MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajkjk | 2025-08-29 03:34:41+00:00
This is worse: this is just pretending like the machine does their jobs because it benefits them.

The big (biggest? ) problem of modernity is that quality is decorrelated from profit. There's a lot more money in having the optics of doing a good job than in actually doing it; the economy is so abstracted and distributed that the mechanism of competition to punish bad behavior, shitty customer service, low standards, crappy work, fraud... is very weak. There is too much information asymmetry, and the timescale of information propagation is too long to have much of an effect. As long as no one notices what you're fucking up very quickly you can get away with it for a long time.

Seems even worse to me. At least in the 'competition' paradigm there's a mechanism for things getting better for consumers. No such thing here.
by dvrp | 2025-08-29 03:35:46+00:00
hey thanks for the kind words (krea cofounder here). i agree with that! everyone’s focused on leaderboards and evals but not enough on higher order repercussions imo

on a related (but shameless plug) note, did you check our real time video rendering release?

> https://x.com/krea_ai/status/1961074072487620635
by kmoser | 2025-08-29 03:35:49+00:00
I think it's overly simplistic to frame the issue as one of manager-vs-managed. Everybody is distracted by whatever messages come their way, whether orders from above or reports from below (not to mention self-imposed distractions like social media).

True, management often foists tools on their underlings without a good understanding of the disadvantages of those tools. But that's a somewhat different (albeit related) issue from that of time management. Even with the best tools, time management can still be a problem if you're being inundated with tasks faster than you can complete them.

In my experience, where things go most sideways isn't forced use of clunky tools but rather poor prioritization skills amplified by poor articulation skills. In other words, the worst offenders are people who are bad a prioritizing, and bad at verbalizing what they're having trouble with so they can get help. Of course, poor management on top of that will practically guarantee massive failure. But without employees (at any level) who have insight into their situation, and can communicate well, you're dead in the water before you've even started.
by aurareturn | 2025-08-29 03:35:53+00:00
Where in Asia? When was the last time in China? Are you comparing Shenzhen to Bangkok? Or lower tier cities to lower tier cities in Thailand? What do you think is the trend for Thailand and China in the next 10 years?

Do you think Americans can afford cutting edge health care? Or even any healthcare at all? You keep mentioning "cutting edge" healthcare like China doesn't have it. In the US, basic health care is expensive and tied to your employer. If you're out of a job, you're out of health insurance mostly. In China, they have universal health care where basic health care is cheap. If you want private health care in China, it's expensive. So you tell me which is better.

I think a ton of people make the mistake of comparing average China to average US and then say "see! I told you China is bad". In reality, many parts of China 30 years ago barely had electricity and running water. It's more important to talk projections rather than August 2025.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-08-29 03:36:13+00:00
I'm not trying to diminish the complexity of a desktop OS of course, but sometimes it's hard not to feel the priorities are all over the place. Don't get me wrong, I'm not nostalgic about Windows XP, I actually remember how many freezes and crashes I used to have back then.

My frustration is more born out of the OS rough edges constantly getting in the way of tasks I actually want to focus on and accomplish, which doesn't play well with my ADHD.
by jameslk | 2025-08-29 03:36:17+00:00
> So what comes next?

When you don’t need as many people because of automation, you also don’t need them to fight your wars. You use drones and other automated weapons. You don’t need things like democracy because that was to prevent people from turning to revolution, and that problem has been solved with automated weapons. So then you don’t really need as many people anymore, so you stop providing the expensive healthcare, food production, and water to keep them all alive
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-29 03:36:20+00:00
That varies widely.

The worst hardware store in town is a little locally owned one where the owner is often not only in the store but working the checkout. They really push the locally owned angle, the place is neatly kept and folksey, but just try to return anything and they'll give you the third degree. And if you've lost the receipt absolutely forget it.

