MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nextaccountic | 2025-09-13 22:00:30+00:00
This syncopanthic, enthusiastic tone and vocabulary is specific of chatbots of current vintage. It happens because during training the model was evaluated by human feedback (RLHF), and supposedly humans like it more when ai pampers them https://www.anthropic.com/research/towards-understanding-syc...

Think of it like the text version of jpeg artifacts. Or, to make a comparison to image models, it's like "ai hands" (but note that recent image models are much better at drawing hands)

There's research to stop this syncophantic behavior https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/ so it's likely that in the future, systems won't have this specific flaw (or at least not as glaring). However they may have their own artifacts
by sodapopcan | 2025-09-13 22:00:33+00:00
I don't really have any experience with the JVM other than playing with Clojure. I don't have much to add to the other answers. Two things of note:

- BEAM trades slow CPU in favour of fast IO, so it's not great for number crunching. - While it can be great for CLI utilities, the VM (although very lightweight) does have a noticeable startup time. It's under a second but it's not a good fit for something you would want to run often, ie, if you were building something like git.

As mentioned in other comments, its super power is its concurrency model. I've essentially forgotten what a mutex or semaphore or whatthaveyou is :)
by DaveZale | 2025-09-13 22:02:05+00:00
"older Anericans can't afford to retire" is a generalization. It's all about your expenses, your savings and your debt.

A better generalization might be "Americans tend to be slaves to debt" - which is true for up to half of homeowners. I am not sure what %age is in credit card debt, student loan debt, but those are very common for younger people.

Want to be truly free? Don't work for bankers (unless you are paid by them).
by Animats | 2025-09-13 22:02:40+00:00
Regardless of the technology the big thing Rust has that C++ does not is safety culture, and that's dominant here.

True. So many proposals have gone by over the years. Here's one of mine from 2001.[1] Bad idea. The layers of cruft in C++ have become so deep that it's a career just to understand them.

DARPA has something called the TRACTOR program, "Translate All C to Rust". It's been underway for a year, and they have a consortium of universities working on it. Not much, if anything, has come out. Disappointing.

Rust is probably too hard. I write 100% safe Rust, and there are times when I hit an ownership structure wall and have to spend several days re-planning. So far I've always succeeded without using "unsafe" or indices, but it drags down productivity.

Although object-oriented programming is out of fashion, classes with inheritance are useful. It's really hard to do something comparable in Rust. Traits are not that helpful for this.

Go is a good compromise. Safety at a minor cost in performance. Go is good enough for web back end stuff. Go has both GC and "green threads". This automates the problems that wear people down in C++ and Rust.

[1] https://www.animats.com/papers/languages/cppstrictpointers.h...
by pdonis | 2025-09-13 22:02:42+00:00
> "only 22" doesn't mean they have to be hesitant about making pronouncements about the whole human life.

Yes, it does, because he has a lot more life ahead of him, and he doesn't know what it will be like. Lots of pronouncements I would have made at 22, if I hadn't had the humility to refrain from making them, would have been wrong. Even now, not far from four decades older than 22, I'm still hesitant.

> It's our life, anyone can talk about it.

Anyone can talk about the life they've already experienced, sure. But making pronouncements about a whole human life is going way beyond that. See above.
by jvican | 2025-09-13 22:04:15+00:00
Regardless of how they might feel, they're still Spanish (hold a Spanish passport), so it's a true fact. I also take issue with you claiming that all Catalans feel this way, that's largely untrue.

That being said, both terms "Castilian Spanish" and "Catalan Spanish" sound weird to me. Source: I'm both a Catalan and Spanish speaker. In my languages, they're both referred as "Castellano" o "Catalan".

I'd appreciate that people referred to these languages either as Catalan or Spanish, no need for unnecessary qualifiers. (Spanish is, unlike English, a completely centralized language. No need to make geographical distinctions.)
by hollerith | 2025-09-13 22:04:19+00:00
Your pdf is mostly about the 1870s and later. (Although it does mention the Tokugawa period, which began in 1603, it seems to do so for quite tangential reason.)

In contrast, people in East Asia started cultivating rice 9,000 years ago, and modern Japanese are probably mostly descended from these early rice farmers (who started out in China, then spread to Korea and then Japan) with a substantial contribution from another population called Jomon, which were already in Japan when the heavily-rice-dependent people started to arrive in Japan about 2,300 years ago and who lived mostly by hunting and gathering.

