MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bee_rider | 2025-08-29 17:29:07+00:00
I’ve seen comments here claiming that this site is either a bunch of coders coping about the limitations of AI and how it can’t take their job, or a bunch of startup dummies totally on the AI hype train.

Now, there’s a little room between the two—maybe the site is full of coders on a cope train, hoping that we’ll be empowered by nice little tools rather than totally replaced. And, ya know, multiple posters with multiple opinions, some contradictions are expected.

But I do find it pretty funny to see the multiple posters here describe the site they are using as suffering from multiple, contradictory, glaringly obvious blindspots.
by jMyles | 2025-08-29 17:29:10+00:00
> Everyone loves the dream of a free for all and open web.

> protect their blog or content from AI training bots

It strikes me that one needs to chose one of these as their visionary future.

Specifically: a free and open web is one where read access is unfettered to humans and AI training bots alike.

So much of the friction and malfunction of the web stems from efforts to exert control over the flow (and reuse) of information. But this is in conflict with the strengths of a free and open web, chief of which is the stone cold reality that bytes can trivially be copied and distributed permissionlessly for all time.
by klik99 | 2025-08-29 17:29:15+00:00
You could write a book on why it's practically impossible to create a new OS these days. Love Carmack for stating it so clearly. I also love that called out TempleOS, I also have a weird respect for it. Plan 9 is the probably the best example of a totally new OS and I hope someday it becomes viable because it's really a joy to use.

But ultimately it just makes sense to adapt existing kernels / OS (say, arch) and adapt it to your needs. It can be hair wrenchingly frustrating, and requires the company to be willing to upstream changes and it still takes years, but the alternative is decades, because what sounds good and well designed on paper just melts when it hits the real world, and linux has already gone through those decades of pain.
by dheera | 2025-08-29 17:29:46+00:00
It has none of the actionable information that people want in a good feedback message:

- What did I do wrong during the interviews

- What did I do that you weren't happy with

- Why was I not liked enough to be accept==1

If there is even a bit of information on these things, there are actionable things that can be done for the next interview (with any company).
by trelane | 2025-08-29 17:29:57+00:00
> protection from duplicate packets was never a requirement..

Nope. This is what "at-most-one" means. Either zero or one. Not two.

Three is right out.

> you also assume there is no other identifying info inside the packets that might provide an inherent protection anyways

Yes, but then if we're positing a system on top of UDP, then it doesn't matter what the protocol is, TCP or UDP. We can also assume the underlying system we're relying on can also detect missing requests, or even ensure we have exactly one.
by jijijijij | 2025-08-29 17:30:33+00:00
> I think this post comes in light of Europe being seen as curtailing free speech recently.

Which is motivated by foreign need of influence.

I mean, the blog linked here is most certainly associated with an American thinktank, even if registered in the UK, judging by their curious selection of articles and lack of identifying information. Rather unlikely, some intrinsically motivated individuals got the time to write several articles per day, but mostly concerned with European matters "hostile" to American social media influence, and advertising for American right-wing influencers and Trump's politics.

Fun fact: Registered On 2018-08-08, Expires On 2033-08-08. Conspiracy isn't my vice, so I won't hold that as evidence of anything, but it sure as hell is a hilarious coincidence for a political bias.

Not to dismiss the topic in the article here, although I think stylizing personal insults as a pillar of democracy and freedom is a bit silly.

By the way, is it legal in the UK, or the US to accept donations and sell merch, disclosing nothing but an domain-bound email address? Seems like this would allow liability evasion, tax fraud and money laundering.
by ljosifov | 2025-08-29 17:30:52+00:00
Thanks for the consideration. Yeah US and UK are different in that respect. I got the impression that US ends with the worst deal on both ends: organisations that could help you are denied your data, while organisation most unscrupulous most bent on doing their worst with your data, get almost free access to it.

