MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by walleeee | 2025-09-21 18:26:19+00:00
This evokes Lyotard's notion of narrative sense-making, in which narrative is periodic, i.e. rhythmic, in a way standing outside of time, or outside any particular moment in time, and is implicitly self-legitimizing in a way more formal thoughtforms aren't

"[A] narrative's reference may seem to belong to the past, but in reality it is always contemporaneous with the act of recitation... what is emphasized is the metrical beat of the narrative occurrences, not each performance's differences in accent... this mode of temporality can be said to be simultaneously evanescent and immemorial."

- the postmodern condition, ~1979
by jfengel | 2025-09-21 18:26:48+00:00
You say that because you know that the news is fake, and you know that because it's not really that difficult to figure out at least an approximation of the truth. You know who are the abject liars (because they routinely tell outright falsehoods), and you know who at least tries to get it right even if they sometimes fail at it.

It's not that hard. People seek out the fake news; the millionaires and billionaires are just providing slightly better versions of it. They could be doing really sophisticated propaganda but they just don't have to. People are pleased to believe the most outlandish lies if it affirms their egos.
by throwaway0123_5 | 2025-09-21 18:27:06+00:00
> The early narrative was that companies would need fewer seniors, and juniors together with AI could produce quality code.

I don't remember this being the narrative at all. Almost as soon as LLMs could produce useful code the narrative I was hearing among devs was "Seniors + LLMs means you'll need less juniors."

And the narrative from companies (sometimes requiring the smallest amount of reading between the lines) is "You'll need less human employees, period."
by adastra22 | 2025-09-21 18:27:28+00:00
> The problem with using AI to review AI is that what you're checking is the same as what you're checking it with.

This isn't true. Every instantiation of the LLM is different. Oversimplifying a little, but hallucination emerges when low-probability next words are selected. True explanations, on the other hand, act as attractors in state-space. Once stumbled upon, they are consistently preserved.

So run a bunch of LLM instances in parallel with the same prompt. The built-in randomness & temperature settings will ensure you get many different answers, some quite crazy. Evaluate them in new LLM instances with fresh context. In just 1-2 iterations you will hone in on state-space attractors, which are chains of reasoning well supported by the training set.
by peteforde | 2025-09-21 18:27:30+00:00
I respect that. We're both operating with radically different goals and end results. If you're cooking primarily from a food culture that evolved without ovens then it's clear you don't need an air fryer OR a convection oven.

I would however suggest that this makes you poorly qualified to deem an entirely category of popular tools "stupid" just because you don't happen to use them.
by 9dev | 2025-09-21 18:27:56+00:00
You’re on a very slippery slope yourself there. Did the native Americans "agree" to the transactions that took their land away, land they never considered something you could own in the first place? Did the African tribes converted to Christianity by colonists agree to give up their way of life? Did the peasants in feudal times agree to being servants of the aristocracy? Did the tribes in early Europe agree to submit to the Romans?

Throughout history, people have been coerced into a subordinate position by the stronger party, without much choice over their fate other than to give in to pressure. Until that pressure grew too strong under the greed of the privileged, as it always does eventually, giving way to revolution.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-09-21 18:28:00+00:00
Because universities borrowed staggering amounts of money and hired massive numbers of people.

The assumption was that international student numbers would be allowed to grow as fast or faster than in the past, ignoring the fact that the UK is not able to provide infrastructure for the people who live here let alone temporary inhabitants. There is no way to keep the bubble going (as with every bubble, for government and university administrators it just seemed unlimited because there are no limits to resources, dangerous).
by righthand | 2025-09-21 18:28:27+00:00
I think the hidden lesson in Field of Dreams is that “they will come” happens because of word of mouth. Shoeless Joe Jackson tells the other dead baseball players to come hang out. The townsfolk tell about baseball field to save the farm.

But really “build it and they will come” in product development is pitched as if “they will come” because they are searching for it. Which is not really true if people don’t know your thing exists.
by retrochameleon | 2025-09-21 18:29:59+00:00
I installed Windows 11 LTSC for a work project recently. The experience left me shocked. The installer was shortened and brief, and upon first logging into the new OS, it was a thing of beauty. Clean desktop, empty start menu, no bloatware. Just a true clean slate to start from.