Who doesn't hassle customers about returning stuff? Lowes.
Best up-to-date guides on Vibe Coding
by grigy | 2025-08-29 03:36:21+00:00
Vibe Coding is fast-moving space, and I’m trying to get a clear sense of the best way to approach it. I’m interested in resources that cover both the basics for getting started as well as deeper guidance for using it effectively once you’re past the initial learning curve. Since the technology is evolving quickly, I’d especially like recommendations for guides, documentation, or communities that are actively maintained and updated rather than static posts that go stale. For those already experimenting with or using Vibe Coding, what have you found most useful for keeping up?
by throwaway2037 | 2025-08-29 03:36:33+00:00
Hat tip for that blog post! I read it many years ago and laughed very hard reading it.

Here is the HN discussion on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15199709

> Buddy, if you could afford the premium, you wouldn't be writing this article

I agree. I think if we are so curious about airport lounges we should ask: Why are there so many of them now? More than twenty years ago, you were really a player if you frequented airport lounges. None of this miles upgrade nonsense. You were a regular business class flyer. Airlines really wanted to improve your experience to keep you spending. The number of business class (and above) seats has not meaningfully changed since then, yet there are far more people using airport lounges. I am willing to bet that the author is a member of the premium mediocre American class that is not a regular flyer in business class, nor was a regular user of airport lounges twenty-plus years ago.
by os2warpman | 2025-08-29 03:37:13+00:00
Nissan, Chevrolet, Fiat, and Hyundai/Kia all make small, lightweight, low range, low power EVs.

With a 0-60 of 9 seconds, the Fiat 500e may be too low power. A 1993 Honda Civic is quicker than that and if you optioned a Civic coupe up to what comes standard (AC, power doors and windows, cruise) on the 500e, it was $14,700 in 1993[1], which is ~$32k today, which almost the same exact price of a 500e.

And you even get more than one airbag now!

[1]https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1993-honda-civic-2/
by jqpabc123 | 2025-08-29 03:37:25+00:00
For the most part, LLMs just remember.

They don't think or learn or create on their own --- at least not anywhere close to a human level. Otherwise, they wouldn't require so much "training"

Essentially, they are best characterized as a huge database with a natural language interface.

Once the internet had been consumed and indexed, this sort of approach starts to hit a wall. There is no more data readily available for "training".

I don't know what the next breakthrough will be but I firmly believe one will be required to push performance to any significantly higher level.
by nmsmith | 2025-08-29 03:37:30+00:00
Yes, functions can return non-owning references. However, those references do not "borrow" their target, in the sense that they lock others out. That is the Rust model, and OP does a great job covering its limitations.

So, with the understanding that "borrowing" means "locking others out", a group parameter borrows the group for the duration of the function call. If it borrows the group as mutable, no other group parameters can borrow the group. If it borrows the group as immutable, other group parameters are limited to borrowing the group as immutable. This is reminiscent of the Rust model, but the XOR rule applies to group parameters rather than references, and borrowing lasts the duration of a function call, rather than the lifetime of a reference.
by undopamine | 2025-08-29 03:37:52+00:00
Given the current public opinion on AI adoption, especially around art, it's too early.

I'm personally not a fan but for different reasons. AI-voiced (story-critical) characters would diminish the concept of copmletion-ism, as LLMs can talk to no end. Similar to how procedural generation can discourage exploration (but I'm just one data point and No Man's Sky sales numbers indicate otherwise).

Minor NPC personality is s a gap I'd be happy to see LLMs close. After crossing 70 hours on Cyberpunk 2077, I'm catching NPCs repeating themselves.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-08-29 03:38:27+00:00
Tax incentives , labor laws,etc..

Yes, stunt growth if that growth is immediately harmful to the public. Provide adverse incentives that increase the cost of replacing humans. Less or no government subsidies, incentives or tax breaks if you replace humans with LLMs. Even without replacing humans, tax LLM usage like cigarettes.

In the short term that is. over time, wind down these artificial costs, so that humans transition to roles that can't be automated by LLMs. Go to school, get training,etc.. in other fields. Instead of having millions of unemployed restless people collapsing your society.

