MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jackdawed | 2025-09-06 16:13:30+00:00
Small business owners work 997 and you don't see them incessantly posting about it. That's the catch, though. They own the business. Founders can subject themselves to 996 all they want but it's a failure of management to expect that from employees for less than 1% equity.

I took a break from tech to open my own bookstore and I definitely work more hours than when I worked at a pre-IPO $7B startup. I'm way less stressed. At least my bookstore doesn't wake me up at 3am 3 nights in a row, and expect me to come to work the next day.
by k0tan32 | 2025-09-06 16:13:44+00:00
Mind sharing why do you consider Java tooling to be good (and largely, what is good here)?

The reason I ask is that I recently had to join a Java project at my company, and having a background in Node/Rust/Perl/Lua and some C++, I found the Java tooling to be extremely unsuitable for my taste.

A simple example: there is no standard LSP server, and the amount of jumps required to have a working setup with FOSS tools and make it IDE-independent is just horrendous. In every other ecosystem I've worked with so far, it was pretty easy in the last 5 years: if you don't like IDEs, you can keep using your vim/emacs/helix or whatever and just embed a plugin or two, with LSP integrated -- and you're ready to go.

Java world felt complete the opposite, like you had to use/buy some commercial tools to start doing something.
by vluft | 2025-09-06 16:13:59+00:00
that's not mostly what car enthusiasts care about, especially somebody buying a 150k porsche; they care about handling and road feel and a fat pig of an EV will never match a lighter car (well set up) on that; you can't beat physics when you're slinging that much weight; even set up as well as can be, a 5000lb taycan doesn't come close to the handling feel of a 3250lb 911.
by jcgrillo | 2025-09-06 16:14:02+00:00
> For now.

What can incremental progress do to make a camera see through road salt deposited on its lens? I call bullshit. There isn't any incremental path because it's not physically possible. The photons are stopped by the salt. No amount of "AI" or what the fuck ever else will change this. There is no path towards "progress" here.
by tombert | 2025-09-06 16:14:05+00:00
I am arguing that they aren’t improving their skills in any regard, including how to properly use the tools they already pretend to know. They don’t go “deep” or “broad”, they don’t learn anything more than what they were taught in university.

I have had to debug a lot of concurrent Java, so my opinions are skewed towards that, but I have seen cases where “staff engineers” label every single function as `synchronized`, who genuinely don’t know why you would use a queue, have no concept of thread starvation or fairness, when to use an atomic instead of a mutex, and genuinely do not seem to understand that for network applications it’s generally more important to figure out how to reduce latency than trying to choose the optimal hashmap or sort implementation. These aren’t arcane details that require a PhD in category theory or require being constantly plugged into hacker news, these are extremely basic things that these Java engineers do not know.

I think most Java engineers, like more professionals in general, are very bad at their jobs. I think Java just selection-biases higher than other languages for people who are bad at their jobs.
by dataviz1000 | 2025-09-06 16:14:34+00:00
> Getting customers to pay for the weights

Provide the weights as an add-on for customers who pay for hardware to run them. The customers will be paying for weights + hardware. I think it is the same model as buying the hardware and get the macOS for free. Apple spends $35B a year in R&D. Training GPT5 cost ~$500M. It is a nothing burger for Apple to create a model that runs locally on their hardware.
by nerdsniper | 2025-09-06 16:15:33+00:00
Those don’t apply to public spaces in the USA. This is super well-established law. If you needed consent to record in public there would be nearly zero YouTube videos recorded in public. And security cameras would generally not be allowed to record audio. And Tesla’s “Sentry mode” would be illegal.

In the USA, there is no right or legal expectation of privacy in public spaces, which includes fast food restaurants that are open to the public (indoors or outdoors)

Edit: Another commenter has made me aware that some states do ban non-consensual audio recordings in public: https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/massachusetts-recording-law

The laws prohibiting these recordings have neither been upheld nor overturned by the US Supreme Court.
by lostdog | 2025-09-06 16:15:41+00:00
It gets super frustrating to have to empty/null check fields everywhere you use them, especially for fields that are effectively required for the message to make sense.

