MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ctoth | 2025-08-04 16:30:16+00:00
Bit of a dunk but ... It must have saved you what ever time you were going to spend on this article because I detect a bunch of LLMisms and very little content.

I'm not sure that Claude saves me time -- I just spent my weekend working on a Claude Code Audio hook with Claude which I obviously wouldn't have worked on elsewise, and that's hardly the gardening I intended to do ... but man it was fun and now my CC sessions are a lot easier to track by ear!
by jobs_throwaway | 2025-08-04 16:30:47+00:00
> And the probably correct alternative is that if some people are just on video, everyone should be on individual video.

But practically though, how does this work in an office setting? I work in an exorbitantly nice office, and we still don't have near enough conference rooms/enclosed spaces for everyone to individually book a room

And in another sense, this is just defaulting to the lowest common denominator. People in-person go to side chats because its beneficial to do so.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-04 16:30:57+00:00
> Oof, an HTTP 200 OK response with a body that says the request actually was not OK.

What's "oof" about it? The application layer should not inject error codes into the transport layer which is what HTTP is in this case.

Do you also think that Apache/Nginx should be injecting codes into IP packets?

If your application injects codes into the HTTP layer, how on earth does the client know whether the error originated at the application or at the reverse proxy/webserver?
by cnst | 2025-08-04 16:31:03+00:00
> I have a user who YOLOd and tried the Cinnado D1 (t23) installer and claimed success.

Oh, wait, Cinnado D1 is only $14.99! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CBBT5RMP

That's cheaper than Wansview Q5! (Unless the Woot deal returns.)
by anon_cow1111 | 2025-08-04 16:31:10+00:00
I know basic things like cpr, how and where to apply pressure to stop bleeding, signs of a stroke or hypothermia, you know, basic vital stuff to keep someone alive in case of emergency.

Similarly, I'd expect a doctor to be familiar with things such as "save as" or "print screen" if they used a computer every day.
by jeffbee | 2025-08-04 16:31:11+00:00
There aren't enough details in the somewhat hyperbolic narrative format to really say, but if I were going to create a temporary archive of files on an embedded system for diagnostic upload, I would also delete it, because that's the nature of temporary files and nobody likes ENOSPACE. If their system had deleted the inputs of the archive that would seem nefarious, but this doesn't, at first scan.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-04 16:31:18+00:00
There were some legitimate technical decisions, that said, imho, Node should have just stayed compatible with Babel's implementation and there would have been significantly less friction along the way. It was definitely a choice not to do so, for better and worse.

It's interesting to see how many ideas are being taken from Deno's implementations as Deno increases Node interoperability. I still like Deno more for most things.
by philipallstar | 2025-08-04 16:31:54+00:00
> It's very violent because it gets violently repressed by capitalist forces

Millions of Soviet deaths; millions of Chinese deaths; deaths from the Khmer Rouge....these are not "violent capitalist repression". Capitalism isn't a total system. It's a voluntary exchange system, where people who provide the most get the most.

> What value do people inheriting wealth provide?

That money was earned by providing value.

> What value do high frequency traders provide?

If listing a company on a stock exchange isn't valuable for companies, then they wouldn't do it. But it is. So they do.

> What value do speculators of all sorts provide?

It depends on your other examples of speculators. If you see how they make money, then you'll probably have your answer.
by o11c | 2025-08-04 16:32:01+00:00
Okay, but if so, let's be explicit about making that tradeoff. Also, let's not pretend that "ban all NSFW games" either was asked for or would be acted upon.

It's quite telling that there's a grand total of one (1) specific game people keep suggesting be unbanned. Given the number of games affected, a rare false positive is only to expected.

