re-enable it on select websites; I'm personally not willing to do that.

So a browser really needs a good, up-to-date sandbox. There has to be protection somewhere in the chain.
by reactordev | 2025-08-21 18:14:56+00:00
Their tooling is starting to show it's age, meanwhile competitors are advancing. I understand you were sold the dream that Unity will be your partner but they won't, ever, as you are their customer.

If you want to make a game, go for it. If you want to make one that works well into the future, I would question going with Unity. (fmr creator of Reactor 3D, contributor to UnrealEngine, donator to Godot, grand-uncle to MonoGame, I know this space).
by nostrademons | 2025-08-21 18:15:01+00:00
I also use Gemini notes for all my meetings and find them quite helpful. The key insight is: they don’t have to be particularly accurate. Their primary purpose is to remind me (or the other participants) of what was discussed, what considerations were brought up, and what the eventual decision was. If it inverts the conclusion and forgets a “not”, we’re going to catch that, because we were all in the meeting too. It’s their to jog our memory of what was said, because it’s much easier to recognize correct information than recall it, it’s not the authoritative source of truth on the meeting.

This gets to a common misconception when it comes to GenAI uses: it functions best as “augmented intelligence” rather than “artificial intelligence”. Meaning that it’s at its best when there’s still a human in the loop and the AI supplements the parts the person are bad at rather than replacing the person entirely. We see this with coding, where AI is very good at writing scaffolding, large-scale refactoring, picking decent libraries, reading API docs and generating code that calls it appropriately, etc but still needs a human to give it very specific directions for anything subtle, and someone to review carefully for bugs and security holes.
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-21 18:15:06+00:00
My only concern with this approach from an ecosystem standpoint is that runtimes (and more importantly, their standard libraries) can be expensive. JS is still the heavyweight engine that everyone running a browser already has installed; a world where the browser has to download a novel runtime per website is going to be hard on the end-user on the back of a low-bandwidth connection.

... but it doesn't have to be that way. Proper tree-shaking of libraries and smart caching of common resources should make it possible for that cost to get minimized or amortized.
by antonymoose | 2025-08-21 18:15:10+00:00
While I generally agree with you on the consumer side, I have the opposite experience in selling Business-to-Business solutions.

I’ve worked for small firms selling software to libraries (public and university systems), enterprise managed security services (think anti-Phishing operations), and now in managed medical claims for niche practices.

In all cases, our firm has had the customer-first philosophy to make them love us. Provide rapid responses and quality outcomes, regardless of perceived cost-center metrics. That has always, in my experience, resulted in an easy contract renewal or even having fans of ours jump to a new job at a new firm and buy our product at their new job.

Turns out people aren’t as fickle and price sensitive and still highly value good service, at least when they’re spending the companies money and not their own.
by guywithahat | 2025-08-21 18:15:22+00:00
> but rather there just being not many jobs, lots of historic pollution to deal with, and a poor future economic outlook

I have never seen someone leave due to pollution, other than just wanting to leave the city.

The poor economic outlook and lack of jobs is directly due to the unions. If there weren't unions, Detroit and Flint would still be the capital of the auto industry, and Erie PA would still be a major locamotive hub. Instead everyone was forced out because of the unions.
by rootnod3 | 2025-08-21 18:16:04+00:00
How large is that code-base overall? Would you be able to let the LLM look at the entirety of it without it crapping out?

It definitely sounds nice to go and change a few queries, but did it also consider the potential impacts in other parts of the source or in adjacent running systems? The query itself here might not be the best example, but you get what I mean.
by dfxm12 | 2025-08-21 18:16:07+00:00
In the context of the parent post, don't miss the forest for the trees. 5 minutes away from your loved ones here or there is nothing if, for one example, your loved ones can't find jobs locally (working the till in retail is a common first job for kids, after all...) or otherwise disconnect, going out of our way to avoid interacting with anyone, because of the stress everyday life now requires, doom and gloom, etc. Plus, there's the option of bringing your loved ones with you, if that's your concern.

Even setting that aside, if you're so into min-maxing your free time that you can list waiting in line at the grocery store as one of your biggest regrets in life, then you gotta recognize how privileged a life you lead.
by etbebl | 2025-08-21 18:16:11+00:00
The author dismisses C++ out of hand, but I really think it does a pretty good job of making this a non-issue. Want a structured value type? Sure, that's a struct with public fields by default, passed by value with automatic copy constructor and assignment functions. Want a mutable type that's encapsulated and needs to do something special to be cloned? Sure, that's a class passed by unique_pointer or reference, with non-default (or deleted) copy constructor and assignment functions and private fields by default.

Every language I've used since then feels like it makes this issue needlessly complicated and implicit.