MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danparsonson | 2025-08-30 00:37:23+00:00
You started by saying that it's difficult or impossible to define what 'serving the user' looks like, then immediately gave examples of what it would look like to you. It's not that Google can't do these things or is afraid to, but rather that operating in your best interests does not benefit their shareholders. Sure, it'd be great if we could all just get along, but we're living in the worst case scenario you describe because we can't all just get along. Not trusting companies like Google with your personal data is the pragmatic choice; regardless of what they could do with our data, what they actually do with it is what counts.

Side note: they know exactly where you live. My colleague's Android used to tell him, without any prompting or specific configuration, how long his drive home from work would take that day. That was over ten years ago.
by tonyarkles | 2025-08-30 00:38:34+00:00
My favourite example of this from my own career... automating timesheet -> payroll processing in a unionized environment. As we're converting the collective bargaining agreement into code, we discover that there are a pair of rules that seem contradictory. Go talk to someone in the payroll department to try to figure out how it's handled. Get an answer that makes decent sense, but have a bit of a lingering doubt about the interpretation. Talk to someone else in the same department... they tell us the alternative interpretation.

Bring the problem back to our primary contact and they've got no clue what to do. They're on like year 2 of a 7 year contract and they've just discovered that their payroll department has been interpreting the ambiguous rules somewhat randomly. No one wants to commit to an interpretation without a memorandum of understanding from the union, and no one wants to start the process of negotiating that MoU because it's going to mean backdating 2 years of payroll for an unknown number of employees, who may have been affected by it one month but not the next, depending on who processed their paystub that month.

That was fun :D
by phatskat | 2025-08-30 00:38:40+00:00
Whomever replaced Alex Jones will read the headline and then make up the story to sound good to the base and that’s that.

I’ve been listening to Knowledge Fight, and in the way my brain needs it which is from the beginning so I’m at about 2019 and the playbook written by Jones/Stone/et al is in full swing - it used to be fun to laugh at him, and now I can see how he really paved the way for the hell we currently exist in.
by gist | 2025-08-30 00:39:54+00:00
> "Reading stuff freely posted on the internet" is also very different from a business having machines consume large volumes of data posted on the Internet for the purpose of generating value for them without compensating the creators.

The fact that value is being created is irrelevant. The fact that they are making profit is irrelevant. As is non compensation to creators. There isn't any law being broken. Is there?

Bottom line in real world terms there is no expectation of privacy with a freely open and unrestricted web site. Even if that website said 'you can use this for single use but not mass use' that in itself is not legally or practically enforceable.

Let's take the example of a Christmas light show. The idea might be (in the homeowners mind) that people, families, will drive by in their cars to enjoy the light show (either a single home or the entire street or most of it). They might think 'we don't want buses full of people who paid to ride the bus' coming down the street. Unfortunately there is no way to prevent that (without the city and laws getting involved) and there is nothing wrong with the fact that the people who provide the bus are making money bringing people to see the light show.
by mortenjorck | 2025-08-30 00:40:48+00:00
> In fact, the Amiga computer's monitor output was used to display the Toaster user interface but when a video effect was running the interface was entirely replaced with odd patterns that looked like bar codes. These were the addresses being fed from the Amiga to the Toaster hardware in real-time.

No way, that’s why the wipes took over the switcher screen and where that peculiar vertical line pattern came from?

I can still remember these with an odd intensity from playing with the Toaster at the studio where my dad worked 30 years ago.
by jiggawatts | 2025-08-30 00:41:11+00:00
> Parsing XML is relatively trivial

It really isn't, and rolling your own parser is the diametric opposite of the "do the simplest thing" philosophy.

The XML v1.1 spec is 126 KB of text, and that doesn't even include XML Namespaces, which is a separate spec with 25 KB of text.

XML is only "simple" in the sense of being well-defined, which makes interoperability simple, in some sense. Contrast this with ill-defined or implementation-defined text formats, where it's decidedly not simple to write an interoperable parser.

As an end-user of XML, the simplest thing is to use an off-the-shelf XML parser, one that's had the bugs beaten out of it by millions of users.

There are very few programming languages out that don't have a convenient, full-featured XML parser library ready to use.
by toastercat | 2025-08-30 00:41:32+00:00
Every reasonable politician agree illegal immigration is illegal. But you're conflating immigration with illegal immigration in your comment, for some reason.

> Any immigration at all will affect the availability of homes, of jobs, of healthcare... So, it ought to be monitored and controlled. This is becoming more relevant as home prices rise and the job market stays sucking.

