MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by usrxcghghj | 2025-10-08 18:45:19+00:00
> sharp pivot into defending taxi medallions.

This is a deflection. Cory is not coming out in defense of taxi medallions so much as it is a re-iteration of the current laws in place and how tech uses apps to get around the laws. Yes taxis suck, but also so does uber in their own way - This is all beside the point. These tech companies are using 'gig'ified models to get around laws set by the city officials elected by the people.
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-08 18:45:36+00:00
It's called capitalism.

User hostile will always be more profitable.

It used to be impossible to be this user hostile. You could not build a VCR that was unable to record the Superbowl.

Tech fixed only that.

Enshittification is just what capitalism means

Preventing capitalism from doing exactly what it wants to do requires regulation and enforcing competition. Competition does not happen naturally. Competition is expensive and low profit and kills businesses, so they try to avoid it.

Gas stations next door to each other don't do price wars anymore, because it demonstrably did not improve profits. Sure, you could lower your price slightly and maybe get a few more customers than you do now, but they will just lower their prices and at the end of the day you both end up making less money.

So you just don't compete. Instead of lowering your price, you match their price.
by rkomorn | 2025-10-08 18:46:37+00:00
There are definitely some people who think that directing anger and unpleasantness at the person they talk to (who has no control over the situation other than choosing not to do their job) is a valid approach to providing "feedback".

Some sort of "trickle up" mechanism where if enough people are sufficiently nasty to frontline workers, it'll get back to decision makers who will then change course.

I think that's fantasy and/or rationalization for taking things out on others.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-10-08 18:47:29+00:00
It depends.

Do you use iCloud optimized storage, or do you download originals to your machine ? Kopia only backs up what it can see, and in case of iCloud optimized storage, it only backs up size optimized miniatures and not the original files.

Second, I haven’t researched this, but iPhoto used resource forks and extended attributes quite extensively for its library, and if the same is true for Apple Photos, Kopia will not pick up those, but Arq will. That was the very feature that caused me to purchase Arq all those years ago.
by hylaride | 2025-10-08 18:47:58+00:00
To add to this, remember that YOUR CAREER can and will transcend layoffs, bad bosses, bad companies, etc. With few exceptions, the network you build with the good people you work with are a thousand times more valuable than your current role or predicament.

I've seen people get laid off or fired that, while not necessarily wishing 9/10 of them ill will, am satisfied/happy to varying levels that they are gone. These are people that are a combination of lazy, unintelligent, entitled, uncooperative, etc.

There have been people (~5 in my 25 year career) where I danced on their figurative grave.

There are some (mostly early in my career) where I as shocked, kept in some brief contact with them, but came to the conclusion that the company was right in their move.

There are some where I was immediately in contact with them, planning beers or whatever.

Then there are those that I have kept in touch with over my whole career and have essentially become close friends. We have our own private group chats, keep up to date on tech, people, opportunities, etc. PEOPLE LIKE THIS ARE WORTH THEIR WEIGHT IN GOLD.

Companies are not people. They don't have feelings and they will terminate people, often indiscriminately, over short term and trivial things like a single bad quarter or because some VP needs to flex their MBA. They can act stupid and if other people point it out and don't get a response, that either means you look stupid for not being able to see it, or worse you look like a hack that's never worth being reached out to again. That also ignores the fact that when people are hurt or in shock, they lash out a bit. Terminating the conversation just means you don't care or can't handle any emotion...

The smart people you've worked with at bad companies are often the best to keep in touch with, and you won't know it unless you're willing to open up about "saying bad things" about the company - or the people above both of you.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-08 18:48:08+00:00
If you're looking for a really good alternative: Supermicro makes large chassis that will hold a fair number of drives (I have one that will take drives). They're usually sold cheap on ebay and other such sites when they're written off. If you're willing to replace a couple of fans and do your own software installation they're unbeatable for value-for-money, and they last just about forever. I've still got two Synology diskstations with 12 bays each and one extender. But the Supermicro is far more powerful and seems much more reliable and better engineered, even if it isn't as easy to set up. The downside of the Supermicro chassis is that they're not really made for residential use, they're pretty loud. But other than that redundant power, lots of CPU and RAM for caching.
Ask HN: Anyone Building an AI Airtable?
by matt3D | 2025-10-08 18:48:12+00:00
I do a lot of work classifying and tagging data, at the moment I use a combination of Excel, Supabase, Jupyter Notebooks and recently Teable.io

