MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by verbify | 2025-08-06 14:42:55+00:00
Engaging with why we might actually want inflation of text:

1) For pedagogical or explanatory purposes. For example, if I were to write:

> ∀x∈R,x^2≥0

I've used 10 characters to say

> For every real number x, it's square is greater than or equal to zero

For a mathematician, the first is sufficient. For someone learning, the second might be better (and perhaps as expansion of 'real number' or that 'square' is 'multiplying it by itself').

2) To make sure everything is stated and explicit. "He finally did x" implies that something has been anticipated/worked on for awhile, but "after a period of anticipation he did x" makes it more clear. This also raises the question of who was anticipating, which could be made explicit too.

As someone who spends a lot of time converting specifications to code (and explaining technical problems to non-technical people), unstated assumptions are very prevalent. And then sometimes people have different conceptions of the unstated assumption (i.e. some people might think that nobody was anticipating, it just took longer than you'd expect otherwise).

So longer text might seem like a simple expansion, but then it ends up adding detail.

I definitely agree with the authors point, I just want to argue that having a text-expander tool isn't quite as useless as 'generate garbage for me'.
by hintklb | 2025-08-06 14:43:01+00:00
The Dutch being frugal is well-documented and well-known [1]. Are you suggesting we should just pretend it is not the case and act as if we all thought exactly the same way? This article is only relevant because it takes place in that exact culture.

[1] https://www.moneyonthemind.org/post/how-the-dutch-handle-mon...
by NoboruWataya | 2025-08-06 14:43:13+00:00
They used to be places for people to meet and socialize, yes, but that means that you generally had multiple people per table, buying multiple drinks, and adding to the lively and social atmosphere. Compare that to laptop users, who are generally taking up a table by themselves and making the place feel like an office. So it is different, not to mention that skyrocketing rents compound the problem.

I've been in cafés in New York that looked like open plan offices because everyone was on a laptop (and there were no free tables), and many cafés in London now have laptop policies so I think the problem is broader than you suggest.
by efitz | 2025-08-06 14:43:27+00:00
Do citizens in the EU actually want this?

If not, how are EU politicians so disconnected from their citizens? How did this state of affairs come to be? Is it reversible?

In the US, our politicians don’t diverge quite as much, but when they do, the reason is money, and when it gets bad, we throw the bums out and elect populists. It’s not pretty and it’s messy but it self corrects with the next election if it doesn’t work out how people wanted.
by windexh8er | 2025-08-06 14:43:27+00:00
In the US this allows kids who are not of age to drive to be able to use their bike like someone would use a moped. But since these kids don't have licenses or any oversight they're flying at 25+ mpg down sidewalks and other areas they shouldn't be.

Saw a hilarious exchange of some cops vs teens on ebikes in a relatively affluent restaurant area a few months ago. The teens were taunting the cops as they had their normal vehicle and obviously couldn't go where the teens were. The teens just ignored the cops as they feverishly got nowhere.
by hsuduebc2 | 2025-08-06 14:43:41+00:00
Even though it goes against all my beliefs and values, I still see it primarily as a desperate attempt to gain at least some means of control over encrypted tools — which are, in fact, constantly used for criminal activity. The endlessly recycled “think of the children” argument is laughably pathetic. I don't understand why they don't present the real and much more reasonable justifications — such as terrorism in Europe or the spread of propaganda, which is a genuine issue here. But those reasons likely don’t sell as well with populists.

That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned into a European version of the Patriot Act — where the state takes advantage of the fact that people have become desensitized, and everyone ends up being monitored 24/7. In the end, every citizen would be under surveillance, while criminals would simply download an app that doesn’t comply with this absurd requirement.
by benoau | 2025-08-06 14:43:42+00:00
Flex is great but tables are also a natural solution for anything grid-based, which of course layouts almost always are. The whole internet used to do stuff like this before the structural flow of content became important:

<table width="100%" height="100%"> <tr> <td colspan="2" height="50"> header </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="200" valign="top"> sidebar </td> <td valign="middle"> content </td> </tr> </table>
by veggieroll | 2025-08-06 14:44:07+00:00
I don't have experience with .NET. So that's nice to hear you've got a reliable setup. But, this has generally not been my experience with Microsoft.

