MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by II2II | 2025-10-27 23:43:01+00:00
Note that they said:

> We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code."

This sounds like a fairly broad based outreach program. The inclusion of an organization that supports girls is just one of the avenues they used. There is nothing wrong with that.

Sometimes I feel like founding an organization called Men In Science & Engineering Research, simply because the acronym (MISER) would be a fitting parody for those who promote blind equality (i.e. the type of equality that hoards the riches of science for men).
by loodish | 2025-10-27 23:43:11+00:00
I like cron jobs that run during the work day. If something goes wrong I would prefer to handle it at 10am rather than 10pm. Why make life unpleasant?

If it really needs to run during a low load period I line it up for 6am work time. Again so that if something goes wrong it leads into the work day rather than disrupts the on-call too badly. 6am also provides a daylight savings buffer either way so you don't have to care. Recent work has all been on 24/7 operations though.
by bfkwlfkjf | 2025-10-27 23:43:13+00:00
Great, I have a question for you if you can be bothered.

I recently "bought" a .com domain. It's not a popular English word, it's a small number of letters that match some truncation of my names. No competition, nobody wants it. Anyway, I looked at a handful of registrars and got the cheapest. But then I was a bit concerned. Why are they the cheapest, are they cutting corners somehow? The difference was substancial. GoDaddy was one of the most expensive ones are $23/yr and I bought it from dynadot for something like $6/yr. Why such a huge difference?

I'm reading [1] now thanks for sharing

[1] https://tldrisk.com/beyond-basics/price-protections/#icanns-...
by cthalupa | 2025-10-27 23:43:35+00:00
I'm very pro-protein - we just tend to see better metabolic health outcomes when we eat more of it. Diets with higher proportions of protein result in better body composition, less fat, less chance of diabetes, etc. I think the vast majority of people in America at least would be better off with higher protein diets.

But "Did you even listen to the podcast I linked above" is an insane thing to say in a random online conversation. No, you cannot expect people to listen to a whole podcast to make whatever random unsubstantiated point you have. Explain the important things you took away from the podcast and link it as a reference for if people disbelieve you for whatever reason.
by kstrauser | 2025-10-27 23:45:44+00:00
That might've been an exaggerated example, but only a little! I've seen lots of tools add AI as a feature and immediately jack their prices.

Sure, lots of apps do that. For example, Zed (https://zed.dev/docs/ai/llm-providers) has a subscription plan but alternatively will let you plug in your own key and then provide the same features free of charge.
by bccdee | 2025-10-27 23:45:49+00:00
Running a website that distributes information is not the same as selling drugs. That's why free speech is a right and free drugs are not.

And, yes, there are some types of speech (libel, for instance) that merit special scrutiny. A web forum does not. It is literally just an online conversation—the very definition of protected speech.

For the UK to impose these restrictions within its own borders is already unacceptable. For them to play at imposing them on people in other countries is worse still. If they're serious about this, they should suck it up and proactively block websites from abroad that violate their guidelines. Vague threats of punishments without prior warning are ridiculous.
by tim333 | 2025-10-27 23:46:26+00:00
I mean if he just wanted to cash out he could cut the spend to a few billion and try to float / cash out. I mean why try to spend unprecedented amounts if he thinks it'll all crash?

I just watched an interview and he seems to be leaning the other way that self improving AI is about to kick off https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfE1Wun9xkk&t=810s That would be a step beyond the normal Moore's law type exponential.
by hatthew | 2025-10-27 23:46:30+00:00
Something I think about sometimes is how it's usually more important to maintain shape rather than color. For example, in the first 2 images on the page, quantizing the pink hearts results in some pink, white, and grey. An error diffusion alg will result in pink speckled with white and grey, whereas it might be preferable to have a solid pink that's slightly off color but has no speckles.

