MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GuB-42 | 2025-08-13 02:05:07+00:00
I added this to my toolbox in addition to traditional linters.

My experience is that it is about 10% harmful, 80% useless and 10% helpful. Which is actually great, the 10% is worth it, but it is far from a hands off experience.

By harmful I mean something like suggesting a wrong fix to code that works, it usually happens when I am doing something unusual or counter intuitive, for example having a function "decrease_x" that (correctly) adds 1 to x. It may hint for better documentation, but you have to be careful not to go on autopilot and just do what it says.

By useless I mean something like "you didn't check for null" even though the variable can't be null or is passed to a function that handles the "null" case gracefully. In general, it tends to be overly defensive and following the recommendations would lead to bloated code.

By helpful I mean finding a real bug. Most of them minor, but for some, I am glad I did that check.

LLMs complement traditional linters well, but they don't replace them.
by spijdar | 2025-08-13 02:05:15+00:00
> Forgot that Chomium was opensource but ChromeOS is not, so I guess I had no need to play semantics.

I won’t argue the semantics, but I will be a pedant :-) “ChromiumOS” absolutely exists and is FOSS-licensed. It’s a mess to build — basically a bunch of ebuild overlays for Gentoo’s build system and a boatload of custom tooling/scripts which produce images for a given system configuration, if I remember correctly. I don’t know much about it honestly, but it is open source! At least in the same way Chromium is.
by xorbax | 2025-08-13 02:05:35+00:00
It's like research. People had encyclopedias. If they wanted to know real, deep information about subjects they'd have to specifically spend effort seeking and finding books or papers about that specific subject (which are typically just distilled papers in a far wider range and number than an encyclopedia would be)

Then we could just go Google it, and/or skim the Wikipedia page. If you wanted more details you could follow references - which just made it easier to do the first point.

Now skills themselves will be subject to the same generalizing phenomenon as finding information.

We have not seen information-finding become better as technology has advanced. More people are able to become barely-capable regarding many topic, and this has caused a lot of fragmentation, and a general lowering of general knowledge with regard to information.

The overall degradation that happened with politics and public information will now be generalized to anything that AI can be applied to.

You race your MG? Hey my exoskeleton has a circuit racer blob we should go this weekend. You like to paint? I got this Bougereau app I'll paint some stuff for you. You're a physicist? The font for chalk writing just released so maybe we can work on the grand unified theory sometime, you say you part and I can query the LLM and correct your mistakes
by Y_Y | 2025-08-13 02:05:51+00:00
I'm totally with you, though would note that running Hurd as your main kernel is difficult, but running childhurds on your linux kernel is fun and profitable.

https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/childhurds-and-substitutes...

Obviously I'm crazy, because I use Emacs with EXWM as my shell, but IMHO it's perfectly capable of being a "daily driver" already.
by eru | 2025-08-13 02:06:59+00:00
Yes, exactly.

> If all state functions have the same parameters, then an approach with functions per state that return the new state and new parameter values, which get called from a loop using a state value to function dictionary can be relatively clean. But if states need different parameters, yeah that gets complicated.

In a language like Rust, you can encode your state in an enum, and the different variants (= states) in a Rust enum can have different parameters.

Then your implementation basically becomes a loop around a match statement over that enum.

But all you've done here is manually implement a 'trampoline'. The trampoline is to a tail call what manually maintaining a (call) stack is for simulating non-tail calls. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trampoline_(computing)#High-le...
by nomel | 2025-08-13 02:07:54+00:00
I think you've missed the concept here.

You exist in the full experience. That lossy projection to words is still meaningful to you, in your reading, because you know the experience it's referencing. What do I mean by "lossy projection"? It's the experience of seeing the color blue to the word "blue". The word "blue" is meaningless without already having experienced it, because the word is not a description of the experience, it's a label. The experience itself can't be sufficiently described, as you'll find if you try to explain a "blue" to a blind person, because it exists outside of words.

