MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hardwaresofton | 2025-08-17 14:25:29+00:00
I really feel for new languages that have to compete with Rust.

It’s probably easier than it’s ever been to create a high quality new language but to get as good as Rust has become just takes so much time and collective effort that it can be out of reach for most ecosystems/groups of builders. Getting the language features just right (and including novel stuff) is just the beginning.

Remember when Rust and Go were comparable? Feels like forever ago when they both just looked like “new systems programming languages” a we know how that turned out.

For example Zig is probably the most impressive new language, and it’s got a ton of awesome stuff but the chance that I’m going to adopt it over a language with often comparable performance that is ALSO much safer? Rounds to zero.

Maybe some day I’ll have the brain cells and skill to write code in zig and be confident I’m Not introducing a whole class of gnarly bugs, but it seems like I should just focus my limited brain power on writing high quality Rust code.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-17 14:25:57+00:00
I am a developer or at least I like to still say that I am. More accurately, I’m a post sales architect who does a combination of helping presales, doing strategy consulting, leading larger cloud implementations focusing on app dev (but I can do almost anything competently related to AWS) and doing smaller one off POCs by myself that combine development and “DevOps”.

All that being said, I’ve done my share of blog posts that are still out on the official AWS blog (former employee) and a couple of “thought pieces” on LinkedIn.

It’s all bullshit and noise and blogvertising. But expected at my level of consulting (staff). I work full time for a consulting company so I don’t have to do the hustle to keep money coming in. But if I do have to find another job, it will be another nice to have like all of the recommendations I collect.

For most developers it won’t change their career. Most companies are just looking for good enough franewirk developers or whether you can reverse a b tree on a whiteboard.
by martin-t | 2025-08-17 14:27:10+00:00
The problem is that _we don't want every crime to be caught or solved_.

The worst thing that could happen to freedom is that the system would actually work as advertised. Because then resistance would be impossible.

If a government is so powerful they can stop even just 99% of crimes, they are so powerful that people can't rise up against it. At that point it's only a matter of time until authoritarians get elected and get rid of elections. The probability is not 0 which means it'll happen eventually with a probability of 1.

We need to be able to resist. Look at how many democracies were created by violent revolutions. How many bad people had to be killed before they stopped trying for a while. How many bad people had to be threatened with being killed before they gave up power "voluntarily".

You think the Velvet revolution was peaceful? Imagine you're an asshole who oppressed 10M people for years until they got fed up and 1M of them are now in the square right in front of your eyes, angry and shouting. What do you think is gonna happen if the implied violence materializes? How many cops do you need to stop 1M people and how many of those cops are actually gonna turn their weapons against you too? The real power is always held by men with guns (and these days with drones).

Or look at Syria. You think the cunt in charge fled out of goodwill to stop the bloodshed? No, he fled because he didn't wanna end up bleeding out on the pavement and then be hung up at a gas station as a temporary flag of freedom.

We need to be able to resist and that includes being able to talk about violence, even promote it when the violence is just (not legally but morally). We need to be able to make people angry, to promote hate against injustice. And we need to be able to organize without the government knowing until it's too late for them. And yes, those abilities will be used by bad people too but that's the price we need to pay.
by analog31 | 2025-08-17 14:27:22+00:00
There's a chance that in the heyday of tube electronics (mostly TVs), tubes were being stressed to within an inch of their life for cost reduction.

I'm a musician, an an electronics expert, though I don't use a tube amp myself. There's a lot of chatter on web forums about replacing tubes and capacitors, suggesting that it's done much more often than necessary. Someone's amp will get crackly, so the first thing they'll try is new tubes. Then capacitors. Finally the flaky pot or connector that's the actual root cause.
by toddmorey | 2025-08-17 14:27:42+00:00
The content that feels so vapid (and unfortunately makes a high percentage of what's on there) are the ones where the post itself is the entire body of work. The Photoshop a quote on the wall types.