For UK - I'm reasonably sure some people will have died because of the difficulties sharing their data, that would not have died otherwise. "Otherwise" being - they could communicate with the NHS, share their data, similarly via email, WhatsApp etc, to how they communicate and share data in their private and professional lives.

People at personal level have a fairly reasonable stance, in how they behave, when it comes to sharing their data. They are surprisingly subtle in their cost-benefit analysis. It's only when they answer surveys, or talk in public, that they are less-than-entirely-truthful. We know this, b/c their revealed preferences are at odds with what they say they value, and how much they value.
by extraisland | 2025-08-29 17:30:57+00:00
> Okay, and? I didn't make the claim that some other language was all that. I was dispelling the claim that Python is.

I believe that people should RTFM. Any arguments that is predicated on not reading the documentation for the language, and then pretending that it is somehow opaque, I am going to dismiss to be quite honest.

> Well, we've so far been restricted to function names which is what the claim was. There are plenty of cryptic other names in Python like ABCMeta, deriving from `object`, MRO, slots, dir, spec, etc.

You are still cherry-picking things to attempt to prove a point. I don't find this convincing.

> The idea you can't do RAD with libraries is insane. Games are developed rapidly, and a lot of game engines use C#. The fact that you're using Unity, a very large dependency, means nothing regarding whether you can do RAD, which is more about having the right architecture, tooling, and development cycle.

I didn't say that you can't do RAD with libraries. You didn't understand what I was saying at all.

I can get up and running with Python in mere minutes. It doesn't require a application templates/scaffolding apps to get started (like C# and JS/TS). You just need a text editor and a terminal. Doing that is still quicker and easier to get something working than all the gumpf you have to do with the other languages. I BTW was a JS/TS and .NET for about 15 years

I just wish there were more Python and Go jobs in the UK.
by lanstin | 2025-08-29 17:31:08+00:00
You can say generate a c program that uses gcc 128 bit floats and systematically generates all quadratic roots in order of the max size of their minimal polynomial coefficients, and then sort them and calculate the distribution of the intervals between adjacent numbers, and it just does it. That's qualitatively different from the compilers I have used. Now I was careful to use properly technical words to pull in the world of numeric computation and c programming. But still saved me a lot of time. It was even able to bolt on multithreaded parallelism to speed it up using c stuff I never heard of.
by jcranmer | 2025-08-29 17:31:31+00:00
That's not a map of their HSR network, that's a map of their rail network.

Openrailwaymap plots tracks by max speed, and you can see the map of China here: https://openrailwaymap.org/?style=maxspeed&lat=30.9587685707... --the tracks that are red-to-purple are the ones that are high speed.
by anthem2025 | 2025-08-29 17:31:58+00:00
Did they have people who have built an OS before?

I’ve seen this firsthand. These giant tech companies try to just jump into a massive new project thinking that because they have built such an impressive website and have so much experience at scale they should just be able to handle building a new OS.

In my case it wasn’t even a new OS it was just building around an existing platform and even that was massively problematic.

The companies that build them from scratch have had it as one of their core competencies pretty much from the start.

I’m unsurprised meta had issues like this.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-08-29 17:32:00+00:00
> On the other hand, ~50 brand new games release on Steam every day and a lot of them are gonna be first-time releases from amateurs for whom the level of quality & polish achievable with a small team & publisher support is just out of reach.

I'd wager a lot of them are money grabs from someone who followed a tutorial on how to make a certain type of game in Unity, swapped a few assets, and put it out there hoping to make a few dollars?
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-29 17:32:10+00:00
That's a shame, I have had much better luck.

Last time I had an issue with my internet I went into the Xfinity/Comcast store, they had reps with nothing to do and someone immediately helped me, they seem to have direct access to management systems that are not available to the customers on the website or via the app. Talking to a human to describe the problem is so much easier than dealing with a bot or voice-response system.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-08-29 17:32:12+00:00
You might have this the wrong way around.

It's not the publishers who need to do the hard work, it's the multi-billion dollar investments into training these systems that need to do the hard work.

