MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sargstuff | 2025-08-29 02:43:30+00:00
Perhaps something along lines of setting up / planning robot/activity path? aka (noted in other postings) scratch junior[0]; mblock botly dash[1]; code & go

?? program robot to fetch/push food items to bowl.

----------------------------------

[0] : https://www.scratchjr.org/

[1] : https://blockly.games/puzzle
by nine_k | 2025-08-29 02:43:50+00:00
RSS is terrible as a format (Atom is much better), but RSS is awesome as an idea. If your web site were a database, RSS would be like WAL. If your website were differentiable, it would be like its derivative, or rather a Lagrangian, taken at the moment of last update.

(BTW all serious static site generators know how to produce an RSS/Atom feed.)
by Aardappel | 2025-08-29 02:43:57+00:00
Yes, its somewhat similar, monomorphic specialization.

I am sure it has some limitations, but it is pretty powerful, it can even do things C++ can't, like have a type error in a branch that in the current specialization is never executed doesn't count as a type error :)

There's no FPL style pattern matching. It can do a switch case on types (the various subclasses of a base class) but only 1 level, i.e. can't match against type of members. That could still be added, just personally rarely have use for it.
by skydhash | 2025-08-29 02:44:17+00:00
> I don't usually coax specifications from teammates. I coax them from Product people or customers and while it's not really the most fun sometimes, personally, I do find joy in the fact that I am delivering something that helps the customer.

It's when you're dependent on a service and there's no documentation. Even if you can read the code (and if you can't, you probably should learn), it's better to ask the person that worked on it (instead of making too many assumptions). And that's when the coaxing comes into play.
by SanjayMehta | 2025-08-29 02:44:39+00:00
I’ve heard the “you can order the odd colour online” so many times I’ve started telling the sales people “if we all did that then you wouldn’t have a job.”

I think most brands have adjusted to “showrooming,” where customers check out the fit and finish and then order online anyway, specifically for shoes. Some stores place the order for you.

The extra charge for bags is mandated by many local governments (to “reduce waste”), businesses just tack on another few pennies of profit.
by SillyUsername | 2025-08-29 02:46:26+00:00
This is a misconception, we absolutely do know how LLMs work, that's how we can write them and publish research papers.

The idea we don't is tabloid journalism, it's simply because the output is (usually) randomised - taken to mean, by those who lack the technical chops, that programmers "don't know how it works" because the output is indeterministic.

This is not withstanding we absolutely can repeat the output by using not randomisation (temperature 0).
by wombatpm | 2025-08-29 02:46:34+00:00
But the vehicles today are dumb big.

My second car was a 1978 Buick Riviera. 17.5 feet in length, two doors, rear wheel drive, 403cuin 8 cylinder. It weighs in at 3500 lbs, had 15 mph rated bumpers with shocks attached to the frame. Steel roll cage, double steel doors.

The car was a beast. You could fit 7 adults in the car and two dead bodies in the trunk.

My grandmother was t-boned in it. They straightened the door and replaced the glass and it was good as new.

That was a big car!

I wish I could buy a car like that with modern antilock brakes, transmission. Instead it’s all trucks and SUVs because people like my mother feel “safer” and like seeing from up high.

Look at the specs of a modern vehicle. Any contact over 5mph and you are replacing the plastic bumper. Actually have an airbag go off and you are probably looking at a totaled vehicle.
by typewithrhythm | 2025-08-29 02:46:42+00:00
My experience has been that the cheap outsourcing to India is one of the main areas AI is a real disruption. You can go straight to the artificial indian, and get a better result than an outsourced worker with AI tooling. It's one of the most obvious "I no longer need a person for this" experiences I have had since self checkout.

I expect that other areas like accounting that use outsourcing are going to see similar effects in a few years.
by jsight | 2025-08-29 02:46:52+00:00
I'm happy to see this take gaining some steam. Python got a lot of love while it was growing to where it is now. IMO, that was largely well deserved.

But it seemed like a lot of people overlooked why it was loved. Most of us weren't wishing that our 2k+ line projects were all written in it.

