MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-08-11 16:41:55+00:00
I did as well! No issues any worse than people using habitually using "github" to mean "the remote git repository in the cloud".

I expect this will continue indefinitely until the product becomes little more than an AI training corpus and genericized trademark, similar to how our Xerox machines at work are actually made by Brother, while Xerox the actual brand has faded into obsolescence.

I will note that we don't use many of the CI/CD/issue tracking/wiki/etc. features, though both Github and Gitlab offer them. I'm sure they have their own particular quirks that may be a hassle to migrate between and have people relearn. I prefer to keep those tools separate, allowing the git repository be almost exclusively a git repository and spinning up other tools as needed.
by justonceokay | 2025-08-11 16:42:04+00:00
Competitive advantage is how every small community works. One person runs the coffee shop, someone is the mechanic, there’s the town contractor, plumber, grocer, sheriff, etc. the more each person is able to specialize the more services are available to the whole town.

I understand international politics are completely different, but it is hard for me to understand how comparative advantage would not be useful at that level as well.
by ksherlock | 2025-08-11 16:42:06+00:00
They could spam you with low-quality AI (but I repeat myself) PRs. Maybe add some vaguely plausible but utterly incorrect bug reports as well.

Look at the some of the AI slop curl deals with -- https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s... -- and imagine your issues list filled with that.
by jeremymcanally | 2025-08-11 16:42:10+00:00
GitHub was founded to make managing permissions and sharing a git repo easier. It was a nightmare when git was first starting to get traction. Their original tagline was “git repo hosting - no longer a pain in the ass.”

The social stuff came later as they realized that a big part of the friction in software development (and the actual business opportunity) was the actual working together part. They really innovated here and created a culture of workflows that has permeated the way most of us work.

But then there were a few years where they really didn’t seem to do anything of note (I remember there was a five month stretch where they didn’t post a single product update). And then they got bought. After that I don’t really know what their intention has been, but I guess this change brings it more into focus.

The product works fine for our use cases (and the fact everyone has a GitHub account makes the management piece super easy even with wacky enterprise requirements), but I hope they don’t start jacking up prices to pay for AI that I really really don’t want.
by icedchai | 2025-08-11 16:42:24+00:00
Yes! Also, early ISPs were often massively over subscribed. They might have fractional T1 line coming into a POP (example: 384Kbit line) with 100 modems off of it. At peak times, you not only got busy signals, but when you did get through, a slow connection because that upstream pipe was full...
by melodyogonna | 2025-08-11 16:42:31+00:00
Too much organization never helps, I've learned this with both note taking and with todo apps.

My workflow with ticktick is largely based on having all my to-dos in one "next actions" list. Tags are the one feature I can't throw away though, most of my to-do lists is tagged with a project name. My day to day view of Ticktick is usually some tag
by legitster | 2025-08-11 16:43:00+00:00
> China turned a slow drip into a death spiral. While many countries pushed the boundaries before China did, its economic size and the effectiveness of its mercantilist policies broke the pre-existing order. Through currency management, public procurement, state subsidies, protectionism, and other implicit subsidies, China has developed a range of leading industries, including electric vehicles, solar power, and batteries.

China's rise can be attributed to taking advantage of the neoliberal order. Many of their nationalistic successes come through things like currency manipulation, hiding illegal subsidies, intellectual property theft, and using state monopolies to bully other nations and their corporations.

It's a prisoner's dilemma. If everyone copies China's playbook, there is nothing left to take advantage of. We will all be poorer for it.