(Apparently itch.io temporarily took steps against all NSFW games, which is only to be expected if they have no way to immediately know which games are pedo/incest/rape games since they've chosen to let them flourish for so long.)
by eddythompson80 | 2025-08-04 16:32:19+00:00
> The bots of Big Tech, namely Google, Meta and Apple are of course exempt from this by pretty much every website and by cloudflare. But try being anyone other than them , no luck. Cloudflare is the biggest enabler of this monopolistic behavior

Plenty of site/service owners explicitly want Google, Meta and Apple bots (because they believe they have a symbiotic relationship with it) and don't want your bot because they view you as, most likely, parasitic.
by JohnMakin | 2025-08-04 16:32:53+00:00
I fell in love with PHP in kind of a funny way (and looking at my career now, was probably an indicator I was destined for what I do now) because it saved me during college.

My 2nd to last quarter I had to cram 20 difficult units because of some requirement I had somehow missed. Part of that was a 5 unit web development project/lecture course. Our project was to build an ecommerce site. We were introduced to several paradigms of how to build end to end, PHP being one of them - and as other commenters have noted, what I particularly liked was its ease of deployment.

However, the class at the end pushed everyone towards vanilla JS, which I have never had much success working with and to be honest kind of loathed it. I could not deploy the site with it on the school servers - apparently I wasn't the only one.

So, I looked carefully at the rubric and realized only 20% of it was code evaluation. The rest was site design, and one massive chunk of the grade was simply just getting it deployed by the deadline.

So, I wrote it in php because I knew 1000% it would work and I could get it running on time. The TA wanted to fail the project, but since only 20% of the grade was code, I got a B-. Almost everyone failed because only a few people could get it deployed at all.

I'd love to work on modern PHP projects but don't know where to start or what even is out there, people just scoff at it because it looks horribly ugly and its history of security flaws.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-04 16:32:53+00:00
Most of the time I have three side projects that I'm committed to and I really make progress on two and the other is aspirational -- which is fine.

Right now my current "project" is building a stock of photos so that I can post a continuous stream of photos on social

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/photography

This is pretty consuming because my developing process is intensive. I took about 3500 photos of two basketball games on Jan 31 and picked out about 400 to develop in DxO, I chose one color grade for all of them because a lot of the girls had bad acne that I wanted to minimize, now I am cropping them and applying local microcontrast to the parts in focus (but not faces of athletes with acne) I expect this take a few evenings, then there are many more batches of photos to develop including other games as well as tranches of flowers and landscapes. I have probably 15k undeveloped photos where those came from.

Another stream of that work is building an autoposter which will make it easier to keep these coming, for a while I was posting to Mastodon + Bluesky but lately I am posting to Facebook and LinkedIn, want to add Instagram (hate the UI for uploading) and Threads and anything else I can. That's blocked by my work to finish my Python API for using Postgres as an arangodb-like document database which blocks a whole bunch of projects that both involve moving forward, like a general purpose trainer for text classification and getting YOShInOn (my RSS reader) off arangodb. Feels overwhelming at time but the train is moving.
by nyeah | 2025-08-04 16:33:09+00:00
It would be neat if we could divide programming into (a) software development; (b) other labor-saving automation that's less serious.

When a tool crosses from (b) into (a), we'd have to acknowledge that too. (Or ignore it and invite a blizzard of problems, which are now inexplicable because "it was done".)

Every thinking person already in fact does differentiate between (a) and (b) in their own work. So admitting it out loud and just talking about it may not be the apocalypse that many expect. But ymmv.
by seer | 2025-08-04 16:33:13+00:00
This is why you can give the llm some sort of “outlet” in the event that it is not certain of its tokens.

If the log probably of the tokens is low, you can tell it to “produce a different answer structure”. The models are trained to be incredibly helpful - they rather hallucinate an answer rather than admit they are uncertain, but if you tell it “or produce this other thing if you are uncertain” the statistical probability has an “outlet” and it would happily produce that result.

There was a recent talk about it on the HN YouTube channel.
by wahern | 2025-08-04 16:33:32+00:00
> provide offramps for people with addiction, similar to supervised injection sites for drug users.

Supervised injection sites in the US don't provide offramps, not unless they require as a condition of use regular counseling. Europe had both kinds, but American harm minimization advocates imported the no-strings-attached variety while using the data for the counseling-required sites to sell them to policy makers.