A very common example I see is Vec3 (just x, y, z). In proto2 you should be checking for the presence of x,y,z every time you use them, and when you do that in math equations, the incessant existence checks completely obscure the math. Really, you want to validate the presence of these fields during the parse. But in practice, what I see is either just assuming the fields exist in code and crashing on null, or admitting that protos are too clunky to use, and immediately converting every proto into a mirror internal type. It really feels like there's a major design gap here.

Don't get me started on the moronic design of proto3, where every time you see Vec3(0,0,0) you get to wonder whether it's the right value or mistakenly unset.
by bwfan123 | 2025-09-06 16:15:47+00:00
I would say the same of the following:

1) crypto: raise funding, buy crypto as collateral, raise more funding with said collateral, rinse and repeat.

2) gpu datacenters: raise funding, buy gpus as collateral, raise more funding, buy more gpus, rinse and repeat.

3) zero day options: average folks want a daily lottery thrill. rinse and repeat.

All of the above are fed by fomo and to some extent hype, and ripe for a reckoning.
by lilerjee | 2025-09-06 16:15:51+00:00
Solving problems is the purpose and focus.

How to solve problems?

The simple, direct, and effective method is good one method sometimes, not all time. For example, use very complicated method to obfuscate code in order to increase the difficulty of cracking, and there are many environments to use complicated code or methods.

So one is the purpose, one is the method.

Do not think "Lower Cognitive Load" is the purpose.

"Lower Cognitive load" is just the by-product sometimes, not the purpose.
by lazide | 2025-09-06 16:15:58+00:00
You know how I can tell you haven’t actually lived in a bad climate?

Both SF and LA climates are super cushy compared to say, Northern Michigan. Or most of the eastern seaboard. Or even Kansas, Wyoming, etc. in the winter.

In those climates, if you don’t drive in what you’re calling ‘nobody should be attempting it’ weather, you - starve to death in your house over the winter. Because many months are just like that.

Self driving has a very similar issue with the vast majority of, say, Asia. Because similarly “this is crazy, no one should be driving like this conditions” is the norm. So if it can’t keep up, it’s useless.

Eastern and far Northern Europe has a lot of kinda similar stuff going on.

Self driving cars are easy if you ignore the hard parts.

In India, I’ve had to deal with Random Camel, missing (entire) road section that was there yesterday, 5 different cars in 3 lanes (plus 3 motorcycles) all at once, many cattle (and people) wandering in the road at day and night, and the so common it’s boring ‘people randomly going the wrong way on the road’. If you aren’t comfortable bullying other drivers sometimes to make progress or avoid a dangerous situation, you’re not getting anywhere anytime soon.

All in a random mix of flooding, monsoon rain, super hot temperatures, construction zones, fog, super heavy fireworks smoke, etc. etc.

Hell, even in the US I’ve had to drive through wildfires and people setting off fireworks on the road (long story, safety reasons). The last thing I would have wanted was the car freezing or refusing.

Is that super safe? Not really. But life is not super safe. And a car that won’t help me live my life is useless to me.

Such an AI would of course be a dangerous asshole on, say, LA roads, of course. Even more than the existing locals.
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-06 16:16:30+00:00
The explanation on why Java lets you use unnamed variables to prevent accidental use during deconstruction, but those unusuable variables still getting initialized by calling accessors, is a perfect example why I dislike the way Java implements improvements.

Every single, logical step that led to this hidden performance problem makes complete sense, because every improvement had to be its own tiny, contained improvement, but the end result is that `case Foo(int _, String _, User _, int age)` will still call three getters _just in case_ you're abusing the language to add side effects to accessors.

Perhaps even worse is the explanation that follows: if you don't mess up your accessors, the JVM _may_ decide to not call those accessors at runtime. So now the language itself has this weird performance impact to maintain backwards compatibility, but at runtime that backwards compatibility _may_ not exist and provide you with a performance improvement instead, negating the whole reason why backwards compatibility was added in the first place.