Those little 20-500 line scripts were just so much more fun in Python than anything else though, and it showed up in survey after survey.
by tolerance | 2025-08-29 02:47:07+00:00
The parent comment raises a valid distinction.

> In contrast, a heuristic is an approach to solving problems without well-defined correct or optimal results.[2] For example, although social media recommender systems are commonly called "algorithms", they actually rely on heuristics as there is no truly "correct" recommendation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm

What are the consequences of conflating the two terms? I’m not sure yet.
by jackvalentine | 2025-08-29 02:47:26+00:00
Yeah I'm not sure why I would really care about the motivations of the bank. If I need them to be a store of money that I can move in and out and I'm happy with that then leave me alone.

When you're big enough for that to be a problem, like in the story, then someone who knows more that you've hired will have a stronger opinion of that.
by zahlman | 2025-08-29 02:47:36+00:00
The website at https://www.beverlyhillsone.com tells me:

> Beverly Hills One is a distinguished boutique firm specializing in ultra-luxury design and real estate, renowned for its unparalleled ability to transform estates into masterpieces of value and elegance. Our clientele includes VIPs, celebrities, Fortune 500 CEOs, and ultra-private clients who demand the highest standards of discretion and excellence.

How exactly is it that a company like this is looking for "warriors" of "top AI talent" to build "autonomous agents", who live in India (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengaluru)?

Also, you understand just how obvious your use of AI is in writing this pitch, and how cliche it sounds as a result, right?
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-08-29 02:47:51+00:00
I agree with what you've written, but I've worked with colleagues in South America and Eastern Europe where none of those problems existed: folks spoke perfect English, people were incredibly motivated to do a good job, and they spoke up proactively when problems arose.

I have had issues with Indian outsourcers like you say (lots of churn, time zone hell, a culture of pretending everything is fine until release day and then saying "sorry, nothing works", etc.), but it's a bigger world now, and there are still lots of folks making half of US dev salaries where none of these problems exist.
by dazamarquez | 2025-08-29 02:48:29+00:00
I would say this article is very shallow. Zitron criticizes what he calls the AI bubble from multiple angles, it's not just "they will never be profitable" — and I agree this would be a wild claim. Even in the worst-case scenario where AI is a giant con, as Zitron paints it, they might just become profitable if they can con enough people. I also don't expect people with a stake in any of this to read Zitron's posts and immediately stop doing what they're doing. That would be silly. I don't think Zitron writes for them, and that what he writes needs "debunking". For how I see it, Zitron mainly advocates for a more critic journalism. Regardless of whether he's right or wrong, he does attempt to critically report on AI.
by ady00 | 2025-08-29 02:49:09+00:00
Technically, you DON'T need a subscription to play.

I've been working on https://nyt.plus, a site that offers the New York Times mini crossword for free with no paywalls. It also has comprehensive stats-tracking, a global leaderboard, and a puzzles cache with over 300+ NYT Mini puzzles from the past year and a half.

Check it out at https://nyt.plus!!
by icedchai | 2025-08-29 02:49:17+00:00
IMO, the design matters much less than the functionality. This stuff needs to work. It needs to be accessible.

I once signed up for a state government health care exchange and basic functionality like resetting your password didn't even work. Once I was actually logged in (after waiting on hold with their call center), the site barely functioned: slow page loads. timeouts, absurd error messages. This was a double digit million dollar project, sometime around 2016. So called "professional services" were provided by several major tech firms, which I'm sure outsourced it to the cheapest offshore subcontractors they could find.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-08-29 02:49:21+00:00
My hot take is all OSes are kinda bad for daily driving.

Apple has no qualms breaking backwards compatibility for core functions like bluetooth connectivity in MacOS. Windows has backwards compatibility, but increasingly worsening UX, throwing ads and subscriptions in your face before you can even log in, and a bad security/process isolation model. Desktop Linux is a case of "how many hours before I find out a critical part of my workflow is unsupported/bad/broken/unconfigurable/pain-to-configure in this particular distro/desktop environment".
by ajdude | 2025-08-29 02:49:31+00:00
I'm all in on RSS. Matter of fact, I used an RSS reader (netnewswire) to find this post!