To carry that over to the slot machines, maybe the slot machines should have required some sort of access ID so users could be tracked and addicts identified for intervention (easier today than 20+ years ago) as a condition for continued use. That might be kind of tough in a military environment, though, given the emphasis on morality and potential repercussions if you're not diligent enough to hide your dirty laundry from your CO; sort of like why commercial pilots don't see mental health professionals.
by happens | 2025-08-04 16:33:32+00:00
I daily drive NixOS, and while I initially had the same experience I've settled on some workflows that basically allow me to run anything with minimal maintenance.

I think it's a problem that many tutorials and example configs you find online are very verbose and propose complex patterns, when you don't really need that much for it to be useful. There is still a learning curve, but you don't need to write a modularized configuration framework if you just want some machines with synced config and apps.

I've written about my workflow here [1], but haven't published it anywhere yet. Not sure how useful this is to other people.

[1] https://happens.lol/blog/how-to-nixos-insane/
by viamroboticsnyc | 2025-08-04 16:33:42+00:00
Viam (NYC-based robotics and AI platform, Series C, founded by co-founder of MongoDB and long time CTO) is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for our Motion Planning team. Backend development in Golang.

Viam is a full stack engineering platform that enables our users to work with devices (robotics, IoT, hardware etc) in the physical world. It's an extensive platform that starts with low-level integrations with any sensor or actuators, and enables you to connect and manage everything in the cloud; with that it is simple to get data from the physical world into the cloud, and taking action on it back in the physical world is just as easy. Everything in Viam is pluggable and modular. You can add support for any device you need, any algorithm you want, or any model training or inference engine you care to use.

Apply here: https://grnh.se/2f64cfb34us
by atmavatar | 2025-08-04 16:34:09+00:00
Where have you seen conservatives trying to resurrect labor unions or overturn Citizens United? So far, I've only ever seen such suggestions coming from the fringe left (e.g., Bernie, AOC, etc.) and always shouted down as "socialism".

Both obviously need to happen regardless, but I don't see either happening in my lifetime short of a (probably bloody) restructuring of US government, and even then, only if we're lucky.
by guiambros | 2025-08-04 16:34:24+00:00
Not sure why you were downvoted. Pix is a fantastic example of how much more efficient p2p payments can be, without relying on the Visa-Mastercard duopoly.

Of course Pix had the backing of the government, so it had a huge initial boost, and didn't have to compete with entrenched players for market share.

Still, the fact is that it's universal, fast, efficient, lower cost for merchants, and less prone to censoring. What's not to like?

In a way it's more convenient than making congress pass laws to define payment providers as common carriers. With Pix, payment companies are free to chose their policies, but now citizens have options. Unfortunately that's not the reality in the US.
Ask HN: Does anyone work with VLMs in inudstry? What's your experience?
by NewUser76312 | 2025-08-04 16:34:30+00:00
Vision Language Models that is. Does anyone make extensive use of them? I don't mean the occasional image upload to ChatGPT per se, but rather some automated flow that involves taking constant visual input and getting language output.

What type of application is it for, how have you found the results/quality?

Do you use a stock model or do you finetune something for a custom dataset?

If you haven't used VLMs yet but are curious or interested, what would you try using them for?
by fragmede | 2025-08-04 16:34:56+00:00
Dude, you’re totally right. Common Lisp is the Bagger 288 of programming. It's this absolute unit of a machine, designed to literally eat mountains. And when the first mine shut down, it didn’t retire or rust away. They drove it across Germany at 2 miles an hour, moving villages and flattening everything in its path. People came out just to watch it roll by like it was some kind of steel god. Eventually it got a new job at another mine, still doing work nothing else could touch.