We are moving to a position whereby if you or I want to download something without compensating the publisher, that's jail time, but if it's Zuck, Bezos or Musk, they get a free pass.

That's the system that needs to change.

I should not have to defend my blog from these businesses. They should be figuring out how to pay me for the value my content adds to their business model. And if they don't want to do that, then they shouldn't get to operate that model, in the same way I don't get to build a whole set of technologies on papers published by Springer Nature without paying them.

This power imbalance is going to be temporary. These trillion-dollar market cap companies think if they just speed run it, they'll become too big, too essential, the law will bend to their fiefdom. But in the long term, it won't - history tells us that concentration of power into monarchies descends over time, and the results aren't pretty. I'm not sure I'll see the guillotine scaffolds going up in Silicon Valley or Seattle in my lifetime, but they'll go up one day unless these companies get a clue from history as to what they need to do.
by MetaWhirledPeas | 2025-08-29 17:32:22+00:00
They should be bending over backwards to ensure they ALWAYS present the crash data even when it inconveniences them. Take the lawsuit "L" but boost public trust. It's worth noting that since this 2019 case I've not seen any legal cases where Tesla did not provide crash data.

I think there is a reasonable chance it was honestly mishandled. When considering which parts of the software impact the driving experience, logs are way down the list. They should do better though, and if they intentionally misled anyone they should be punished.

For any company to be significantly liable for a lane-keep crash, the behavior would have to be pretty egregious, IMO. All sorts of bad things can happen with most driving enhancements on any car, with common features such as overdrive, cruise control, or powerful engines, or even with non-features like manual transmissions. The liability for all of this should fall on the shoulders of the driver, most of the time, or we'd never get any cars on the road.
by jvanderbot | 2025-08-29 17:32:49+00:00
Anecdata: I know writers, editors, and white collar non-tech workers of all kinds who use AI daily and like it.

When GPT3.5 first landed a lifelong writer/editor saw a steep decrease in jobs. A year later the jobs changed to "can you edit this AI generated text to sound human", and now they continue to work doing normal editing for human or human-ish writing while declining the slop-correction deluge because it is terrible work.

I can't help but see the software analogy for this.
by TZubiri | 2025-08-29 17:33:57+00:00
The thing is that if there is a single branch (or few branches), then there's processes designed to be able to be completed remotely, with phone calls or faxes, etc...

When the bank has many branches, there will always be some steps that require visiting the main branch, and the opening branch.

With a single branch bank, the main branch and the opening branch are one and the same. And it's the best branch.
by csours | 2025-08-29 17:34:04+00:00
My best understanding/explanation of LLM tools is "plausible extension of a context"

That is, you have some context, ie the prompt and any other text, and the LLM produces a plausible continuation or alteration of that prompt and text.

My intuition leads me to a thought like: To progress, the context must compress into a fractal representation.

I feel very confident that someone smarter and MUCH better paid than me is already working on this.
by jitl | 2025-08-29 17:34:12+00:00
But, does Replicache work for your native targets? Or you are okay with a different data layer for native (sqlite) vs web (boutique data model on top of IndexedDB). At the start of the article it sounds like the goal is to use the same abstraction across web and mobile native and solutions that bifurcate implementation are unacceptable, but then we end up preferring a solution that's different between web target and native targets.

Zero (and I believe Replicache as well) layer their own SQL-like semantics on top of an arbitrary KV store, much like the layering of SQLite-over-IndexedDB discussed; like SQLite-over-IndexedDB, I believe they are storing binary byte pages in the underlying KV store and each page contains data for one-or-more Replicache/Zero records. The big difference between SQLite-over-IndexedDB and Zero-over-IndexedDB is that Zero is written with sympathy to IndexedDB's performance characteristics, whereas SQLite is written with sympathy to conventional filesystem performance.