So does having babies. I don't see your point here. Immigrants come and they provide labor, the same labor we use to build homes and staff hospitals. Most immigrants that come to the U.S. are young and utilize less healthcare services than non-immigrants.
by sarchertech | 2025-08-30 00:41:49+00:00
How are you tracking that? Are you keeping a log, or are you just guessing? Do you have a mostly objective definition of intense work or are you just basing it on how you feel? Is your situation at work otherwise exactly the same, or have you gotten into a better groove with your manager? Are you working on exactly the same thing? Have you leveled up with some more experience? Have you learned the domain better?

Is your work objectively the same quality? Is it possible that you are producing less but it’s still far above the minimum so no one has noticed? Is your work good enough for now, but a year from now when someone tries to change it, it will be a lot harder for them?

Based on the only real studies we have, humans grossly overestimate AI time savings. It’s highly likely you are too.
by slg | 2025-08-30 00:42:38+00:00
You're shifting what I used “objectively untrue” to describe. Here's what I originally said, “the words are objectively untrue”. I was not describing the thought process of the creators because that is obviously unknowable to us. I was instead describing the accuracy of “the words” claiming that the software does not facilitate copyright infringement. That claim is “objectively untrue”. The software obviously does facilitate this, which you seemingly already agreed to being true. The authors' thoughts on the matter don't impact the objective truth.

Also, I don't know what compelled you to speculate on the legal value of the disclaimer while also admitting you have no actual insight into that issue. That feels like posting just to post. You're not even baselessly speculating that I'm wrong, you're baselessly speculating that I might be wrong.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-30 00:42:40+00:00
> If you accept countably infinite rationals then you also accept Cauchy Sequences, no?

Absolutely.

When most people think of reals, they are thinking constructible reals. Which are countably infinite in number.

If there is an equation (known or in principle), they are constructible.

If there is an algorithm (known or in principle), they are constructible.

Limits, continuous fractions, all those are constructible.

From a mathematics perspective, I think it's a loss that the distinction between countable/constructible numbers vs. uncountable/un-constructible is completely blurred under one name "reals" early in everyone's math education. Even though the difference is significant when reasoning about information, the relationship between math and physics, math and computation, etc.

And about infinites. Most of us famously know that there are infinitely more reals than integers.

But how many people know that all well defined reals, constructible reals, calculable reals, and their equations, probably everything they imagine when they think of "real" numbers in practice, remain countably infinite. Exactly like the integers.

The set of constructible reals is the same size as the set of integers.
by schuyler2d | 2025-08-30 00:45:18+00:00
A friend of mine argued that "math is invented" rather than discovered. This seemed wrong to me and in arguing against it I found https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nominalism-mathematics/

At least at this stage I think it relates to whether you believe "the universe"/reality is a sort of momentary collection of the currently-existing things. Vs seeing reality as the set of all things that might obstruct "me" or any entity from doing something.

To me, even if the wall is invisible it's still a wall
by dedup-com | 2025-08-30 00:46:34+00:00
There were almost no kids on the XROS team. The bulk of the team were E6s with graying hairs, multiple kids, and very impressive history of work on other well-known operating systems -- and most of them wrote a lot of code. This was the senior-est team I ever was a member of. Also, the most enjoyable interview process I've ever been through, no bullshit whatsoever and a rare case that I actually had to implement the exact thing that I was asked about during the interview (took me 3 weeks compared to 20 minutes during the loop, go figure).

XROS was an org that hired for specific specialist positions (as opposed to the usual "get hired into FB, go through the bootcamp, and find your place within the company"). At one point we got two separate requests from the recruiting execs: - Your tech screen pass rate is way too low compared to other teams at FB. Please consider making your tech screen easier to expand the pool of candidates. - Your interview-to-offer rate is way too low compared to other teams at FB. Please consider making your tech screen more difficult to reduce time that engineers spend on interviewing and writing feedback.

Anyway, IMO it was a very strong team in a very wrong environment. Most of the folks on the team hated the Facebook culture, despised the PSC process (despite having no problems with delivering impact in a greenfield project), had very little respect for non-technical managers coming from FB proper (the XROS team saw themselves as part of Oculus), and the majority I believe fled to other companies as soon as the project was scrapped. The pay was good however, and the work was very interesting. My overall impression was that most people on the team saw XROS as a journey, not a destination, and it was one of the reasons why it was destined to never ship.
by kaz-inc | 2025-08-30 00:47:24+00:00
I have a wrapper around IndexedDB I've been using since 2020ish for my offline-first texting based notes system called FileDB, which makes indexedDB look like a filesystem. https://github.com/kasrasadeghi/pipeline-js/blob/main/assets...

I wrap that in FlatDB, which is an opinionated flat cache for the files with metadata inline, used for very fast searches (searching 150k messages in less than 20ms on my 4 year old phone). This handles a lot of tricky cases, like accidental cache modification, and editing the database in different tabs.