That’s Lisp. It was made for brain-level problems before AI was cool. It didn’t disappear, it just kept doing its thing while the rest of the world stacked layer after layer of frameworks and hype. It’s not trendy. It’s not dead. It’s just too powerful for most people to even know what to do with. It won’t write your todo app, but if you’re trying to build something wild that actually thinks a little, Lisp is still sitting there, waiting.
by MrBrobot | 2025-08-04 16:35:00+00:00
The self-checkout is the one that gets me. I'm paying you money for products, and you both continuously raise prices, and make it less convenient for me to shop there. That is, unless I want to order it for delivery online, and pay an extra fee. Every retailer doesn't need to be Amazon. I don't even want Amazon to be like Amazon anymore. Maybe this is me getting older, or me having worked in technology too long - but I'm growing tired of the hyper-fixation we have with optimizing every possible thing, at the loss of human interaction.
by Bukhmanizer | 2025-08-04 16:35:12+00:00
I think a lot of people would disagree with this article on HN, but I’ve yet to see too many people say it’s made their coworkers more productive. That is, do people feel like they’re getting better, more reviewable PRs?

Personally, I’ve been seeing the number of changes for a PR starting to reach into the mid-hundreds now. And fundamentally the developers who make them don’t understand how they work. They often think they do, but then I’ll ask them something about the design and they’ll reply: “IDK Claude did that.”

By no means am I down on AI, but I think proper procedures need to be put into place unless we want a giant bomb in our code base.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-08-04 16:35:22+00:00
> Monopolies and labor abuses were mostly in check

Really? Transatlantic slavery by far the biggest labour abuse, then the company towns, then Standard Oil which was allowed to run amok for 30 years then broken up (which then consolidated into ExxonMobil and Chevron again). These are just off the top of my head.

The US from my point of view has been a puritanical, borderline genocidal, enslaving, cowardly and hypocritical, and yet nosy entity that discarded its inconvenient founding and history.

Its success I daresay has been entirely contingent on its remoteness from the rest of humanity (which fed into its exceptionalism narrative), and comparatively sparse population. By many measures the Roman and British empires were 'more successful'.
by queenkjuul | 2025-08-04 16:35:26+00:00
Completely nailed it. The comparison to Adderall and other drugs was exactly how I've been feeling about it all--i watch my boss excitedly post another LLM documentation PR, raving about how he never used to have time for these things, yet the actual output is unclear, ambiguous, and almost entirely useless. But it made him feel good to "get it done," and that alone has largely blinded him to how bad the output actually is, and how long it took him to get.
by h3lp | 2025-08-04 16:35:34+00:00
35M of 1937 dollars is $784M$ today according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/. Also, 97M$ is quoted as a total budget for maintenance; painting apparently costs just 0.3M$ (I have no idea what else goes into mainenance--probably they include roadways and connectors, toll booths(?) etc.)
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-04 16:36:02+00:00
normally a person would go to jail. But corporations just pay a fine. I think we really need to come up with punishments that are actual deterrents. Like any time a corporation ends up killing someone from negligence there needs to be an action that is equivalent and scaled appropriately.

Send the corporation to jail. That means it cannot conduct business for the same amount of time that we would put a person in jail.
by anmolkala | 2025-08-04 16:36:20+00:00
This is such a thoughtful idea. The cooldown and work-hour reframing hit hard and really make you think before spending. You can tell it’s built from personal experience.

Since you’ve already got reflections and streaks in place, a simple browser extension could be an awesome next step. Something that gently pops up when you're about to buy, just to break that autopilot.

Love how real this feels. It’s something a lot of us need.
by mlochbaum | 2025-08-04 16:36:47+00:00
Well, do you know how it works? Don't judge a book by its cover and all. Although none of these are entirely aiming for elegance. The first is code golf and the other two have some performance hacks that I doubt are even good any more, but replacing ∧≢⥊ with ∧⌜ in the last gets you something decent (personally I'm more in the "utilitarian code is never art" camp, but I'd have no reason to direct that at any specific language).

