MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WA | 2025-08-11 08:24:23+00:00
I have zero pity. Zero. Because what kind of metric is this?

- Google is invented and brings lots of traffic to publishers for many years.

- Publishers drink from the firehose, getting used to a lot of traffic. To get even more traffic, quality goes down, SEO spam goes up.

- Publishers give zero fucks about readers privacy and install a gazillion trackers (personalized ad networks)

- Google makes AI snippets with similar quality to the SEO spam on publishers websites resulting in less traffic.

- Publishers whine, because they realize that their spammy unsustained business practices kinda suck for readers and most readers weren’t loyal after all.

- Publishers blame Google, because they felt entitled to this low-quality traffic they got so used to because of their SEO spam.

Anyways. We can talk about the necessity of a general purpose search engine. We can talk about Google‘s role in stealing content from websites. But these are different topics and for now, I’m sick of whiny publishers.
by tetha | 2025-08-11 08:24:35+00:00
Or an escape room, indeed.

Once you're thinking along the lines of "Alright, if I had some order of flags, I could solve that thing over there. If I knew some kind of weights, I could solve that over there. And if I could find a light bulb I could deal with that over there", you're kinda in the mindset of finding an exploitation chain.

It's just that in the security world, it's more about bad memory accesses, confusing programs into doing the right actions with wrong files, file permissions being weird and such.
by shahbaby | 2025-08-11 08:25:30+00:00
Would you rather do 10 take-homes or 10 leetcode questions?

Either way, when you fail, chances are that you will not get any meaningful feedback other than "we have decided to move forward with other candidates".

If you had done a take-home, how could you know where you went wrong?

If you had done a leetcode question, you can look up the question after the interview and usually learn from your mistakes.

With leetcode you usually don't need the interviewer's feedback to improve. You don't even need the interview. And after a certain point you won't need that much time to prepare.
by yMEyUyNE1 | 2025-08-11 08:25:49+00:00
For me, if someone says "try and see for yourself", it implies possibility of failure or something new.

If outcome is considered in terms of success or failure then try implies non-zero probability of failure. If outcome isn't considered in terms of success or failure then "try this flavour of ice-cream" is experience and try this outfit(fits or doesn't) is a test you can't fail. Philosophically, it is as master Yoda said: Do or do not, there is no try.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-08-11 08:26:05+00:00
Well it makes no sense for a company to try to insure properties that are fully expected to be damaged regularly (e.g. due to seasonal flooding, fires etc). That would make the premiums equivalent to the rebuilding costs if the company is to operate long term and customers won't pay for those kinds of premiums. It's not a viable business and so why would an insurance company spend effort to try to offer that product?
by scotty79 | 2025-08-11 08:27:35+00:00
Thank you. From what I see Quebec is insignificantly below the average of the whole country. So my idea about high score being explained by Canadians speaking French and pulling the score up is just wrong. There must be something they are doing well when it comes to teaching English reading. And very well even since they globally score very high. Google AI summary (not sure if it can be trusted) says they made a move towards phonics, due to ineffectiveness of contextual guessing.
by rsaarelm | 2025-08-11 08:27:36+00:00
Sometimes people already are like something and don't want to change it or feel like they could change it, but also don't get along being like they are. This is more awkward to think about than just treating them as damaged or incomplete people who would get around to becoming people who can fit in fine once the damage is fixed or the incomplete development is completed, because it's harder to see good solutions.
by rramon | 2025-08-11 08:28:20+00:00
Now, but after listening to podcasts with him I think he's someone who would tackle hard stuff like drivers or DSP, so called math genius level coding as soon as it becomes more accessible for him through AI assisted coding.

There is a chance to build a real MacOS/iOS alternatives without a JVM abstraction layer on top like Android. The reason it didn't happen yet is the GPL firewall around the Linux kernel imo.
by drawfloat | 2025-08-11 08:28:44+00:00
This is like a news editor suggesting a future of development: zero bugs, never goes down, can be used anywhere, usable be anyone. Yes these all seem nice, but they're just a wishlist that is borderline impossible in practice.