I spend a lot of time doing what I would describe as an AI VLOOKUP where I get an embedding for every record in Table A and lookup the top matches from Table B, sometimes adding in some LLM synthesising of results. The problem I have is there is always a manual step because the results are never perfect, so I might get AI to classify 10k rows of data and then I’ll go through and sort them and start replacing answers I think are incorrect etc.

It seems to be quite an obvious little niche but I think part of the problem is cost. A lot of the tools which are monthly subscriptions can’t afford the cost of the requests, so they resort to simple labelling. I think some kind of BYO Model might be the way.

Anyone seen or working on such a thing?
by ssl-3 | 2025-10-08 18:48:52+00:00
I've tried it previously, and I've also given up on it. I may try it again at some point.

It is worth noting that I am terrible at writing anything resembling "code" on my own. I can generally read it and follow it and understand how it does what it does, why it does that thing, and often spot when it does something that is either very stupid or very clever (or sometimes both), but producing it on a blank canvas has always been something of a quagmire from which I have been unable to escape once I tread into it.

But I can think through abstract processes of various complexities in tiny little steps, and I can also describe those steps very well in English.

Thus, it is without any sense of regret or shame that I say that the LLM era has a boon for me in terms of the things I've been able to accomplish with a computer...and that it is primarily the natural-language instructional input of this LLM "Computer Use" model that I find rather enticing.

(I'd connect the dots and use the fluencies I do have to get the bot to write a functional AHK script, but that sounds like more work than the reward of solving this periodic annoyance is worth.)
by kwar13 | 2025-10-08 18:49:34+00:00
> Don’t feel like you have continue the conversation if they respond. You can if you want, but don’t feel obligated. > Don’t state you are going to keep in touch, unless you plan to.

Either this was written by someone who works in HR, or is some new AI slop.

Why would you reach out with a note then...? Just don't in the first place if those are the suggestions.
by lazide | 2025-10-08 18:49:46+00:00
When two ideologically incompatible parties (as in what is good/bad, high ground or not) are fighting, it gets complicated and ruthless/very destructive. In large part because it’s about incompatible identities and trying to purge ‘the other’, rather than ‘mere’ control of a specific piece of land. It takes a potentially resolvable conflict (an area where there may be a stable compromise), and can turn it into an existential fight.

This becomes especially destructive in very dense environments like urban centers, because the level of hiding that can happen becomes almost fractal.

The fight in Gaza is one recent example, as are the others.

I’m not surprised that Gaza has escalated to the point it has (total war, essentially), because Hamas can’t actually give up without losing their entire identity and reason for being, for example. And the factions in Israel can’t back down without winning or ‘it would have all been for nothing’.

Or are you referring to tactics, because there are actual religions reasons/justifications for the nature of some specific tactics being used in Gaza.
by wat10000 | 2025-10-08 18:50:02+00:00
So it was. The article never mentions the frame pointer and I'm familiar with compilers that load the saved value from the stack in the epilog, rather than adjusting it arithmetically. But they do have an assembly listing showing the two-step arithmetic adjustment for both the stack pointer and frame pointer.

But I'm not sure that matters, because the unwind code they show uses the stack pointer rather than the frame pointer anyway.
by xp84 | 2025-10-08 18:50:56+00:00
I can agree that this is interesting as a thought experiment, and indeed could form an amazing foundation for an ambitious work of fiction. But the only way to bring about such a world IRL would be by force, meaning that many people in such a society would perceive it as a highly oppressive state.

To get the paradigm shift you're after, and a collective consciousness, you'd have to have buy-in from every member of such a society, and to raise children in the same principles. Perhaps it could be a civilization on an island, or the founding principle of a generational starship or something.
by thejash | 2025-10-08 18:51:22+00:00
Since Sculptor allows you to use custom docker containers (devcontainers), you can check out the other projects in there.