The double-struck characters have disappeared from the second and third lines creating a fun puzzle. Original post https://www.ashermancinelli.com/csblog/2022-5-2-BQN-reflecti... has the answers.
by mikestew | 2025-08-04 16:36:49+00:00
Well, maybe not so great for ex-workers. Current employees still have RSUs and employee stock purchase plan, so those shares are making bank. OTOH, my Microsoft-employed spouse also says "no significant pay raises this review period", and I think that's the "not so great for workers" part that TFA missed. MSFT is going big guns, but doesn't have money for increased compensation.
by TZubiri | 2025-08-04 16:37:16+00:00
Websites and any business really, have the right to impose terms of use and deny service.

Anyone circumventing bans is doing something shitty and ilegal, see the computer fraud and abuse act and craiglist v 3taps.

"And those LLMs didn't ask anyones permission to crawl the entire 'net."

False, openai respects robots.txt, doesnt mask ips, paid a bunch of $ to reddit.

You either side with the law or with criminals.
by haswell | 2025-08-04 16:37:24+00:00
In a past life, I ran a tools/operations team at a big company for years and later was the product manager for a visual workflow/integration product for a number of years. I've been the IT department trying to manage the crazy things people in the org build, and later worked with hundreds of customers who wanted visual workflow tools for a long list of reasons that have very little to do with what this blog post describes.

I don't think the author understands why these tools exist or why people find them valuable, and there are a number of major issues with their position.

> Excel and visual workflow tools are fundamentally the same: point-and-click interfaces that let people build complex logic without understanding what they’re actually building. Excel uses cells and formulas, visual workflows use boxes and connectors, but the principle is identical. Both promise to make hard things easy.

While I sort of understand the point they're trying to make, I think it's problematic to call these "fundamentally the same" but then compare them on abstract characteristics. By this logic, a car and a bus are fundamentally the same because they both promise to get us from Point A to Point B. This of course misses out on a myriad of reasons cars and busses are quite different in practice.

> Visual workflow tools aren’t succeeding because they’re better, they’re succeeding because we’ve gotten lazy and scared.

These tools are succeeding because:

- They enable teams and individuals to build things they otherwise couldn't without involving central IT or some dev team

- They provide structure and promise to solve a host of operational/management issues associated with keeping an automation running in perpetuity

- They can often be charged to an expense card vs. requiring headcount, existing resource allocation, new budget, etc.

Is the result also a monstrosity? Possibly. But It's a monstrosity that is making something happen that otherwise wouldn't be happening.

And it's possible that the monstrosity will eventually need to be adopted/fixed by a real dev team, but again, that's a team that would never have gotten involved to begin with if someone hadn't built something that now needs to be "fixed". The team doing the fixing sees this as a problem, but the team who built the monstrosity got something built and into production and see it as a win.

It's entirely possible that a "proper" solution built by a dev team would have been superior. But that ultimately doesn't matter if the only way a thing sees the light of day is through the Excel/Visual Workflow Tool pipeline.

These products are not targeted at people who have the ability to build things from scratch the "right" way. And the reasons people/companies buy them usually fall into a few categories: resource constraints, politics, and managers/directors wanting to gain autonomy to build things for their teams without fighting for budget/prioritization with central dev/IT.
by saubeidl | 2025-08-04 16:37:35+00:00
> Millions of Soviet deaths; millions of Chinese deaths; deaths from the Khmer Rouge

We could count the dead of capitalist imperialist oppression and come to similar conclusions, but I don't think that's a productive converation.

> It's a voluntary exchange system, where people who provide the most get the most.

That is not true. You either participate or you starve and are denied housing and health care. It is "voluntary" on paper only.

> That money was earned by providing value.

That money was earned by exploiting labor.

> If listing a company on a stock exchange isn't valuable for companies, then they wouldn't do it. But it is. So they do.

I'm not talking about profits for companies - which are the very source of the ills described in the article we're commenting on. I'm talking about value to society.
by rozenmd | 2025-08-04 16:37:48+00:00
I gave myself two hours to ship.

Obviously you're not going to complete entire projects in two hours, so you cut scope, while ensuring some version of "the thing you want to do" is possible.

So for insane forms with dozens of fields, you start with one field.

Then you iterate.

The idea is that at any given point outside of those two hours, your project can be used. It doesn't do ALL the things, but just enough to be useful.