MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by t917910 | 2025-10-05 16:43:21+00:00
Everything you wrote is correct. And the problem the author of the original post is addressing has a very simple solution: you and your bosses should eat less and live more modestly. Your medieval cable-bolt-fitters' guild should become less exclusive and demand less money for membership. The ultimate beneficiaries of horribly expensive electricity can easily live without three ranches and two yachts. And then people won't be forced to build this cable-flipping sham.

The same applies to the rest of the construction industry in the US. If they're building houses out of cardboard and sticks, they should be paid enough to buy a cardboard steak. And house prices should be low, not like they are now.
by a3w | 2025-10-05 16:43:28+00:00
I cannot use wolframalpha most of the time since the syntax is not that natural. WolframAlpha is good AI, it never lies.

Calculators are good AI, they rarely lie (due to floating arithmetics rounding). And yes, Wikipedia says calculators are AI tech, since a Computer was once a person, and not it is a tool that shows the intelligent trait of doing math with numbers or even functions/variables/equations.

Querying a calculator or wolfram alpha like symbolic AI system with LLMs seems like the only use for LLMs except for text refactoring that should be feasible.

Thinking LLMs know anything on their own is a huge fallacy.
by adriand | 2025-10-05 16:43:34+00:00
I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I guess one theory, then, of excessive screen time is nihilistic too: if you can’t get ahead, why not spend your time absorbed in an alternate reality, perhaps including alternate realities where you can get ahead, like GTA.

That said, what I see in young people around me (because of my age, there’s quite a few) is a lot of addiction, not nihilism. These are kids with opportunities based on their socioeconomic status and yet many are just wasting huge amounts of time. The underlying question behind my post is essentially, does Cal Newport’s theory of success - so good they can’t ignore you - hold? And what happens to society when a generation is sucked into what they themselves literally refer to as “brain rot”?
by quotemstr | 2025-10-05 16:43:54+00:00
> In aggregate, you reduce trips flown minimally. On the individual level, you’re pricing certain families out of flying.

True. Don't we tacitly agree as a society, in other contexts, that certain experiences aren't worth having at all if they're below some quality threshold? We have minimum wages and we don't let people sell cars made of cardboard, even to those otherwise unable to buy transportation.

I'm not sure economists have properly modeled the mass psychic effects of enshittification or, more generally, model the morale and spirit of the people as a proper factor of production.
by ajross | 2025-10-05 16:44:18+00:00
Right, that's "quibbling over 'classic'". You said "you'd be foolish to design CISC" meaning the hardware design paradigm of the late 1970's. I (and probably others) took it to mean the instruction set. Your definition would make a Zen5 or Arrow Lake box "RISC", which seems more confusing than helpful.
by robomiri | 2025-10-05 16:44:20+00:00
I’m building https://analytics.robomiri.com, a lightweight, privacy-first analytics tool that gives you real insight without turning your users into tracked profiles. It captures page views, content engagement, funnels, and user paths in a minimal UI. My goal is to balance usefulness with simplicity: metrics you can act on, not just dashboards to stare at. I’m leaning hard on defaults like anonymization, flexible retention, and user control over what’s collected.

The hardest parts are always the ones you don’t see: scaling storage & query times, making interpretation meaningful (like “this bounce rate is unusually high”), and doing all of this in a way that’s GDPR/CCPA friendly.

Why do this? Because I believe analytics doesn’t need to feel creepy. You should be able to learn about your users respectfully — see what’s working, diagnose what’s broken — without handing over control or trust.
by skydhash | 2025-10-05 16:44:25+00:00
As another commenter have put it [0], the need for specialized paradigms is to restrict what you can do and data type available to you, because it's easier to think and act when things are specialized and distinct.

But in daily life, people are not accustomed to formalize their thought at that extent as there's a collective substrate (known as culture and jargon) that does the job for natural languages.

But the wish described in TFA comes from a very naive place. Even natural languages can't be reduced to a single set.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45482816
by blargey | 2025-10-05 16:44:43+00:00
re "behavioral sink" that wikipedia article is kind of a credulous stub that's missing the pile of criticisms of the "Universe 25" experiment (lack of reproducibility, much of the dysfunction being attributable to how the setting trapped the population in each other's scent+sight lines, akin to shoving humans in a transparent panopticon and calling it a test of urban life)
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-05 16:44:54+00:00
> Focusing on this instead of the point (how would you feel if X happened to you instead)

I’m 6’. My partner is 6’ 7”. I’d prefer to not have to pay extra for more legroom. I’d also prefer to not pay for anything else in my life.

