MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Zambyte | 2025-08-13 17:34:44+00:00
Right, I'm not saying it's impossible in Go, but it's so easy in Lisp you're bound to do it even by accident. There are no "AST utilities" in Lisp because the AST is just a normal list / tree of primitive values (of the `symbol` type). You operate on code structures with the same libraries that you operate on a list / tree of numbers, strings, etc. Code is data.
by potatolicious | 2025-08-13 17:34:45+00:00
I remember that part too, I just don't feel like any of it was particularly egregious. Disappointing sure, but I suppose I disagree that anything about it was untoward.

I'm generally pretty hostile to companies being acquired and breaking their past customers' products. Shutting down various required cloud services, making software undownloadable, etc.

But I don't think that happened? The roadmap simply ended, but every watch that was out there kept working as-advertised for a good long while?
by doublerabbit | 2025-08-13 17:35:02+00:00
$50 a month and still on 2mb ADSL. Living in the centre of the city right next to a hotel that owns an 10Gbit feed. Literally ten steps from my apartment to the cities main telephone line exchange

All three domestic providers do the "we are working in your area" which where it comes to my building "nah" is said and the promises of fast broadband suddenly disappear.

I've been living here 8 years now. Same thing said each year.
by jjoonathan | 2025-08-13 17:35:05+00:00
No, that was 4o. Agreed about factual prompts showing less sycophancy in general. Less-factual prompts give it much more of an opening to produce flattery, of course, and since these models tend to deliver bad news in the time-honored "shit sandwich" I can't help but wonder if some people also get in the habit of consuming only the "slice of bread" to amplify the effect even further. Scary stuff!
by tzs | 2025-08-13 17:35:06+00:00
> In the case of E2E encryption, it's definitely a hill to die on, there is no way to make a backdoor "only the good guys" can access.

You can make a backdoor that only the good guys can access--it's not even hard thanks to public key cryptography. The problems are:

(1) The good guys might be sloppy in how they handle you data, so they might leak or or they themselves might get hacked.

(2) The good guys might later become the bad guys.
by kijin | 2025-08-13 17:35:12+00:00
Only if you let certbot take down your normal nginx and occupy port 80 in standalone mode. Which it doesn't need to, if normal nginx can do the job by itself.

When I need to use the HTTP challenge, I always configure the web server in advance to serve /.well-known/ from a certain directory and point certbot at it with `certbot certonly --webroot-path`. No need to take down the normal web server. Graceful reload. Zero downtime. Works with any web server.
by grepnork | 2025-08-13 17:35:33+00:00
>the copper could come up with some vague excuse for why they stopped you / want your ID.

In which case, their sergeant will tear them a new one, right after the custody sergeant has finished tearing their own hole because the careers of both of those people rely on supervising their coppers and supervising their arrests. If the custody sergeant has to release someone because the copper can't account for themselves, that is a very serious matter. The sergeant's can smell a bad arrest a mile away.

The copper has to stand up in a court of law, having sworn an oath, and testify on the reasonable suspicion or probable cause they had. If they are even suspected of lying, that's a gross misconduct in a public office investigation.

Assuming they weren't fired over that, any promotion hopes are gone, any possibility of involvement in major cases or crime squads, hope of a firearms ticket, advanced driving, or even overtime are gone. Their fellow officers will never trust them to make an arrest again.

It's not consequence free, I'm not saying it doesn't happen, or that some officers rely on you not knowing your rights, but it is a serious matter.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-13 17:35:35+00:00
Sounds like you’re doing it wrong. I don’t know about this native support, but I’d be very surprised if it was worse than the old way, which could just have Certbot put files in a path NGINX was already serving (webroot method), and then when new certificates are done send a signal for NGINX to reload its config. There should never be any downtime.
by lefstathiou | 2025-08-13 17:35:48+00:00
Agreed, I can't wait. It's this or they should install facial recognition cameras with social credit scores. Either way, something needs to happen.