It cannot be understated that we are getting front row seats to the end of Pax Americana. In a world where countries can no longer enjoy reliable trade for commodities, we are going to revert to a world of imperialist land grabs and violence.
by zem | 2025-08-11 16:43:27+00:00
from James Hague's blog https://prog21.dadgum.com/56.html:

8<---------------------

I still like to implement my own ideas, especially in fun languages like Erlang and Perl. I'm glad I can program, because personal programming in the small is fertile ground and tremendously useful. For starters, this entire site is generated by 269 lines of commented Perl, including the archives and the atom feed (and those 269 lines also include some HTML templates). Why? Because it was pleasant and easy, and I don't have to fight with the formatting and configuration issues of other software. Writing concise to-the-purpose solutions is a primary reason for programming in the twenty-first century.
by julianeon | 2025-08-11 16:43:35+00:00
If we're being fair here then this must be the place to list the problems with the note card/pad system. For me, I ultimately settled on using a GitHub repo of todo lists w markdown as my solution, viewable on desktop & mobile.

The problems with a physical note card system are:

- I have to use the computer & mobile phone to enter and receive all my work, so it makes sense to consolidate the todo list(s) into those systems, instead of adding a third one. Having to remember to keep a physical bundle near me all the time, with a working pen, feels clunky.

- My handwriting is messy and this causes various problems. I can't really read it at a glance; longer messages take longer to decode; something about the non-uniformity of it also throws me off. I don't relish the thought of consulting a pile of my handwriting multiple times in an hour.

- I frequently cross off old items and add and/or modify new items. This is very easily done with a text file but sounds like a mess with note cards: keeping the empty cards around, scratching off or erasing existing ones, etc. With GitHub's commit history, I can even get a holistic view of how it's changed over the day, not possible with physical cards.

- A LOT of the value of my system comes from being able to view past days todo lists, to see what's getting done and what isn't; I do this daily. Obviously keeping up w/today's tasks stretches the physical card system to its limits; extending that to the past 7 days sounds like a nightmare.
by wujerry2000 | 2025-08-11 16:44:34+00:00
A few common ones we've heard

Engineering: QA automation is huge, closes the loop on "fully automated" software engineering if another computer use system is able to click around and help identify bugs in software

Deep Research: probably the biggest use case for computer use right now, finding information that isn't easily indexed or accessible via APIs.

General RPA: This is industry specific, but lots of just everyday knowledge work involves data transfer between many platforms that sucks and no one wants to do. A great example is Epic in Healthcare. SO much labor is employed just to write and read information from this desktop app that isn't easily accessible. Imagine a computer use system that can do automated data pulls at scale for legacy desktop apps. This is a huge huge use case, and something that we're excited to try and improve with simulators of things like Epic, SAP, Salesforce, etc.

Consumer: Lots of just general everyday tasks. I would recommend checking out https://yutori.com/ if you're interested in seeing how a computer use agent can be helpful in your day to day. Its fun for daily news reports, restaurant reservation checking, etc.
by qualeed | 2025-08-11 16:44:43+00:00
PBS Spacetime had an episode somewhat recently about a black hole which is growing at many (hundreds? thousands? I forget) times the Eddington Limit. And, as far as I remember, it isn't the only one to exceed the Eddington Limit - just the one with the record for how much it exceeded it.

I'll try to dig it up when I'm not at work (or if I remember the exact episode through the day).
by JohnFen | 2025-08-11 16:44:59+00:00
I've drifted away from the OSS subculture years ago, before LLMs. However, I did continue to publicly release source code under permissive licenses. That has absolutely changed because of genAI crawlers. I've removed my sources and have no plans to publicly release any new ones yet. I'll start making my code available again if/when I feel that I can adequately protect it.
by Atreiden | 2025-08-11 16:44:59+00:00
In theory, yes. In practice, he already has a long track record of leveraging his position, and the institutions it allows him to command, to enact personal vengeance upon his enemies. The examples are numerous, but one need look no further than Stephen Colbert.

Paramount paid $16 million to the Trump library fund to settle a meritless case, because of his ability to wield the FCC to squash their merger.

Colbert called this out on his show as rampant extortion by the Trump Administration, and they promptly cancelled his show.

Sure, you can argue that this wasn't a police/military act, and the government itself did not punish Colbert for his views and speech.