I like the improvements to Java, don't get me wrong. It's no longer the JDK 1.7 language poor enterprise programmers are stuck with. But if the Java people had come together and worked this out as one single feature, rather than five different ones, we wouldn't have needed to remember edge cases/a code analysis tool to remind us that using this intuitive language feature _may_ actually has a 3x performance impact depending on the mood the JVM is in today.
by Rubio78 | 2025-09-06 16:17:22+00:00
Working through Karpathy's series builds a foundational understanding of LLMs, providing enough confidence to explore further. A key insight is that LLMs are logit emitters, and their inherent uncertainty compounds dangerously in multi-agent chains, often requiring a human-in-the-loop or a single orchestrator to manage it. Crucially, people confuse word embeddings with the full LLM; embeddings are just the input to a vast, incomprehensible trillion-parameter transformer. The underlying math of these networks is surprisingly simple, built on basic additions and multiplications. The real mystery isn't the math but why they work so well. Ultimately, AI research is a mix of minimal math, extensive data engineering, massive compute power, and significant trial and error.
by monegator | 2025-09-06 16:17:43+00:00
Hear me here for a second: what if... what if, on every single bot post people just commented for the bot to go and suck a big fat.. you know what And then lock the conversation maybe the bot would learn something, eventually?

Sometimes i wonder why this hasn't happened anyway: Internet's not what it used to be.

And maybe companies would eventually take a clue, after they banned all actual contributors for having foul fingers (very unlikely i know)

thanks for attending my ted talk
by nerdsniper | 2025-09-06 16:18:23+00:00
There’s no liability or exposure for recording non-consensually. It’s a public space. There’s not even an edge case. If a random member if the public could walk into the drive-thru (which they can) then anything can be recorded without notification or consent.

Edit: Another commenter has made me aware that some states do ban non-consensual audio recordings in public: https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/massachusetts-recording-law

The laws prohibiting these recordings have neither been upheld nor overturned by the US Supreme Court.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-09-06 16:18:55+00:00
Sounds horrible. I can understand that stopping you from cycling, but if you could have managed to sit in a car, would you have been able to drive it? I can imagine that inner ear issues can sometimes affect vision too as my wife suffered from positional vertigo for a while and I could see her eyes flicking rapidly when she was getting dizzy. (I did find a helpful YouTube video about a sequence of positions to put the sufferer through which basically helps to remove the otoliths from the ear canal).
by nerdsniper | 2025-09-06 16:19:02+00:00
Thats only for private phone calls not for public spaces.

Edit: Another commenter has made me aware that some states do ban non-consensual audio recordings in public: https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/massachusetts-recording-law

The laws prohibiting these recordings have neither been upheld nor overturned by the US Supreme Court.
by goku12 | 2025-09-06 16:20:08+00:00
> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.

For the sake of correctness, the concept of pull requests was not introduced by Github. It already existed in git in the form of the 'request-pull' subcommand. The fundamental workflow is the same. You send the project maintainer a message requesting a pull of your changes from your own online clone repo. The difference is that the message was in the form of an email. Code reviews could be conducted using mails/mailing lists too.

This is not the same as sending patches by email. But considering how people hate emails, I can see why it didn't catch on. However, Torvalds considered this implementation to be superior to Github's and once complained about the latter on Github itself [1].

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...
by tombert | 2025-09-06 16:20:36+00:00
Sure, I am not claiming that you have to use every new feature every day 100% of the time. Obviously there are cases where you can’t upgrade for legal or compliance or “customer is just being difficult” reasons.

A lot of Java jobs aren’t that though, especially internal applications. A lot of places are running Java 17 or Java 21 on all their servers, literally have no plans to ever support anything lower, but the engineers are still writing Java like it’s 2003. That is what’s maddening to me.
by lapcat | 2025-09-06 16:20:56+00:00
> That's a really complex, very out-of-distibution, hard-to-know question

No, it's not. It's a trivial question in any context.