The concept here is that something like an LLM, trained on human text, can't having meaningful comprehension of some concepts, because some words are labels of things that exist entirely outside of text.

You might say "but multimodal models use tokens for color!", or even extending that to "you could replace the tokens used in multimodal models with color names!" and I would agree. But, the understanding wouldn't come from the relation of words in human text, it would come from the positional relation of colors across a space, which is not much different than our experience of the color, on our retina

tldr: to get AI to meaningful understand something, you have to give it a meaningful relation. Meaningful relations sometimes aren't present, in human writing.
by 000ooo000 | 2025-08-13 02:07:58+00:00
Came here to say this.

>What We're Losing

>1987-2024: X11 Evolution

>37 years of continuous development, bug fixes, and feature additions. Stable, predictable, and extensively documented. The XLibre project continues this legacy with active community development.

This is a very charitable interpretation of the situation, and to suggest XLibre, which got forked 2 months ago, is the future is insane. Would be a different story if XLibre had been around a few years but 2 months is very young..
by bigbadfeline | 2025-08-13 02:08:30+00:00
> Maybe one day unemployed people will be truly useless to other people, but for the last 250 years, new professions have always emerged.

Free market capitalism lacks anything approaching a clear and exhaustive definition and the term is used for many arrangements - from market oligarchy to market anarchy but there is one thing that is absolutely certain about it:

"Past performance is no guarantee of future results"

In effect, the most enduring tenet of free market capitalism negates your argument. You need to provide material evidence, not glorious promises of some unknowable bright future, North Korean style.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-13 02:08:41+00:00
> machines can evolve faster

[Squinty Thor] "Do they though?"

I think it's valuable to challenge this popular sentiment every once-in-a-while. Sure, it's a good poetic metaphor, but when you really start comparing their "lifecycle" and change-mechanisms to the swarming biological nanobots that cover the Earth, a bunch of critical aspects just aren't there or are being done to them rather than by them.

At least for now, these machines mostly "evolve" in the same sense that fashionable textile pants "evolve".
by ViscountPenguin | 2025-08-13 02:09:34+00:00
My concern is that people seemingly lack the ability to be discerning about when and where to use new technologies. A world in which more deep thought was put into where to apply AI almost certainly wouldn't feature things like AI image generation, as an example.

If we accidentally put ourselves in a position where humans fundamental skills are being eroded away, we could potentially lose our ability to make deep progress in any non-AI field and get stuck in a suboptimal and potentially dangerous trajectory.
by thrance | 2025-08-13 02:11:49+00:00
And what's the national guard supposed to do with the homeless? Beat them senseless on the sidewalk? Don't you think that would leave a much worse impression on hypothetical tourists? Jesus fucking Christ.

Bizarrely, tourism is way down since they've started arresting foreigners at the border for no reason, so maybe start there if you care about that? But you probably only care about issues that are convenient to your talking points.
by jackvalentine | 2025-08-13 02:12:33+00:00
> I think we are going to have to overhaul a lot of how we educate people.

I agree.

I work in healthcare and if you take a tech view of all the data there are a lot of really low hanging fruit to pick to make things more standardised and efficient. One example is extracting data from patient records for clinical registries.

We are trying to automate that as much as possible but I have the nagging sense that we’re now depriving junior doctors of the opportunity to look over hundreds of records about patients treated for X to find the data and ‘get a feel’ for it. Do we now have to make sure we’re explicitly teaching something since it’s not implicitly being done anymore? Or was it a valueless exercise.

The assumptions that we make about training on the job are all very chesterton’s fence really.
by throwanem | 2025-08-13 02:13:02+00:00
None in particular, as of course you realize, being a fluent reader of this language. It was just a longwinded way of saying rationalists suck at noticing when they're wrong about something because they rarely really know much of anything in the first place. That's why you had to take that scrap of a phrase so entirely out of context, when you went looking for something to try to embarrass me with.