There's tons of old programs from the Windows 95-XP era that I haven't been able to get running. Just last week, I was trying to install and run point and click games from 2002 and the general advise online is to just install XP. There was a way (with some effort) to get them working on Windows 7. But, there's no way to get them to work that I've seen on 10/11.
by noname120 | 2025-08-06 14:44:16+00:00
I literally had someone tell me that I’m a coward and a psychopath because I didn’t prioritize solving their problem: https://github.com/devnoname120/vhbb/issues/75#issuecomment-...

I don’t regret open-sourcing this project but god as your project becomes popular bad apples start joining and ruining the party for everyone. Fortunately it’s only a tiny minority, but it’s what stays the most on your mind.
by benreesman | 2025-08-06 14:45:01+00:00
I'm a long time Yegge fan and follower and while I think he's still in the vibe code honeymoon phase and hasn't had the vibe code hangover yet, his bona fides on emacs are up there with anyones.

It was my observation around 12-18 momths ago that LLMs are weirdly good at elisp (which kicked off all the // hypermodern stuff I'm doing.

I think he's onto something with efrit, I havent gotten it dialed yet but its reaaallyy promising.
by tolmasky | 2025-08-06 14:45:01+00:00
I think the slightly more sophisticated position is that, regardless of the operational security that is currently employed, if you were to implement something like this, then criminals would quickly adapt to improve their operational security accordingly. Especially because "operational security" in this case is doing a lot of heavy lifting to obscure how easy it would be: just use a good E2E messenger.

This is not some wild hypothetical, the recent explosion in VPN use by every country that has implemented an age restriction law should be sufficient to display this effect in place. In a world without weird country restrictions (whether that be intellectual property restrictions or content restrictions), VPNs would be a niche technology for business. Instead unbelievably large amounts of the general population are now not only using it, but paying for it.

I think the assumption that criminals would not learn how to use one of the many free E2E encrypted messengers is the deluded and naive position.
by chimprich | 2025-08-06 14:45:08+00:00
> Not really, the virus mutating into less aggressive strains did.

This didn't happen. There was no selection pressure on the virus to mutate to a "less aggressive" form. To think there was is to fundamentally misunderstand the science here.

The incubation period was plenty long enough for the virus to spread before incapacitating the host. All the selection pressure was for the virus to become more virulent - and that is precisely what happened. We saw multiple strains appear which were harder to deal with.

> Reducing counter-productive treatments (like ventilators) helped greatly too.

This had a negligible impact. Patients were only put on ventilation when they were already very sick and at a high chance of death. Worldwide only a tiny proportion of deaths came about in this way. Even rich countries only had ventilators in the tens of thousands. Compare that to the billions who received vaccinations.
by Bender | 2025-08-06 14:45:23+00:00
The first mitigation steps that come to mind:

- Keep casual conversations on mainstream crap to be reachable by the masses and give the appearance of being monitored.

- Send friends to a tiny URL that redirects to a tiny ephemeral private anonymous chat instance running entirely in RAM with an IP certificate [0] once available to remove domain name ownership from the picture. When done with that chat edit redirect to be something benign and wipe the chat instance. Block most crawlers using Anubis [1] and some other tricks. Chat crawlers that validate URL's are usually very obvious.

I would wager HN could come up with 1000% more clever ideas.

[0] - https://letsencrypt.org/2025/07/01/issuing-our-first-ip-addr...