On the subject of "keep whole thing in memory", this is what Zero does for its instant performance, and why they suggest limiting your working set / data desired at app boot to ~40MB, although I can't find a reference for this. Zero is smart though and will pick the 40MB for you though. Hopefully Zero folks come by and corrects me if I'm wrong.
by axiolite | 2025-08-29 17:34:23+00:00
The $20/hr wage is only an 18% bump over the normal CA minimum wage, and it came at the tail-end of the pandemic... So A) it just replaced the "hero pay" and B) fast food prices had already been climbing due to supply chain issues, inflation, and veiled corporate profit-taking.

The kiosks were just the threat fast food companies used to try to push-back on the proposed law, and when lawmakers called their bluff, there were some deplyments, but not everywhere, and in general fast food employment has gone UP (not down) since then.

"the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed California had approximately 750,000 fast food jobs, roughly 11,000 more than when the higher minimum wage law took effect."

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/california-minimum...

I'm not seeing the shorter hours you are. Might be unrelated to wages. There was a general decline in fast food sales across the country (not just in CA) because of the crazy corporate price hikes (which consumers pushed back on).

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/10/03/californias-20-fast-food-m...

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-10-10/column-the...
by omoikane | 2025-08-29 17:34:24+00:00
These pages need to take input file into account to provide better flags. Maybe what you want is a page that generates shell scripts.

+ Compress to target needs to know input length, as others have mentioned. Also, usually I would encode in multiple passes to better allocate the bits if I am targeting a specific size.

+ "Extract audio" shows commands that will reencode the audio stream. If input stream is already in a format that I can use, what I would do is to copy the audio stream without reencoding (`-c:a copy`).
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-29 17:34:32+00:00
The simplest system that acts entirely like a human is a human.

An LLM base model isn't trained for abstract thinking, but it still ends up developing abstract thinking internally - because that's the easiest way for it to mimic the breadth and depth of the training data. All LLMs operate in abstracts, using the same manner of informal reasoning as humans do. Even the mistakes they make are amusingly humanlike.

There's no part of an LLM that's called a "mind", but it has a "forward pass", which is quite similar in function. An LLM reasons in small slices - elevating its input text to a highly abstract representation, and then reducing it back down to a token prediction logit, one token at a time.
by narag | 2025-08-29 17:35:05+00:00
I can't help thinking that a big factor is how bad our tools were before. There are many leaking abstractions, boilerplate code and cruft. Dealing with that fills a sizeable percent of a programmer's job.

These tools seem great because they are less sensitive than humans to the mess and lift us over the tedious work. But at the same time, they're giving us an excuse to not fix what needed to be fixed and, in doing so, they're adding more crap to the heap.

Maybe what we need is forcing the tools to build on a simpler base, so we can keep an understanding of the results.
by jayd16 | 2025-08-29 17:35:07+00:00
> The endgame being pushed, and looking increasingly technically viable over a decade or so, is the user, holodeck style, describes what they want and it is assembled in front of them.

Maybe this is just more cope but I think its important to remember that anyone who can write will still read books written by others. AI will be disruptive but art is ultimately about sharing and receiving what someone else is trying to share.
by dr_kiszonka | 2025-08-29 17:35:29+00:00
Hi, very nice language!

I noticed that Lobster, like many other languages, does not use the C style for-loop syntax, `for (int i = 0; i < m; i++): print(i);`. Could you say why that is? I have been writing Python for many years but still miss that C syntax. Initiating `i` right before every loop feels clunky to me.
by pfdietz | 2025-08-29 17:35:39+00:00
The key insight is that the "cost of inefficiency" is proportional to the number of charge/discharge cycles in the storage system. That's because, for a given storage capacity, there is a cost from the extra energy thrown away at each cycle.

However, the cost incurred in building the storage system is independent of the number of charge/discharge cycles.

So: in comparing diurnal (daily) storage systems, with seasonal (up to yearly) storage systems, the relative importance of efficiency and capex are radically different. In the latter, capex can be 365 times more important than in the former.

For seasonal storage, one is strongly driven to minimize capex, even at the cost of making round trip efficiency worse.
by 9rx | 2025-08-29 17:36:16+00:00
> That's qualitatively different from the compilers I have used.

