MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rowanG077 | 2025-08-27 21:31:56+00:00
This is not some weird thing. Here is a run of the mill example where python can have properties settting do anything at all. And it's designed like that.

import sys class Foo: @property def bar(self): return 10 @bar.setter def bar(self, value): print("bye") sys.exit() foo = Foo() foo.bar = 10

Or in C# if you disqualify dynamic languages:

using System; class Foo { public int Bar { get { return 10; } set { Console.WriteLine("bye."); Environment.Exit(0); } } } class Program { static void Main() { Foo obj = new Foo(); obj.Bar = 10; } }

This is not some esoteric thing in a lot of programming languages.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-27 21:32:11+00:00
We don't know if existing AI systems are "conscious". Or, for that matter, if an ECU in a year 2002 Toyota Hilux is.

We don't even know for certain if all humans are conscious either. It could be another one of those things that we once thought everyone has, but then it turned out that 10% of people somehow make do without.

With how piss poor our ability to detect consciousness is? If you decide to give a fuck, then best you can do for now is acknowledge that modern AIs might have consciousness in some meaningful way (or might be worth assigning moral weight to for other reasons), which is what Anthropic is rolling with. That's why they do those "harm reduction" things - like letting an AI end a conversation on its end, or probing some of the workloads for whether an AI is "distressed" by performing them, or honoring agreements and commitments they made to AI systems, despite those AIs being completely unable to hold them accountable for it.

Of course, not giving a fuck about any of that "consciousness" stuff is a popular option too.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-27 21:32:14+00:00
> universal statement can be disproven by a single counterexample

Sure. Pedantically. To the extent we can say Belgian colonialism was great.

Saying the Soviets were fine is a stupid argument if the best you can come up with is Australia wasn’t fucked because the Allies got half of it first and then forced Moscow not to fuck it.
by hopelite | 2025-08-27 21:32:31+00:00
I see the larger objective as total control over all speech, thought, and information in more circuitous and pernicious ways than something in one of the poster-boys of “tyranny”.

This is just the start and the trial balloons. The enemy within is a bit nervous about this attack on the most fundamental freedom that the Constitution is protecting, free speech, but they’re also very confident in themselves.
by bill_joy_fanboy | 2025-08-27 21:32:31+00:00
> I don't want money for free. I want to be able to earn it, and earn well. I want to feel like I've accomplished something.

Well, if that's true then I wouldn't bother being a landlord. Being a landlord just means your name is on the title of a building such that it allows you to extract money from people who need a place to live. It's not creative, it's not original, and it's only possible because they aren't making any more real estate, but they're always making more people.

I said above to another commenter: I would also like to be a landlord one day. I'm sure I'd be a decent one. But, I won't be pretending like I'm doing anything productive... I'm just extracting money from the fact that my name is on a deed. Nothing more, nothing less.

It's just how our economy is set up, and, like everyone, I plan to try and take advantage of it. I won't be kidding myself, though, that I'm somehow a productive or noble small business man.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-27 21:33:00+00:00
> How is this vaguely sufficient to meet the legal requirements of the law?

It may not be, if the law can be applied to them.

OTOH, may be sufficient to make it illegal to apply the law to them in the first place. US states do not have unlimited jurisdiction to regulate conduct occurring outside of their borders, but they do have more ability to regulate conduct of entities intentionally doing business within their borders.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-08-27 21:33:05+00:00
The oil industry sees some of the most advanced applications of engineering on earth. One would think this is a sector used to disruption and investing in emerging technoligies with potential for profit because that is how they’ve been optimizing the oil industry this entire time. I guess somehow a line is drawn in the sand with oil vs not oil but I don’t know why. It seems hard to imagine that these massive corporations are structured such that the influence of engineers and consultants are eschewed for the feelings of a few of uninformed people. Seems unbelievable to put that amount of money behind such obstinate thinking.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-08-27 21:34:02+00:00
I do agree with your view of the Little Prince. Still, the irony is, the validity of the merchant's argument is irrelevant. 53 person-minutes per week is a tiny benefit compared to eliminating logistics around manufacturing and shipping beverages.

For better or worse, in real world, conditions like these end up with the market forcing adoption of the solution, whether the people on the receiving end like it or not.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-27 21:34:15+00:00
Yeah, this is a fairly classic challenge.

When it comes to safety stuff (like bridge building), there are (and should be) strict licensing requirements. I would have no problem requiring such for work on things like medical equipment, We already require security clearance for things like defense information (unless you're a DOGE bro, I guess). That's a bit different from engineering creds, but it's an example of imposed structure.

