MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by troupo | 2025-08-12 20:15:13+00:00
And the chance of that working depends on the weather, the phase of the moon and the arrangement of bird bones in a druidic augury.

It's a non-deterministic system producing statistically relevant results with no failure modes.

I had Cursor one-shot issues in internal libraries with zero rules.

And then suggest I use StringBuilder (Java) in a 100% Elixir project with carefully curated cursor rules as suggested by the latest shamanic ritual trends.
by EGreg | 2025-08-12 20:15:26+00:00
There are certain things I am sure of even though I derived them on my own.

But I constantly battle tested them against other smart people’s views, and just after I ran out of people to bring me new rational objections did I become sure.

Now I can battle test them against LLMs.

On a lesser level of confidence, I have also found a lot of times the people who disagreed with what I thought had to be the case, later came to regret it because their strategies ended up in failure and they told me they regretted not taking my recommendation. But that is on an individual level. I have gotten pretty good at seeing systemic problems, architecting systemic solutions, and realizing what it would take to get them adopted to at least a critical mass. Usually, they fly in the face of what happens normally in society. People don’t see how their strategies and lives are shaped by the technology and social norms around them.

Here, I will share three examples:

Public Health: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

Economic and Governmental: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362

Wars & Destruction: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=424

For that last one, I am often proven somewhat wrong by right-wing war hawks, because my left-leaning anti-war stance is about avoiding inflicting large scale misery on populations, but the war hawks go through with it anyway and wind up defeating their geopolitical enemies and gaining ground as the conflict fades into history.
by HackerThemAll | 2025-08-12 20:15:33+00:00
What people seem to miss very hard is that they get interactive chat mode of all the models, including the best and newest (Gemini 2.5 Pro, 2.5 Flash, 2.5 Flash Lite and older) totally for free. I mean when working from chat at https://aistudio.google.com/ the entire 1M context window and all is totally free of charge. You really get a very good AI for nothing.

https://i.imgur.com/pgfRrZY.png
by uecker | 2025-08-12 20:15:58+00:00
They sometimes screwed up, sometimes just because of bugs, or because different optimization passes had different assumptions that are inconsistent. This somehow contradicts your second point. Compiler have something things implemented which may be concrete on some sense (because it is in a compiler), but still not really a "thing" because it is a mess nobody can formalize using a coherent set of rules.

But then, they also sometimes misread the standard in ways I can't really understand. This often can be seen when the "interpretation" changes over time. Earlier compilers (or even earlier parts of the same compiler) implement the standard as written, some new optimization pass has some creative interpretation.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-12 20:16:27+00:00
> Porn peddlers would probably pinky-promise not to disobey the user-agent and expose the kids to the content (and get them while they're young).

We're talking about a law. If you distribute pornography to someone who sent the header in that request, it would be a violation of the law. But that law doesn't have any ID requirements or privacy problems, unlike the proposed one.

> However, as we have already seen, asking nicely in the HTTP headers doesn't actually work, it may even help porn peddlers better target children.

To begin with, "targeting children" is preposterous. It assumes that they would not only not care but prefer to have children as users than adults, even though children are less likely to have access to money to pay for content/subscriptions and purposely targeting children would get them into trouble even under longstanding existing laws.

On top of that, the header isn't specifying that the user is under 18, it's specifying that the user agent is requesting not to be shown pornography. It's as likely to be set when the user is a 45 year old woman as a 14 year old boy, so using it to distinguish between them wouldn't work anyway.
by topspin | 2025-08-12 20:16:44+00:00
> It is non-trivial additional work to add since these are high frequency signals.

And there it is. Yes, PCI-E 3.0 from 2010, 15 years ago, involves 4 GHz wire level signals. A 4x PCI-E connector has four differential pairs of this, not cross-talking, not violating EMC limits, etc. This requires excellent layout and high quality PCBs with enough layers.

Never mind 4.0, 5.0...

People just do not appreciate what their expectations entail. A recent discussion about "soldered" RAM in the Framework Desktop thread illustrates this, where someone just can't accept that there are reasons for the things board designers do. After you get done routing the display connector, multiple ethernet, USB, DRAM and all the other high frequency stuff on a couple square inches of low cost PCB, there isn't much room for the stretch goal of PCI-E good enough to get through EMI testing.

It is possible. Raspberry Pi did it. But it's a question of cost, talent and time-to-market.
by eswat | 2025-08-12 20:16:54+00:00
Seoul is similar. Many Twosome Places have study desks and some of the chains known for small footprint also have bigger locations for meetings and work (Ediya Coffee Lab).

I never understood why people who are frugal would go to Starbucks in Korea to work, when local chains are beside them, have cheaper drinks and their desk/chair setups are less hostile to working.
by paxys | 2025-08-12 20:16:57+00:00
Meta "bought" Alex Wang for $14.3B.