Also personalisation of news is almost the number one 'hidden dopamine hooks', and in many ways the most insidious in its impact.
by rickandmorty99 | 2025-08-11 08:29:08+00:00
> instead of just "winning" interactions

Mainstream pickup artists yea. Some niche ones, not really. Wayne Elise feels like a good example, from back in the day.

On a throwaway because the judgmental people will judge me for the rest of my life due to me nuancing that not all people associated to pickup artists looked at social interactions in a zero sum way.
by aaron695 | 2025-08-11 08:29:45+00:00
> at least from my perspective.

If you are afraid of salt I guess. That's an old idea and somewhat a religion formed off a misdirect marketing campaign.

Any Who even with salt is evil not much difference at McDonalds -

McPlant https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/mcplant.html#acco... (510 Cal.)

Quarter Pounder with Cheese https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/quarter-pounder-w... (520 Cal.)

I don't see Beyond Meat as a replacement to steak, it's very unhealthy compared to that.

Reducing livestock is the most 2nd most pressing environmental issue in the world, to fixing fishing. I can't think of anything else that matters more than those two. We need to farm the oceans (70%) and leave land (30%) for hunters.

I love pictures of Chinese diamond factories - https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=chinese+diamond+fact...
by mike_hearn | 2025-08-11 08:32:21+00:00
Selling something to the black market doesn't magically make it tax free. It's almost the opposite. The money is going to show up in your auditable accounts sooner or later, so it's best to pay tax on it, but you'll also have to come up with a fake but auditable story of where it came from, meaning you'll have to engage the services of professional money launderers. They will also take a cut. So, it's like paying tax twice.

Getting paid in cryptocurrency isn't necessarily a dodge either because even if you claim you mined it or something, the authorities have got wise to this a while ago IIUC and will expect to see evidence to back that claim up too.
by PicassoCTs | 2025-08-11 08:32:57+00:00
My problem with AI is that it has humanity mediocre, filtered for the masses culture baked into it by definition.

This is machinery that can not suggest experimental jazz- unless it is already mainstream. It can not go to the fringes and shove the species towards new and wild discoveries.

I find it hilarious though, that it may destroy the cultural behemoths with their IPs by mashUp. Death by a million beatles-clone songs, yesterday came suddenly indeed. And after all that is sad and done for- some of us, might even venture out to the fringe and find the weird and wild parts again.
by kragen | 2025-08-11 08:32:59+00:00
When you are using the shared memory to communicate with an untrusted sender. Examples might include:

- browser main processes that don't trust renderer processes

- window system compositors that don't trust all windowed applications, and vice versa

- database servers that don't trust database clients, and vice versa

- message queue brokers that don't trust publishers and subscribers, and vice versa

- userspace filesystems that don't trust normal user processes
by ktallett | 2025-08-11 08:33:03+00:00
I'm not AI's biggest fan, but it is training it's virtual brain on images and data, just like a creative human would, yet it is just far quicker at that.

Do we need to limit scraping and learning to only free publicly available data? Therefore is a Reuters photo still not publicly available for learning style of photo, composition, lighting, even with a watermark. What you pay for is the license to reproduce the image, you can still look at them beforehand.
by ang_cire | 2025-08-11 08:33:31+00:00
> the amount of money paid should factor in the anticipated risk for your business. If a privilege escalation means that Google takes a massive hit in Ad Revenue, than this should be factored in.

Given this exploit, that would probably lower the payout. There are absolutely tons more sandbox escapes in Chromium engine right now (here's a fun list of previous ones, none of which cost them ad rev[1]), and they're not adversely affecting Google's ad revenue. No company is pulling ads because Chrome has a vuln.

This wouldn't even be the kind of reputational hit that something like SolarWinds was.