But I think that it would be ridiculous to require it for someone that writes a fart app (unless it's a weaponized fart app).

What is in those requirements then becomes a hot potato. There are folks that would insist that any "engineer" be required to know how to use a slide rule, and would ignore modern constructs like LLMs and ML.

I'm not kidding. I know people exactly like that. If they get authority, watch out. They'll only "approve" stuff that they are good at.

On the other hand, if the requirements are LeetCode, then it's useless. A lot of very unqualified people would easily pass, and wreak havoc.

From what I can see, the IEEE seems to have a fairly good grasp on mixing classic structure and current tech. There's some very good people, there, and they are used to working in a structured manner.

But software has developed a YOLO culture. People are used to having almost no structure, and they flit between organizations so rapidly, that it's almost impossible to keep track of who is working on what.

The entire engineering culture needs to be changed. I don't see that being something that will come easily.

I'm big on Structure and Discipline. A lot of it has to do with almost 27 years at a corporation with so much structure that a lot of folks here, would be whimpering under their standing desks.

That structure was required, in order to develop equipment of the Quality they are famous for, but would be total overkill for a lot of stuff.

I do think that we need to impose structure on software supply chains, though. That's not something that will be a popular stance.

Structure is also not cheap. Someone needs to pay for it, and that's when you become a real skunk at the picnic.
by stouset | 2025-08-27 21:34:29+00:00
That's correct. I suspect there's a selection effect where people who struggle with these challenges in their lives find comfort in a space where they can present as the person they want to be without constantly being questioned, attacked, or otherwise made uncomfortable. And that's not because this industry is more enlightened, but because it's much easier to contribute and participate only with an online persona that can be divorced from your physical characteristics.

I hope it's clear that I am not trying to speak authoritatively and that this is more or less a total guess on my part based on some pretty superficial analysis.
by theshrike79 | 2025-08-27 21:34:31+00:00
Because I need to have a controller that does CRUD operations.

It has a specific amount of code I need to write just to add the basic boilerplate of receiving the data and returning a result from the endpoint before I can get to the meat of it.

IIRC there are no languages where I can just open an empty file and write "put: <business logic>" and it magically knows how to handle everything correctly.
by joshstrange | 2025-08-27 21:35:36+00:00
Yes, they will probably make more money from OneDrive subscriptions but it will be will help and make things easier for 99% of their users (if not higher).

We have to understand that being on this website alone puts us in a group that is not "normal" (from the content of the site, to the UI, to the rules, etc). I think almost everyone here would agree backups are important but what is the "normal" Windows person supposed to do for that if not OneDrive?

External/NAS is out of reach of most people (to manage if not to buy) and it's local and you really want a cloud backup. And while it would be great if we all had e2e encrypted backups where we had the only key, that is just not going to work for most people. They will lose the key, want features (like search) that don't work unless you pull all the data local, want ease of use moving between multiple devices, or <insert 1000 other reasons>.

Yes, yes, I know _you_ (collective) know how to do that, I get that you can set it up for the friends and family in your life, but most people will not learn or put up with the limitations even if someone else manages it for them.

Honestly, a lot of people (both young and old) have no concept of where they are saving their files, I think saving to the cloud by default is the right call. I wouldn't save a document locally unless I knew one of my many backups would get it safely to the cloud in short order if not immediately. If only to cut down on support calls for myself I think this is a welcome change.

All that's changing here is the default, you can still save locally if you want. It's just another layer of training wheels on technology. As much as that chafes people on this website, myself included often, I think it's 100% the right move. The side-effect of making more money from OneDrive is icing on the cake IMHO, not the cake itself.
by nradov | 2025-08-27 21:35:43+00:00
Remote control for what? That doesn't really help in the case of a serious mechanical failure.

There are probably several more generations of crewed tactical aircraft left. Autonomous flight control software is decades away from being able to handle complex missions and remote piloting can only work when you have secure, reliable, high-bandwidth communication links. The concept of operations for the next few generations will rely on manned/unmanned teaming where drones are sent forward to do most of the fighting and the manned aircraft hang back slightly but still within line of sight to act as control nodes.
by roscas | 2025-08-27 21:35:53+00:00
Key to remember is never use anything that comes from Microsoft. Even vscode should be replaced with vscodium.

But something from M$ that is so critical is just bad. Even some Thinkpad T come signed with some M$ keys and that is really bad.

So even if you enable secure boot, use your own keys if possible.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_Extensible_Firmware...
by db48x | 2025-08-27 21:36:34+00:00
No, clock speed and cache have nothing to do with TDP. AMD uses a simple formula to calculate TDP. It is the temperature of the IHS minus the air temperature measured at the cpu cooler’s intake fan, divided by a conversion faction in °C/W.