[1] - https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
by ptaffs | 2025-08-06 14:45:27+00:00
Yes customers over-staying, complaining, not spending enough seems to be the problem Cafe owners have. One near me had a threatening sign that "if you're sitting, you need to be sipping" (you're welcome, but not for long). The solution of a printed-flyer to tell specific customers to move on seems like the good idea here, and I would think a cafe owner could print a card which says "we need to pay the bills, you've taken this table for an hour, please come get another drink." or maybe ask two laptop users to share one table. Also noteworthy is the Capital One (ING Direct (USA)) model where laptop users are welcome, but the Capital One Cafes are brand enforcing, not profit making coffee shops. This 2005 Slate article is one of my favorite on the topic: https://slate.com/human-interest/2005/12/my-coffeehouse-nigh...
by cipehr | 2025-08-06 14:45:55+00:00
I feel similarly. For me it’s less about my unique customizations and more about this paranoia of there being something remotely sensitive in my ssh configs or something… the idea of hostnames, ips, domains, etc “leaking” worries me.

I use chezmoi to manage my dotfiles, if anyone has any advice on how to handle these worries I am all ears. I would love to share mine, even to just be able to point coworkers at my config.
by JSR_FDED | 2025-08-06 14:46:23+00:00
This is one of the reasons I signed up for a coworking space - it is so distracting having to mentally keep track of whether I’m spending the minimum amount. If I have a proper meal at the coffeeshop it easily costs more than one coffee an hour. But then after an hour nobody remembers I bought the big meal so I feel compelled to buy another drink (that I don’t want).

Then there’s a shift change and again I feel I need to prove I’m not a freeloader.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-06 14:46:26+00:00
> as we know it necessitates the pillaging and raping of native tribes

Believe me, any historian will tell you, that tribes pillaging and raping other tribes was completely common before the European settlement. While this does not justify the European settlement by itself, we were the winners who beat the previous winners. Our atrocities are just better documented.
by amalcon | 2025-08-06 14:46:32+00:00
I mean, the presumptive GOP primary candidates at the time were Trump, Trump-lite (DeSantis), about 10 Trump sycophants, and Haley. He had demonstrated a high level of influence over GOP primary voters in the 2022 midterm. It had been (internally) obvious since at least then that he was going to win the primary again. I can't speak to how much of that made it across the Atlantic.

Whether he would win the general was an open question then. In the American system, your prediction should never get very far from a coin flip a year out.
by ifyoubuildit | 2025-08-06 14:46:36+00:00
As I understand it, species that are really good at healing from injuries are more likely to develop cancer. So evolution has to optimize for survival via healing vs survival via not getting cancer.

Some people probably do come at it from the moral angle. But there are good reasons to assume that this time isn't different, that there is indeed no free lunch. Thankfully, everyone is free to make that risk assessment themselves. Just don't start trying to force it on anyone.
by talkingtab | 2025-08-06 14:46:47+00:00
To give credit where it is due, the codepen is not mine, but from this page: https://r3f.docs.pmnd.rs/getting-started/examples from @react-three/fiber.

My guess, and only a guess, is that 3D is especially (only?) useful for navigation. As in moving around documents, panes, windows, etc.

As for "I wonder what it would feel like to use a whole note-taking app ..." The note taking is in some ways already done pretty well. So my current guess is that it is more the navigation that would benefit.

I don't really have answers, but I often feel like I live in 'flatland' these days.
by JimDabell | 2025-08-06 14:46:50+00:00
> Once users are able to install Chrome on iPhones, developers will just abandon every other engine wholesale.

This is the thing that is most concerning. We’ve seen this happen before. We ended up with an Internet Explorer monoculture that paralysed front-end development for over a decade. Huge numbers of developers were happily writing Internet Explorer-only websites and didn’t care about any other browser at all. There’s a real danger that this ends the open web and turns it into a Chrome platform controlled by Google.
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-06 14:46:59+00:00
Given the low expected profit margin, a CRM solution at Google would likely come from a 20% project (or rather, the equivalent thing these days since last I checked 20% is basically dead as a formal concept). Nobody expected GMail to blow up the way it did, for example; it happened because some Googlers decided they could probably do a web-client-fronted mail client with a Google search engine attached to it and if they did it'd be really cool.

But even with their, what, 180,000 people these days, I think it's entirely possible nobody is as excited about CRM as Paul Buchheit was about email services.
by claytongulick | 2025-08-06 14:47:18+00:00
For me, it's not just boredom, it's missing the little thrills.