Are there existing techniques that do this sort of thing? I'm imagining something like doing a median filter on the image, run clustering on the pixels in the colorspace, and then shift/smudge clusters towards "convenient" points in the colorspace, e.g. the N points of the quantized palette and the N^2 points halfway between each pair. Then a partial-error-diffusion alg like atkinson smooths out the final result.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-10-27 23:47:09+00:00
We were only in that area for a couple of days. It seems to be a nice area. Midland has a bit of a theme park / artificial feel to it, though. Saginaw seems a little more "authentic".

We were impressed by Dow Gardens. I'm also particularly interested Alden B. Dow's architecture. I'm hoping to attend one of the various tours the studio offers next year.

I happened to see an article[0] about a Dow house coming up for sale last year. That ignited my interest in that area of the state. (I'm not a credible enough potential buyer to actually see this property in the flesh, sadly.)

Some of my family lived in the Traverse City area and we still have property there. We spend time there every summer and, coming from western Ohio, we always take a westerly route to get up there. I'd never spent any time on the eastern side of the peninsula before. We're definitely going back for another couple days sometime.

[0] https://www.mlive.com/realestate-news/2024/08/see-inside-an-...
by marcuskane2 | 2025-10-27 23:47:36+00:00
It's crazy to me that you're still blaming the poorest, most exploited, least powerful person in the economy for the problems instead of the people actually responsible.

Since you moved the goalposts after I pointed out the absurdity of suggesting that the underpaid Honduran laborer is also bidding up the price of housing to a broader, indirect impact, I'll go ahead and point out that your argument still fails there. That low-cost labor you're complaining about? That makes construction of housing less expensive. The migrants are building more houses than they're occupying.

Be mad at the top 1%. Be mad at the people who inherited land, wealth and power. Be mad at the people raising your rent and preventing people from building more housing. But don't be mad at some guy just trying to make an honest living doing hard work to stay fed and sheltered because he wasn't born as lucky as you.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-27 23:47:49+00:00
> and the practice of advancing the clock during daylight-saving time changes each zone's standard time.

Even more pedantically, “standard time” is not necessarily consistent across each zone (particularly, during the period for which in parts of the zone it is advanced by an hour) since "standard time” only advances for those states, or parts of states, for which an exemption is not in place.

So, the Unix-y convention of using PST for "Pacific Standard Time without advancement", and PDT for "Pacific Standard Time with advancement" is the simplest way of getting meaningful concise labels out of the US legal scheme. (This is only a theoretical issue for some US timezones, but it is a concrete one for at least the Pacific and Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zones.)
by tptacek | 2025-10-27 23:47:51+00:00
Why does it matter? I know the answer and this is a philosophical complaint, but the purpose of CVE is simply to make sure that people are talking about the same bug, not as a certification of importance or impact.

In this particular case, the poster is complaining that 3 CVEs were assigned for memory corruption vulnerabilities reachable only from the dnsmasq configuration file. I didn't read carefully, but the presumption that config file memory corruption bugs aren't vulnerabilities is problematic, because user input can find its way into configurations through templating; it depends on how innocuous the field triggering the bug is.
by schmichael | 2025-10-27 23:48:10+00:00
It has to be AI generated or at least edited right? The reliance on bulleted lists. The endless adjectives and declarations. ...but also the subtle... well not exactly errors, but facts I think are open to dispute?

Such as:

> Together, these tools make Go perfect for microservices, real-time systems, and high-throughput backends.

Real-time systems?! I have never heard of anyone using Go for realtime systems because of its GC and preemptive scheduler. Seems like the sort of thing an LLM would slip in because it sounds good and nails that 3 item cadence.

> Built on top of Go channels → broken backpressure.

But then the example is about ordering. Maybe I'm being pedantic or missing the specific nomenclature the ReactiveX community uses, but backpressure and ordering are different concerns to me.

Then the Key Takeaways at the end just seems like an LLMism to me. It's a short article! Do we really need another 3 item list to summarize it?