Not an exaggeration, I witness some physical escalation 3 out of 5 days a week between Union Square and Midtown NYC on my daily commute. 10 minutes ago a delivery guy and a pedestrian got into it when the bicyclist ran the red light and went into the cross walk while a swarm of people were walking through it. I've personally been accosted 3x while holding hands and walking my 5-year old son to school in completely "random" acts aggression. Strangely, it's not them trying to rob me, the aim is just to harass.
by flkiwi | 2025-08-13 17:36:27+00:00
I've found 5 engaging in more, but more subtle and insidious, ego-stroking than 4o ever did. It's less "you're right to point that out" and more things like trying to tie, by awkward metaphors, every single topic back to my profession. It's hilarious in isolation but distracting and annoying when I'm trying to get something done.

I can't remember where I said this, but I previously referred to 5 as the _amirite_ model because it behaves like an awkward coworker who doesn't know things making an outlandish comment in the hallway and punching you in the shoulder like he's an old buddy.

Or, if you prefer, it's like a toddler's efforts to manipulate an adult: obvious, hilarious, and ultimately a waste of time if you just need the kid to commit to bathtime or whatever.
by bityard | 2025-08-13 17:36:35+00:00
I grew up on Apache and eventually became a wizard with its configuration and myriad options and failures modes. Later on, I got semi-comfortable with nginx which was a little simpler because it did less than Apache but you could still get a fairly complex configuration going if you're running weird legacy PHP apps for example.

When I tried using Caddy with something serious for the first time, I thought I was missing something. I thought, these docs must be incomplete, there has to be more to it, how does it know to do X based on Y, this is never going to work...

But it DID work. There IS almost nothing to it. You set literally the bare minimum of configuration you could possibly need, and Caddy figures out the rest and uses sane defaults. The docs are VERY good, there is a nice community around it.

If I had any complaint at all, it would be that the plugin system is slightly goofy.
by mrangle | 2025-08-13 17:36:40+00:00
>If "just persuade them with your good ideas" was a workable solution it would've worked at least once by now

If I have this right: your measurement for whether or not people are in their right mind is if they take to your specific ideas?

Have you considered the possibility that people are most often persuaded by good ideas and your ideas are awful?

And insofar as you present them in an ostensibly good light, you are lying somewhere in the presentation and people can see that.

To be clear, your perspective is that everyone else is a psychopath or so much dumber than you, personally, as to be led by psychopaths.

And it's not you that's dumber than most others, nor who is led by the psychopath(s), nor who is the psychopath that needs to advance their ideas by marginalizing people who have other ideas.

And the strategy is to marginalize people because...checks notes... your ideas are unpalatable to the population. For no good reason.

Why are your ideas unpalatable to the population, from their perspective?

Any good policy wonk will know that much, will be able to explain the opposition's reasons accurately and in detail, and will be able to steel-man their own argument utilizing that perspective.

Whereas a manipulative person will avoid that level of analysis.
by PhantomHour | 2025-08-13 17:37:08+00:00
"CEO is obsessed with [thing]" isn't much evidence that the thing in question is worthwhile. Zuckerberg was utterly enthralled with the Metaverse, and we're not having this discussion in a virtual world as legless avatars.

There's two big reasons this is such a red flag: 1) Come on. Unless you are hiring highschool graduates directly, you have other means of finding out how good candidates are. If a highschool report card tells you more about a candidate than your own interview process, you need to fire everyone involved with that process.

2) Highschool performance is highly correlated with a bunch of causes that are very undesirable things to proxy-measure in your hiring process.

In the UK, where Canonical and Mark hail from, high school performance is a statistical proxy for class (wealth). In the US, it is a statistical proxy for ethnicity as well. You need to be careful with such measures, as selecting job candidates based on class or race is both unethical and commonly illegal.

Again consider that these are high school results. A person who is born to unlucky schooling opportunities can still compensate for the learning they were deprived of by working harder in college/university or their formal career after that.
by sebstefan | 2025-08-13 17:37:39+00:00
You do whatever you want.