But everyone is on the take, they want their short term lobbying money and stock tips so they can take what's theirs and run before the ship sinks. (if I can be a bit over dramatic :) )
by bigger_cheese | 2025-08-29 03:40:53+00:00
For Splines I found Christian Reinsch's classic paper to be a really good resource. You can find it various places on the web i.e here: https://tlakoba.w3.uvm.edu/AppliedUGMath/auxpaper_Reinsch_19...

The algorithm at the end is written in Algol but I found it pretty easy to understand.
by tuesdaynight | 2025-08-29 03:41:01+00:00
I'm sorry, but I disagree that Claude Code and alikes wouldn't be helpful for experienced engineers. Am I saying that they would make their day 1000x more productive? Nope, but I'm sure they wouldn't say that they are time-wasting tools. Honestly, at this point, I wouldn't trust an experienced engineer that refused to try them.
by MacroStan | 2025-08-29 03:41:23+00:00
Here's what I do to survive macos updates, random restarts, crashes etc. I had Claude Code to configure all of this:

Terminal Setup: - Alacritty as your terminal - tmux as your session manager - Auto-start tmux in Alacritty configuration

Key Protection: # Alacritty auto-starts tmux sessions tmux new-session -s main # Creates persistent session # tmux shortcuts (prefix: Ctrl+a) # Sessions persist even if terminal closes Plugins: tmux-resurrect and tmux-continuum plugins to automatically save/restore sessions with a simple "dev" command. The tmux session will survive terminal crashes/closes, so you can reconnect to your Claude session by reopening Alacritty (which auto-attaches)
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-08-29 03:41:40+00:00
This is amusingly the main argument at the cornerstone of most leftist theory.

Capitalism works great as an improvement from feudalism and mercantilism however it starts to majorly break down as a system once the capital owning class cements itself as only needing to invest their capital and manage assets to maintain perpetual dominance. From there they slowly accrue capital and the rift between the working classes and the capital owning classes spreads further and further until the two are effectively completely divorced with the working classes providing 100% of the labor and the capital owning classes consuming 100% of the profits.

And the sign that this decay has reached the point of no return without major social upheaval is the death of the petit bourgeois/petite bourgeoisie, i.e. the end of the self employed shop owners and family businesses. This is one thing people famously get wrong about Marx. His view was that under capitalism the petite bourgeoisie will always eventually be cannibalised by the haute and grande bourgeoisie despite generally siding with them politically (ergo acting against their long term interests). This of course contrasts with the view popular with the state socialists (who misguidedly view the petite bourgeoisie as a threat to and toxic element of capitalism).

And so now we stand at the precipice with the widespread death of the canary in the coal mine that is the small business owner and the question that remains is where do we go from here?
by jedharris | 2025-08-29 03:41:59+00:00
> it's possible for simple normal trains of thought to latch your brain into a very undesirable state.

This seems very incorrect, or at least drastically underspecified. These trains of thought are "normal" (i.e. common and unremarkable) so why don't they "latch your brain into a very undesirable state" lots of the time?

I don't think Scott or anyone up to speed on modern neuroscience would deny the coupling of mental state and brain chemistry--in fact I think it would be more accurate to say both of them are aspects of the dynamics of the brain.

But this doesn't imply that "simple normal trains of thought" can latch our brain dynamics into bad states -- i.e. in dynamics language move us into a undesirable attractor. That would require a very problematic fragility in our normal self-regulation of brain dynamics.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-08-29 03:43:13+00:00
I say let's fight against smartphone usage being required everywhere. I don't care if the phone is FOSS or not, we still should be allowed to not have a personal tracking device. I am also all for supporting a fork of AOSP. The EU talks big on not depending on US tech companies, it even funds lots of FOSS projects, this should be on top of their list.