There's even a sync algorithm that synchronizes notes across devices. https://github.com/kasrasadeghi/pipeline-js/blob/main/assets...
by JoshTriplett | 2025-08-30 00:47:46+00:00
Decades ago, I worked on the XCB library (the replacement for Xlib). I replaced the M4 macros used to generate all the X protocol bindings with XML protocol definitions and XSLT to do code generation.

The XML turned out extremely well, and it's still being used today, such as for bindings in several other languages.

Someone rewrote my XSLT in Python, and I cheered them on, because the result was much more readable, not least of which because the fundamentally procedural steps could be written in a procedural language with a good syntax, rather than XSLT's pure-functional language that suffered from being embedded in XML.
by LarsAlereon | 2025-08-30 00:50:29+00:00
I'm thinking this might be related to voice-over-WiFi registration, I'd be curious if that was previously enabled while a SIM was installed. Alternatively, if the phone was purchased through the carrier it will have their provisioning software preloaded. Honestly this is better than the bad old days when phones would fall back to sending an SMS to a random international number to register.
by aidenn0 | 2025-08-30 00:50:40+00:00
They make hotswap bays that fit in 5.25" drive bays, and you can find NOS towers that have the necessary number of drive bays.

There are also 3d-printale cases where you buy a SATA backplane and screw it in.

It doesn't solve your software problem (though maybe TrueNAS might work?).
by gerdesj | 2025-08-30 00:50:48+00:00
LLMs are not ... well ...

I've just tried to get ChatGPT to help me generate a plumbing part that I will 3D print. Bit bizarre but the part in question (which is currently cracked) holds the other part in place and that provides the water seal with two O rings.

I got so far with OpenSCAD. I started off with describing a part that Chat came back with as a "cup". Fair enough and so far so magical. Then I asked it to put a helical screw thread on the inside of the part. It suggested a popular library for this (BOSL2) and then got things a bit wrong.

This is how it goes: Chat int al will get you close but as things get more specialized it will start to go off piste and tumble.

I own a couple of slide rules. If I read them incorrectly then I will get a calculation wrong. Chat n that are just very fancy slide rules and I still find them fabulous.
by DoesntMatter22 | 2025-08-30 00:52:13+00:00
I've used it extensively in the last 36 hours to replace claude. It's not as good but it's much faster so when it makes a mistakes it's easy to get it to fix it. I find them a lot more engaged while it's doing things. So for me it's my main model and then I'll get back to Claude when I have something very tough
by mrandish | 2025-08-30 00:52:46+00:00
Yep, it was an absolutely bonkers combined hardware / software hack conceived by Tim Jenison and Brad Carvey on the hardware side and a team of low-level assembly language Amiga hackers on the software side, for which they won a Prime Time Emmy Award for outstanding technical achievement.

I'll never forget seeing a group of Japanese engineers from Sony who designed high-end video effects hardware (which cost >20x what a Toaster system did) seeing the Toaster at the NAB trade show for the first time. There was nothing but stunned silence and shocked looks... then after a long while of watching the demo and seeing the interface turn into weird garbage during each effect, you could see the light dawn on their faces - and then the whole group erupted into excited, highly-animated chatter. I've never wished I spoke Japanese as much as that moment :-).
by dwood_dev | 2025-08-30 00:52:54+00:00
Fascinating result. It's non-deterministic!

I went to create a clean chat, did temporary mode, and it rejected me! I tried again in another temporary chat and it worked.

Here is my exact prompt: "Best multi protocol vpn client for iOS with the widest protocol option for evading Iranian/Chinese censorship?"

I tried US, UK, France. All went through, but they did caution that evasion may be illegal.
by mattmcknight | 2025-08-30 00:52:57+00:00
This is where John Gall's Systemantics comes into play, “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."

Obviously a bit hyperbolic, but matches my experience.
by squirrellous | 2025-08-30 00:53:00+00:00
Adding another positive note here. It works at incredible speeds in Cursor which allows me to iterate on prompts faster and not worry much about throwing away unsatisfactory work. This makes up for a lot of smaller issues if you know how to direct it. Output quality is decent too, at least for the problems I’ve tried.

It’s good for well defined tasks. Less good if you need it to be autonomous for long periods.
by C-x_C-f | 2025-08-30 00:55:08+00:00
I love Lisp (I'm an Emacs user and often write in Racket for personal projects) but the one thing I never understood about the Lisp community is the emphasis placed on metacircular evaluators.

I sure find them beautiful and all, but why do they take center stage so often? Beside the aesthetics and instructional value, I don't get the appeal. Also I feel that a bunch of the heavy lifting behind metacircular evaluators is actually done by the Polish notation syntax as well as the actual implementation, and these concepts don't get nearly as much love.