>preserving the rules-based international order

The USA's foreign policy is anything but rules-based. They're brutal and barbaric. You can agitate China and Russia as being scarier, that doesn't make the U.S. military a force of good.

If you're asking the whether they have their place being shoved at the center of Defcon you have to take in the whole picture
by anonym29 | 2025-08-13 17:37:49+00:00
I don't think this is your point, but semantically, doesn't this necessarily assert that either:

1. African Americans were not Americans, or

2. African Americans, the victims of slavery, somehow benefited from it?

I would disagree with both of those assertions.

Further, consider that a vast majority (90%+) did not own slaves. Were non-slave-owners beneficiaries of slavery? What about poor, unskilled whites, who had their own wages effectively suppressed due to the negligible labor costs of slavery - were they really net beneficiaries of slavery? They certainly were not the main victims, but that doesn't automatically make them beneficiaries, either. Slavery was overwhelmingly a horrific practice by wealthy elites for wealthy elites, not by all white people for all white people.
by EGreg | 2025-08-13 17:37:52+00:00
I guess that's why patents are annoying. I have been Mr. Open Source and against intellectual property for most of the past 15 years. But with AI companies rampantly taking everyone's work and repurposing it, and with VC companies not being very eager to invest in open source, I'm taking a different tack with my AI ventures.

My first two companies are radically open source, and no one cared:

https://github.com/Qbix

https://github.com/Intercoin

And this is what we're doing now with AI, but it's not going to be as open: https://engageusers.ai/deck.pdf

Don't worry, we're not looking to get into it with some random other projects. It's mostly to protect our business model against the Big Tech and enterprises.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-08-13 17:38:23+00:00
The LLM turns my unstructured command into structured command (a limited set of commands hardcoded in the prompt) and a script takes that and executes it. I have it do stuff like interact with google keep/google calendar using the CLI. Those are the most used actions but there's a few others . Of course all actions can be scheduled.

The LLM can screw up now and then and output absolute garbage. But I've got a knack now for figuring out what prompts it's gonna be hopeless on and I manually enter those.

Example:

Saying

Remove makhana from shopping list

Ends up running the command

gkeep items edit shopping_list --check makhana

There is a direct text interface too that skips the voice transcription.

The main thing is it does in a background window without interrupting my screen or me needing to wait for whatever slow webpage to load. I had it do a few things on GitHub like remind me when checks pass on PRs. You could potentially connect it to various things like your amazon account to check on your order, etc,.. as I write this I now realise I did what basically amounts to what folks do with MCP today. Maybe I should update it to use the protocol.

These days I have a little more idle time as a grad student than I did in a tech company, and I don't really need to manage home/cooking/... so I don't really use some of the more complicated features. I mostly just use it to schedule 1on1s with my guide and add reminders about assignments and TA work and talks and my music class.
by andrewla | 2025-08-13 17:38:23+00:00
The whole discourse around gerrymandering is fundamentally broken because national politics is too influential compared to local politics.

What should happen is that candidates should position themselves based on the districts that they represent. A West Virginia Democrat is a different creature than a New York Democrat, and a New York Republican is different than a West Virginia Republican. This is how it should be! The candidates should be trying to win races in their districts.

Instead we have this horrifying attempt to fix the parties in time and space and say "this is what the national party represents" and try to shape districts to align to those parties. This is the tail wagging the dog.

In a perfect world the districts should be shaped based on common interests, not based on voting record. Geography or population density are pretty good heuristics. Voting record is not because they are votes for candidates, not for parties.
by Bratmon | 2025-08-13 17:38:43+00:00
Clarification question: When you say "dependency systems," are you referring to PIP/NPM/go get/Cargo or just the C/C++ clusterfuck?

Because under the hood "go install" (and NPM/PIP/Cargo) makes sure that if you indirectly depend on a library, you only have one version* of that library installed, and it's pretty easy to track which version that is.