But in cronyism, especially under a regime actively trying to gut the federal government and allow private parties to assume it's functions, this becomes at best a nominal distinction. If you, in an official government capacity, can wield your power to enact vengeance on your opponents and dissidents, maybe even going as far as to diacriminate against entire states that vote against you (https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/trump-discriminati...), you have a mechanism with which you can quasi-legally (good luck fighting this one in court) punish Speech You Do Not Like.

For the average, or even exceptional person, this functionally amounts to a restriction on your speech. I am highly critical of Trump, but not under any avenue tied to my identity.

I am far from the only person who operates this way. The assertion that you can freely citizen the administration without fear of reprisal does not hold water.
by itsanaccount | 2025-08-11 16:45:04+00:00
If Grusch and the rest's testimony is to be believed, you hear about UFOs yet find no evidence because the evidence is difficult to obtain and has actively, intentionally been subject to a multi-decades long disinformation campaign where none of it can be validated. Which is one helluva whopper to believe, I very much understand.

But I think we are slowly getting real scientific evidence. I'm looking forward to this paper being peer reviewed about transient contacts in pre-sputnik sky surveys that then disappeared. The "orbs" are the single most reliable phenomenon that you can find good evidence for and the point on which has captured my own belief. Beyond that I can prove nothing but am super interested in what we find out. https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-6347224/v1
by msgodel | 2025-08-11 16:45:16+00:00
I understand why people initially feel this way but the destruction of copyright is a realization of the end goal of the GPL, furthermore the way LLMs do it doesn't seem to impinge on the way it's used practically: preventing corporate administrators from mishandling source.

I wish pro-copy-left people could see this better. The future is brighter than you think.
by mynameisvlad | 2025-08-11 16:45:21+00:00
The CoreAI team is where DevDiv got reorged into earlier this year: https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342793/microsoft-ai-eng...

DevDiv was arguably the place where GitHub would have ended up had it become integrated earlier, so it makes sense that it would end up there.
by cholantesh | 2025-08-11 16:45:21+00:00
This is just laundering editorial through some anonymous phantom; if he didn't offer any qualification or pushback, he's effectively endorsing the opinions being expressed. At the end of the article he also talks about devs being mere humans being reluctant to change and how "that's okay". This is very typical C-suite therapy speak. There's no need to unpack _why_ the skepticism exists, it just needs to be worked around until the inevitable truth™ is accepted.
by dkersten | 2025-08-11 16:45:26+00:00
I tried a bunch of todo apps, task trackers etc and also tried a txt file. None of it really worked for me. I tried bullet journals, I couldn’t stick to it.

What did end up working for me is a clipboard with a sheet of paper that I replace every few days. I write my todo list on it and I cross done tasks off in red marker. I guess it’s kinda like the bullet journal but even more lite.
by tootie | 2025-08-11 16:45:30+00:00
True. And in a few years we'll find out how much Trump has actually affected the nation's trajectory. His trade policy is an absolute 180 from GOP orthodoxy and members of his own party have mostly said "we'll do what the president wants" and not "we think this is a great idea". I'd wager a lot of this policy gets undone at the first opportunity.
by ActorNightly | 2025-08-11 16:45:32+00:00
Funny how you talk small about small government, meanwhile the current administration has shown that it has no problem in going full authoritarian, ignoring the law. But that is not a problem because you personally aren't affected.

This example in the OP post aligns pretty clearly with conservatives encroaching on other peoples freedoms.