But there actually IS good content on LinkedIn. It's professionals doing interesting work and posting about it. One user that springs to mind for me does UX for the automotive industry and posts concepts, designs, and experimentations. Its fun and fascinating to watch. And I think it has much more traction to the folks that matter than any post he could do about what his weekly grocery trip taught him about the creative process.

Maybe put another way, build a content brand and not a personality brand. You can still get meaningful, career changing traction. Or do what this author does and just set up your own small tent miles outside the fairground because that's what makes your soul happy. I love the indie web.
by regularization | 2025-08-17 14:27:46+00:00
> concerning g is that it's largely genetic, and immune to "intervention" AKA stability

Biology seems to be the destination for smuggled in quasi-religious beliefs. Lysenkoism, creationism and in the case of a segment (or more?) of the western professional-managerial class, this kind of Bell Curveism.

In the past people were satisfied with the divine apotheosis of people into a superior Brahmin class, or chosen people, or even in more modern times a Calvinistic elect, which this is an attempt to smuggle in as a secular, "scuentific" basis.

If we were watching elementary particles smash together in an accelerator, the idea that a brain could be boiled down to a number and ranked in order, and said this be due to differential genes and such would be seen as absurd. Especially considering human behavioral modernity happen two to three thousand generations ago, if one knows a genetic time scale. For our version of biological Lysenkoism or creationism, this all goes out the window though. Speaking of Lysenkoism, it is akin to the Marxist idea of false consciousness - the people who believe such ideas can see the errors of Lysenkoism or creationism, but the crank idea tied to their particular system makes a lot of sense to them.

I think of al-Andalus in Spain the 1450s, or the Battle of Vienna in 1683. Until a few centuries ago, Europe could barely keep itself free of Arab or Turk rule (and often didn't). Change back a few centuries and this would be about the genetic superiority of the Arab brain over the Caucasian. It's all quite silly.
by lukeschlather | 2025-08-17 14:27:50+00:00
If this has the effect its proponents claim it will, it seems like substantially the larger outcome of this will be that government agents will be reviewing people's sexts. They say that false positives are rare, but how often is it okay for the government to be reviewing peoples' sexts? I found it a little hard to get concrete info on how exactly their image hashes work, but it sounds quite literally that if you've got a couple of young people (whether teens or twentysomethings) who are sexting, and their sexts look a bit like some piece of "known CSAM" if you squint, then a government agent will review it and possibly harass them.

Seems like eventually the law will get some poor girl killed when the authorities contact her parents about "CSAM," discover that it was the girl herself who took the picture and sent it to her boyfriend, her dad finds out she was having sex and does an honor killing.

But we're just supposed to trust that these image hashes have a small false positive rate, when there's no way to have transparent review without making it easy for adversaries to avoid the scan.
by like_any_other | 2025-08-17 14:28:19+00:00
That's a bad argument - people trust the government differently than each-other. They also (should) mistrust the government differently. Voting is secret for a reason. How much of a chance do you think we have of meaningfully changing a government, if they can guess with 80% degree accuracy how everyone voted, based on their chats and social networks? When they know ahead of time who is assembling a new political party? When they know all of their friend's friends dirty secrets, and will tactically leak them to the press? Or simply prosecute them for spreading hate/antisemitism/homosexual propaganda/some other vague crime?

Knowledge is power. Does it feel like the balance of power is currently tilted too far in favor of individuals?
by lubujackson | 2025-08-17 14:28:33+00:00
In college, we went deep into this game. We realized you needed to have a closed circuit track for it to let you play, so we made a small circle track in the corner and the "real" track was off-road.

Then we could have half-completed banked curves, alternating banked curves where you had to thread the needle to not crash, etc. We used all kinds of bugs in our tracks. I remember you could drive over water if you were within 90 degrees of facing the fence, or get a bonus boost by hitting a jump at juat the right angle.