That's the key difference: With "go install" you only have one version of your indirect dependencies, with single-file libraries, you have one version for each thing that needs them and have no real way of tracking indirect dependencies.

I'm not going to try to defend the C/C++ clusterfuck. Switching to single-file libraries would improve that because any change would improve that.

* Sometimes one version of each major release
by pron | 2025-08-13 17:38:50+00:00
> Hidden functions aren't a big deal in practice.

Again, that's like me saying "forgetting defer isn't a big deal in practice." You seem to disagree with that and I disagree with your assertion. It's largely a matter of personal preference.

And no, except for some compile-time tests/assertions and a smattering of lambdas, we don't use most of "modern C++" (or almost any of std). Sometimes we need to emit hand-crafted machine code, and sometimes we may need to mess around with stack frames directly (which means we can't use destructors in those cases. We do use destructors a fair bit, but I personally soured on RAII some ten years ago.
by weitendorf | 2025-08-13 17:38:52+00:00
And the article is about Canonical making multiple job postings all around the world where California labor laws aren’t applicable…

Regardless, I think there are underrated issues with mandatory pay bands that aren’t obvious unless you’re on the hiring side. Let’s say you legitimately are open to hiring candidates from anywhere from $100k to $300k. For candidates closer to the $300k end they might not want to apply if they think they might get offered way less than they want, and it might attract a lot of candidates on the $100k end who will make it all the way through the process and then get upset when they’re not offered something closer to $300k. Also, for companies like Canonical, they have enough name recognition and genuine supporters that they probably don’t want to talk to candidates who are only applying because they saw a big number (and if they have to, it makes harder for candidates that are better fits to get noticed).

There’s understandably a lot of strong feelings about hiring practices right now and I know a lot of candidates will tend to assume the worst because of how they’ve been treated by other companies. But sometimes companies just make multiple listings so they show up for candidates around the world instead of as a spam tactic, are flexible on salary, and have a culture that values different things.
by littlexsparkee | 2025-08-13 17:39:38+00:00
Found myself cutting back, too. I drink beer and usually have 1-2 at a time - any more and the flavors just get muddled. It's water, tea, coffee for me most of the time (added benefit of polyphenols, antioxidants for those brewed drinks). If I drank more, I would be too worried about handicapping my intellect.
by horsawlarway | 2025-08-13 17:39:43+00:00
I really don't think this holds.

It's vanishingly rare to end up in a spot where your site is getting enough LLM driven traffic for you to really notice (and I'm not talking out my ass - I host several sites from personal hardware running in my basement).

Bots are a thing. Bots have been a thing and will continue to be a thing.

They mostly aren't worth worrying about, and at least for now you can throw PoW in front of your site if you are suddenly getting enough traffic from them to care.

In the mean time...

Your bowl of candy is still there. Still full of your candy for real people to read.

That's the fun of digital goods... They aren't "exhaustible" like your candy bowl. No LLM is dumping your whole bowl (they can't). At most - they're just making the line to access it longer.
by 3036e4 | 2025-08-13 17:39:48+00:00
I used it like sibling commenter to get subtitles for downloaded videos. My hearing is bad. Whisper seems much better that YouTube's built-in auto-subtitles, so sometimes it is worth the extra trouble for me to download a video just to generate good subtitles and then watch it offline.

I also used whisper.cpp to transcribe all my hoarded podcast episodes. Took days of my poor old CPU working at 100% on all cores (and then a few shorter runs to transcribe new episodes I have downloaded since). Worked as good as I could possibly hope. Of course it gets the spelling of names wrong, but I don't expect anything (or anyone) to do much better. It is great to be able to run ripgrep to find old episodes on some topic and sometimes now I read an episode instead of listen, or listen to it with mpv with subtitles.
by joshuaissac | 2025-08-13 17:39:55+00:00
Solaris is still developed and sold by Oracle, and expected to be supported for a very long time. The current version, Solaris 11.4, is planned to be supported until 2037 at the earliest. The previous major version, Solaris 10, was released in 2005 and is supported until 2027. So they are unlikely to sell the trademark any time soon.
by joe_the_user | 2025-08-13 17:40:27+00:00
The compiler analogy is seductive but problematic imo.