Ilya Sutskever's "business" (really his skillset/personal brand) was worth $1B+ the minute he stepped away from OpenAI.

Joe Rogan could fire all his staff and there would still be companies lining up around the block to buy his podcast for $1B+.

There are many such examples of a person having something or being something that is worth a lot to someone else, to the tune of billions.

So by that metric a one-person billion dollar company has already been achieved. What remains are the technicalities (does it need to be incorporated, does it need to have revenue, does it need to operate as a traditional business).
by arduanika | 2025-08-12 20:17:00+00:00
Oh come on.

Anyone who's ever seen the sky knows it's blue. Anyone who's spent much time around rationalism knows the premise of this article is real. It would make zero sense to ban talking about about a serious and obvious problem in their community until some double blind peer reviewed data can be gathered.

It would be what they call an "isolated demand for rigor".
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-12 20:17:46+00:00
Neuralink is pretty far along, with actual humans wearing their hardware inside their body. It’ll be a while before Altman gets anywhere. I also find him to be a lot less trustworthy than Musk. Whatever you think of Musk’s politics or his track record of exaggerating what his companies build, he did give the world Tesla and SpaceX and has also surprisingly now come out as a big critic of the current administration for wasteful spending. If I were to have a medical product inserted into my body, it would be easier to choose Musk between the two of them. I have an uneasy feeling about Sam Altman and his motivations. Interviews he’s taken on AI only bolster my feelings, as he seems to dodge every direct question.
by throw0101a | 2025-08-12 20:18:01+00:00
> The first SSH server that chose it was TinySSH.

Yes, I know. I mention this timeline in another one of my comments:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866802

> I use this in a variety of ways, thousands of logins per day. I don't see much love for AES.

So? Given its focus on low(er)-performance systems, perhaps on chips without AES-NI, it's no surprise that TinySSH does not have AES. Further, Dropbear, another implementation often used on smaller footprints, does have AES and recently added ML-KEM:

* https://github.com/mkj/dropbear/commit/1748ccae5090d511753c0...

PuTTY added ML-KEM in 0.83 earlier this year. So I'm not sure how talking about a niche SSH implementation supports your claim that "there will be great preference in the community for Bernstein's NTRU Prime."

The evidence appears to me that implementation have been adding NIST's choice(s) since they have become available.
by const_cast | 2025-08-12 20:18:12+00:00
Ive had this theory about the US economy for a while. There's mover, and makers. The movers just move money around, making nothing productive. The makers are what actually construct the world we live in and the services we use.

The US has a lot of movers, not enough makers. Our GDP is essentially propped up by fake jobs that do nothing. Of course we are a service economy, but a lot of this isn't even services, it's just move thing A to thing B then move it back and make money doing that. It would make sense if we're physically moving stuff - but we're not. We're just moving money back and forth.
by ryzvonusef | 2025-08-12 20:18:14+00:00
> We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes. > These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe. > This dissonance shows up everywhere. Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors. For many, this has become second nature — an instinct for academic and professional self-preservation.
by nancyminusone | 2025-08-12 20:18:21+00:00
>A pile of jumperwires, breadboards and devices don't make a good hero image

I strongly disagree! Hardware people love seeing that sort of thing - the more guts you show, the better. It means you've gotten something to work and probably know what you're talking about. Take pride in what you have accomplished so far! Ideas and concepts are a dime a dozen; working hardware is a worthy milestone.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-12 20:18:31+00:00
Curiously, in what no academic could have predicted, millions of people interact with a microkernel every day, and it was written by freaking Nintendo of all possible companies. (The Switch is a custom microkernel called Horizon; not FreeBSD, not Linux, not Android.) Almost every other consumer device is monolithic or hybrid.

While the Switch was broken early, this was due to NVIDIA's buggy boot code. The operating system itself... you could literally pwn WebKit or the Bluetooth driver, and get absolutely nowhere. SciresM famously reimplemented the kernel in an open source fashion (Mesosphere) and the secure monitor code (Exosphere), and has publicly stated they have zero possible security bugs in his eyes. That was in 2020 and there have not been any reports of kernel security bugs since.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-12 20:18:33+00:00
That sounds like an FPGA, but aren't those notoriously slow for most uses? You can make a kickass signal pipeline or maybe an emulator but most code gets shunted to an attached arm core or even a soft-core implemented on top that wastes an order of magnitude of performance.

And no architecture is clock limited by driving signals across the die. Why do people keep assuming this? CPU designers are very smart and they break slow things into multiple steps.
by logicprog | 2025-08-12 20:18:40+00:00
Here's an in depth analysis and critique of that study by someone whose job is literally to study programmers psychologically and has experience in sociology studies: https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down-...