Also in general, given the Epstein stuff, you basically lost any sort of right to talk about what is good politically considering you actively support child molestation.
by lovehashbrowns | 2025-08-11 16:45:38+00:00
I just switched to printing my todo tasks on a receipt printer. I have an arduino connected to a receipt printer and a Python script that can send commands to the arduino to print tasks. Also just finished adding barcode scanning so the task gets printed with a barcode and I use an iOS Shortcut to mark the task as complete. Actually works so well! Having the tasks in physical form helps me stay more focused and scanning the barcode to mark a task as complete feels so satisfying. I have the code if anyone wants to delve into this but it does require arduino + receipt printer + a TTL to RS232 module, though! And BPA-free receipt paper if you are concerned about that.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-08-11 16:45:42+00:00
You don't need to have a lawyer on retainer, but you should probably at least have the name and phone number of one you could call in a pinch. Most law-abiding folks aren't going to see that moment coming, so having a phone number handy could make it a lot less stressful. And in a case like this, it will show the apparatchik at your door that you're not going to be an easy pushover.
by swat535 | 2025-08-11 16:45:45+00:00
The only note taking app I've been able to use is "Reflect" (https://reflect.app/) because it gives me a calendar view and allows linking with tags and backlinks. Plus it's encrypted and I can always export my notes.

The only downside is that it's only on OSX/IOS but the webapp is good enough for my use cases.
by churchill | 2025-08-11 16:46:11+00:00
How did you make the leap from free markets vs. autarkic Juche to birth rates discourse?

It's unambiguously true that free markets has made South Korea significantly, mind-bendingly wealthier than the North. And on the subject of fertility, birth rates are so low (1.8) that you have Kim Jong Un crying on national TV, begging women to have more kids.

Personally, I have this pet theory (irrational, it may be) that as the boomers die off across the West, newer generations will pick up having more kids and TFR will level off. Like new growth springing up in a forest after a wildfire burns up all the old, dry wood.

Something similar to the post-war baby boom.
by webnrrd2k | 2025-08-11 16:46:13+00:00
Have you seen (or read) "Cloud Atlas", by David Mitchell? It's worth watching. And I think the phrase from the movie "the big eats the small" encapsulates this administration's behavior. It's simply exploitative, even predatory (for e.g., if you're homeless in Washington D.C. right now.)

I think that the attitude that "the big eats the small", and its consequences (that is: the trade war and the accompanying uncertainty for business, slashed science funding, tax cuts that lead to more debt for the country, and all the other potentially disasterous policy decisions) America and the world will pay a very heavy price.
by gareth5851 | 2025-08-11 16:46:21+00:00
I made a dumb command-line tool that sends a 1-line email to my work email or to my personal email. The tool is in my PATH on 2 computers. I use paper when I'm not at my computer and I have small pen and small paper with me at all times. Occasionally I send texts to my email address. I'm considering giving this tool to my coworkers.
by bowsamic | 2025-08-11 16:46:25+00:00
I like Org Mode but I feel like custom agenda views are not really as flexible as they should be, and as soon as you want to do something outside of the bounds of what Org offers with its settings for the built-in agenda views you have to go on a deep dive into the emacs lisp

For example I wanted the global TODO list view to show next to each entry when the TODO was scheduled for, but there's really no way to modify the global TODO list much at all
by geremiiah | 2025-08-11 16:46:37+00:00
Simple models shouldn't be applied without nuance (and that's why I get really annoyed at "engineers" on HN who think they know jack shit about economics because they took econ 101). The idea is sound, but the real world is more complicated. In a simple world model where there are two industries of equal value and two countries with complementary specialization in these industries, it makes sense.

There is an opportunity cost to closing the borders and trying to do everything yourself, which you are not considering.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-08-11 16:46:59+00:00
> Wikimedia should block UK access. That will get the attention of media and popularity contest politicians might change their mind.

Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in?

I'm quite critical of the implementation of this legislation but the idea of an American company throwing their weight around trying to influence policy decisions in the UK gives me the ick.

Fair enough if the regulations mean they just don't want to do business there but please don't block access to try and strong arm the elected government of another nation.
by djfobbz | 2025-08-11 16:46:59+00:00
You basically reinvented something Elixir Streams already nails out of the box.

Streams in Elixir are lazy, chunked, and backpressure-friendly, so you can process any size dataset without loading it all into memory...whether it's a million or a trillion rows. The trick is you never try to render them all in the browser (that's where virtualization comes in).