The fact that your country is getting age verification, given how democratic and free Denmark is should tell you the prevailing view of the public on the subject matter. Why not focus on what everyone will support - which is being free from tech companies and closed code systems. The 99% of people that do pay for phones, don't think about technology much, they don't even know what sideloading is let along care about it. You/HN is an extreme minority in that aspect, as are android devs. and there are definitely more people being adversely impacted by sideloaded malware. Freedom that is not practical is just wishful thinking. Freedom that ignores the harm caused on others is tyranny by any other name.
by _mlbt | 2025-08-29 03:43:19+00:00
The agricultural parts of California are largely red. In this hypothetical scenario, why wouldn't they pull a West Virginia and secede from Southern California to be with their ideological brethren?

If you look at an electoral map by county of the United States, you'll see that the major cities are blue and almost everything else is red. The everything else is the part of America that produces food and manufactured goods.

https://tmp.propublica.org/assets/img/2024-us-election-resul...
by esbranson | 2025-08-29 03:43:22+00:00
> why are you making your voting choices known

I doubt she knew my voting choices. I think both of you assumed. (I did not vote for Trump.)

> stand there and listen

Listen to what? lolwut It was quite mundane. She was obviously experienced, it was very pro forma.

> Obama voter

End of an era.

> I have spent years overseeing polling locations

> I have every confidence

And 2016 and 2024 come into clearer focus.

> clearly and transparently a retaliation

And 2026 and 2028 come into clearer focus.
by dlcarrier | 2025-08-29 03:43:25+00:00
An AMD Ryzen 9 7950x3D has 16 physical cores and 32 logical cores. The diminisshing return for thread counts above cores / 2 is likely due to using the logical core count, not the physical core count, as SMT doesn't improve every type of performance. It's not the fault of Firefox, but an aspect of the CPU design.
by dragonsky67 | 2025-08-29 03:43:48+00:00
How's that working for you at the moment?

Sorry for the snide comment, but considering the last 6 - 8 months in the US, at least from what is being reported in the outside world, the 1st amendment doesn't seem to be providing much in the way of protection, and unless I'm missing something the general public doesn't seem to have the level of interest that would be required for your 2nd amendment to play out in any meaningful way.
by daemonologist | 2025-08-29 03:43:56+00:00
According to MDN Safari clamps it to 4 or 8, but Firefox does not: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/h...

I always found it annoying that CPU information was widely available and precise while memory information was not - it's clamped to 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, 4 or 8 GB. If you're running something memory-bound in the browser you have to be really conservative to avoid locking up the user's device (or ask them to manually specify how much memory to use). https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Device_Memo...
by rgoulter | 2025-08-29 03:44:09+00:00
I get the impression from the article that the author is writing in support of "LLMs are dangerous; e.g. they instruct people to make bombs". (I suspect that the author is in favour of regulating/restricting access to LLMs).

But, for one, seems that OpenAI and Anthropic running these tests shows they have the same concerns & want to address it. Similarly, as Anthropic mentions, their applications provide additional safety measures in order to mitigate that bad behaviour.

For another.. I wish the argument for "LLMs need to be restricted" was more explicit. LLMs help provide convincing (albeit potentially hallucinated) summaries & reproductions of information you could find elsewhere. I'd expect any such dangerous information could already be found on the internet by a motivated bad actor. -- And, on the flip side, it'd be naive to have no concerns over excessive government control over LLMs.

Though otherwise... I think it's kind of funny that the LLMs, who clearly have a goody-two-shoes personality, can be so easily tricked into discussing the bad actions mentioned. I wonder to what extent that's just reiterating crime fiction.
by moron4hire | 2025-08-29 03:44:11+00:00
Let's presume you are correct. The Boeing engineers who made this slide were geniuses. The NASA managers consuming it were dullards. If the Boeing engineers were so smart, why didn't they write for their audience?

I am consistently ranked as both one of the best engineers in my company and one of the best communicators. I would never make a slide like that for any audience. It's shit writing for non-engineers and it's shit writing for engineers, too.

You have got to get over whatever this hangup is about "PhD level analysis". That phrase doesn't mean anything.
by eadmund | 2025-08-29 03:45:40+00:00
> Again, beer isn't boiled - as long as we're quashing myths here. It is heated.