Why? Which perspective of yours has you so twitchingly desperate to defend it?
by dang | 2025-08-13 02:13:10+00:00
Related. Others?

Visualizing quaternions (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38043644 - Oct 2023 (42 comments)

Visualizing quaternions: an explorable video series (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31083042 - April 2022 (15 comments)

Visualizing quaternions: An explorable video series - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18310788 - Oct 2018 (32 comments)
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-13 02:13:12+00:00
This already happened in aviation a long time ago, they have to do things to keep the pilots paying attention and not falling asleep on a long haul where the auto pilot is doing most of the work. It isn't clear at what point it will just be safer to not have pilots if automated systems are able to tackle exceptions as well as take offs and landings well enough.
by drdeca | 2025-08-13 02:13:47+00:00
I don’t know what you mean by “unidirectional relation”. I get that you gave an explanation after the colon, but I still don’t quite get what you mean. Do you just mean that what words I use doesn’t pick out a unique possible experience? That’s true of course, but I don’t know why you call that “unidirectional”

I don’t think describing colors to a blind person is nonsense. One can speak of how the different colors relate to one-another. A blind person can understand that a stop sign is typically “red”, and that something can be “borderline between red and orange”, but that things will not be “borderline between green and purple”. A person who has never had any color perception won’t know the experience of seeing something red or blue, but they can still have a mental model of the world that includes facts about the colors of things, and what effects these are likely to have, even though they themselves cannot imagine what it is like to see the colors.
by queenkjuul | 2025-08-13 02:14:20+00:00
Yeah once i saw XLibre I decided this was a joke, then it became apparent everything after the first section is AI i stopped reading entirely.

Wayback is the more promising project, if you can run an X11 display manager on Wayland you can still do XRDP and SSH, is my understanding. Those are the two features i really depend on
by daemonologist | 2025-08-13 02:14:26+00:00
The linked article mentions that they ingested 8 million panos - even if they're scraping the dynamic viewer that's $30k just in street view API fees (the static image API would probably be at least double that due to the low per-call resolution).

OCR I'd expect to be comparatively cheap, if you weren't in a hurry - a consumer GPU running PaddlePaddle server can do about 4 MP per second. If you spent a few grand on hardware that might work out to 3-6 months of processing, depending on the resolution per pano and size of your model.
by lbrito | 2025-08-13 02:14:45+00:00
Wasn't JRuby an option?

Anyway, obviously Ruby (or any other dynamic language for that matter) isn't the solution to every problem. I was once tasked to refurbish an old Delphi desktop application that did some thermal simulations; I wrote the interface as a Rails webapp and the simulation itself as a compiled C routine, which I called from Rails via FFI.
by lr4444lr | 2025-08-13 02:15:56+00:00
Are we supposed to be upset about this? NYCHA is public property for one. A disproportionate amount of the city's violent crime happens there, a significant amount also gang related. (IIRC, it's 4% of the city's residents and about 20% of the violent crime.)

And that line about chilling public assembly and protest? Spare me: as the nucleus of Occupy Wall Street, pride celebrations for dozens of identity groups, and a major center of the BLM movement, NYC is not exactly a 1984 hellscape of conformity.
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-13 02:16:18+00:00
Yes, I am constantly offended that the LLM tells me I'm wrong with provably false facts. It's infuriating. I then tell it, "but your point 1 is false because X. Your point 2 is false beacuse Y, etc." And then it says "You're absolutely right to call me out on that" and then spends a page or two on why I'm correct that X disproves 1 and Y disproves 2. Then it does the same thing again in 3 more ways. Repeat
by softwaredoug | 2025-08-13 02:16:35+00:00
The main motivation is narcissistic supply. He knows people will be angry. He sops up the attention.

For him at least I don’t think there’s anything deeper other than he found this way to get people to either adore him or hate him. In either case he’s the center of attention.