Sadly, we lost all our levels in a HD failure. But what a fun, buggy ass game. The best were the crashes where you'd "shoot the moon".
by lloydjones | 2025-08-17 14:28:53+00:00
Yes — I (as somebody who posts to promote my startup) wonder what the true goal is sometimes, as it’s ambiguous.

Certainly target customers and industry peers, but probably recruiters and VCs too.

My interpretation of how a very experienced recruiter once explained it to me is:

It’s “public life” online, and your public persona (in a “The Fall of Public Man” sense), and if you have no presence or a minimal one, when the time comes that you NEED attention (job seeking; shilling your business) you won’t have any listeners due to the algorithm.

Therefore one must constantly be telling the LI gods that they are an active user by posting perfunctory mediocrity.

It’s algorithm-gaming and cosplaying as a table-stakes activity for being “seen” or acknowledged to exist.
by brookst | 2025-08-17 14:29:11+00:00
I think the space race ended because we got all the benefit available, which wasn’t really in space anyway, it was the ancillary technical developments like computers, navigation, simulation, incredible tolerances in machining, material science, etc.

We’re seeing a resurgence in space because there is actually value in space itself, in a way that scales beyond just telecom satellites. Suddenly there are good reasons to want to launch 500 times a year.

There was just a 50-year discontinuity between the two phases.
Show HN: NextDNS Adds "Bypass Age Verification"
by nextdns | 2025-08-17 14:29:22+00:00
We just shipped a new feature in NextDNS: Bypass Age Verification.

More and more sites (especially adult ones) are now forcing users to upload IDs or selfies to continue. We think that’s a terrible idea: handing over government documents to random sites is a huge privacy risk.

This new setting workarounds those verification flows via DNS tricks. It’s available today to all users, including free accounts.

We’re curious how the HN community feels about this. Is it the right way to protect privacy online, or will it just provoke regulators to push harder?

https://nextdns.io
by breakyerself | 2025-08-17 14:29:34+00:00
No the whole book is controversial. It's a political argument for dismantling the welfare state disguised as a review of science. They laundered a bunch of work by racial eugenicists along with a bunch of other junk science methodology.

https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo?si=bzVMwGU4XjPrk4sr
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-17 14:29:52+00:00
That reminds me of a joke I liked from Tim Heidecker when he was ribbing Maynard Keenan about his wine making:

"The blood of Christ is essentially wine, correct?"

Yes.

"Who are you to put that in a bottle?"

So a logical spoke can be inferred as well, blood->wine wine->bottle blood->bottle. That uses their own logical inferences against them as a "trick" which is another funny element for people. Using that to vault straight to the punch line makes the joke better, but you have to be sure the audience is on board, which is why there is a bit of reinforcement at the beginning of the joke to force them onboard.
by dwroberts | 2025-08-17 14:30:02+00:00
> Note: VERBAL models are asked using the verbalized test prompt. VISION models are asked the test image instead without any text prompts.

Just glancing at the bar graphs, the vision models mostly suck across the board for each question. Whereas verbal ones do OK.

And today's example of clock faces (#17) does a good job of demonstrating why: because when a lot of the diagrams are explained verbally, it makes it significantly easier to solve.

Maybe it's just me, but #17 for example - it's not immediately obvious those are even supposed to represent clocks, and yet the verbal prompt turns each one into clock times for the model (e.g. 1:30) which feels like 50% of the problem being solved before the model does anything at all.
Ask HN: Ask HN: What bug made you laugh after hours of frustration?
by doppelgunner | 2025-08-17 14:31:18+00:00
For me it happened back in my junior years. We were about to head home when a bug popped up right before deployment. We ended up staying for hours hunting it down. In the end it turned out to be nothing more than a single period left in the code by my coworker. The IDE we used did not even point to the error.