Is it? I can, in most traditional programming languages commonly used to today, using decades old compiler technology, say something like "x = [1,2,3]" and it will, for example, systematically generate all the code necessary to allocate memory without any need for me to be any more explicit about it. It would be fair to say AI offers an even higher level abstraction, like how most programming languages used today are a higher level abstraction over assembly, but fundamentally different it is not.

"generate a c program that uses gcc 128 bit floats and systematically generates all quadratic roots in order of the max size of their minimal polynomial coefficients, and then sort them and calculate the distribution of the intervals between adjacent numbers" is just code. You still have to write the code get AI to translate it into a lower-level abstraction. It doesn't magically go off and do its own autonomous thing.
by salawat | 2025-08-29 17:36:56+00:00
Note I said minimal. If manufacturers were content to just restrain integrated circuits to those purposes without widespread telemetry or phoning home, or creating software lockouts we'd meet my definition of minimal. Just what it takes to make a functioning device. Instead, we see software used as load bearing supports for predatory or exploitative/surveillance oriented architectures. That is not minimal to me.
by bobthepanda | 2025-08-29 17:36:58+00:00
In 2025 when starting from scratch all you really need is flexbox, css grid, and the box model and that will get you like 99% of the way on most layouts.

Specificity is really just

* ids take priority * the highest number of specified classes, and if there’s a tie it’s the first one specified * the highest number of types

The only problem is that most paths in frontend development say “slap a class on an element” and call it a day but you do need to be intentional about it and only specify what you need
by armchairhacker | 2025-08-29 17:37:11+00:00
What would be the real advantage of a custom OS over a Linux distribution?

The OS does process scheduling, program management, etc. Ok, you don’t want a VR headset to run certain things slowly or crash. But some Linux distributions are battle-tested and stable, and fast, so can’t you write ordinary programs that are fast and reliable (e.g. the camera movement and passthrough use RTLinux and have a failsafe that has been formally verified or extensively tested) and that’s enough?
by procaryote | 2025-08-29 17:37:19+00:00
There are pci boards that let you hook up 4 sata ports to the pci3 on a raspberry pi 5. The drives will be a large part of the power draw, so if you want low power, going for 2 drives is probably better. That probably gets you into the 20-30 watt range

for 10+ sata ports you might as well get an x86 motherboard as it's going to draw lots of power anyway

Unless you plan to power down most of the drives most of the time
by godelski | 2025-08-29 17:37:40+00:00
> You can understand a lot by just imagining 2D/3D mappings before generalizing to n-dimensional vector spaces.

While I'm a big fan of visualization I must also stress that it can equally be misleading. It's to make mistakes because you can only visualize anything above 3D like a blind man can describe an elephant[0]. It can be useful but it is also common to get caught up in one aspect while ignoring the rest. The trouble is you're not ignoring because you're rejecting what's there, you're ignoring because you can't see it and it is really hard to see it.

I also think there's this misnomer of being good at geometry or good at algebra. I lied about math being a language. It is a family of languages. It's good to be able to speak several of these languages, just like it is beneficial to be able to program in multiple languages. The best language is only the best one in a certain context, but technically any of them will work. That's why I suggest multiple perspectives. I'll even say that programming is one of those math languages ;)

[0] https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
by DrewADesign | 2025-08-29 17:37:57+00:00
A) J. Crew and others are using AI models instead of real models. Retail modeling was steady pay-the-bills work for models and actors and is actively being replaced by AI image generators— sometimes trained on images of a particular model they’re no longer paying. Writers and stock photographers are in much worse shape.

B) Even in cases where AI actors are used where there wouldn’t have been actors before, the skillset is still devalued, and even that modest insulation for higher-end work is almost certainly temporary. Someone doing a worse version of what you do for 1% of your pay affects the market, and saving 99% is great incentive for companies to change their strategy until the worse version is good enough.