I think that you are confused. Mashing is used to convert the starches in malted barley into sugars, and is done at temperatures below under boiling (well, with decoction mashes a portion of the mash is boiled, but the mash as a whole is not). But then the sweet wort produced from mashing is pulled off, hops are added and the wort is — yes — boiled, typically for quite awhile, and generally quite vigourously. Then the wort is chilled, yeast is pitched in and it ferments.

The brewing process most definitely involves boiling in every beer style I am aware of. It’s definitely possible that there is some style out there which doesn’t do it, of course, but the vast, vast majority are.
by kelnos | 2025-08-29 03:45:43+00:00
That really took me back. In the 80s my mom drove a mid-70s, 2-door Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Itt was just under 17 feet long, also two doors, and I believe rear-wheel drive, with a fairly large engine. If memory serves (sigh, it often doesn't), my mom even called it "the beast". I laughed out loud at your "two dead bodies in the trunk" -- yup, checks out.

I'm torn, though, on your idea to have a car like that with modern (safety) features. I hate all the trucks and SUVs out on the road, and I drive a mid-sized sedan. And I agree with you on how easy it is to damage that car. But man those old cars were so heavy. I can't imagine getting decent gas mileage (or good BEV range) on one today.
by pansa2 | 2025-08-29 03:45:58+00:00
> Those little 20-500 line scripts were just so much more fun in Python than anything else though

It's notable that you've written this in the past tense. These kinds of scripts don't seem to be a focus for Python any more.

In fact, I recently heard as justification for a new Python feature: "it helps us with our 100-million-line Python codebase". The language has become extremely complex as it prioritizes the needs of a few teams writing millions of lines over millions of developers each writing relatively few lines.

The reason is that the design team are all working on these large codebases and, understandably, mostly focused on what makes their own lives easier. I was hopeful that in the transition from a BDFL-based governance system to a Steering Council, we would see a larger variety of experience and opinions designing the language. Instead, I don't think there has ever been a single scientist, finance worker etc on the Steering Council - it's always software developers, almost always employees of large software companies.
by GCUMstlyHarmls | 2025-08-29 03:48:16+00:00
Actually quite handy and practical to know about, specifically in the context of a "low end box" where I personally would prefer that RAM exist for my applications and am totally fine with `/tmp` tasks being a bit slow (lets be real, the whole box is "slow" anyway and slow here is some factor of "vm block device on an ssd" rather than 1990s spinning rust).
by footlose_3815 | 2025-08-29 03:48:38+00:00
Those are just the anecdotal bad things unions are known for in political smear campaigns.

Blockade from what? Flip the script and they're protecting their own. Someone joined a group that protected them. Seems like a good deal to an individual contributor.

But then you got cop unions, who move abusers around and shield people from consequences. But they're different because they're state power with the power to ruin lives at him. So of course they get bad raps.

Not all systems are perfect, not all unions are the same, but the philosophy of them in-general, unions are decidedly better than without for those who benefit from them. That includes the general public who knows their traffic light wasn't put up by a corner-cutting SC who doesn't care what happens to it in 3 months.
by miffy900 | 2025-08-29 03:50:12+00:00
This is still some code, as opposed to no code. It does seem to model everything in the research paper.

Aside from the original research paper needing to be included in the repo, it definitely does not need anything more than what's already there. It all builds and compiles without errors, only 2 warnings for the library proper and 6 warnings for the test project. Oh and it comes with a unit testing project: 59 tests written that covers about 73% of the library code. Only 2 tests failed.

Even having a unit testing library means it beats out like 50% of all repos you see on GitHub.
by genewitch | 2025-08-29 03:51:49+00:00
"Mustangs are all exhaust until they hit the wall" - my ex

i owned one. it was quite loud. Not as loud as the 240SX i took the muffler off to have a shop look at it up the road, but still, pretty loud.

I still drive a 4.6L V8, though. Just not american.