[1]: https://github.com/allpaca/chrome-sbx-db
by quetzthecoatl | 2025-08-11 08:33:43+00:00
the western democracy was lost not with trump/farage etc but with the entrenched liberals who decried democracy redefining it as populism and institutional entrenchment as true democracy. This is fallout from it. The populist movements happened because the liberals who once stood for working class people abandoned the poor and working class. Nobody cared then and some even mocked the working class. Now everyone here/reddit/etc cares because suddenly they are affected and its an issue that they identify with and not just the working class. Good times. You won't be able to do anything. They will walk all over you just like when they walked all over the working class.
by wazoox | 2025-08-11 08:34:10+00:00
Also people forget that up to the 1830s, going from Paris to Marseille was a 2 week journey (unless you were a royal courier switching horses every 40 km, who could do it in a few days), and that sending a message across the Atlantic and getting a reply a 2 month affair. In the late 1860, going from Paris to Marseille was done in about 15 hours by train; it only got gradually faster since then (nowadays, 3h30, by train or by plane).
by arun_sharma2020 | 2025-08-11 08:34:17+00:00
We are expanding our software engineering team, and management has suggested focusing on hiring senior developers, as they are more likely to quickly grasp AI capabilities and write effective prompts. However, in my personal opinion, while tools like GitHub Copilot are helpful for simpler tasks, they are not well-suited for complex areas—especially payment calculations and payment gateway integrations.
by nicbou | 2025-08-11 08:34:43+00:00
As I wrote in a root comment, it’s decimating the traffic of informational websites. We will lose a lot of those websites that produced high-effort, simple-conclusion information. Who will bother with in-depth reviews if someone else gets the sale? Who will patiently answer questions if no one asks anymore?

I think that a certain kind of craftsmanship will be lost.
by ben_w | 2025-08-11 08:36:08+00:00
Without whose consent?

This looks like a sales pitch to a business, which are the people whose consent is necessary for employment. I doubt the tech is as good as the sales pitch — it never is.

Or do you mean the consent of the people who would be calling these lines, expecting a human? For most of my adult life, the default on customer support lines has either been "press 1 for foo, press 2 for bar", and when you get to an actual human, the human is limited to following a script instead of using their own judgement. In the "GOFAI" sense of "AI", back then was the script itself was an AI, and the human operator just a voice-to-if-statement shim.
by verisimi | 2025-08-11 08:37:23+00:00
Yes, all that data that ai is sucking up belongs to Google, twitter and Facebook! Lol. They are the owners of it. Those corporates didn't commit legal theft!

So ridiculous.

The whole idea of copyright is wrong. Anything that is popular and therefore successful, owes that to the crowd that made it popular. The crowd has is what gives it the interest.

I personally wouldn't even be averse to some sort period of copyright, say 2 years, with the possibility to extend to say 5, but these things are common.
by TheDong | 2025-08-11 08:37:36+00:00
Yeah, assuming the people working at the taco shop aren't very well off the taco should cost $100 for a software engineer, $80M for Jeffrey Bezos, and $4 for someone down on their luck.

If we wanted, we could make this more efficient by giving out free healthcare and housing to people, proportional to their need, and tax $95 from the software engineer, $80M from Bezos, and $0 from someone down on their luck.

Progressive Tacos does sound better than Progressive taxation, and it would probably work better because rich people dodge taxes all the time, but come on, who doesn't want to eat tacos?

We (software engineers) won't have proper empathy for the poor until we go into an apple store and the price tag on the iPhone is "20% of your net worth".
by 0xEF | 2025-08-11 08:41:37+00:00
I would be on board with this if the system was not touching the outside world, but it does every time you hook a smartphone to it or if you have an optional data network. Just like with our smartphones, there's nothing stopping a car company from pushing system-damaging updates when they want to steer us toward buying a new vehicle since that one is too outdated/no longer supported.