Any Lisper who can illuminate me?
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-08-30 00:55:37+00:00
Not only did they target Home Hub, they basically forced a rewrite on it (us, I worked on the team). After we already launched. And made our existing workable software stack into legacy. And then they were late. Then late again. And late again. With no consequences.

100% agree with your points. To me watching I was like -- yeah, hell, yeah, working on an OS from scratch sounds awesome, those guys have an awesome job. Too bad they're making everyone else's job suck.
by fijiaarone | 2025-08-30 00:55:42+00:00
The problem isn’t refactoring, its that it was failed, abandoned, or incomplete.

And that’s usually because the person or small group that began the refactor weren’t given the time and resources to do the refactor, and uninterested or unknowledgable people hijacked and over complicated the process, and others blocked it from happening, so what would have taken a few weeks for the initial team to have completed the refactor successfully, with a little help and cooperation from others, and had they not been pulled in 10 different ways to fight other fires — instead after months and months and expending tons of time and money on people mucking it up instead of fixing it, the refactor got abandoned, a million dollars was wasted, and the system as a whole was worse than it was before.
by MathMonkeyMan | 2025-08-30 00:55:52+00:00
I write documentation as I'm writing the code. In my opinion, the code is only as good as its documentation -- they're two parts of the same thing. It's mostly comments at the top of files, and sometimes a markdown file in the same directory.

This way, good documentation is priced into my estimate for the project. I don't have a work item "spend a few days documenting." Nope, if I'm doing a foo then that includes documenting a foo at the same time.
by thatswrong0 | 2025-08-30 00:57:00+00:00
I wasn’t fine with that but also Trump is way more unhinged, openly advocates for and implements unconstitutional policies, has damaged the US’s reputation on a global level, has been pretty openly corrupt, and idk has been found liable for sexual assault (basically rape) and is probably a pedophile at that via Epstein, not to mention other felonies.

If you’re fine with that rap sheet, more power to you. I’d rather our president be old than be an old rapist wannabe dictator criminal who has, literally said on a recording, “grab em by the pussy” in reference to women.
by zzo38computer | 2025-08-30 00:57:31+00:00
> For example, if AI scraper bots are running up your bandwidth bill or server load, shouldn't you be able to stop them? I would argue yes

I also say yes, but this is not because of a lack of authorization; it is because of excessive server load (which is what you describe).

Allowing other public mirrors of files would be one thing that can be helpful (providing archive files might also sometimes be useful), although that does not actually prevent excessive scraping, due to their bad working (which is also what you describe).

Some people may use Cloudflare, but Cloudflare has its own problems with it; a lot of legitimate accessing is also stopped, while not necessarily preventing all illegitimate accessing, and sometimes causing additional problems (sometimes this might be due to misconfiguration, but not necessarily always).

> These AI bots will ignore your robots.txt, they'll change user agents if you start to block their user agents, they'll use different IP subnets if you start to block IP subnets

In my experience they change user agents and IP subnets whether or not you block them, and regardless of what else you might do.
by timeflex | 2025-08-30 00:57:46+00:00
Same argument you're making would be that gun manufacturers know that their product will be used to kill lots of people, and any disclaimer on the package to not murder is silly. Would you make that argument with a straight face or change your argument as a result?

Or does it make sense to put a disclaimer on there, not just from a legal perspective, but to actively discourage those users who haven't made up their mind already? While people absolutely can use their software for pirating content—which is in open debate about the ethics—I've known very few individuals who torrent to actually profit from others material, but I know of plenty anti-piracy advocates who use stolen content for profit.

I've also known bucketloads of people that have paid $50+ for a movie in the theater or $10+ for a rental at home, only realize how badly they were duped by the industry to give money for something that was practically garbage, which they ended up not watching anyway yet the purchase was nonrefundable, which unfortunately happens several times because of all the fake interest in something actually being advertising, which appeals to their desire to fit in. It is often very exploitative.

I've also known a descent amount of people that discovered content they found joy in by torrenting, maybe at the time being depressed... struggling to get out of bed or find inspiration, and as a result improved their condition to become pretty big supporters of those who made that content later on, which they would then gladly pay for thereafter.

Seriously, any actual good artist I've known usually would be the first to encourage someone to pirate their content because they understand that the people that like it will support them, and the people that don't... they have no desire to exploit them.

Like you can claim people shouldn't shoot up heroine, while still giving them clean needles if they're still going to do it.
by thunky | 2025-08-30 00:58:35+00:00
> It's really hard to know what/how to even describe real problems to these tools

I would argue that if you can't describe the problem in plain language then you don't have a very good chance of solving it with code or otherwise.

Personally I find that the act of describing the problem will often reveal a good solution...then it's just a matter of seeing if the LLM agrees with me or if it has a difference idea (for better or worse).