This is relevant because some people here are advocating for everyone to adopt a Japanese-like diet, which might not turn out so well for you unless most your ancestors have 8,000 or 9,000 years of experience getting most of their calories from grains.
by lazide | 2025-09-13 22:04:49+00:00
Also, having lived in Asia before - Americans are totally amateur racists compared to Asians (well, east, southeast, and south anyway. Never lived in Central Asia).

Those aunties and uncles can discriminate you down to damn near the block you came from, even if it was on the other side of the planet, and tell everyone exactly why you’re a bad idea for reasons even you didn’t know about.

Signed, your good little gwailou.
by GoatInGrey | 2025-09-13 22:05:24+00:00
I'm unsure if this also qualifies as incompetence/embryonic understanding, though I've used LLMs for hundreds of hours on development tasks and have also found that sub-agents are not good at programming. They're more suitable for research tasks to provide informed context to the parent agent while isolating it from the token consumption which retrieving that context cost.

Zooming out, my findings on LLMs with programming is that they work well in specific patterns and quickly go to shit when completely unsupervised by a SME.

* Prototyping * Scaffolding (i.e. write an endpoint that does X that I'll refine into a sustainable implementation myself) * Questions on the codebase that require open-ended searching * Specific programming questions (i.e. "How do I make an HTTP call in ___ ?") * Idea generation ("List three approaches for how you'd ____" or "How would you refactor this package to separate concerns?")

The LLMs all fuck up on something in every task that they perform due to the intersection of operating on assumptions and working on large problem spaces. The amount of effort it takes to completely eliminate the presence of assumptions in the agent make the process slower than writing the code yourself. So people try to find the balance they're comfortable with.
by archdang | 2025-09-13 22:05:50+00:00
There are quite a few to be found if you look around.

From Wikipedia: On January 4, 2021 (the day before the Capitol attack), Kirk tweeted that Turning Point Action and Students for Trump were sending more than 80 “buses of patriots” to Washington, D.C. to “fight for this president.”

On March 21st 2024, he called for the whipping and using rubber bullets and lethal force on migrants at the southern border.

Sounds plenty violent to me. I'd have to agree with those who say there are grounds for seeing Kirk as someone who frequently advocated for violence.
by majormajor | 2025-09-13 22:06:02+00:00
Phones exaggerate textures and flatten lighting, so when shooting at similar angles I like some of these things:

- challenging lighting. The phone will give you a more legible out-of-the-box processing, but is there a better photo if you let the background be blown out, or the foreground be in deep shadow?

- shots with textured things where the difference between the "sweater effect" sharpening and "natural" texture becomes apparent in a "reduce the eye strain from everything being hyper-sharpened" way

- night shots generally - it's been nearly ten years since long-exposure-blur-reduction night modes on phones, and they have a very specific look that's pretty different and generally fairly artificial when you see alternatives

- high shutter speed / motion - especially in lower lighting where the phone is gonna choose less noise

- cropping; make use of the bigger sensor and more pixels compared to the phone

lightroom and similar other tools with modern noise reduction systems go along way to get wow-factor out of handheld high-iso raw files compared to camera stabilization/processing
by dismalaf | 2025-09-13 22:06:42+00:00
Maintainers owe users absolutely nothing.

This is how open source was back in the day:

- Someone puts code out there

- You fork, then use code. Maybe you change it, put it out there

- Someone forks it back if they like the changes

That's it. No one owes anyone a single thing except following the terms of the license.

Want a change? Do it your self, pay up, or fuck off and wait for someone else to maybe do it, or not do it at all, depending on how they feel.
by godelski | 2025-09-13 22:06:43+00:00
That story had a profound impact on me when I read it as a kid. It encouraged me to learn for the sake of learning and to not get worked up over some test result. Many times the test is measuring something different than you think, than even the testers think. It encouraged me to look at things differently, so find more depth. To realize that to make things different you also have to do things differently.

Reading again as I've become older I can see Asimov's call to fix education in the US and how much he resented the growing anti-scientific movements. As a child I thought it would be cool to belong to this elite group of "tape makers" (people who create knowledge)[0]. But as an adult I realized the naivety and grotesqueness of a society constructed in such a way. It is inhumane because it turns man into machine, with only a few being allowed to even be given the chance to explore the world around them.

It's a really good read. I highly recommend. It's old Sci-Fi, so can be rough, but I feel it has aged well. It's under 50 pages, so easy to finish in a single sitting. It's in Asimov's "The Complete Stories Vol I" if you find a copy, but you can find it online or I believe it is also in "The Asimov Chronicles". It's also HN, so I hope everyone knows ways to get those...