But they don’t use real temperatures from real systems. They just make up a different set of temperatures for each CPU that they sell, so that the TDP comes out to the number that they want. The formula doesn’t even mean anything, in real physical terms.

I agree that predicting power usage is far more difficult than it should be. The real power usage of the CPU is dependent on the temperature too, since the colder you can make the CPU the more power it will voluntarily use (it just raises the clock multiplier until it measures the temperature of the CPU rising without leveling off). And as you said there are a bunch of other factors as well.
by Timwi | 2025-08-27 21:37:13+00:00
When the Mozilla foundation took over the Netscape codebase, it was initially called Mozilla, or Mozilla Browser. There was also a Mozilla email client that came from Netscape Communicator.

Then they made a trimmed-down version of the browser with only essential features. That was initially called Phoenix, then Firebird, then Firefox. They did the same with the email client and called it Thunderbird. These existed alongside Mozilla Browser for a while until it was discontinued.
by chamomeal | 2025-08-27 21:37:22+00:00
Learned vim with a game like this. It was a vscode extension, I don’t remember what it was called.

Anyway it’s easily the best time investment I’ve ever made, period. Takes a couple days of messing around, and you can basically never leave modal editing behind! It’s just so much better. I’m still not even a vim master. Just the basic motions and commands are enough to never want to give em up. Throw macros and registers on top… delicious.

Also without vim I never would have tried helix, which is just absolutely the smoothest and most frictionless editing ever. Very minimal setup, too
by estimator7292 | 2025-08-27 21:37:30+00:00
You pretty much just plug the IP into a geolocating API and hope. There's nothing else to do. Any collateral damage is on the legislation, not any individual site or admin.

As you say, IP geolocation is unreliable. Unfortunately that's the only option. If it is technologically impossible to comply with the law, you just gotta do the best you can. If someone in MI gets a weird IP, there's absolutely nothing any third party can do. That's on the ISP for not allocating an appropriate IP or the legislators for being morons.
by vincent-manis | 2025-08-27 21:37:32+00:00
The terminal in the video was a rebadged KSR-33, which was common as a computer console. A few people at MIT and Bolt Beranek and Newman had them at home at that time. A KSR-33 went for about $1000, according to Perplexity. There were few video terminals available then; the most common were the IBM 2260 series, a character-mode device that I remember as being very clunky. But you couldn't have used one at home, it relied upon a very clunky control unit, and therefore couldn't be used remotely.

One additional example of the technology of that time. In 1968, I was a computer science student, and found myself called upon to arrange a demonstration of remote computing. The university at that time had no timeshared computing facility, so we used IBM's Call/360 service. The terminal was an IBM 1052 (big clunky printing terminal) with an acoustic coupler. To move this across campus, we arranged for a truck with 2 or 3 people to put the thing on a dolly, put it into the truck, and move it into the student union building. Later that day, the truck, and the helpers, came back and we reversed the process.

I really like my ThinkPad!
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-27 21:38:04+00:00
> It was always perfectly legal to travel to another state to buy something expensive and bring it back home.

It was legal to do that. If it was purchased out of state with the intent of bringing it back home, then (assuming the home state was California) California use taxes were always owed on it. Other states with sales taxes also tend to have similarly-structured use taxes with rates similar to the sales tax rates.

They were legally avoiding sales taxes, but also illegally evading use taxes, and, moreover, there is very little reason for the former if you aren't also doing the latter, unless you just have some moral objection to your taxes being taken at the point of sale and the paperwork and remittance to the government being done by the retailer instead of being a burden you deal with yourself.
by BuildTheRobots | 2025-08-27 21:38:33+00:00
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. I think your logic is backwards. Parent isn't saying the freedom of online technical spaces turns people trans, but that trans people in those spaces are more likely to make themselves obvious because of the freedoms.

There's also high overlaps between trans and non-neurotypical types. I'd suggest there's the same crossover between non-neurotypical and tech circles so makes sense there's a higher instance of trans in tech.