I'm not anti-LLM, but the sameness of the content it generates grates on me.
by subtlesoftware | 2025-10-27 23:48:58+00:00
True for now because models are mainly used to implement features / build small MVPs, which they’re quite good at.

The next step would be to have a model running continuously on a project with inputs from monitoring services, test coverage, product analytics, etc. Such an agent, powered by a sufficient model, could be considered an effective software engineer.

We’re not there today, but it doesn’t seem that far off.
by adamwk | 2025-10-27 23:49:44+00:00
I think this article does an alright job selling ro over RxGo, but doesn’t really explain why using a reactive library is better than plain go. The channel/goroutine example is fine, as they say, but they hand wave how this will fall apart in a more complex project. Conversely, their reactive example is mapping and filtering an 4 item array and handwave how the simplicity will remain no matter the size of the codebase.

I’ve worked in a few complex projects that adopted reactive styles and I don’t think they made things simpler. It was just as easy to couple components with reactive programming as it was without.
by skeaker | 2025-10-27 23:51:03+00:00
I have read it in the past as a way to deal with imposter syndrome. You push past it by believing that you're tricking the system by faking it despite your own perceived inadequacy, when in fact you are performing perfectly fine. You do this until the results of your work are evident enough to ward off imposter syndrome. If you are indeed doing bad fake work then I guess this would fall apart, yes.
by tracker1 | 2025-10-27 23:51:49+00:00
This also tends to include the rainwater that falls on the ground to grow the grass that cattle eat that would fall on the grass anyway, or that the cow farts aren't really more greenhouse emissions than the grass rotting out over the summer anyway. It's distortive.

IMO, water is a renewable resource and what should count is the use of water in scarce environments from scarce sources directly in excess of what gets renewed. If you're right by the Mississippi river and often see flooding in your region, I don't think using the water for cooling a reactor (steam as the byproduct) is necessarily something that should be considered a negative... it'll come back down as rain somewhere.

I'm not sure why Amazon is "using" so much water, assuming their cooling systems are a closed loop... otherwise, if using evaporation for cooling, like a reactor, it depends on the location, source and usage. "it's complicated"
by the_af | 2025-10-27 23:52:09+00:00
No, that's a false equivalence.

> Everything else is just recycled slop.

No, not everything is slop. AI-slop is slop. The term was coined for a reason.

Everyone can ask the AI directly, unlike accessing journals. Journals are intermediaries because you don't have direct access to the source (or cannot conduct the experiment yourself).

Everyone has access to AI at the slop "let's generate blog posts and articles" level we're discussing here.

A better analogy than teachers is: I ask a teacher a random question, and then I tell it to you with almost no changes, with the same voice if the teacher (and you also have access to the same teacher). Why? What value do I add? You can ask the teacher directly. And doubly so because what I'm asking is not some flash of insight, it's random crap instead.
by almosthere | 2025-10-27 23:52:09+00:00
https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-def...

In Texas even if you steal $100 you can go to jail for 180 days.

The nuance in CA (before it recently changed) was that there was absolutely NOTHING you could do if they stole 3 lawnmowers.

Besides why fight this? You already know you're wrong.
by simonw | 2025-10-27 23:52:27+00:00
This is a good headline. LLMs are remarkably good at writing code. Writing code isn't the same thing as delivering working software.

A human expert needs to identify the need for software, decide what the software should do, figure out what's feasible to deliver, build the first version (AI can help a bunch here), evaluate what they've built, show it to users, talk to them about whether it's fit for purpose, iterate based on their feedback, deploy and communicate the value of the software, and manage its existence and continued evolution in the future.

Some of that stuff can be handled by non-developer humans working with LLMs, but a human expert needs who understands code will be able to do this stuff a whole lot more effectively.

I guess the big question is if experienced product management types can pick up enough coding technical literacy to work like this without programmers, or if programmers can pick up enough enough PM skills to work without PMs.