Basically, the study has a fuckton of methodological problems that seriously undercut the quality of its findings, and even assuming its findings are correct, if you look closer at the data, it doesn't show what it claims to show regarding developer estimations, and the story of whether it speeds up or slows down developers is actually much more nuanced and precisely mirrors what the developers themselves say in the qualitative quote questionaire, and relatively closely mirrors what the more nuanced people will say here — that it helps with things you're less familiar with, that have scope creep, etc a lot more, but is less or even negatively useful for the opposite scenarios — even in the worst case setting.

Not to mention this is studying a highly specific and rare subset of developers, and they even admit it's a subset that isn't applicable to the whole.
by freeopinion | 2025-08-12 20:19:14+00:00
Too many steps? How is it more steps than submitting an MR or PR today? You have to fork, code a patch, submit a pull request. The difference is just that it happens across forge instances.

You have a point about the review process. How much of a moat do you want around your project? You want to keep spammers out. But that creates hurdles.

I was trying to interact with the Trunk project the other day. But they required me to create accounts on multiple services just to get in the game. When you need a Github account and a Discord account and... You know what? Nevermind. It's too much effort just to be nice and inform you of an issue with your project.

I totally understand that putting a public email address out there creates a huge burden for them. I suppose if I value a product enough I will accept some smaller burden and take the load off them. But most of the time I don't value a product enough to allow the authors to offload their burden onto me. Conversely, they don't value my input enough to accept the huge burden it would take them to allow me to interact with them.
by tshaddox | 2025-08-12 20:19:18+00:00
> - What if there are several paths to different kinds of intelligence with their own local maxima, in which the AI can easily get stuck after optimizing itself into the wrong type of intelligence?

I think what's more plausible is that there is general intelligence, and humans have that, and it's general in the same sense that Turing machines are general, meaning that there is no "higher form" of intelligence that has strictly greater capability. Computation speed, memory capacity, etc. can obviously increase, but those are available to biological general intelligences just like they would be available to electronic general intelligences.
by strange_quark | 2025-08-12 20:19:20+00:00
I'm not sure that the dotcom bubble leaving behind the web means that AI (and by AI I mean LLMs) are going to be transformative in the same way the internet was. Just because it happened once doesn't necessarily mean it's going to happen again.

To be clear, I don't think LLMs are going to vanish, there's clearly some things they're good for, but there's also some really big differences between the AI bubble and the dotcom bubble. People are very skeptical and worried about AI, they (the general public) aren't really using it for anything more than search, there hasn't been any clear economic data indicating that it improves productivity in a meaningful way, and a killer app hasn't really emerged that isn't a free chatbot. Plus, the majority of the money is concentrated in the same 5 or 10 companies just passing it back and forth between each other before eventually handing it over to NVIDIA. Maybe I was just too young to pay attention to the dotcom bubble, but the vibe seems completely different.
by m463 | 2025-08-12 20:19:27+00:00
> arbitrage opportunity

I kind of wonder if something like this will come along for non-enshittified hardware and software.

I keep seeing most companies "getting on the bandwagon", such as printer companies locking their ink refills, hdtv companies collecting viewer and viewing data, and cellphones getting between you and the device you own in just about every way possible.

I can hope.
by TZubiri | 2025-08-12 20:19:37+00:00
"However. Price is king. Allowing me to flood the context window with my code base is great"

I don't vibe code, but in general having to know all of the codebase to be able to do something is a smell, it's spagghetti, it's lack of encapsulation.

When I program I cannot think about the whole database, I have a couple of files open tops and I think about the code in those files.

This issue of having to understand the whole codebase, complaining about abstractions, microservices, and OOP, and wanting everything to be in a "simple" monorepo, or a monolith; is something that I see juniors do, almost exclusively.
by dsr_ | 2025-08-12 20:19:58+00:00
You shouldn't downvote entries that are wrong, you should present evidence against them. People shouldn't feel penalized for being wrong, just not rewarded for it.

However, you should downvote for doing things that hurt the community -- and "I asked ChatGPT" hurts the community almost as much as "I googled this for you" does.
by jsbisviewtiful | 2025-08-12 20:20:24+00:00
There was an article I saw this morning saying only the very top of the S&P 500 are the stocks showing substantive growth in recent years, companies below that have been relatively slow to show growth. Additionally, since the pandemic and Ukraine war started global cost of goods have been rapidly increasing, much faster than they should be. Now with AI, the market in the US is losing a lot of jobs - both entry level and above. The latest US job numbers were so terrible Trump fired someone to try and cover it up.

I'm not sure what else needs to happen to show the economy has been doing poorly for all but the richest segments. The return of a blatant and severe caste system and mass starvation?
by kazinator | 2025-08-12 20:20:46+00:00
> Starbucks South Korea implemented a policy asking patrons to not bring bulky items like desktop computers and printers into stores.