Conflating safety and comfort in the context of an airline is incredibly disingenuous. I’m as safe as I’m miserable flying middle seat economy. I’m also in that position because I preferred to spend my dollars on something else.
by kriops | 2025-10-05 16:45:27+00:00
It absolutely does account for that. Your entire comment is a strawman.

If that is not intentional (which I suspect it is not, so no offense intended), then I believe a quick search on “God-given rights” should help you make whatever case you want to in a logically consistent manner. It is a well-defined concept that has a specific meaning over a specific domain. I get the feeling “negative rights vs. positive rights” might be a useful search phrase as well.
by artur_makly | 2025-10-05 16:46:19+00:00
One way schools, from middle and high schools to universities, can mitigate AI-driven cheating and cognitive decline is by radically rethinking how they conduct final exams.

They should require in-person oral dissertations, presented before a panel of one to three teachers and lasting one to two hours. Ideally, the topic would be based on the student’s own original thesis.

This approach restores creativity and critical thinking, because at any moment during the examination, teachers can ask probing questions, explore unexpected tangents, and even encourage real-time brainstorming.

THIS is the kind of challenge that can help our species evolve beyond its current state of neurological atrophy.

NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study has been doing this since'72

https://gallatin.nyu.edu/

*it was probably the most stimulating 4 years of my life.
by awongh | 2025-10-05 16:46:39+00:00
I thought this was a good take: https://youtu.be/rslcr774JXM?si=KzjiSwC3hBE14zLZ

Basically the economies of scale and different route topography (hub & spoke vs. distributed) that powered low cost airlines in the past doesn't work anymore. It doesn't account for the basic fact that the bigger airlines have more cashflow and can outspend the smaller ones where the low-cost passengers don't have any brand loyalty.

Now it's a race to the bottom because the only way these kinds of airlines can survive is more cost cutting and a few more dollars of revenue per passenger.

One interesting aspect that is touched upon in the video is also that airports are basically municipally-run real estate monopolies for the airlines. The big carriers capture airports in the 6 biggest national markets (or geographic centers) and use the monopoly to punish the other carriers. In most places it's near impossible to expand or diversify airport capacity- it takes many decades.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-05 16:46:59+00:00
> 1/ So far, you've made five comments about this throughout the thread.

As someone who actually clicks the links and reads the articles, I’m growing frustrated with these AI-written articles wasting my time. The content is typical of ChatGPT style idea expansion where someone puts their “ideas” into an LLM and then has the LLM generate filler content to expand it into a blog post.

I try to bring awareness of the AI generated content so others can avoid wasting their time on it as well. Content like this also gets flagged away from the front page as visitors realize what it is.

Your edited admission of using AI only confirms the accusations.
by mingtianzhang | 2025-10-05 16:47:24+00:00
The current OCR approach typically relies on a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to convert a table into a JSON structure. However, a table inherently has a 2D spatial structure, while Large Language Models (LLMs) are optimized for processing 1D sequential text. This creates a fundamental mismatch between the data representation and the model’s input format.

Most existing pipelines address this by preprocessing the table into a linearized 1D string before passing it to the LLM — a question-agnostic step that may lose structural information.

Instead, one could retain the original table form and, when a question is asked, feed both the question and the original table (as an image) directly into the VLM. This approach allows the model to reason over the data in its native 2D domain, providing a more natural and potentially more accurate solution.
by gs17 | 2025-10-05 16:47:25+00:00
> if you're not a pixel artist

Are you looking at the input or the animation? The input is decent pixel art. The output is decent pixel art... on the first frame. One it's in motion it immediately becomes a blurry, non-pixel-art mess that would all need to be redone. It can't just be drawn over with a pixel art tool, the proportions are all off from the original and things don't move they way they should for a sprite animation.
by ben_w | 2025-10-05 16:47:42+00:00
"Senior" was already a weird title, given it could have been anything from 3-10 years of experience even back in 2021.

I've seen people with 10 years experience blindly duplicate C++ classes rather than subclass them, and when questioned they seemed to think the mere existence of `private:` access specifiers justified it. There were two full time developers including him, and no code review, so it's not like any of the access specifiers even did anything useful.
Ask HN: What's the best approach for displaying data tables on mobile?
by hilti | 2025-10-05 16:47:50+00:00
I’m working on a web app with some fairly data-heavy tables (think product inventories, user lists, analytics dashboards, etc.) and the mobile experience is pretty rough. On desktop everything looks fine, but on phones it’s a mess. I’ve tried just letting tables scroll horizontally but it feels clunky. I’ve seen some apps convert tables to card-style layouts, others use expandable rows, and some just hide columns. What patterns have you found actually work well in production? Any libraries or examples you’d recommend checking out? Bonus points if you’ve done user testing on this and have data on what users actually prefer.
by ttoinou | 2025-10-05 16:47:51+00:00
if AI can translate our English descriptions into working code, do we still need programming languages at all?

