MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by libraryofbabel | 2025-08-16 17:53:10+00:00
I do see this a lot. It's hard to have a reasonable conversation about AI amidst, on the one hand, hype-mongers and boosters talking about how we'll have AGI in 2027 and all jobs are just about to be automated away, and on the other hand, a chorus of people who hate AI so much they have invested their identify in it failing and haven't really updated their priors since ChatGPT came out. Both groups repeat the same set of tired points that haven't really changed much in three years.

But there are plenty of us who try and walk a middle course. A lot of us have changed our opinions over time. ("When the facts change, I change my mind.") I didn't think AI models were much use for coding a year ago. The facts changed. (Claude Code came out.) Now I do. Frankly, I'd be suspicious of anyone who hasn't changed their opinions about AI in the last year.

You can believe all these things at once, and many of us do:

* LLMs are extremely impressive in what they can do. (I didn't believe I'd see something like this in my lifetime.)

* Used judiciously, they are a big productivity boost for software engineers and many other professions.

* They are imperfect and make mistakes, often in weird ways. They hallucinate. There are some trivial problems that they mess up.

* But they're not just "stochastic parrots." They can model the world and reason about it, albeit imperfectly and not like humans do.

* AI will change the world in the next 20 years

* But AI companies are overvalued at the present time and we're mostly likely in a bubble which will burst.

* Being in a bubble doesn't mean the technology is useless. (c.f. the dotcom bubble or the railroad bubble in the 19th century.)

* AGI isn't just around the corner. (There's still no way models can learn from experience.)

* A lot of people making optimistic claims about AI are doing it for self-serving boosterish reasons, because they want to pump up their stock price or sell you something

* AI has many potential negative consequences for society and mental health, and may be at least as nasty as social media in that respect

* AI has the potential to accelerate human progress in ways that really matter, such as medical research

* But anyone who claims to know the future is just guessing
by appease7727 | 2025-08-16 17:53:45+00:00
Subtitles are very explicitly not something you're meant to engage with or focus on which is why people hate it when you make the subtitles more "engaging" than the content of the video. If you want people to focus on your subtitles, you should write a blog instead of make a video.

Subtitles are an accessibility feature. They are meant to stay out of the way and add to, not detract from the video content. They are meant to be subtle and only visible if you need to look at them.
by valdrinNereth | 2025-08-16 17:55:15+00:00
Honestly, since the first day I switched to Firefox I'm just saving to it's own bookmarks. Whenever I wanna check those websites I just open it either from my desktop or my laptop(s), since it's syncing in between my devices.

I don't know if there's much people using bookmarking tools, but to help you see another perspective, as a person who finds bookmarking tools not necessary I'd say it wouldn't worth your time to vibe code one. Also just for "vibe coding", be really really careful if you're gonna make it a "product" because you'll definitely face rough situations through it.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-16 17:55:26+00:00
I recall the kerfuffle about (IIRC) llama where the engineer lost his mind thinking they had spawned life in a machine and felt it was "too dangerous to release," so it's not a ludicrous take. I would hope that the first person to ask "LLM Jesus" how many Rs are in strawberry would have torpedoed the religion, but (a) I've seen dumber mind viruses (b) it hasn't yet
by rpdillon | 2025-08-16 17:55:47+00:00
This is a logical fallacy in two dimensions.

First, you're conflating one UI option in the product with the entire product. It could be that 28 million users are using the list-based view.

Second, you're implying that high sales of a product are correlated with quality. This isn't true: high sales are a result of demand and available options, as well as target audience. In Apple's case, because users don't buy a specific product from Apple, but rather buy into the entire ecosystem, Apple users don't typically have the choices that other users have. So it's perfectly viable that they would want the Apple Music integration and the iMessage integration, but hate the UI of the launcher.

Finally, the 'may suggest' phrasing doesn't sound like good faith, but rather a sarcastic quip, which is why I suspect you've been voted down.
by rekabis | 2025-08-16 17:56:04+00:00
> But in most cases replication lag can be worked around with simple tricks: for instance, when you update a record but need to use it right after, you can fill in the updated details in-memory instead of immediately re-reading after a write.

I found myself truly confused by this one - does this actually need stating? Do people actually re-read immediately after a write? Provided you got confirmation that a write was successful and the data doesn’t have anything that an SQL trigger would change, what would be the point of an immediate read instead of just using the DB “successfully written” response as a go-ahead to just update the in-memory data?
by jofla_net | 2025-08-16 17:56:23+00:00
Just learning this now, terrifying as a merchant.

Was wondering what anyone's experience with chargebacks are in general. I could imagine that, in the worst case, if combined with 'card testing' as a merchant you could immediately get slammed with thousands in unavoidable charge back fees? Maybe i'm hyperventilating but thats huge, really. I hope theres some stop gap.
by troupo | 2025-08-16 17:56:40+00:00
> Elon Musk is a genius and not just an obnoxious narcissist who got lucky with the startup lottery

There's an undeniable truth that Musk had quite a unique talent: he could find and fund people to run outrageous startups and make them work.