When I have a project that has tons of forms that require complex validation, it's the little thrill of thinking of a way to do it that saves time and is reusable.

Maybe I'll create a js proxy object and a generic "change" event handler. In the "change" I'll assign a value to the proxy that's the name of the form component. Maybe this proxy object is smart enough to issue batches of JSONPatch mutations to the server, that handles validation biz logic etc... so I end up with this neat, elegant little solution to a tedious problem. I get a thrill of satisfaction when it all works great, and the joy of problem solving to create and debug it.

Exactly zero out of a million runs would an AI come up with something like that. It's a stochastic parrot.

But it'll happily chug along and generate 10,000 lines of repetitive forms code that mostly work, and done in the most tedious way imaginable.

But I guess it's more "productive" than me.

Each time I run in to a tedious or boring problem, I take joy in pushing the boundaries of my understanding to come up with a better way of solving it.

AI coding kills that completely.
by rpdillon | 2025-08-06 14:47:21+00:00
My point is that "artists" are huge teams of people. Here are the credits for Swift's top 12 hits. Of course I wasn't in the room for the writing of any of these, but the diverstiy of the team involved is at least notable, yeah?

"We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" (2012): Taylor Swift, Max Martin, Shellback

"Shake It Off" (2014): Taylor Swift, Max Martin, Shellback

"Blank Space" (2014): Taylor Swift, Max Martin, Shellback

"Bad Blood" (featuring Kendrick Lamar) (2015): Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Max Martin, Shellback

"Look What You Made Me Do" (2017): Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff, Richard Fairbrass, Fred Fairbrass, Rob Manzoli

"Cardigan" (2020): Taylor Swift, Aaron Dessner

"Willow" (2020): Taylor Swift, Aaron Dessner

"All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor's Version)" (2021): Taylor Swift, Liz Rose

"Anti-Hero" (2022): Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff

"Cruel Summer" (2023): Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff, St. Vincent

"Is It Over Now? (Taylor's Version)" (2023): Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff

"Fortnight" (featuring Post Malone) (2024): Taylor Swift, Post Malone, Jack Antonoff
by captain_coffee | 2025-08-06 14:47:40+00:00
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how tech-savvy people will go out of their way to make sure they communicate with as many people as possible exclusively using End-to-End-Encrypted services exclusively. (that do not scan your messages even locally / on device before sending / after receiving them)

In the UK a massive surge in using VPNs happened in the last 2 weeks and the adoption only keeps rising.

Call me Nostradamus but if this legislation gets passed I can see how a lot of people will become familiar with the Privacy and Security aspects of the tech world (comms in particular).
by radiofreeeuropa | 2025-08-06 14:48:02+00:00
... and drugs.

And they had 86% adherence for a year. If they'd studied this farther out and it went the same way as basically any study that's done that, adherence would be a lot worse in another couple years. And that's in a group that's exceptionally motivated vs. the general population—has an actual illness they're trying to treat, and has opted in to the study knowing what it's asking of them and for how long.
by 9rx | 2025-08-06 14:48:10+00:00
> The data tells us that many child abusers are caught with CSAM as well

How much CSAM? A PornHub's worth of content, or a couple of pictures? The data suggests that in the adult porn world, people aren't satisfied by a single Playboy magazine. Which, too, is the logic behind CSAM laws — that the insatiable search for more content incentives production of more content. But at some point there will be more content that can be consumed, and given how often CSAM producers are caught (not even counting those who never are) we've no doubt far exceeded that threshold. And with the way AI is going...

> Take your CSAM apologia somewhere else.

Ad hominem is a logical fallacy.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-08-06 14:48:24+00:00
The security thing is BS anyway; Apple aren't perfect at security and having only one option can make this worse.

Google's Project Zero uncovered quite a few 0 days in Apple's "perfect" operating system. They're not magical wizard cult gods over there, they're just a buncha developers same as 'em all. And given the quality of what's been coming out of Apple _and_ Google recently sometimes I wonder if someone's dug a pit under their supposedly high bars they held in the 2010s. Even just Youtube is a disgustingly buggy app nowadays.
by 10298373 | 2025-08-06 14:48:27+00:00
> Just as the existence of America as we know it necessitates the pillaging and raping of native tribes. But we're not going to watch over your shoulder to make sure you don't participate in American society and send you to jail if you do. As unfortunate as past damage is, life moves on.