All that time lost for one tiny dot.
by gnerd00 | 2025-08-17 14:31:37+00:00
> Transformer model just trivially blowing everything else out of the water

no, this is the winners rewriting history. Transformer style encoders are now applied to lots and lots of disciplines but they do not "trivially" do anything. The hype re-telling is obscuring the facts of history. Specifically in human language text translation, "Attention is All You Need" Transformers did "blow others out of the water" yes, for that application.
by Oras | 2025-08-17 14:32:20+00:00
>There’s some decent stuff on there in amongst all the noise. But, for whatever reason, that good stuff gets lost amongst a million posts of washed out nonsense.

That's the problem with all social networks anyway. The algorithm would encourage content that reaches a wider audience, not target niches.

Also add the LinkedIn pods (which is a group of people that will like and comment nonsense on posts to boost), same concept of bots in other social networks.

That said, LinkedIn is still the only social network where I have real people that I know and have done business with.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-08-17 14:32:33+00:00
> EXACTLY! Thank you for finally agreeing to this obvious point … Not sure why you tried this in the first place, it was so obviously wrong.

You were the one who tied it to renewables: “And the energy crisis 2021-2023 affected the entire world, yet for some reason the countries with intermittent renewables were worst affected?”

So I really don’t know what point you’re making.

> in order to incorrectly smear some site as an unreliable source. This smear failed, because they were correct and you were not.

A statement of fact (that the site peddles in misinformation and anti-renewable taking points) is neither a smear now a straw man.

> Actually, Germany for example does have a de-facto 100% renewables target for electricity

If you go an read the paper you linked to, you’ll see that they are talking about 100% renewable from a single source, e.g. only solar, or only wind. This is not what Germany is doing; they may be targeting 100% renewables, but they aim to reach that by combining multiple sources.

> Here you present another common straw man, which is that renewables and nuclear are somehow mutually exclusive.

When you have $ to spend on new energy sources, every dollar spent on one source is a dollar not spent on another. And any dollar spent on nuclear would be better spent on renewables.

> In fact, coal consumption increased while renewable share went down. So check your facts.

Feel free to check them, all you have to do is click on the links I have already sent. But here you can clearly see that your statement is categorically false [0-1].

> Germany spent somewhere between €400-600 billion on its failed "Energiewnde", and it has 10x worse CO₂ emissions than France, which spent €228 billion

I don’t see any sources for this. For starters, is that French price adjusted for inflation given that their fleet was built decades ago?

As for the CO2 levels, see [0] that shows their emissions high even before their renewables push. And after it is has been decreasing consistently since then.

[0]: https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/germany/ [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...
by josephg | 2025-08-17 14:32:44+00:00
I have no doubt plenty of smart engineers at tech companies would rather reinvent the wheel than read a book on theatre. But if anyone’s interested, there are plenty of great books talking about the philosophy of comedy, and why some things work on stage and some don’t. I highly recommend Keith Johnstone’s “Impro”. He’s the guy who invented modern improv comedy and theatre sports.

He says things are funny if they’re obvious. But not just any obvious. They have to be something in the cloud of expectation of the audience. Like, something they kinda already thought but hadn’t named. If you have a scene where someone’s talking to a frog about love, it’s not funny for the talking frog to suddenly go to space. But it might be funny to ask the frog why it can talk. Or ask about gossip in the royal palace. Or say “if you’re such a catch, how’d you end up as a frog?”.