Btw, the Wiki[1] has spoilers. Do not read the paragraph starting with "Suddenly a stranger appears" nor the one that follows. Here's a short non-spoiler version instead: In the 66th century, school doesn't exist and instead people are educated through a direct download into their brain. They learn to read at 8 and are fully educated at 18, allowing them to live their lives as children do. Our protagonist, George, differs than his peers, being a nerd and using his new found ability to read to read whatever he can get his hands on. At 18, children are fully educated, tested, and then assigned careers by their aptitudes. George stands out, his test results suggest he is mentally challenged, is not given a designated career, and thus is not allowed to be further educated. Not being fit for any career or education, they commit him to psychiatric ward where he'll live out the rest of his days.

[0] In some sense I still do. I have a deep passion for research and my dream job would be somebody giving me money to just explore my ideas. Probably not too far off from what people imagine a tenured professor does, though that's quite different from what one actually does.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella)
by iKlsR | 2025-09-13 22:06:49+00:00
I love using AI to prototype that something is possible then go and build it myself while borrowing bits from that initial MVP. The other night I wanted to build a browser extension that could intercept requests from a tab, claude got me something working in about 10 minutes with a couple prompts and a local storage session and then I toyed with the UI a bit to see what was possible.

Now after a weekend morning I have something much slimmer, predictable and sophisticated running... my extension shows a list of repeated responses and I can toggle which one to send to a localhost api that has a simple job queue to update a sqlite db with each new entry, extract the important parts and send it to my lm studio gpt oss 20b endpoint for some analysis and finally and send me a summary on telegram.

I know what I want in my head but cutting down the experimenting or PoC step down to minutes vs hours is pretty useful and as a competent enough dev it's elevated what I can get done now so I can take on more work than I would have by myself previously.
Show HN: Another note-taking app? My first built app
by markpGN | 2025-09-13 22:07:12+00:00
Finally I was able to build an app for the first time. Its not that fancy but it works for me at least.

It is a note-taking app. (I know its always been this app)

I built this using Google Ai Studio which I accidentally stumbled upon on and I was just blown away. I have tried other tools like bolt, lovable but man Google did amazing on this.

I am always looking for a note taking app that is simple but functional. Not too many clutter or confusing commands.

I just exported the files from Google AI Studio and made a repo on github though right now it is private but let me know your thoughts about it.

I am open to any comments or suggestions or bug fixes. Thank you!

For more details: https://graphnotesapp.carrd.co/
by schoen | 2025-09-13 22:07:26+00:00
While Catalan speakers would be very unlikely to say "Catalan Spanish", there is a conception that there are many "lenguas españolas" (Spanish languages, as in languages that are part of the country of Spain). In this formulation even Basque is a "Spanish language" (as a language of Spain), even though it isn't linguistically related to Castilian Spanish.

Notably, the constitution of Spain uses this phrasing in its article 3:

1. El castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado. Todos los españoles tienen el deber de conocerla y el derecho a usarla.

2. Las demás lenguas españolas serán también oficiales en las respectivas Comunidades Autónomas de acuerdo con sus Estatutos.

3. La riqueza de las distintas modalidades lingüísticas de España es un patrimonio cultural que será objeto de especial respeto y protección.

In English:

1. Castilian is the official Spanish language of the state. All Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it.

2. The other Spanish languages are also official in their respective Autonomous Communities, in accordance with their Statutes.

3. The richness of the different linguistic modalities of Spain is a cultural heritage which shall be accorded particular respect and protection.

I've heard a minority of (seemingly highly educated) people prefer to say "Castellano" instead of "Español", maybe as a deliberate reference to this concept.
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-13 22:07:38+00:00
This is a frequent challenge when following breaking news.

I similarly delayed accepting Charlie Kirk had actually died because the only source I could find was President Trump (and news sources reporting Charlie Kirk's death that, ultimately, seemed to be using President Trump as a source).

Since President Trump is an extremely-well-documented liar, this was not a reliable source. It can be hard to figure out the source for news like this, since news outlets are not in the habit of doing well-disciplined source citation or summarizing sources to make it easy to identify them (in contrast to, say, a research publication).
by torginus | 2025-09-13 22:08:04+00:00
Imo, deepending on the desired quality of the result and the amount and complexity of bespoke requirements, the more of the former are present, the more strongly I consider rolling something bespoke.

With out-of-the-box libraries, the more custom requirements I have, the more trouble I tend to have supporting them, and trying to make something do a thing it wasn't designed for, can erase initial gains very quickly. At least this has been my experience over the years.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-13 22:10:26+00:00
I used it when it was called Ritalin. It interacts with alcohol, too. Interesting stuff (not exactly the same stuff, but damn similar).