> for the early LLMs.

Early? Claude 3.7 was introduced just 6 months ago, and Deepseek-V3 9 months ago. How is that "early"?
by nerdsniper | 2025-09-06 16:21:09+00:00
Please stop spreading misinformation . There are so many court cases about this. A quick google will give you dozens you can read.

Legally there is no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in public spaces and the only limit on that are extreme telephoto lenses looking from public spaces into private spaces.

Edit: Another commenter has made me aware that some states do ban non-consensual audio recordings in public: https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/massachusetts-recording-law

The laws prohibiting these recordings have neither been upheld nor overturned by the US Supreme Court.
by groby_b | 2025-09-06 16:21:18+00:00
AI is the first dev tool that makes a difference that is immediately noticeable even for higher layers, that's why they apply pressure.

The core problem, as OP called out, is change aversion. It's just that for many previous useful changes, management couldn't immediately see the usefulness, or there would've been pressure too.

Let's not forget that well-defined development processes with things like CI/CD, testing, etc only became widespread after DORA made the positive impact clearly visible.

Let's face it: Most humans are perfectly fine with the status quo, whatever the status quo. The outward percolation of good ideas is limited unless a forcing function is applied.
by nlawalker | 2025-09-06 16:21:38+00:00
I think it's coming from both places, it's just that the top-down exhortations are so loud and insistent.

I wasn't around to experience it but my understanding is that this is what happened in the 90's with object oriented programming - it was a legitimately useful idea that had some real grassroots traction and good uses, but it got sold to non-technical leadership as a silver bullet for productivity through reuse.

The problem then, as it is now, is that developer productivity is hard to measure, so if management gets sold on something that's "guaranteed" to boost it, it becomes a mandate and a proxy measure.
by nerdsniper | 2025-09-06 16:22:21+00:00
Did you read that law? It applies to “Confidential communication…carried on among the parties in the presence of one another or by means of a telegraph, telephone, or other device, except a radio”. Conversation in public is by nature not “confidential”. You are grossly misinterpreting this law and (unintentionally/ignorantly) spreading misinformation.

Edit: Another commenter has made me aware that some states do ban non-consensual audio recordings in public: https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/massachusetts-recording-law

The laws prohibiting these recordings have neither been upheld nor overturned by the US Supreme Court.
by macintux | 2025-09-06 16:22:28+00:00
> For the purposes of this section, “confidential communication” means any communication carried on in circumstances as may reasonably indicate that any party to the communication desires it to be confined to the parties thereto, but excludes a communication made in a public gathering or in any legislative, judicial, executive, or administrative proceeding open to the public, or in any other circumstance in which the parties to the communication may reasonably expect that the communication may be overheard or recorded.

This is not confidential communications.
by grayhatter | 2025-09-06 16:22:33+00:00
because quality has never been the driver of survival. It has always survival. The race is a race of endurance, it's not a competition on merits. Humans would undoubtedly be better without scars, but the same anomaly that gave us scar tissue, gave us faster wound healing. Increasing survival. But scars don't go away, when it'd be better if they did. There's no selection pressure there because it's good enough. IBM still exists despite it's inability to make good decisions, it makes decisions that allow it to survive. It could just as easily make different decisions, and I would have named a different company. Not because it made different decisions, but because it survived. Why do companies that survive make these weird decisions? They don't, there is no back pressure. Decisions don't matter, survival does.

The race isn't a competition, it's a death march. If you want to 'win' the death march, prioritize survival above everything else, especially quality and correctness.

(I don't strictly follow this philosophy myself, a good engineer will always ask, why not both. Just make sure you identify endurance as the most important strategy)
by Sherveen | 2025-09-06 16:22:49+00:00
You aren't taking what he said seriously. The junior could also get sick, present management issues, etc.

If this person plus a junior represented "1.3 engineering knots," he's saying... "actually, I'm still 1.3 engineering knots without him."