I think some people equate “source code” with “compiled code” or “AST” (abstract syntax tree). The former contain so many features that are still part of the english language such as functions / variables / types names, source files organization folder and filenames, comments, assets, git repo with log and history etc. And the AI probably wouldnt be as efficient if all those elements were not part of the training data. To get rid of such programming language and have a pure AI programming language would require tons of training data that humans will never produce (chicken and egg paradox)
by AnonC | 2025-10-05 16:48:34+00:00
> That culture died when Forstall was booted from the company (one of apple's biggest mistakes, IMO). Tim Cook gives people their space. It's why Jony Ive and Alan Dye have been allowed to run amok, with almost zero checks and balances.

This is what I’ve been thinking too, ever since Tim Cook fired Scott Forstall over Apple Maps. To be frank, it’s about a decade later now and Apple Maps still sucks big time in many countries, and Google Maps is what iPhone users there use. Coming back to the change of people, the huge messes made by Jonny Ives (without Steve Jobs to balance him out) on hardware (the butterfly keyboard was his design and decision, AFAIK) and software just carried on for years. Now Alan Dye and his team seem to be tanking the user interface and user experience like there’s nobody with any taste left at Apple.

Add to this the turf war between John Giannandrea and Craig Federighi on the AI part, with Federighi winning the game, it doesn’t look like Tim Cook has a good grasp on people’s abilities and how to manage them. Cook has his strengths in supply chain and manufacturing, but design (along with better software quality) are not his strengths or focus areas.
by dvcoolarun | 2025-10-05 16:48:50+00:00
If this happens, that's great, but humans still need to understand any amount of code.

A few years ago in India, I saw a presentation where people were attempting to write programming in their mother tongue.

One such effort I found on GitHub is https://github.com/betacraft/rubyvernac-marathi (for Marathi, an Indian dialect).
by seesaw | 2025-10-05 16:49:24+00:00
I had been a customer of Amazon for almost 20 years. I had Prime since day one. For me the breaking point was when they increased the fee and then decided to have ads for Prime Video. I sold the few Amazon stocks I had, and canceled Prime.

I found after I canceled Prime, my Amazon spending significantly went down. Sometimes I will add something to the cart, look at the shipping fee, and decide to abandon the cart. Canceling Prime made me realize I was ordering a lot of junk I didn’t need.
by Rohansi | 2025-10-05 16:49:40+00:00
I almost exclusively work in C# and have never experienced the Roslyn crashes you mentioned. I am using either Rider or Visual Studio though.

> Like cross-project "go-to-definition" takes me to either a list of members or a decompiled listing of source code, even when I have the actual source code right there!

If these are projects you have in the same solution then it should never do this. I would only expect this to happen if either symbol files or source files are missing.
by wkat4242 | 2025-10-05 16:49:40+00:00
I agree. Copilot 365 has been really underwhelming to me. It was also released way too early, half the features in excel didn't even work. That will have left a bad impression on the earliest of adopters. Which are usually the biggest advocates.

But also, 30$ per month is a lot. For around 300 users you're already talking 100k per year! It's also many times the price that companies pay for their existing M365 licenses including office apps, hosting etc. So it means a completely rebudgeting of their entire IT operations. That kind of money leads to highly critical evaluations that reach the very top. They don't do much volume discount because it's all compute heavy.

Another thing I've been seeing is that users who get Copilot often don't use it at all. From the users buying it, I've heard that in our org only 5-10% actively use it. Others might tap it once a month or use only one or two specific features like the teams meeting summaries. Only the most serious AI bros use it for everything.

I'm in that group myself too. I use it for asking questions about meetings (like "i was distracted for a bit, what did I miss") and for finding stuff in SharePoint which always ends up being a huge mess.

I don't use the email rewriting because Copilot can't match my style which makes it very obvious that I've used it which automatically leads people to devalue the message ("he didn't even bother to write it"). Something the end of this article also alludes to when it refers to an all hands email from Nadella being made with copilot.

Also the pushiness of Microsoft is exhausting. Since that ignite 2022 it's's constant Copilot this Copilot that. For me that has the opposite effect. I just end up rolling my eyes when they rebrand entire product groups and keep rolling their product names. It makes it feel like they have no idea what they are doing and just scrambling to keep up.

The dumbing down is also a problem. When 'researcher' was released first it would spend half an hour on my queries making really great and lengthy well-researched results. It was really powerful and comprehensive. Now all I get is a couple of minutes. It's already lost its value. I'm sure they do this to tune the compute costs but it makes the value prop even worse.