There is a significant difference in that you can choose not to consume CSAM. Most Americans don't get to choose not to participate in American society.

> Algorithms do incentivize production of more and more adult porn even as 90% of will never been seen by anyone, for sure, but the law could still take a harder stance on those algorithms if that is the better solution.

I would argue that the better solution is to keep the CSAM laws we have—maybe make them harsher, even—and keep letting adults make consensual porn with other adults if they so desire.
by GJim | 2025-08-06 14:48:28+00:00
> Luddites were idiots. They thought they could stand in the way of progress.

Ummmm. No.

The luddites were not opposed to progress or new machinery. The luddites called for unemployment compensation and retraining for workers *displaced* by the new machinery (machinery they sometimes helped build!). This probably makes them amongst the most progressive people of the 1800's.
by gorbypark | 2025-08-06 14:49:27+00:00
These being mixture of expert (MOE) models should help. The 20b model only has 3.6b params active at any one time, so minus a bit of overhead the speed should be like running a 3.6b model (while still requiring the RAM of a 20b model).

Here's the ollama version (4.6bit quant, I think?) run with --verbose total duration: 21.193519667s load duration: 94.88375ms prompt eval count: 77 token(s) prompt eval duration: 1.482405875s prompt eval rate: 51.94 tokens/s eval count: 308 token(s) eval duration: 19.615023208s eval rate: 15.70 tokens/s

15 tokens/s is pretty decent for a low end MacBook Air (M2, 24gb of ram). Yes, it's not the ~250 tokens/s of 2.5-flash, but for my use case anything above 10 tokens/sec is good enough.
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-06 14:49:28+00:00
> One of the most outlandish one being that freedom to use your phone however you want would necessarily compromise security and privacy for everyone.

I suppose in a round-a-bout way, it could, more specifically around iMessage, which is Apple's baby in the US and a big part of their lock in effect for US users.

Right now, you can reasonably assume that using iMessage with another iPhone user that both ends are reasonably secure and private. Break open the walls of the garden and now you could say that you can't trust that the other end you are communicating with hasn't installed some random crapware or malware that's scraping their messages, or recording the screen during a facetime call, thereby compromising your own privacy by interacting with a bad devices.

In that instance, Apple is correct - but what Apple doesn't tell people is that all other forms of digital communication are open to the same risks so they aren't special.
by sdenton4 | 2025-08-06 14:49:40+00:00
Huh, this post is not what I thought it would be! Even after the first two paragraphs!

There's a line of thought which states that intelligence rhymes with compression: Identifying patterns allows better prediction, enables better compression of the data.

However, internally, LLMs typically do the opposite: Tokenization and vectorization multiply the bit rate of the input signal. Chain of thought techniques add a lot of extra text, further increasing the bit rate.
by benreesman | 2025-08-06 14:49:48+00:00
Neovim and to an extent emacs are where corporate IDE vendors go for ideas.

From ergonomics of the UX, performance, portability, design sense (!!) and theming?

It's like Sun and GNU in the 90s. Those UI/UX folks getting pissed their perfect HSL wheel and black balance got dicked with by some PM which is why the GitHub theme is great not legendary?

They go home and rice Arch or NixOS and just shit on the dayjob stuff.

These people are artists, and hacks follow.

edit: My black balance is calculated on a per-display basis with an HSL-space transform from a hero color by the same NixOS module tree that builds the background from it's own source code as SVG and renders it before downsampling it for the specific display it's on. Of like two people helping beta it, both said roughly "using another desktop is like using the screen at the ATM". DHH is doing something similar with Arch, he's not quite as far along but this is the future.

https://cdn.some.pics/b7r6/68936c070fa56.png

https://cdn.some.pics/b7r6/68936d79c607c.png