.. says the caption under a Getty image which shows no such thing! No wonder people don't respect the media.

The only reason I would click on this sort of thing would be to see a video or image of Koreans bringing their desktops and printers to a Starbucks and setting them up.

Without that, I can imagine it just fine without relying on any words in the article.

Searching YouTube, I'm not able to find any videos footage of people with desktops that they brought to a Starbucks in South Korea. The story is circulating and there are various new stories in various languages from various news networks, but all have only generic footage unrelated to the story.

I found this 17-year-old prank video (not Koreans): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKEeHREK2nQ

One 7-year-old video (likewise): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBRkRZzCeTo

Ho-hum content. They brought a computer, set it up and sat down.

I'm guessing this Korea thing was probably a very small number of people in specific locations (possibly pranksters) and not a national trend.
by margalabargala | 2025-08-12 20:21:09+00:00
None of these. Even the guy who runs the Primitive Technology youtube channel, building up technology solo from literal sticks and rocks he gathers himself, would not be alone, because he did not too personally manufacture the digital camera he uses to record himself creating these things.

Also, was he not born? Can anyone be said to do anything alone, who did not themselves arise spontaneously from the primordial soup?

/s
by leptons | 2025-08-12 20:21:14+00:00
Apple already lost this exact fight in the EU where they are now forced to let Chrome use its own browser engine. The US lawsuit is definitely about this, as well as many other abusive practices. It's one of many reasons the DOJ is rightly suing them.

You're trying to weasel around the fact that "Super App" is definitely what a native browser app not using Safari is considered to be. The DOJ is explicitly mentioning HTML and Javascript, and you're just handwaving that away.

Good luck to you sir or madame, I don't care to continue this pointless back and forth.
by const_cast | 2025-08-12 20:21:16+00:00
Usually I would say this stuff doesn't matter either way, but when said person is making moral arguments, we can make them back.

Which, by the way, is one reason why moral arguments are stupid and we should stop making them. If you're making moral arguments on a particular subject it's trivial to destroy your argument but just questioning your own personal morality.

We should be making concrete arguments.
by foldr | 2025-08-12 20:21:18+00:00
Mostly just for geographical reasons, no? If you have a free travel area covering a large swathe of continental Europe then it's inevitably going to include mostly EU member states. AFAIK there has never been any substantial objection to Ireland and (formerly) the UK opting out of Schengen, which obviously wouldn't make sense for those countries given where they're located.
by Gibbon1 | 2025-08-12 20:21:24+00:00
What I think is one should question if something is the point of the exercise.

I'd argue that where writing spelling is something completely arbitrary and thus of no fundamental importance. Arithmetic is the same way, lots of algorithms to do that and they are all valid. So calculators and spell checkers are fine. And you should use them.

The same is not true for grammar. Getting AI to write an essay for you.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-12 20:22:21+00:00
A search engine that kept dead entries but maybe put them in an “missing” tab or something would’ve been monstrously useful for me in so many situations. There’s been numerous times I’ve remembered looking at something N years ago only for all but the faintest traces of it to have disappeared from the internet. With a “missing” tab I’d at least have former URLs, page titles, etc to work with (archive.org, etc).
by leptons | 2025-08-12 20:22:57+00:00
Nope, I'm not wrong:

"The central issue was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its IE web browser software with its Windows operating system. Bundling the two products was allegedly a key factor in Microsoft's victory in the browser wars of the late 1990s, as every Windows user had a copy of IE. It was further alleged that this restricted the market for competing web browsers (such as Netscape Navigator or Opera), since it typically took extra time to buy and install the competing browsers."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

Yeah, Windows has a larger market share than Apple ever will, but that doesn't change the abusive business tactics Apple is using to satiate their greed.

When someone installs Chrome on iOS, they aren't getting Chrome, they are getting Safari with a wrapper. It's way worse than what Microsoft did with IE by simply bundling a browser with Windows - was it really so inconvenient to download and install a different browser when downloading and installing software is the de facto means of obtaining and running any software? I think the case against Microsoft was a bit absurd, honestly. And I don't care if Apple's market share is smaller, that isn't the point. They are preventing competition so that they can pocket even more money from developers.

>There are two types of people: those who think the web is an application delivery platform, and those who think it's a window into information.

And yet the web is both of those things. I think it's both, so am I a third type of person? What else are you getting wrong about this?
by dkdcio | 2025-08-12 20:23:05+00:00
> Databricks recently spent $1 billion to acquire Neon, a startup building a serverless Postgres. Snowflake also spent about $250 million to acquire Crunchy Data, a veteran enterprise-grade Postgres provider.

It's kinda funny to not mention that Databricks acquired Tabular, the Iceberg company, for a billion dollars: https://www.databricks.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/d...