What you say can be true about a static isolated system, though. My employer has a Windows XP computer still running a machine in our factory. The PC was built built in 2006, connected to the Internet once upon deployment then disconnected thereafter. It has been running the software and machine more or less untouched since, receiving zero updates, performing it's duty as it was built to.
by huncyrus | 2025-08-11 08:43:09+00:00
I had side projects that died because the market shifted. When I was in middle school, I managed a small website for tabletop RPGs on a very limited market (a small European country), and the community was extremely toxic and kept copying my work and replacing the name in it, so after like 6-8 years of battling, I decided to close it. Now, after more than a decade, I plan to reopen it, uploading again my old stuff there as archives. I still have the domains.
by XCabbage | 2025-08-11 08:43:38+00:00
Well, not necessarily, on your last sentence. It might also be theft, depending on the precise nefarious purpose and on the jurisdiction. If you take somebody else's property without their consent, that's typically theft, even if the "property" is money in a bank account and no tangible physical object changed hands, and even if the method of taking involved deception. Fraud and theft overlap.
by johnisgood | 2025-08-11 08:44:28+00:00
IntelliJ is unfortunately very sluggish for me either way, and as of now, if it is open, I cannot do anything else on the PC, which means it is only open when I am actively coding, but even then, it is just so slow that I would rather not.

On the other hand, VSCodium and vim / emacs are always open, at the same time. But I do not like coding in Java / Kotlin without IntelliJ, which I do for some work.

Honestly, a better PC would solve this issue.
by TrackerFF | 2025-08-11 08:44:54+00:00
Following this logic, anything that is digital can not be stolen? After all, you only steal a digital copy - not the original, and not something that is physical.

In which case, the following is not theft:

- Pirating anything that is digital video

- Pirating anything that is digital audio

- Pirating anything that is digital text

- Pirating any software

etc.

EDIT: For the proponents of "it is not theft", what's your stance on personal data being stolen ("accessed")? If someone can access your medical records, are you fine with that? They can do whatever they want with that?
by yorwba | 2025-08-11 08:44:57+00:00
Not quite. If some values are filler and some are not, and the corresponding keys are linearly separable, it's not difficult to find a query where standard attention gives low attention scores to filler and high attention scores to non-filler. Attention sinks deal with the problem when everything is filler, so there's no non-filler to allocate attention to.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-11 08:45:17+00:00
> You don't use any AI - drafting documentation, write boilerplate code, transcribing meetings, simplifying team communications, searching product documentation, alternative to Google or StackOverflow, creating presentations, as a brainstorming partner? I would consider all of these "work". If you say AI does 0% of your work, I'd say you're either a genius, behind the curve or being disingenuous.

There are reasons that seasoned OSS developers reject AI PRs: https://news.itsfoss.com/curl-ai-slop/ (like the creator of curl). Additionally, the only study to date currently measuring the impact on LLMs on experienced developers found a modest 19% decline in productivity when using an LLM for their daily work.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

Now we can ponder behind the reasons that the study showed experienced developers get a decrease of productivity, and you anecdotally experience a boost of "productivity", but why think about things when we can ask an LLM?

- experienced developers -> measured decrease of productivity

- you -> perceived increase of productivity

Here is what ChatGPT-5 thinks about the potential reason (AI slop below):

"Why You Might Feel More Productive

If senior developers are seeing a decline in productivity, but you are experiencing the opposite, it stands to reason that you are more junior. Here are some reasons why LLMs might help junior developers like you to feel more productive:

Lower Barrier to Entry

- LLMs help fill in gaps in knowledge—syntax, APIs, patterns—so you can move faster without constantly Googling or reading docs.

- Confidence Boost You get instant feedback, suggestions, and explanations. That can make you feel more capable and reduce hesitation.

- Acceleration of Learning You’re not just coding—you’re learning as you go. LLMs act like a tutor, speeding up your understanding of concepts and best practices.

- More Output, Less Friction You might be producing more code, solving more problems, and feeling that momentum—especially if you are just starting your coding journey."
by cyber1 | 2025-08-11 08:45:28+00:00
At first glance, when I looked through the Zig reference, I didn’t like a lot about its syntax (though syntax isn’t the most important thing for me). But when I tried writing in it, I changed my mind - it’s a concise and convenient language with a very low entry barrier. It feels like Go, and with some C experience, you can quickly start writing functional stuff.
by falcor84 | 2025-08-11 08:45:49+00:00
> The author decides who can consume their art,