The moment he tries to run anything himself, or have a say in anything, it turns out to be shit. And this has become worse over the past several years.
by LoganDark | 2025-08-16 17:56:46+00:00
> wired to common banks

I highly doubt banks would choose some completely new payment processor (or card, etc.) over Visa or Mastercard: Visa and Mastercard can just put in their terms of service that you're not allowed to use that payment processor and that'll kill them real quick. Highly unlikely any existing bank would give up Visa or Mastercard just for that.
by rectang | 2025-08-16 17:56:59+00:00
And so the "solution" is to give dissenters free rein and thus trolls and haters free rein as well, effectively deplatforming all but the most pugilistic amongst marginalized communities as those who don't want to spend their lives fighting flee the torrent of abuse. Whether you intend it or not, that's a fabulous scenario for both active haters and those who quietly prefer that the marginalized not exist.

But even after they flee, it won't be enough — the new platform where they took refuge, having become popular, must be stormed. Any room where the marginalized congregate must be filled with the din of hatred. In short, it is not enough for Musk-era Twitter to be Twitter — BlueSky must also become Twitter.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-16 17:57:16+00:00
Failure to understand why developers chose CUDA, is exactly why NVidia keeps selling.

Same applies to proprietary 3D APIs.

There is a reason why only FOSS devs make such big fuss out of APIs, while professional game studios keep talk about how to take each hardware to its limits at GDC, since 8 bit heterogeneous home game systems.
by da_chicken | 2025-08-16 17:57:26+00:00
A version control system is a tool for managing a project, not exclusively a tool for managing source code.

Wanting to split up the project into multiple storage spaces is inherently hostile to managing the project. People want it together because it's important that it stays together as a basic function of managing a project of digital files. The need to track and maintain digital version numbers and linking them to release numbers and build plans is just a requirement.

That's what actual, real projects demand. Any projects that involve digital assets is going to involve binary, often large, data files. Any projects that involve large tables of pre-determined or historic data will involve large files that may be text or binary which contain data the project requires. They won't have everything encompassed by the project as a text file. It's weird when that's true for a project. It's a unique situation to the Linux kernel because it, somewhat uniquely, doesn't have graphics or large, predetermined data blocks. Well, not all projects that need to be managed by git share 100% of the attributes of the Linux kernel.

This idea that everything in a git project must be all small text file is incredibly bizarre. Are you making a video game? A website? A web application? A data driven API? Does it have geographic data? Does it required images? Video? Music or sound? Are you providing static documentation that must be included?

So the choices are:

1. Git is useful general purpose VCS for real world projects. 2. Git does not permit binary or large files.

Tracking versioning on large files is not some massively complex problem. Not needing to care about diffing and merging simplifies how those files are managed.
by simonsarris | 2025-08-16 17:57:41+00:00
The author comes across as unsympathetic because he seems to have a near-total failure to model the world. He can model one resentful aspect of it, but not the rest.

> He said he was letting me go because my department was the most expensive in the agency, and that last month the company closed in the red for the very first time. He told me, very sadly, that he even had to take out a loan to pay his mortgage, and that cutting costs was the only way to keep the agency alive. All of this, of course, from his vacation in Hawaii.

If you are a business or a department of a business and losing money, it's often sensible to axe it. Yes that may involve axing some or all of the people involved, but there's no "oh well we're losing money, but I'm rich enough, better let the business keep losing money" reasoning. That is generally considered incoherent. This feels like "money comes from the money store" levels of reasoning.

> I just hope that someday my boss can forgive me and give me another chance to make him richer, without expecting anything in return, not even the tiniest bit of empathy or courage it takes to fire someone while looking them in the eye.

Emphasis mine. Presumably this person was paid? If he was doing unpaid work for a boss for profit, maybe this would make more sense. But under normal circumstances he absolutely expecting - and getting - something in return.

I would recommend that the author try to go into business for himself. It may be the only way to really understand what he is missing, if he has missed it all these years.
by dmead | 2025-08-16 17:57:47+00:00
I had such a professor as well, but those people used to use the more accurate term "machine learning".

There was also wide understanding that those architectures were trying to imitate small bits of what we understood was happening in the brain (see marvin minsky's perceptron etc). The hope was, as I understood it that there would be some breakthrough in neuroscience that would let the computer scientists pick up the torch and simulate what we find in nature.

None of that seems to be happening anymore and we're just interested in training enough to fool people.

"AI" companies investing in brain science would convince me otherwise. At this point they're just trying to come up with the next money printing machine.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-08-16 17:58:37+00:00
> How is this different from humans?