I host freshrss on a linode vps so my read/unread feeds are synced across devices.

Hacker news, various subreddits, YouTube channels, webcomics, blogs, forum posts, and even a newsgroup (comp.lang.ada is still active) are all in there, letting me catch up on feeds that I choose to read at my own pace.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-29 02:49:35+00:00
I've heard people say "people want vehicles the size of tanks" in discussions like this but I've never heard "I want a vehicle the size of a tank" although that person exists.

It seems like a different world but before the pandemic if you wanted to buy a compact car you would go to the dealer and find out they don't have any new ones, you'll have to settle for used, they say factory washed out in a flood. Well they have 100 SUVs made in the same factory lined up that nobody wants to buy that are $7000 off.
by cxr | 2025-08-29 02:50:15+00:00
Everyone should note that the slides in this blog post are fabricated, and the author of this post misrepresents Tufte and the conclusions of the review board—subtly pointing people in a direction that's the exact opposite of the real takeaways from the investigation. It's almost insidious.

The first time I came across this blog post a few years ago, I found it enraging, and I still do. As I said I said in my personal notes at the time, "The choice to use this fabricated material for this article and the false claims in it—claims not actually confirmed by the sources that it cites—amounts to what would be considered serious misconduct elsewhere." But there's no real accountability here, of course, because at the end of the day it's just some jerk with a blog serving up distorted pop science insights to aspiring entrepreneurs.
by zahlman | 2025-08-29 02:51:40+00:00
> Current AI valuations assume one thing: mass workforce extinction pays the bill.

I disagree. My evidence is simple: just look at how the most recent generation of smartphones is being advertised. Look at the platforms like Base44 that are spamming their ads all over YouTube. The bet is diversified quite a bit, into the expectation that end users will (eventually) pay through the nose for AI-powered toys.
Tell HN: 2nd wave of Nx attack: private GitHub repos are being made public
by labordayruined | 2025-08-29 02:52:01+00:00
It appears as though the attackers behind the Nx supply chain attack on Wednesday are now using leaked GitHub tokens to make private GitHub repositories public (and renaming them to s1ngularity-repository-XXXXX in the process). 7.2k repositories affected at time of writing.

https://xcancel.com/adnanthekhan/status/1961152614055207039
by gary_0 | 2025-08-29 02:52:09+00:00
I couldn't get it to properly syntax highlight and autosuggest even after spending over an hour hunting through all sorts of terrible documentation for kate, clangd, etc. It also completely hides all project files that aren't in source control, and the only way to stop it is to disable the git plugin. What a nightmare. Maybe I'll try VSCodium next.
by Proofread0592 | 2025-08-29 02:52:29+00:00
This person feels entitled to quality customer service. Maybe 30 years ago that was an expectation. Nowadays, if you want good customer service, you need to pick business that deliberately prioritize it, which often means paying more.

Consumer Cellular is a great example of a company that prioritizes customer service and costs a bit more. Compare their cellular service to a company like Mint, which gives you basically the exact same product, but for half the price due to having literally zero customer service.

For running shoes to use one of their examples, REI is a great store to get a human to show you where things are and to give their opinion on what the right shoe for you would be. If you go into a Macy's or a WalMart you'll pay a lot less, but you won't have anyone there to help you.

Every self checkout I've been at has always had an employee willing to help, in fact more often than not the person manning the self checkouts at Costco just ends up gunning all my items when they see I have an infant strapped to me, and I typically don't have to lift a finger. Of course, you can't get into Costco without purchasing an annual membership and you can't get out of Costco without spending at least $100.