What?! How would that even happen? Unless you limit your definition of art to performing at salon events, that doesn't make much sense. Typically art is released into the world and at best the authors can get a bit of rent from the people who consume it (typically via a publisher), but they don't have any control over who the consumers would be.
by gwd | 2025-08-11 08:46:40+00:00
There was a good essay I saw a bit ago, talking about how this shift from "fraud" to "identity theft" neatly started shifting the victim from the bank to the individual. E.g., 30 years ago, if someone claiming to be me went to my bank, asked for my money, and the bank gave it to them, then the bank that was a victim of fraud. But now, if someone goes to my bank, asks for my money, and the bank gives it to them, then I am the victim of identity theft.

The difference is subtle, but potentially important. If the bank unfortunately gives money to someone else, that's their problem: I can say to the bank, I'm sorry you were the victim of fraud, but you still owe me my money. If I unfortunately "have my identity stolen", then that makes it seem like it's my problem -- the bank may say, we're sorry you "had your identity stolen" and thus lost your money, but that's not really our problem.
by pjc50 | 2025-08-11 08:46:46+00:00
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/emiliano-s-agents-left-beh...

ICE are to a large extent above the law. Their entire purpose is to snatch people and move them to locations where they can be denied legal redress. A couple of high profile cases have only got redress due to very dedicated intervention by congresspeople, which does not scale.

I think people need to start reckoning with the underlying problem, which is that oppressive policing in America is popular provided it's happening to someone else.
by eastbound | 2025-08-11 08:47:04+00:00
I find the argument “Nothing was stolen” very weak compared to “The infinite endeavour of preventing private people from copying bytes, shouldn’t be a prerogative of the state” / ideas are copiable and can’t be decently guaranteed by the public against copy.

That is, public funds, tribunals and lawmaking power, shouldn’t be used to protect a private interests.

Corollary: 1. DRM is ok. 2. If one cracks it, it’s ok too, 3. You gotta find other ways to conduct business than retaining information (licenses, movies, etc.) 4. For software companies, cloud is one of those ways, compared to licensing downloads, 5. Netflix is the cloud of the movies and you pay for earlier access to a shared experience that is synchronized with other friends who will watch the same thing, 5. Patents are another stupid attempt by the state to protect corporations against citizens.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-11 08:47:11+00:00
I'm not sure if I'd ever have a job at YC (my industry isn't very "investor friendly"). But I like the idea of having a bunch of opportunities with such companies. It also encourages an environment of people I want to be around as well. So that indirectly serves my interests.

I will even use an ad example with conventions and festivals. You can argue an event like Comic-con is simply a huge ad. And it is. But I'm there "for the ad" in that case. It gathers other people "for the ad". It collectively benefits all of us to gather and socialize among one another.

Ads aren't bad, but many ads primarily exist to distract, not to facilitate an experience. And as a hot take, maybe we do need to gatekeep a bit more in this day and age. I don't want a "free intent" if it means 99% of my interactions are with bots instead of humans. If it means that corporations determine what is "worthy" of seeing instead of peers. If credit cards get to determine what I can spend my money on instead of my own personal (and legal) taste.

>It wouldn't ever be worth me getting $.0001431 dollars for my data and individual data will always be worthless on it's own

On top of being a software engineers who's contributed to millions on value with my data, I also strive to be an artist. An industry that has spent decades being extracted from but not as fortunate to be compensated a living wage most often. People can argue that "art is worthless" , yet it also props up multiple billion dollar industries on top of societal cultured. An artisan these days can even sustain themselves as a individual, with much faster turnaround than trying to program a website or app.

By all metrics, its hard to argue this sector's value is zero. Maybe having that lens only strengthened my stance, as a precursor to what software can become if you don't push against abuse early on.
by bob1029 | 2025-08-11 08:47:24+00:00
> a single core in a desktop CPU can easily saturate the bandwidth of the system RAM controller.

Modern x86 machines offer far more memory bandwidth than what a single core can consume. The entire architecture is designed on purpose to ensure this.

The interesting thing to note is that this has not always been the case. The 2010s is when the transition occurred.