A compiler can be fixed thing that does a fixed task. A cancer recognizer is something like a snapshot of people's image-recognition process during a period of time. These are judgement that can't be turned into set algorithms directly.

There was a discussion a while about how face recognition trained with Internet images has trouble with security camera footage 'cause the security camera doesn't certain images.

It sounds weird to say that what cancer looks like drifts over time but I'm pretty sure it's actually true. Demographics change, the genes of even a stable group change over the generations, exactly how a nurse centers bodies, etc. change over time and all these changes can add to the AI judgement snapshot being out of date after some period. If the doctors whose judgements created the snapshots no longer have the original (subtle) skill then you have a problem (unlike a compiler whose literal operations remain constant and where updating involves fairly certain judgements).
by generalizations | 2025-08-13 17:40:48+00:00
> You'd be surprised what becomes reasonable and possible once a requirement is set.

In that case, I'm not sure why you're concerned. Let's flip this around: set up our regulations to loosen our EMI radiation restrictions & facilitate our satellites and space exploration. According to your logic, that should be perfectly reasonable to astronomers, if that's what the regulations say, and it should be possible for them to adapt to that.

If that's not what you meant, then astronomy needs to make some concessions.
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-13 17:40:49+00:00
> and resell it back to them.

This is the part I take issue with the most with this tech. Outside of open weight models (and even then, it's not fully open source - the training data is not available, we cannot reproduce the model ourselves), all the LLM companies are doing is stealing and selling our (humans, collectively) knowledge back to us. It's yet another large scale, massive transfer of wealth.

These aren't being made for the good of humanity, to be given freely, they are being made for profit, treating human knowledge and some raw material to be mined and resold at massive scale.
by nlawalker | 2025-08-13 17:41:36+00:00
> If you want people in e.g Bay Area to consider you at all, you'll have to offer them more than you'd need to get the attention of people in Warsaw. That's why remote salaries can still vary by location.

Then why not take what you'd offer to people in the Bay Area and also offer that to people in Warsaw? That's what the author is taking issue with.

EDIT: This was posed as a question for rhetorical purposes, it's obvious that businesses don't do this because they don't have to and it's cheaper not to. Parent said they didn't agree with the author's logic, but the author's statement about companies paying based on value wasn't attempting to make a logical assertion, it was a lament about ethics.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-08-13 17:41:47+00:00
"You're holding it wrong" really doesn't work as a response to "I think putting this in the hands of naive users is a social ill."

Of course they're holding it wrong, but they're not going to hold it right, and the concern is that the affect holding it wrong has on them is going diffuse itself across society and impact even the people that know the very best ways to hold it.
by guywithahat | 2025-08-13 17:41:54+00:00
I think there are just some kinds of housing where ownership doesn't make sense; any sort of shared building requires an HOA fee, and the mortgage for a 1-bed in a shared building could easily have an HOA fee that's half the cost.

What's more is the most up-to-date data says housing is becoming more affordable, at least in cities with a high percent of illegal immigration. This is a story about millionaires who now have to temporarily rent after their million dollar home burned down and they wait for the market to adjust. It's sad, but not reflective of the average person or their experience
by mikestew | 2025-08-13 17:41:57+00:00
And why is pointing out anti-Western agenda…

Perhaps folks don’t feel as if that’s what you’re actually pointing out. The post you replied to was referring to the direct democracy of Switzerland, not castigating all of Western society. I mean, from my point of view, by “disregarding” you basically ignored the entire point of the comment to support a narrative.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-13 17:42:15+00:00
Certbot always worked fine for me. It autodetects just about everything and takes care of just about everything, unless you manually instruct it what to do (i.e. re-use a specific CSR) and then it does what you tell it to do.

It's not exactly an Ansible/Kubernetes-ready solution, but if you use those tools you already know a tool that solves your problem anyway.