Humans will generally not do this because being made to look stupid (aka social pressure) incentivizes not doing it. That doesn't mean humans never lie or are wrong of course, but I don't know about you, I don't make shit up nearly to the degree an LLM does. If I don't know something I just say that.

> To make this claim you need a theory of consciousness that essentially denies materialism.

I did not say "a machine would never be conscious," I said "an LLM will never be conscious" and I fully stand by that. I think machine intelligence is absolutely something that can be made, I just don't think ChatGPT will ever be that.
by m4nu3l | 2025-08-16 17:59:02+00:00
I'm assuming no coercion. In my scenario, tier 1 doesn't need any of that except natural resources because they can self-produce everything they need from those in a cheaper way than humans can. If someone in tier 1, for instance, wants land from someone in tier 2, they'd have to offer something that the tier 2 person values more than the land they own.

After the trade, the tier 2 person would still be richer than they were before the trade. So tier 2 would become richer in absolute terms by trading with tier 1 in this manner. And it's very likely that what tier 2 wants from tier 1 is whatever they need to build their own AIs. So my argument still stands. They wouldn't be poorer than they are now.
by plipt | 2025-08-16 17:59:09+00:00
In my area we've had the Spotted lanternfly for more than 5 years now, maybe closer to 10. In the first year or two they could be seen in huge numbers. Since then they've waned off considerably. Like last year I don't recall seeing many at all. This summer they are back but still nothing compared to that initial wave. I've seen birds eating them, leaving lots of disembodied red wings in my backyard. Feels like they will reach some equilibrium stable population.

I hope your grapes make it through
by judofyr | 2025-08-16 18:00:02+00:00
Acquire-release ordering provides ordering guarantees for all memory operations. If an acquire observes a releases, the thread is also guaranteed to see all the previous writes done by the other thread - regardless of the atomicity of those writes. (There still can't be any other data races though.)

This volatile keyword appears to only consider that specific memory location whereas the Volatile class seem to implement acquire-release.
by Rohansi | 2025-08-16 18:00:08+00:00
They can't really provide that guarantee. It's possible for lower allocation rates but what happens when 10ms is not enough time to keep up with all of the new allocations? At some point it'll need to stop the world because it's not able to do a complete cycle.

I like the way .NET does it where you can define regions to have the GC avoid running in [1]. You just need to declare how much memory the region should be able to allocate and it wouldn't run the GC unless it is exceeded. This is great for things like games where it's best to let the GC run while the GPU is rendering/presenting (note: not supported in Unity because they use Mono).

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.gc.tryst...
by paxys | 2025-08-16 18:00:33+00:00
So you are trying to shame your boss for firing you over WhatsApp while he was on vacation in Hawaii, when you were the one who repeatedly messaged him, including on his personal WhatsApp number, while he was on vacation in Hawaii?

You could have gotten paid for a few more weeks (and maybe even secured a severance) had you been patient and let the official layoff notice come to you.

Learn and move on.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-16 18:00:33+00:00
Another shot at a bookmark manager is welcome.

The usual story is "I bookmarked 20,000 web pages over 3 years and then I realized I never looked at any of them!"

I built an "image sorter" which used to ingest image galleries using a bookmarklet which would queue the galleries to get crawled with a web crawler, I would then classify and rank the image galleries in an HTMX-based UI. I really do look at the images every day so it is successful in that sense. The web crawler started running into Cloudflare problems so now I save the whole page with the browser and have a Python script harvest the pages out of my Downloads folder.
Show HN: Lue – Terminal eBook Reader with Text-to-Speech
by superstarryeyes | 2025-08-16 18:00:33+00:00
Shown HN: Lue - Terminal eBook Reader with Text-to-Speech

Hello,

Just went live on GitHub with this project.

I really enjoy listening to my eBooks as audiobooks but was frustrated by the available options. Converting books into audiobooks with scripts is tedious, and most tools stumble over footnotes, headers, or formatting. I wanted something simple: just throw a book at it, and it starts reading immediately without any clicking or loading.

I also wanted it to be customizable and modular because new, better TTS engines are released all the time. For this initial release, I settled on Edge and Kokoro because they’re both fast (real-time) and good quality. I’ve already made modules for Kitten TTS, Gemini and a few others, and they work too. So I hope this setup is future-proof.

Here’s what Lue supports:

Multi-format: EPUB, PDF, TXT, DOCX, HTML, RTF, and Markdown.

Modular TTS system: Default Edge TTS (online) and Kokoro TTS (offline/local), with an architecture to add more models.

Rich terminal UI: Full keyboard and mouse support, customizable color themes, smooth scrolling.

Smart persistence: Automatically saves reading progress across sessions.

Cross-platform & multilingual: macOS, Linux, Windows, supporting 100+ languages.