If good comedy is obvious, you’d think LLMs would be good at it. Honestly I think LLMs fall down by not being specific enough in detail. They don’t have ideas and commit to them. They’re too bland. Maybe their obvious just isn’t the same as ours.
by twodave | 2025-08-17 14:33:41+00:00
One’s ceiling may be more or less stable, but there are many instances where individuals have certain underdeveloped cognitive skills (of which there are a litany), undergo training to develop those skills, and then afterwards go on to score (sometimes much) higher on IQ tests. Children with certain disabilities such at autism or FASD tend to see more dramatic differences. This isn’t to say they “became more intelligent,” but rather that the testing is unable to measure intelligence directly, rather relying on those certain cognitive skills as a proxy for intelligence.
by dkiebd | 2025-08-17 14:33:45+00:00
There are far too few people working in elderly care because it pays peanuts. It pays peanuts because immigration increases the supply of workers. With a limited supply of workers and increased demand as more people get older, those jobs would pay well and natives would want to do them. It’s basic economy. It works well in countries that are not a free for all regarding immigration.
by althea_tx | 2025-08-17 14:34:06+00:00
I preferred o3 for coding and analysis tasks, but appreciated 4o as a “companion model” for brainstorming creative ideas while taking long walks. Wasn’t crazy about the sycophancy but it was a decent conceptual field for playing with ideas. Steve Jobs once described the PC as a “bicycle for the mind.” This is how I feel when using models like 4o for meandering reflection and speculation.
by mattmanser | 2025-08-17 14:34:51+00:00
And the ORM free code has massive downsides, not limited to if you add/change a column code can break at runtime, not compile time.

The negatives of not using an ORM is far worse than the negatives of not reigning in some developers who shouldn't be making complex queries.

If they don't even know how to check the SQL their complex ORM query produces, that's a training problem, not an ORM problem.

It's one of our great weaknesses as a profession, assuming everyone will figure stuff out on their own.
by JCM9 | 2025-08-17 14:35:01+00:00
LinkedIn is useful to check someone’s career history.

Beyond that it’s mostly a bunch of folks spending time on LinkedIn trying to impress people that aren’t spending their time on LinkedIn. Which ironically drives away the people folks seem to be trying to impress. Spend time there if you wish, but you’re “marketing” to people that mostly aren’t there.

The whole “influencer” thing on LinkedIn is mostly full of grifters claiming to be experts at things they’re not really experts at. When someone starts off by saying they’re a “top influencer” on LinkedIn I run the other way, quickly. If you have to market yourself as an influencer then newsflash you’re probably not. If you are, you just are.
by mostlystatic | 2025-08-17 14:35:34+00:00
I love LinkedIn as a founder/developer. It's become my main social network after the Twitter acquisition.

Your experience depends on what show up in your feed. For me, it's mostly developers talking about web performance optimization, small business owners talking about conferences they've been to, people sharing posts or videos they've released... and the occasional post from the local council or someone criticizing Facebook's AI features.

Posting on LinkedIn doesn't necessarily mean bullshitting or low-value content. My two most popular posts are about single-page app performance [1] and TCP slow start [2]. And when I talk to people using our product they mention they have team members regularly sharing my posts in their company (but they might not "like" it on LinkedIn).

I might not be getting thousands of engagements, but there's little point reaching random people who aren't interested in working on the same problems as me either.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mattzeunert_client-side-rende... [2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mattzeunert_resource-download...
by gnerd00 | 2025-08-17 14:37:46+00:00
you ask yourself .. for most people, that means closer to average reply, from yourself, when you try to figure it out.

There is a working paper from McKinnon Consulting in Canada that states directly that their definition of "General AI" is when the machine can match or exceed fifty percent of humans who are likely to be employed for a certain kind of job. It implies that low-education humans are the test for doing many routine jobs, and if the machine can beat 50% (or more) of them with some consistency, that is it.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-08-17 14:38:09+00:00
That is a very fatalist perspective. In HS, I was in a class with 3 kids, who were genuinely smarter than me ( not by a notch, mind; comparatively speaking I was just dumber ). I agree that pretending I was/am not dumb by comparison would not help, but suggesting 'nothing you can do about it' is not entirely accurate either. Frankly, the reason I slowly got less dumb is because of my exposure to them. There is something awe-inspiring about seeing a guy using cold logic to guide you through something and be 100% correct.
by xenotux | 2025-08-17 14:38:27+00:00
It's one of several canned jokes you get with a very high likelihood. Try a couple of times and be dismayed - you'll be getting the same three jokes over and over again. I'm fairly certain they were specifically tuned to return that. It takes special prompting to get it to write a new joke, and the results are typically disastrous / surreal.