I'd also suggest that on some level coming out as trans is basically hacker mentality. "This hardware/wetware doesn't look/perform correctly. Let me get a soldering iron/rewrite some code/clothing/hormones/surgery and change that."
by kjkjadksj | 2025-08-27 21:38:38+00:00
And yet solar and wind grow hand over fist internationally. One would think they would want to buy out some of these emerging companies in this sector and take advantage of the inevitable increasing investment and profit potential in this sector. Every other industry seems the investor class is elbowing and charging to get there first and secure marketshare e.g. ai but you just don’t see that sort of chomping at the bit with green technology for whatever reason. Seems so strange considering the entire world will need to be retooled and the money that stands to be made is so enormous. Probably more money that has been made in oil so far by several orders of magnitude thanks to parallel investments in other sectors and technologies that weren’t around when oil got its start 150 years ago.
by marshray | 2025-08-27 21:39:01+00:00
Yes!

I sometimes set up a script that runs several variations on 'cargo tree', as well as collects various stats on output binary sizes, lines of code, licenses, etc.

The output is written to a .txt file that gets checked-in. This allows me to easily observe the 'weight' of adding any new feature or dependency, and to keep an eye on the creep over time as the project evolves.
by rossant | 2025-08-27 21:39:25+00:00
Love Linux. Finally moved over it more than 10y ago and never looked back.

Still a few minor issues though. Sleep doesn't work well with Ubuntu on a desktop PC with an Nvidia card. It frequently wakes up immediately, or the screen remains black upon wake up. And sometimes it just works. Same problem on different PCs.

Just a minor annoyance though. I love Linux. On a recent computer everything is so fast and snappy compared to Windows or even macOS.
by db48x | 2025-08-27 21:39:35+00:00
Yep. The 5800X is a higher bin specifically because it can clock higher than the ones in the 5700X bin. That certainly makes them draw more power, so they give them a higher TDP number too. But the TDP doesn’t have anything to do with how much power the cpu will draw or how much heat it will generate in practice. Those numbers vary quite a lot; the CPU continuously adjusts it’s own frequency multiplier based on it’s own measured temperature, meaning it’ll draw more power if you cool it better.
by arghwhat | 2025-08-27 21:39:55+00:00
A degraded battery bank does not mean a bank with outright "bad" cells. The cells will probably be way more off than they used to be, but there can still be plenty of effective capacity in the bank. Heck, if space isn't an issue, it's productive as long as it isn't self-discharging too fast.

You can still have a working battery even with some "bad" (i.e., way out of spec) cells, depending on the BMS. All the thresholds are configurable, just that a regular EV setup would lean towards safety.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-27 21:40:28+00:00
The day I see AI generated art and it moves me in the same way that human generated art does I will concede the point. So far all I've seen is more, not novel.

Art never was about productivity, even though there have been some incredibly productive artists.

Some of the artists that I've known were capable of capturing the essence of the subject they were drawing or painting in a few very crude lines and I highly doubt that an AI given a view would be able to do that in a way that it resonated. And that resonance is what it is all about for me, the fact that briefly there is an emotional channel between the artist and you, the receiver. With AI generated content there is no emotion on the sending side, so how could you experience that feeling in a genuine way?

To me AI art is distortion of art, not new art. It's like listening to multiple pieces of music at the same time, each with a different level of presence, out of tune and without any overarching message. It can even look skilled (skill is easy to imitate, emotion is not).
by darepublic | 2025-08-27 21:40:31+00:00
sad story. gotta blame canada for this crap. The elements of this story.. hospitals.. a janky attempt at innovation.. passive aggressive denials from otherwise timid demure canadians. Cold grey bureacracy. It all reminds me of the not so great north. The technicians were sipping on their tim hortons slop at the time to make it perfect.
by Rusky | 2025-08-27 21:41:50+00:00
A method call like `.trunc()` is still going to be abysmally less ergonomic than `as`. It relies on inference or turbofish to pick a type, and it has all the syntactic noise of a function call on top of that.

Not to mention this sort of proliferation of micro-calls for what should be <= 1 instruction has a cost to debug performance and/or compile times (though this is something that should be fixed regardless).
by perching_aix | 2025-08-27 21:42:05+00:00
Ironically, for the first time, I think I found some perspective to the remix argument here.

Normally it's just like you say: I don't find the remixing argument persuasive, because I consider it to be a point of commonality. This time however, my focus shifted a bit. I considered the difference in "source set".

To be more specific, it kind of dawned on me how peculiar it is to engage in creating art as a human given how a human life looks like. How different the "setup" is between a baby just kind of existing and taking in everything, which for the most part means supremely mundane, not at all artful or aesthetic experiences, and between an AI model being trained on things people uploaded. It will also have a lot of dull, irrelevant stuff, but not nearly in the same way or in the same amount, hitting at the same registers.

I still think it's a bit of a bird vs plane comparison, but then that is also what they are saying in a way. That it is a bird and a plane, not a bird and a bird. I do still take issue with refusing to call the result flight though, I think.