So yeah...neat work, but battle-tested versions of this have been around for a while.
by moonmagick | 2025-08-11 16:47:05+00:00
I employ ~10 devs, and have hired quite a few over the last few years

I have no interest in looking at their resume, the first thing I do is look to see if they have a Github and what they've done with it

My green bar on Github and open source contributions have gotten me everything in life. Money, jobs, contracts, community support, etc.
by ruszki | 2025-08-11 16:47:13+00:00
> There is an initial honeymoon where the LLMs blow your mind out.

What does this even mean?

In the first one and half years after ChatGPT released, when I used them there was a 100% rate, when they lied to me, I completely missed this honeymoon phase. The first time when it answered without problems was about 2 months ago. And that time was the first time when it answered one of them (ChatGPT) better than Google/Kagi/DDG could. Even yesterday, I tried to force Claude Opus to answer when is the next concert in Arena Wien, and it failed miserably. I tried other models too from Anthropic, and all failed. It successfully parsed the page of next events from the venue, then failed miserably. Sometimes it answered with events from the past, sometimes events in October. The closest was 21 August. When I asked what’s on 14 August, it said sorry, I’m right. When I asked about “events”, it simply ignored all of the movie nights. When I asked about them specifically, it was like I would have started a new conversation.

The only time when they made anything comparable to my code of quality was when they got a ton of examples of tests which looked almost the same. Even then, it made mistakes… when basically I had to change two lines, so copy pasting would have been faster.

There was an AI advocate here, who was so confident in his AI skill, that he showed something exact, which most of the people here try to avoid: recorded how he works with AIs. Here is the catch: he showed the same thing. There were already examples, he needed minimal modifications for the new code. And even then, copy pasting would have been quicker, and would have contained less mistakes… which he kept in the code, because it didn’t fail right away.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-11 16:47:34+00:00
It's obvious to me that the converse is true here as well... Fair Use is NOT theft.

I've seen plenty of photos of "The Bean" in Chicago, most of which aren't mine if I look really, really closely, but that's all ok. I'd be an idiot if I got upset by any other similar photos.

Clearly copyright needs to be updated for the modern era, but perhaps it's reputation that should replace it? Instead of focusing on the content, let's instead work to secure the sources of information, so that we know a story is from a given source, and everything has a digital provenance.
by owlbite | 2025-08-11 16:47:59+00:00
Trying to reduce high end processor performance to "operation X takes Y cycles" likely confuses the uninitiated more than it helps once you get beyond "cache miss bad".

For the uninitiated, most high-performance CPUs of recent years:

- Are massively out-of-order. It will run any operation that has all inputs satisfied in the next slot of the right type available.

- Have multiple functional units. A recent apple CPU can and will run 5+ different integer ops, 3+ load/stores and 3+ floating point ops per cycle if it can feed them all. And it may well do zero-cost register renames on the fly for "free".

- Functional units are pipelined, you can throw 1 op in the front end of the pipe each cycle, but the result sometimes isn't available for consumption until maybe 3-20 cycles later (latency depends on the type of the op and if it can bypass into the next op executed).

- They will speculate on branch results and if they get them wrong it needs to flush the pipeline and do the right thing.

- Assorted hazards may give +/- on the timing you might get in a different situation.
by wujerry2000 | 2025-08-11 16:48:05+00:00
Computer use agents are starting to perform well on websites/apps that are in their training distribution, but still struggle a lot when dealing with tasks outside their distribution. A big reason why is because many more niche/enterprise applications are really hard to test on in the real world, hence the need for sims!

re: labs doing this internally. They definitely are! However, the scale of sims buildout is going to be massive, probably many orders of magnitude above what we have today. We think it makes sense for one central player to do this because a really good simulator can be used by multiple people at once. It doesn’t make sense for every AI lab/company to build out their own environments if an industry standard catalog exists.