A lot of it. Other stuff, too, that makes it look like a cup of weak tea, but it’s been 45 years.

I’m pretty familiar with the illusion of productivity.
by LadyCailin | 2025-09-13 22:11:18+00:00
Something similar happened to me in college. I got to my class late, and there was only one seat left, in the middle of the row in the large auditorium, so I had to make a big commotion getting to it. I finally sit down and pull out my notes, only to realize that whatever this substitute teacher was talking about was totally Greek to me. After a while, it dawned on me - I wasn’t late for class, I was super early! Since I made such a commotion getting to the seat, and since I didn’t want to do that again, I just sat there and pretended to take notes. My class was the one after, and I left the room when everyone else did, went to the bathroom, then came back, just so no one would notice that I was going to the much more junior class right after. :D
by WJW | 2025-09-13 22:11:33+00:00
Short answer: no.

Slightly longer answer: no, because Ruby as a language isn't designed to be JIT friendly. Any web request in my rails app could theoretically add new functions to any other class, in ways that would just not work in most other languages. This wreaks havoc on JIT compilers, because they constantly need to check if the assumptions they made when compiling certain bits of code still hold or if the entire world has shifted out from underneath them. This is a super beloved aspect of Ruby, but is just not JIT friendly.
by ornornor | 2025-09-13 22:12:02+00:00
I’m so envious people get such good ideas. I always come up empty when trying to invent something that is enjoyable to use, fun, funny, partly an art project, partly making us question ourselves and our habits… Of you want a piece of that feeling: https://anycrap.shop/product/regrets-for-what-could-have-bee...

Could you walk us through the process of coming up with the idea for this website?
by fluoridation | 2025-09-13 22:12:29+00:00
>Consider what happens if you are overenthusiastic and try to move your core filesystem into userspace. What does the OS do if your filesystem process segfaults? Probably it can't do anything at that point beyond block everything and try to restart it? But every process then lost its connection to the FS server and so all the file handles are suddenly invalidated, meaning every process crashes. You might as well just panic and reboot, so, it might as well stay in the kernel.

I mean, it's not necessarily true that if a filesystem process crashes, every other process crashes. Depending on the design, each FS process may serve requests for each mountpoint, or for each FS type. That already is a huge boon to stability, especially if you're using experimental FSs. On top of that, I think the broken connection could be salvageable by the server storing handle metadata in the kernel and retrieving it when the kernel revives the process. It's hardly an insurmountable problem.
by AnEro | 2025-09-13 22:13:46+00:00
These people aren't at a funeral, they are online, responding to false glorifications of him. These comments obviously aren't directed at the family but the news publications and media's handling of his passing. If that's not the appropriate space for that criticism when/where is it? Just after the public not ever knowing their real action's in life have moved on with a false glorified image of the person, move on and aren't paying attention anymore?
by majormajor | 2025-09-13 22:15:51+00:00
lotta folks have no work life balance and hardly any money

the majority of people will have average-or-worse results - just definitionally

there are a lot of advantages - of circumstance, of timing, of availability, of placement, of health - that nobody has control over

if someone tells you that you can just grind yourself to generational wealth they're trying to sell you something, don't listen

you can't guarantee yourself success with the right attitude and actions

BUT

you can guarantee yourself failure pretty damn easily with the wrong ones. you don't need to be a workaholic. but you need to be willing to work for what you want. and you need to be willing to work to find what will satisfy you beyond just high scores in bank accounts. there's mental poison on both ends, both will likely leave you bitter and unfulfilled when you don't replicate someone else's tens of millions of dollars by age X
by bbatchelder | 2025-09-13 22:15:58+00:00
I'm just slightly younger than you, but have the exact same sentiment. Hell, even moreso maybe, because what I realized is that "writing code to implement interesting ideas" is not really what I enjoy - it's coming up with the interesting ideas and experimenting with them. I couldn't care less about writing the code - and I only did it because I had to...if I wanted to see my idea come to life.

AI has also been a really good brainstorming partner - especially if you prompt it to disable sycophancy. It will tell you straight up when you are over-engineering something.

It's also wonderful at debugging.

So I just talk to my computer, brainstorm architectures and approaches, create a spec, then let it implement it. If it was a bad idea, we iterate. The iteration loop is so fast that it doesn't matter.

Did you end up regretting a design choice, but normally you'd live with it because so much code would have to be changed? Not with Agentic coding tools - they are great at implementing changes throughout the entire codebase.

And its so easy to branch out to technologies you're not an expert in, and still be really effective as you gain that expertise.

I honestly couldn't be happier than I am right now. And the tools get better every week, sometimes a couple times a week.