I hate Windows and Microsoft and switched to Linux years ago with no regrets. I can't help but wonder the goodwill they would garner if this was the typical user experience with Windows. If I had some path to using Windows like this, and was able to use GPOs as a home user, I might not have left in the first place.

It's a convoluted pain in the ass to get licenses for LTSC as a business, and it's basically a nonstarter as an individual. There is a 5 license minimum.

I'm tired of companies being determined to make everything shitty in the name of value extraction from customers.
by rglullis | 2025-09-21 18:30:01+00:00
You are looking at the cost in your pocket, not the aggregate.

Add the cost of the gas needed to power all these cars, plus the cost of the land allocated solely for parking, plus the costs of the roads, plus the costs in healthcare associated with air pollution, plus the environmental cost of all the concrete and steel need to build and maintain the roads, etc.

It's not just "car ownership", it's "car-centric infrastructure" that is expensive.
by ivape | 2025-09-21 18:30:21+00:00
I think, maybe, that as a human moves away from the innocence and security of their childhood years, that “ending” continues to be a lifelong depression in reaction to that end, and it manifests in a variety of ways.

We have a lot of technology so it’s expressed technologically (digital addictions). But overall, every human that has ever lived, lived out this prolonged lifelong depression.

Clinically, this would be considered dysfunctional. But subjectively, there’s no reason why you can’t be in grief forever. People will never want to accept this, but it’s something to think about.

So many people were depressed throughout time, and I think we need to see it more as a spiritual condition more than anything else, as it appears to be not bounded by time, or circumstance.
by lolive | 2025-09-21 18:30:26+00:00
I was unhappy with [the briefness of] my piano metaphor. Thanks for elaborating.

But my important point in it was the « identify and name » the elements of your problem [piece of music, or whatever]

Learning process has usually been, as you mention, to follow the path first, then eventually you can name things afterwards. Which is a highly uncomfortable process.

Another path that AI might force us to follow is to quick-identifyAndName the proper concepts, ahead of practical experience.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-09-21 18:30:27+00:00
I have a T470 bought in 2017. I have done the following:

- replaced the screen when I accidentally dropped water on the laptop, and the screen shorted out.

- upgraded RAM from 8 GB to 32 GB

- Replaced internal battery after it gave out about 5 years in.

- Expanded storage by putting a memory chip on the WAN slot.

I think almost all of these issues would have required getting a new laptop if it was not repairable. I also have done similar repairs on my T440s, so it will work as an emergency laptop if anything happens to my T470. In fact, it did when I my screen stopped working 3rd month of Covid.
by Scoundreller | 2025-09-21 18:31:09+00:00
So I guess some analysis methods:

1. The center of gravity will likely be all off.

2. X-ray or just a powerful enough light

3. My favourite and I wish hamas did this for their pagers: carolimetric analysis (ie: set it on fire and see how many btu’s come out): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorimeter
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-09-21 18:31:20+00:00
No, you can get a scholarship. Again, this is really the best of the best, those with the highest merit. If you have that, why would you study somewhere that has no people of merit? All they had to do was convince a bureaucrat their life was hard (usually based on rather unobjective criteria), everyone else has to pass exams.

If you can't get the grades, you don't have merit.

Debase the currency, surprised when it has less value? Lol.
by programjames | 2025-09-21 18:31:47+00:00
I believe you're being purposefully dense here. I get it, and probably do the same sometimes, but the connection is pretty obvious: someone gets in (allegedly) due to ideological fit instead of merit, and then becomes one of the most prominent voices for that ideology at the campus. It shows "wokism" has finally solved the reproduction crisis, and for people opposed to certain aspects (like affirmative action), that's pretty worrying.
by TulliusCicero | 2025-09-21 18:31:55+00:00
> I'm a bit surprised to see how much snark there is in the comment sections of this video.

It's "slashdot talks about the iPod announcement" all over again.