My money is on both roles continuing to exist and benefit from each other, in a partnership that produces results a lot faster because the previously slow "writing the code" part is a lot faster than it used to be.
by kulahan | 2025-10-27 23:52:28+00:00
Yeah and you can rent a truck every time you need to haul something, but it's nice when your friend lets you borrow his - and his manpower/time. And yeah, you can hire an emergency remediation company, or chef, or psychologist for your friends, but that seems... impersonal to me?

I'm not trying to say there's no value to Discord friends, but I do think it's substantially less valuable to the human condition than real, in-person friends.
by linsomniac | 2025-10-27 23:52:43+00:00
Early in our dating, my (now) wife moved into a new apartment and accidentally turned in the key to the back patio storage room with the keys to the old place. She was embarrassed to ask the old landlord, so she asked me to ask him. Instead, I popped home, picked open the patio storage lock, and then re-keyed the lock to match the front door. When I was a teenager I bought a (apparently lifetime) supply of assorted lock pins.
by em-bee | 2025-10-27 23:52:55+00:00
People were loathe to work in other groups compared to their friends like most kids are.

understandable, but actually a problem that should to be counteracted. it's not really healthy if the same kids always work together because it leads to building cliques. ad you don't want that in a school. it also causes kids that don't fit in any group to be excluded.
by mfrye0 | 2025-10-27 23:53:01+00:00
Interesting. That's actually where we started. We were doing automated research on vendors from a TPRM perspective and looking for data points around organizational security / reputation. Examples - if the company had been hacked before / how they responded, do they have a CISO, nth party vendors, are they SOC2 / FedRAMP certified, etc. Basically, predictors of risk / stability.

We realized the underlying business graph was the bottleneck though, so that's been our focus for some time. With that in place, we're now coming full circle on the risk research standpoint.

On your comment about confidence / liability, we're actually having conversations around that now and getting feedback. First step is exposing all the research and evidence directly to build trust, which is what we're doing now for the new corporate hierarchy system.
by Faelon | 2025-10-27 23:54:16+00:00
There are proposed diabetic mechanisms which are exacerbated by cholesterol. Plant based food are completely devoid of cholesterol and have dramatically lower incidences of diabetes. So there you have a mechanism, and the demonstrable effect of abstaining from that source of food. What else do you want? https://diabetesjournals.org/diabetes/article/56/9/2328/1265... https://www.mdpi.com/2218-273X/13/2/224
by vesterthacker | 2025-10-27 23:54:35+00:00
The paper Artificial Writing and Automated Detection by Brian Jabarian and Alex Imas examines the strange boundary that now divides human expression from mechanical imitation. Within their analysis one feels not only the logic of research but the deeper unease of our age, the question of whether language still belongs to those who think or only to those who simulate thought. They weigh false positives and false negatives, yet behind those terms lives an older struggle, the human desire to prove its own reality in a world of imitation.

I read their work and sense the same anxiety in myself. When I write with care, when I choose words that carry rhythm and reason, I feel suspicion rather than understanding. Readers ask whether a machine has written the text. I lower my tone, I break the structure, I remove what once gave meaning to style, only to make the words appear more human. In doing so, I betray something essential, not in the language but in myself.

The authors speak of false positives, of systems that mistake human writing for artificial output. But that error already spreads beyond algorithms. It enters conversation, education, and the smallest corners of daily life. A clear sentence now sounds inhuman; a careless one, sincere. Truth begins to look artificial, and confusion passes for honesty.

I recall the warning of Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt in The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. She foresaw a culture that would teach obedience in place of thought. That warning now feels less like prophecy and more like description.

When people begin to distrust eloquence, when they scorn precision as vanity and mistake simplicity for virtue, they turn against their own mind. And when a society grows ashamed of clear language, it prepares its own silence. Not the silence of peace, but the silence of forgetfulness, the kind that falls when no one believes in the power of words any longer.
by pil0u | 2025-10-27 23:54:58+00:00
I agree that tooling is maturing towards that end.