Once the toy he stops generating attention, he will get bored and he will find a new toy.
by duxup | 2025-08-13 02:16:44+00:00
>Wipro

Oh man when I worked tech support for some computing equipment (going to try to keep it vague here) Wipro would call up for support, ask me to lie when they bought their client on and try to coach me what to say.

They did not like it when I refused... they tried to get me in trouble with my bosses many times. Thankfully my employer backed me every time.

Then when they couldn't get what they wanted that way, they'd just demand I fix the problem with the equipment and they'd try to lie to me about how "this has been working for months" but I'd check and it NEVER worked. Like never ever configured to work in any way ever... Some of their clients were under the impression their disaster recovery solutions were functional when they hadn't been for years.

The few times I talked to their clients it was clear Wipro was the only technical person on the call except myself, and the clients weren't knowledgeable enough to know they were being taken for a ride.
by lurking_swe | 2025-08-13 02:17:59+00:00
An x ray machine can be used “locally” without uploading the images into the IT system. So i don’t understand the question. If it was designed to be cloud only then that would be horrendous design (IMO).

The x ray machine would still work, it’s connected directly to a PC. A doctor can look at the image on the computer without asking some fancy cloud AI.

A power outage on the other hand is a true worst case scenario but that’s different.
by carlosjobim | 2025-08-13 02:18:13+00:00
I'll make an attempt to explain it:

Advertising on TV cost tens of thousands of dollars and requires great effort, magazines and billboards a bit less on both fronts. But advertising on social media costs as little as you want, and these platforms are constantly asking business owners to throw in $20 or $50 to advertise. And when the business owner does so, Meta will give them completely fake statistics of how 40 000 people saw their ad. What does it matter that nobody clicked the ad and nobody purchased the product? Meta says right here that the ad was very effective. People love to gamble, and Facebook ads are nothing but a form of gambling for (usually small) business owners. "Sales have been slow this month, what if..." And since the barrier to spending on ads is so low, millions of people will take the bait. Add in the factor that advertisers can choose from hundreds of parameters to target the ads, and they feel like it's a skill they can train to win - hey it's just like sports betting!

Or somebody with a business or an executive has hired their niece to take care of "social media presence" for the company. Of course she is going to say that the ads she is buying on Meta are working great. Her job depends on it! Dito for outsourcing this to a third party that takes care of social media advertising. Of course they're going to give you phony presentations on how well their ads are working.

So it's not that the ads are working. It's a simple casino, and ad purchasers are the suckers.

Except for the 50%+ ads on Instagram which are outright scams and frauds. They probably bring in a lot of money to the advertisers.
by bccdee | 2025-08-13 02:18:39+00:00
Also because it's a niche WM catering to pretty specific preferences. I used tiled window managers for a while but eventually I decided I preferred the no-customization, one-size-fits-all Gnome/KDE experience. A hyperland config is going to fit like a tailor-made glove—but in this case, it's a glove tailor-made for your CEO, not you.

I spun up Omarchy in a VM just to see what the fuss was about, and when I opened Neovim it booted into a plugin manager and started installing at least two dozen random plugins, including an extremely over-eager autocomplete config that filled my screen with snippet suggestions. I was instantly irritated.
by brettgriffin | 2025-08-13 02:18:46+00:00
> Linux is fundamentally appealing to those who want to tinker with OS

I respect that and truly admire what dhh has done and tweeted about over the last year or so. But for a business to mandate an operating system for their developers (which I fully agree they have the right to do) with those reasons is underwhelming.

What is a productivity boost for you in one OS might be a burden to someone else. And vice versa. That's the benefit of letting developers choose their OS.
Show HN: From CRUD Dev to AI Founder in 30 Days – Photor.ai
by ghiblio | 2025-08-13 02:19:18+00:00
30 days ago, I was just a backend dev writing CRUD APIs. Then AI came along — and suddenly, it felt like my skills might be obsolete.