Unfortunately, communities tend to devolve other time into empty cynicism and negativity, and it's hard to stop, since obviously you don't want to ban 100% of cynical or negative comments.
by vlovich123 | 2025-09-21 18:32:00+00:00
I really don’t know what I said that was such an emotional trigger for you. All I said is that it’s an accelerant for you when you leave your domain. Like for example I’m a systems engineer. I hate coding UIs but with the LLM I can pump out a UI quickly and this was true both for web code and a GUI I built with dioxus. The UI code was also cleaner because I had some sense of how it should be structured and asked the AI to cleanup that structure. But ultimately it did most of the work in response to high level prompts and I picked and chose what to review line by line vs vibe coding.

That’s what I mean - by myself it would have taken me easily 10x longer if not worse because UI coding for me is a slog + there’s nuances about reactive coding + getting started is also a hurdle. The output of the code was still high quality because I knew when the LLM wasn’t making the choices I wanted it to make.
by mbac32768 | 2025-09-21 18:32:05+00:00
It's astonishing how involved a fucking modern JSON library becomes.

The once "very simple" C++ single-header JSON library by nlohmann is now

* 13 years old

* is still actively merging PRs (last one 5 hours ago)

* has 122 __million__ unit tests

Despite all this, it's self-admittedly still not the fastest possible way to parse JSON in C++. For that you might want to look into simdjson.

Don't start your own JSON parser library. Just don't. Yes you can whiteboard one that's 90% good enough in 45 minutes but that last 10% takes ten thousand man hours.
by tantivy | 2025-09-21 18:32:39+00:00
Best I ever feel is when I'm walking 4+ miles daily. The phenotypic human body (not to dismiss any individual's disabilities or idiosyncracies) is top-to-bottom built to walk long distances, and bipedalism is an older trait of our evolutionary lineage than a lot of the other qualities we take as "human."

This really stuck with me from studying comparative primate physiology as an undergrad. The human leg and foot is a total outlier in comparison to any other primate's limbs. Our bodies are incredibly specialized for walking and running.
by patanegra | 2025-09-21 18:33:09+00:00
It might come over as appalling, given the whole culture has shifted towards: "Nobody is dumber! Every child deserves a medal."

Which isn't true, and never was. I get why we do that with kids in Reception and Year 1. With young adults, like University students, the fact of inequality of potentials of individuals, is just a fact anyone has to live with.

I am clever, but I am a fat, average looking guy. So that's what I have to live with. David Beckham is not so smart, but he is sporty and looks great. He uses his innate talents, and I use mines. Nobody is discriminated by being different.

The system has been built by those with means. And those with means more often than not are clever, hard-working people. That's how you get successful in the first place. And when you are born with great talents, you will go up too. That was the point of aristocrats being replaced by bourgeois, and now people in tech growing no matter where they are from.
by gmueckl | 2025-09-21 18:33:30+00:00
System-wide Vulkan layers definitely cause chaos. I remember unit tests for our renderer crashing on some machines and not on other nearly identical ones. The culprit was a Vulkan layer installed by a video capture software. It had a hard limit of 16 Vulkan instances that it could keep track of before overflowing an array and crashing. But our tests would recreate the Vulkan environment from scratch for each test, which is fairly unusual for a Vulkan application, to be fair.

In the end, we added the list of loaded Vulkan layers to the diagnostic log of our software to help customer support spot fishy ones.
by jfengel | 2025-09-21 18:33:44+00:00
It's a bunch of individual investments by large tech firms, going both ways. It wouldn't ordinarily require a government intervention, but both governments are in need of a win right now. (Brexit has limited the UK's access to Europe, and the US needs to show that the tariffs give it leverage.)

These are all fine, and some things might even actually happen. (Deals like these tend to diminish as you get closer to money actually changing hands.) International cooperation is good. It's just a little weird that it had to happen between two countries who have been explicitly rejecting international cooperation.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-09-21 18:33:59+00:00
I don't recommend using the vast majority of mobile apps, which exist for data-mining and addiction-maintenance purposes. Android is specifically known as the worst ecosystem in this regard. Browsers continue to work, despite the corporate push to dark patterns.