I wonder if that same non-technical person that built the MVP with GenAI and requires a (human) technical assistance today, will need it tomorrow as well. Will the tooling be mature enough and lower the barrier enough for anyone to have a complete understanding about software engineering (monitoring services, test coverage, product analytics)?
by NetworkPerson | 2025-10-27 23:54:59+00:00
Having years of direct interaction working in the vet field, some skepticism is warranted. Ignoring the lack of studies, I’ve had drug reps explain how the three year and one year rabies vaccines are actually the exact same shot made from the same batch. It just costs a good bit less to license some of it as one year. And they can technically charge a little more for it so buying it over three years is a greater gain than the single three-year shot.

Past that special bit of marketing, we’re also lacking in studies of dog/cat titers to have a good understanding of when/if booster shots are needed for animals. There’s a decent set of vets who believe it is a lot more like humans where it’s make it through the initial series and you’re good for life vs needing the yearly updates. Bordatella is likely the most abused booster with some boarding facilities requiring a booster every 6 months for animals while even the vets usually state yearly.

To be clear, vaccines are good and should be used. The unclear question is if they really need to be yearly for animals.
by bradfa | 2025-10-27 23:55:31+00:00
The context windows are still dramatically too small and the models aren’t yet seeming to train on how to build maintainable software. There is a lot less written down about how to do this on the public web. There’s a bunch of high level public writing but not may great examples of real world situations that happen on every proprietary software project, because that’s very messy data locked away internal to companies.

I’m sure it’ll improve over time but it won’t be nearly as easy as making ai good at coding.
by thomasfromcdnjs | 2025-10-27 23:55:32+00:00
Agreed.

I've played around with agent only code bases (where I don't code at all), and had an agent hooked up to server logs, which would create an issue when it encounters errors, and then an agent would fix the tickets, push to prod and check deployment statuses etc. Worked good enough to see that this could easily become the future. (I also had it claude/codex code that whole setup)

Just for semantic nitpicking, I've zero shot heaps of small "software" projects that I use then throw away. Doesn't count as a SAAS product but I would still call it software.
by taeric | 2025-10-27 23:56:28+00:00
Right, I was just using that as "at the extreme" and how it largely exists to allow you to put a functional feel on top of the imperative below it.

I'm sympathetic to the idea, as you can see it in most instruction manuals that people are likely to consume. The vast majority of which (all of them?) are imperative in nature. There is something about the "for the humans" layer being imperative. Step by step, if you will.

I don't know that it fully works, though. I do think you are well served being consistent in how you layer something. Where all code at a given layer should probably stick to the same styles. But knowing which should be the outer and which the inner? I'm not clear that we have to pick, here. Feel free to have more than two layers. :D
by dijit | 2025-10-27 23:56:45+00:00
I don’t personally see a lot of difference in consulting a chart of “what time is it in x country” vs a chart of say “the time business starts in country x”.

They’d be the same exact list. “offset +9 hours”- the only semantic difference would be that clocks don’t change.

I should mention that I spent a little bit of time in Saudi Arabia and expecting them to be out and about at 7pm like in Western Europe and the USA is crazy, they seem to get up later and keep going until 3am. I’ve never seen rush hour at 3am until I spent time in Riyadh. It’s a false construct we’ve decided on: that everyone follows the same time pattern anyway.

Why do we believe the world needs to wake up at 7am? If nothing else its so incredibly arbitrary to begin with.
by preommr | 2025-10-27 23:56:47+00:00
These discussions are so tiring.

Yes, they're bad now, but they'll get better in a year.

If the generative ability is good enough for small snippets of code, it's good enough for larger software that's better organized. Maybe the models don't have enough of the right kind of training data, or the agents don't have the right reasoning algorithms. But it is there.