I don't know where this is going but our company is not buying much of it for now. And tbh I can see why.
by ineedasername | 2025-10-05 16:49:55+00:00
My son has mentioned friends whose fathers let them place bets. “Hey, who do you like for the wildcard game tonight, I’ll put a tenner ($10) on it for you.” It’s not seen the same way as a parent giving giving their kid alcohol or other age-gated things like that.

Interestingly, considering the role that sports have in day to day social discourse & self-identity with teams (“we” need to win this game), I’ve heard a few acquaintances say basically “placing a bet makes watching it more interesting, it’s too boring otherwise”. And given the social/identity thing you can’t not watch it. “Hey you catch that play last night? ‘We’ fell apart, awful…” gotta be able to keep up with the tribe chants.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-10-05 16:50:01+00:00
> There’s a classic joke that my brother loves: a software engineer’s partner asks him to go to the store and get milk, and if there are eggs, bring twelve! The engineer comes back with twelve bottles of milk. When asked why, he says “they had eggs”.

Notably, a modern LLM wouldn't make this mistake.

It's not at all clear to me that LLMs are or will become better at translating Python → C than English → C. It makes sense in theory, because programming languages are precise and English is not. In practice, however, LLMs don't seem to have any problem interpreting natural language instructions. When LLMs make mistakes, they're usually logic errors, not the result of ambiguities in the English language.

(I am not talking about the case where you give the LLM a one-sentence description of an app and it fails to lay out every feature as you'd imagined it. Obviously, the LLM can't read your mind! However, writing detailed English is still easier than writing Python, and I don't really have issues with LLMs interpreting my instructions via Genie Logic.)

I would have found this post more convincing if the author could point to examples of an LLM misinterpreting imprecise English.

P.S. I broadly agree with the author that the claim "English will be the only programming language you’ll ever need" is probably wrong.
by bob1029 | 2025-10-05 16:50:31+00:00
> I really can't think of anything that comes close in terms of performance, features, ecosystem, developer experience.

This is also why I prefer to use Unity over all other engines by an incredible margin. The productivity gains of using a mature C# scripting ecosystem in a tight editor loop are shocking compared to the competition. Other engines do offer C# support, but if I had to make something profitable to save my own standard of living the choice is obvious.

There's only two vendors that offer built-in SIMD accelerated linear math libraries capable of generating projection matrices out of the box. One is Microsoft and the other is Apple. The benefits of having stuff like this baked into your ecosystem are very hard to overstate. The amount of time you could waste looking for and troubleshooting primitives like this can easily kill an otherwise perfect vision.
by reaperducer | 2025-10-05 16:50:31+00:00
With modern electronics and displays, could something like a model 100 be made that could run for hundreds or even thousands of hours on 4 AA batteries?

The biggest problem is the screen. People aren't going to tolerate a 40x8 (320px x 64px) screen with no backlight and limited contrast.

Putting a modern screen on it is going to eat power beyond your budget.

The M100's refresh rate wasn't great, so replacing the LCD with an e-ink display would be comparable, except it would far more expensive.
by Jensson | 2025-10-05 16:50:35+00:00
It is really hard to kill an elephant, you need a lot of people to do it or big traps. You can lookup videos of people doing that, you have like 100 people standing around throwing spears at it as it slowly bleeds to death and that is when its alone. If its a herd you can't even do that.

So when farming requires you to have a big hunting party constantly ready to take down an elephant, why not just live off elephant meat? The farm doesn't add any value and is very difficult to start.
by trod1234 | 2025-10-05 16:50:46+00:00
School in the last 50 years was never about education. It was about inducing a level of thought control and torturing the intelligent/competent to reduce their number to only those that can be controlled, and as systems of disadvantaging those that might create wealth, through economic warfare.

Hanlon's razor is also something that has been repeated so many times its not even funny anymore, and it originated as a joke in a joke book despite the revisionists trying to change that. It has no valid basis for the claims it makes.

Malice exists, and unfortunately quite a lot of people are malicious today and don't realize it. This is how evil works. It blinds the individual to the destructive consequences of their actions, and rhetoric designed to allow those people to continue in such delusions abound.

Gross Negligence coupled with loss is sufficient to show general intent which is need definitionally to show malice. If you are grossly negligent, and you caused loss, you are acting with malice even if you don't recognize that you are doing so. These are basic things that are no longer taught, that evil people take advantage of; unfortunately. The only way to not be evil is to always question from multiple perspectives, and don't repeat destructive actions when it may benefit you as an individual.

This article is also pushing for a narrative as soft propaganda. It seems like it might be worth listening to at a cursory level, but that's how influential propaganda works.

You can say something influential composed with certain elements, and still be completely wrong in what you are saying. Those that can't tell it for what it is, will be the victims, or they will find other victims to sacrifice in their place.