It's Linux, if you need something you or someone else will eventually write it. But first there needs to be acceptable, working hardware. Enter the FLX1/s, and we come full circle.
by nabla9 | 2025-09-21 18:34:07+00:00
Good News: The Eurofighter Typhoon is Not Obsolete for European NATO countries.

The Eurofighter Typhoon dominates anything Russia can throw against it. The F-22 and F-35 will never fight a Typhoon outside exercises.

A decade or two from now, there could be one Typhoon and 4-8 stealthy unmanned wingmen flying 100-200 km ahead of it. The Typhoon pilot would simply tell them what to do.

Harry J. Kazianis wrote yet another stupid "My daddy can beat your daddy article".
by quietbritishjim | 2025-09-21 18:34:31+00:00
That sounds like a similar idea but I doubt it's to the same extent.

When I was at Cambridge in the early noughties, supervisions for maths and computer science (and physics I believe but I didn't go to any of those) were 2 students in 4 1-hour sessions per week (1 per 24 hour lecture course). [Edit: hmm, actually maybe it was just 2 per week.] In maths, if there were an odd number of students then one would get 1 to 1 supervisions, but I'm sure that depends on the college. For computer science, I was put in a 3 person supervision when they had an odd number (and I wasn't happy about it at the time!)

I later did teaching at UCL and Imperial and the difference was huge. When they get to it, I would advise my children to go Oxford or Cambridge in a heartbeat. (For reference, my parents were too poor to even consider university.)
by Ensorceled | 2025-09-21 18:34:45+00:00
This is what I've been finding. Currently, if I have a junior level task, I take the email I would have sent to a junior developer explaining what I want and give it to ChatGPT/Claude/etc and get a reasonably good solution that needs as many feedback loops as the junior dev would have needed. Except I got that solution in a few minutes.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-21 18:35:49+00:00
Not everything in the White House is going through Stephen Miller.

This announcement itself has Vance, Sankar, and Kupor's fingerprints all over it.

For tech policy this admin is a basically A16Z and Founders Fund people, but the last admin leaned Sequoia Capital.

This is why you see a lot of crypto (A16Z) this admin and GreenTech (Sequoia) the last admin.
What are effective prompts to learn kernel code?
by linq936 | 2025-09-21 18:35:50+00:00
I have Android 12 AOSP, including its kernel code, downloaded. I like to familiarize the data structures, functioning sequences, etc. on topics such as how kernel messages end up in logcat.

I like to use AI tools such as Claude Code to help me, but I am not sure what are effective prompts. Please let me know if you had similar experiences.
by darepublic | 2025-09-21 18:36:26+00:00
I don't really believe this but ok. I worked at a functional / typescript heavy shop where when I had parsed what a complicated set of steps was doing discovered multiple redundant queries and a library that was parsing strings into code. But damn some of those functional paradigms chef kiss /s. Imo my dumbass code , besides being demonstrably more performance was way less of a liability.
by bentt | 2025-09-21 18:36:55+00:00
The truth of it is that when I code with an LLM I scope the work up to include parts that would be a stretch for me to implement. I know what I want them to do, I know where I could find the info to write the code, but the LLM can just spit it out and if it's validate-able, then great, on to the next.

If I were to attack the same system myself without any LLM assist, I'd make a lot of choices to optimize for my speed and knowledge base. The code would end up much simpler. For something that would be handed off to another person (including future me) that can be a win. But if the system is self contained then going bigger and fancier in that moment can be a win. It all depends on the exact goals.

All in all, there's a lot of nuance to this stuff and it's probably not really replacing anyone except people who A) aren't that skilled to start with and B) spend more time yelling about how bad AI is than actually digging in and trying stuff.
by fatfox | 2025-09-21 18:36:57+00:00
I’m not sure where you’ve got the stats from, but student visas granted dropped since 2022, acc to UK gov (-5% in 2023, -14% in 2024).[0]

Combined with universities' increasing reliance on international student income (over the last years) and issues accessing research funding, this can get universities into trouble.