I’d love feedback on both usability and the TTS experience. Are there any features you wish it had?
by Sophira | 2025-08-16 18:00:47+00:00
How does this upcoming feature deal with the potential problem of fake commit IDs?

Commit IDs are based on a number of factors about the commit, including the actual contents and the commit ID of the parent commit. Any fully cloned git repository can theoretically be audited to make sure that all its commit IDs are correct. Nobody does this (although perhaps git does automatically?), but it's possible.

But now, picture a git repository that has a one petabyte file in one of its early commits (and deleted again later). Pretty much nobody is going to have the space required to download this, so many people will not even bother to do so. As such, what's to stop the server from just claiming any commit ID it wanted for this particular commit? Who's going to check?

(Bonus: For that matter, is the one petabyte file even real? Or just a faked size in the metadata?)

To be clear, I assume people have already thought about these issues. I'm just curious what the answers are.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-16 18:01:10+00:00
Ragebait that buries the lede: The author initiated the conversation with the boss, not the other way around. The company was losing money and had to cut staff.

Even the introductory sentence has the puzzling statement “one of my jobs” which raises a lot of questions. Was this person over-employed? Was this part-time contracting situation?

This is just anger bait.
by walterbell | 2025-08-16 18:01:23+00:00
Other tech pioneers who rode off into the sunset:

Blackberry co-founder (sold stock when iPhone launched), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Fregin

Facebook co-founder (pushed out), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_Saverin

MySpace founder (pushed out after sale), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Anderson, "If you knew me before Myspace, you'd probably thought I'd have been a scholar teaching philosophy in a university my whole life. If you met me before college, you'd probably have thought I'd be a musician for my entire life ... I like change.
by mooreds | 2025-08-16 18:02:06+00:00
Interesting perspective about writing a bunch of mini-apps that you aren't concerned with making money on or scaling.

Reminds me a bit of the carpenters I've seen work who spend time building frames/other wood "tools" to help them get the actual work done faster.

The cost of writing software has definitely decreased. And you do have a different and smaller class of problems when you write an ad-hoc app.
by setr | 2025-08-16 18:02:15+00:00
> Including timestamps on rows (including created_at and updated_at) are real bacon savers when you've deployed a bug and corrupted some rows and need to eg refund orders created in a certain window.

But that’s my point. You’re making an active decision to record timestamps on important events (and no bool was being converted here); bool —> timestamp everywhere is not the same thing — the bool data type is not a useful signal for whether this change needs to be timestamp-tracked.

Either think and choose to track these particular changes or not, and drop in the appropriate tracking. The mindless Bool—>timestamp change is only ever suggested because it’s a “why not”, not because it’s a good practice that often leads to good things.

The audit table is of course just deciding “every change ever is important”
by xpe | 2025-08-16 18:02:55+00:00
I am so tired of people acting like planning for an uncertain world is a zero sum game, decided by one central actor in a single pipeline execution model. I’ll unpack this below.

The argument above (or some version of it) gets repeated over and over, but it is deeply flawed for various reasons.

The argument implies that “we” is a single agent that must do some set of things before other things. In the real world, different collections of people can work on different projects simultaneously in various orderings.

This is very different than optimizing an instruction pipeline for a single core microprocessor. In the real world, different kinds of tasks operate on very different timescales.

As an example, think about how change happens in society. Should we only talk about one problem at a time? Of course not. Why? The pipeline to solving problems is long and uncertain so you have to parallelize. Raising awareness of an issue can be relatively slow. Do you know what is even slower? Trying to reframe an issue in a way that gets into people’s brains and language patterns. Once a conceptual model exists and people pay attention, then building a movement among “early adopters” has a fighting chance. If that goes well, political influence might follow.
by lazide | 2025-08-16 18:02:57+00:00
One neurotypical I know who took 20mg of Adderall IR ended up going into a hyperfocused ‘can’t look away from the road’ 12+ hour road trip without stopping and couldn’t sleep for 3 days afterwards.

An ADHD’er I know who did the same thing, took a nap instead, and then actually started their taxes.

These are not the same thing.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-08-16 18:04:10+00:00
There are some books out there like “Distributed Systems” by Tanenbaum. Then there are the various company publications like “The SRE Book” by google and eng blogs.

You could also contribute to an open source project like kubernetes or postgres to get your feet wet.

Like all things, the best way to get better is to do it.
by kaashif | 2025-08-16 18:04:46+00:00
The story is wildly different based on what job the person has. Are they supposed to be a senior-ish employee who is supposed to know what to do without being told? (Pardon my ignorance) Do people at agencies usually get assigned tasks by a project manager and that's it, they have no agency or independence in picking up tasks?

If a senior engineer who's supposed to be independent and who knows that messages me on a personal number while I'm on vacation, I probably wouldn't fire them immediately, but that person is unlikely to be considered a high performer.

Totally different situation for a panicking junior, which is a situation that means I've done something more wrong.