You can get cheap stuff, and you can get less cheap stuff with good customer service. Peoples' time and energy is not free, and you should be willing to pay for it if you expect it. Feeling entitled to good customer service when you purchase bargain-barrel products lacks a certain awareness of how much an employee deserves to be paid.
by uz3snolc3t6fnrq | 2025-08-29 02:52:30+00:00
you could self-host your own rss reader on a server & set it up to automatically update the feeds in the background every now and then, and just check on it whenever you want to read what's new. freshrss seems to be the popular choice.

there's also some subscription services that seem to do the same thing, but i have no experience with them.
by hinkley | 2025-08-29 02:52:55+00:00
Also attended an engineering school. I had to take way too much chem and physics. It was weird.

I can be kind of a pain in the ass when it comes to details so I’ve worked on a couple such projects. It’s sobering, but also I think, “better me than” half a dozen corner cutters at my last two jobs. They could do much worse.

That said, I stayed on a commercial aerospace project about 14 months after I didn’t really want to be there because people kept saying the wrong things in meetings and thinking they sounded right.
by primitivesuave | 2025-08-29 02:53:29+00:00
Just to stymy the spread of misinformation - this is in reference to an interview from 2019 or 2020, where he said he would prioritize women/minorities for mentorship. While I personally don't agree with that notion (IMO mentorship should go to the most qualified person, regardless of race/background), I definitely didn't hear it as a refusal to help white men.
by NegativeK | 2025-08-29 02:53:43+00:00
As a first and very pessimistic guess, the pages getting DoSed are maintained by people or groups with pretty minimal resources. That means time or money available for lawyers isn't there, and the monetary impact per website is small enough that LE may not care.

Also, they might share the common viewpoint of "it's the internet; suck it up."
by geodel | 2025-08-29 02:53:51+00:00
Agree. It is harsh truth. Even the good old outsourcing seems in resurgence. Lately I see at work large delegations of IT bodyshops claiming 60% saving with AI + a dev/support center in India.

It may or may not work but it can crater 70% of IT/software department by 2027 as per their plan.
by chrisco255 | 2025-08-29 02:53:57+00:00
No, you don't even have life expectancy as it is confounded by several things: for one, there are racial differences between countries. It turns out some races are naturally prone to die earlier than other races, even when you control for income.

And how would you weigh life expectancy vs suicide rates? Let's say we try to create an index. You think life expectancy should be weighted at 80% and suicide rates at 20%? Why? There's no rhyme or reason for that figure, it just sounds good. Well it gets more and more confounding as you add up all the other vectors. Labor market participation now thrown into the same broad index, despite all three values being completely orthogonal.

There is no objective way to reconcile that.
by bcrl | 2025-08-29 02:54:20+00:00
It's easier to uninstall it. There's nothing good that tuned has ever done for me.

FYI: messing with irq bindings for per-cpu queues of nics has been a bug for at least 16 years depending on the nic. FYI: Intel launched the 82599 back in 2009.

Clueless software developers should not be messing with kernel settings like irq bindings. Software that does that is not worth my time.
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-08-29 02:54:27+00:00
> The parent comment raises a valid distinction.

Not really, as described in the quote you shared, it is common to refer to "recommendation systems" as "algorithms", even if its not actually such a thing.

There are plenty of examples of well-known aliases to concepts that obfuscate actual meaning in the English language, but they aren't wrong, as language is usage.
by fakedang | 2025-08-29 02:54:37+00:00
It's likely because of the nature of the country. Singapore and the UAE (another similar country) are notoriously difficult for getting started with business banking because banks often expect you to be either well-funded (from elsewhere) or matured as a business. For a long time, they haven't ever evolved their thought to expect startups to natively grow, and even of late, they expect startups to be these well-capitalized entities with angel/VC funding. That, I presume, is because of the fact that these countries tend to be conduits for money rather than destinations themselves - they'll roll out the red carpet for you if you went with another, more "matured" objective in mind like laundering money or expanding into the country.