When this person leaves, they go find someone else who is 1.3 engineering knots. The junior represented .3, without the 1., it doesn't matter that much. Headcount strategy shifts.
by cduzz | 2025-09-06 16:23:14+00:00
First, I guess I'll just invoke Sturgeon's law[1] -- almost all software, especially if you don't really understand it, is crap, and probably the software you understand is also crap, you're just used to it. Good software is pretty tricky to make.

But second -- I use colima lots, on my home macs and my work macs, and it mostly just works. The profiles stuff is kinda annoying and I find myself accidentally running arm when I want x86, or other tedious config issues crop up. But it actually has been easier to live with than docker desktop where I'd run out of space and things would fall apart.

Docker on MacOS is broadly going work poorly relative to it on linux, just from having to run the docker stuff in a linux vm that's hiding somewhere behind the scenes.

If you find too much friction with any of these, probably it's easier to just run a linux vm on the mac and interact with docker in the 'native' environment. I've found UTM to be quite a bit easier to live with than virtualbox.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
by ozgung | 2025-09-06 16:23:28+00:00
Not necessarily. They can generate letters, tokens, or words in any order. They can even write them all at once like they do in a diffusion model. Next token generation (auto-reggresion) is just a design choice of GPT, mostly for practical reasons. It fits naturally to the task at hand (we humans also generate words in sequential order). Also they have to train GPT in a self-supervised manner since we don't have labeled internet scale data. Auto-regression solves that problem as well.

The distinction I want to emphasize is that they don't just predict words statistically. They model the world, understand different concepts and their relationships, can think on them, can plan and act on the plan, can reason up to a point, in order to generate the next token. It learns all of these via that training scheme. It doesn't learn just the frequency of word relationships, unlike the old algorithms. Trillions are parameters do much more than that.
by tombert | 2025-09-06 16:23:45+00:00
This experiment has already been run with pretty much every language that isn’t Java or C, and I think most people have been ok.

Yes, code review is arguably worse, but most people who write Java do so with an IDE and the type is never unknown at that point.

Also, if your function is big enough to where the type of var is not very clear, it likely shouldn’t be passing code review regardless.
by pornel | 2025-09-06 16:24:11+00:00
The absolutely worst efficiency I've experienced was 2.7km/kWh at 120km/h in DS3 e-tense. That was a v1 Stellantis drivetrain, without a heat pump. Peugeot e208, Corsa-e, etc. are the same thing. Stellantis sucks at EVs, especially their first gen, so that's probably really the worst case scenario (apart from EV's nemesis: towing non-aerodynamic trailers at high speeds).

So if you take an EV's battery size in kWh and multiply it by 2.7, that's the worst range you will get in km.

In normal weather EVs get 5-7km per kWh.
by bonzini | 2025-09-06 16:24:22+00:00
The text includes this specification: "The Foundation promises that all distribution of the Work, or of any work "based on the Work," that takes place under the control of the Foundation or its assignees, shall be on terms that explicitly and perpetually permit anyone possessing a copy of the work to which the terms apply, and possessing accurate notice of these terms, to redistribute copies of the work to anyone on the same terms". So you're right, in principle the FSF could apply the AGPL to every software they have copyright assigned for, but they also have to be careful not to breach the terms of their own contract.

As to the SSPL and similar license, the FSF hasn't publicly commented on it but they also don't include it in their list of approved free software licenses, so we know that the FSF doesn't really think the line could/should be drawn far from the GPLv3 and AGPL.
by sunscream89 | 2025-09-06 16:24:36+00:00
Do I risk the vengeful deniers of HN by saying the reason this crap will never work is that though sure we all do have certain universal and unalienable rights, you cannot MAKE ANYONE DO ANYTHING! Not even for world peace.

You cannot make people be nice, you cannot make them respect, you cannot make them even recognize dignity!

You can however recognize law and the right to legally destroy those who do not recognize the so called “fundamental rights” of others.

To simplify further, our only real human right is not to be messed with. The right to our own business and that of our place and properties.

All of this “shall” and “must” makes me want to take up arms and shout F-OFF!