The past two years have been a whirlwind. AI models now create images, videos, and even code faster than humans. I felt both amazed… and scared. If AI could do my job, what would be left for me?

Instead of waiting for the wave to wash over me, I decided to build something of my own. Video tools were too costly, so I started with images — the foundation of video — and began working on photor.ai, an AI-powered image generation and editing tool.

No design skills. No frontend experience. No budget.

1.V0 for the product page

2.Cursor for both frontend & backend code

3.GitHub for source control

4.Cloudflare Pages for hosting frontend

5.A tiny cloud server for the backend

It wasn’t smooth:

1.Broke deployments at 2 a.m. more than once

2.Rebuilt features from scratch when early versions failed

3.Hit API rate limits just hours before launch

There was a night I nearly quit. I told myself, “Maybe I’m not cut out for this. I’m just a CRUD dev.”

The next morning, I decided to keep going anyway. One bug at a time, one feature at a time, one tiny improvement at a time. Slowly, photor.ai came to life.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: you don’t need to be a “full-stack rockstar” to launch something in the AI era. Curiosity and persistence matter more than credentials.

If you’ve been hesitating, start now. Even if it’s messy, even if it’s small — the best way to understand this new era is to create in it.
by deathanatos | 2025-08-13 02:19:40+00:00
> Marketing has, and will continue to, ruin notifications.

This is one of my personal "Laws", except it's not just notifications. Any communications medium will eventually be ruined by spam. What makes a medium useful to legitimate consumers/users is what makes it a target for "marketing", i.e., spam.

I've seen multiple media ruined by marketing in my lifetime. This isn't a technological problem.
by eru | 2025-08-13 02:20:18+00:00
Eh, if the hypothesis remains unfalsified for longer and longer, we can have increased confidence.

Similar, Newton's laws say that bodies always stay at rest unless acted upon by a force. Strictly speaking, if a billiard ball jumps up without cause tomorrow that would disprove Newton. So we'd have to wait an infinite amount of time to prove Newton right.

However no one has to wait so long, and we found ways to express how Newton's ideas are _better_ than those of Aristotle without waiting an eternity.
by alberth | 2025-08-13 02:20:27+00:00
I completely agree — it’s a tricky human challenge.

For example, (a) we’ve lost the knowledge of how the Egyptian pyramids were built. Maybe that’s okay, maybe it’s not. (b) On a smaller scale, we’ve also forgotten how to build quality horse-and-buggies, and that’s probably fine since we now live in a world of cars. (c) We almost forgot how to send someone to the moon, and that was just in the last 50-years (and that’s very bad).
by cmckn | 2025-08-13 02:22:03+00:00
I wrote a lot of Java in a past life, and the documentation situation is night and day, for sure. I think it's partly a syntax/tooling issue, and partly a cultural thing. Luckily Go's standard library (+ `/x/` modules) lets me avoid third-party dependencies in many cases. The documentation from the Go team is very good in my opinion.
by nixosbestos | 2025-08-13 02:22:50+00:00
Yeah I'm so, just so upset XScreensaver can't lock a Wayland session. Jfc, good company there with a jwz link.

There's so much wrong with wanting or thinking an XScreensaver app would somehow work with a random Wayland compositor. But it does require ignorance of the exact security changes made to the model when moving from X11 to Wayland.

I can't. I can't. I should never waste my time in these threads.

Edit: i do also find it amusing how much of that manpage is dedicated to calling out how fragile and broken X11 is. You can't make this stuff up.

Edit2; I actually can't get over the irony of linking an app that notoriously has had a storied history because of X11's architecture. I can't name the number of time X11 sessions were not locked properly.

Whatever. Going to keep happily enjoying the basic features that every other desktop OS user expects that I get with KDE, gnome, cosmic, away, Niri, and more, in Wayland. Good luck unclutching y'all's pearls.