On the other hand, Switzerland has been surprisingly very easy to get started with quickly, even though Switzerland falls in the same category. You can easily obtain a (shitty service) Postfinance account to get started, and UBS is a breeze to work with, despite being bulge-bracket - even for new companies. Or you can also opt for a cheaper Kantonalbank, which are surprisingly very open to new businesses.
by jimmont | 2025-08-29 02:54:54+00:00
Organizations are choosing to eliminate workers rather than amplify them with AI because they'd rather own 100% of diminished capacity than share proceeds from exponentially increased capacity. That's the rent extraction model consuming its own productive infrastructure. The Stanford study documents organizations systematically choosing inferior economic strategies because their rent-extraction frameworks cannot conceptualize workers as productive assets to amplify. This reveals that these organizations are economic rent-seekers that happen to have productive workers, not production companies that happen to extract rents. When forced to choose between preserving rent extraction structures or maximizing value creation, they preserve extraction even at the cost of destroying productive capacity. So what comes next?
by mixmastamyk | 2025-08-29 02:55:25+00:00
One fateful spring day in 2000/2001? I read the Python tutorial. It was so good I never wrote a single new line of Perl after that, nor Java for about twenty years (when I brushed up because of needing a job).

Reading all the complaints about it recently is a bit surreal. Newer developers can't program without IDEs and "type systems." Packaging was kind of a mess, but feel like uv solved it. Neither issue really affected me, I used setup.py almost exclusively until moving to uv maybe six months ago.

It was always a glue/prototyping language—if you're using it for kernel drivers or multi-threaded Fibonacci servers or worse, that bad decision is yours (or that of your boss). ;-)
by slipperydippery | 2025-08-29 02:55:46+00:00
I think the author needs to shop at "richer" places for the treatment they want. Service is rich-people shit, and they're evidently not spending rich-people money. Inflation may recently have fucked up their expectations. It's been rough, I get it, I feel like I've dropped a "class" or so, too, just as I was clawing my way into upper-middle.

$300 full-retail for two pairs of sneakers in the downtown of a major city is not rich people money anymore, the goddamn trash-tier sneakers for my kids at Kohls often cost like $50+ a pair—on clearance. That's dead-center middle-class spending now, and the middle class has had shit service a long time.

I get it. $100 sneakers should be premium. $150? Pft! If you're somewhere that stocks those, it's gotta be nice, right? I mean damn. But not so much any more.

I suspect there's something similar going on with the rest of what they're seeing. Though yes, I agree that the middle class once again receiving any amount of actual service instead of constant attempts to fuck them over and nickel-and-dime them would be rad.
by Jach | 2025-08-29 02:55:49+00:00
Worse for whom? Not the end user, where again they just permanently enable the app once if they are going to use it often. This makes it little different to the consent for browser permissions, like notifications or access to a microphone or camera, which everyone does use. If everyone used noscript you might even see a change to the default interface to make it more like the permissions flow.

Separately, we already live in a world where people tend to pick "native" apps (e.g. Discord, Slack) that are just wrappers around the webapp, and on the phone you have similar behavior where people often prefer the "native" app (e.g. twitter/X) over the mobile web version. Despite this asymmetry, web apps continue to be built, and they would continue even if everyone used noscript.
by more_corn | 2025-08-29 02:55:53+00:00
philosopher Jacques Derrida saw language as a self-contained system, which is a good description of what goes on inside an LLM. For the machine, words only refer to other words rather than having a relation to external reality.

This means that any sequence of words generated by an LLM is derived solely from its relationship to other words within the linguistic system, not from any “understanding”
by tkel | 2025-08-29 02:56:11+00:00
Democracy is only in the political arena, in the US the economy is organized as dictatorships. So it's unsurprising that the economic results are not good for the majority of people. Because all businesses are organized as dictatorships, they are not controlled by the majority of people. Same way political dictatorships did not deliver what people wanted, they deliver what dictators want.
by daydream | 2025-08-29 02:56:44+00:00
You can subscribe to newsletters with any RSS reader nowadays, but it’s a multi step process requiring the use of an external (free) tool.

1. Create a feed on https://kill-the-newsletter.com/. This will also give you a custom email address to send your newsletter to.

2. Subscribe to the newsletter with the custom email address and add the feed you created to your reader.

This setup works very well for me with NetNewsWire though there is friction in the multiple steps. No affiliation with either, just a satisfied user.