[0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
by rdrd | 2025-09-21 18:37:39+00:00
As a solo/indie dev who's currently early in building a product, I've been keeping a journal of "ideas" for content in a txt file in the codebase as I hate context switching and want to build this up before I get to it.

Here's what I've done:

- At the top of the file I've listed my audience, 3 personas

- My content has to be useful to one of those

- If I see an interesting post/take on social media I hold the link and write an idea for my own spin/take (takes 30 seconds) - log it

- If I have a problem/issue that I resolve that would be useful to my audience - log it

- If I have a key product/design/UX choice that took some time to think through - log it

- If something takes me much longer than I thought because there's more to it (iceberge effect) - log it

I've been doing this for about 6 weeks now and I've got 100 ideas for pieces of content.

One of the best pieces of advice I read is that when you're solo, many times people/community rally around you. You are the product too so you have to share what you're doing, it's interesting to many, not just your customers. They care about the advice you give, the input you have, the way you build things. You are a subject matter expert in this domain, so you should structure your content with this in mind.

"You escape competition through authenticity." - @naval
by patanegra | 2025-09-21 18:38:01+00:00
When you compare 1:83 vs 1:2600, it is so big difference, it deserves bold statements.

In the UK, there's 1.5 million kids playing footbal. 1:83 ~18000 kids play in any professional club. 1:2600 ~580 kids get to play in Premier League, EFL Championship in a season

What is Oxford doing is letting kids who play in absolutely any club, if they go to state school, or only those who got to Premier League, if they go to independent school.

Again, it's discrimination so bad it should be illegal.
by sandworm101 | 2025-09-21 18:38:07+00:00
What is the computational burden of FHE over doing the same operation in plaintext? I realize that many cloud proponants think that FHE may allow them to work with data without security worries (if it is all encrypted, and we dont have the keys, it aint our problem) but if FHE requires a 100x or 1000x increase in processor capacity then i am not sure it will be practical at scale.
by rcxdude | 2025-09-21 18:38:10+00:00
How exactly? the way it's managed at the moment is that the admissions tutors keep an eye on what different schools are doing in terms of prepping their students and keep that in mind when assessing them. Which is exactly what causes the 'bias'. I am significantly more impressed by someone who manages to get good grades with little help than someone who manages to get excellent grades with the most effective teaching of the test that money can buy (having gone to an independent school, I was one of those being 'discriminated' against, but I can well understand that many of my classmates, who primarily good at cramming for the exam and not understanding the material, got very good grades but would not do nearly as well at university. Heck, I got in and struggled way more than I had done before, and more so than many in my year who had worse grades in less good schools)

(I would, in general, be in favor of fixing GCSEs and A-levels. They have persistently moved in a direction that rewards memorisation of particular keywords, something which especially rewards teaching the test, as well as getting easier and especially less good at discriminating the top end of ability accurately. But it's still not going to be enough to remove this difference)
by hypeatei | 2025-09-21 18:38:14+00:00
You're not aware of the simplistic, single header C library culture that some developers like to partake in. Tsoding (a streamer) is a prime example of someone who likes developing/using these types of libraries. They acknowledge that these things aren't focused on "security" or "features" and that's okay. Not everything is a super serious business project exposed to thousands of paying customers.
by concernedParty | 2025-09-21 18:38:16+00:00
There is a growing number of parents who, because of this exact overt and known discrimination against applicants from private schools, will first send their kids to elite private primary schools and then they switch them to the best secondary state schools they can find, using the money to supplement their education with private one-to-one tutors.

This is an entirely expected outcome. Water will find a way to ground.
by mmmllm | 2025-09-21 18:38:24+00:00
One of the biggest factors for me personally was going vegetarian, and then vegan. I didn't realize it for 30 years, but it's hard to feel connected to nature, animals, and the environment when you are eating something you didn't kill yourself. Once I made that move, it's a beautiful feeling and a kind of connection to animals and the planet I never knew before. I wasn't even much of a pet person before that.