Then your primary project (from Sculptor's perspective) is simply whatever contains the devcontainer / dockerfile that you want it to use (to pull in all of those repos)

It's still a little awkward though -- if you do this, be sure to set a custom system prompt explaining this setup to the underlying coding agent!

(I'm a founder of Imbue, the company behind Sculptor: https://imbue.com/sculptor/ )
by port11 | 2025-10-08 18:51:42+00:00
While afraid that we developers will eventually be automated away — as I have bills to pay —, I only need to ask the JetBrains AI assistant for help to understand why that won't happen in my ‘career-span’.

It's not a diss on JetBrains, their assistant is good enough that I've paid for it for a few months; but ask of it anything a tad more complex and it becomes a code review for a PR that you begin to question in its entirety. I'm not familiar with CSS Grid, as I've stopped doing CSS when flex was becoming popular, but I have to say none of the models managed what I wanted. They kept proposing solutions with an arrogant confidence that this must work. When I pointed out this didn't work, they'd look at the codebase and find something else that was the problem. When I asked for help with a script for an Alpine box, it was very assertive that systemd-based solutions should work. How can you get that wrong?

I imagine the code laundering will eventually get far enough that you can copy-paste someone else's project fully baked, and then the LLM will truly shine. But for building something piece by piece, I haven't gotten good results yet. The Assistant so far has been most useful for writing unit tests, HTML, or getting a decent web search within the IDE.

I wonder if paying for Kagi wouldn't make for better search, and then I'd find some tool that writes unit tests based on your code. It really does feel like some people are being very generous about how magical these things are, because I'm not getting the magic at all.
by manx | 2025-10-08 18:51:51+00:00
It's not only the amount of code but also the quality of the available code. If a language has a low barrier to entry (e.g. python, javascript), there will be a lot of beginner code. If a language has good static analysis and type checking, the available code is free of certain error classes (e.g. Rust, Scala, Haskell).

I see that difference in llm generated code when switching languages. Generated rust code has a much higher quality than python code for example.
by zamadatix | 2025-10-08 18:52:14+00:00
Should thermal and cost constraints at scale not also tend to relate to the volume of the individual components in the same way (ignoring constant factors) as the growth factors for an idealized memory structure around the CPU itself? In a more literal sense: the size and quantity of transistors (or other alternative units) also describe the cost, heat dissipation, and volume of the memory simultaneously. Tweaking any of the parameters still ultimately results in a "how much can we handle in that volume of product" equation, which will be the ultimate bound.

The difference is we spread them out into differently optimized volumes instead of build a homogenous cube, which is (most likely IMO) where most of the constant factors come from.

I think this is the part the article glossed over to just get to showing the empirical results, but I also don't feel it's an inherently unreasonable set of assumptions. At the very least, matches what the theoretical limit would be in the far future even if it were to only happen to coincidentally match current systems for other reasons.
by sarchertech | 2025-10-08 18:52:32+00:00
Nice to see that you recognize that!

> One of the more "engineering" like skills in using this stuff is methodically figuring out what's a superstition and what actually works.

The problem is there are so many variables and the system is so chaotic that this is a nearly impossible task for things that don’t have an absolutely enormous effect size.

For most things you’re testing, you need to run the experiment many many times to get any kind is statistically significant result, which rules out manual review.

And since we have tried and failed to develop objective code quality metrics, you’re left with metrics like “does this pass the automated test or not!”, but that doesn’t tell you whether the code is any good, or whether it is overfitting the test suite. Then when a new model comes out, you have to scrap your results and run your experiments all over. This is engineering of the laws of physics were constantly changing, and I lived in that universe, I think I’d take my ball and go home.

There's always been a bit of magic to being a programmer, and if you look at the cover of SICP people like to imagine that they are wizards or alchemists. But "vibe engineering" moves that to a whole new level. You're a wizard mixing up gunpowder and sacrificing chickens to fire spirits before you light it. It's not engineering because unless the models fundamentally change you'll never be able to really sort the science from the superstition. Software engineering already had too much superstition for my taste, but we're at a whole new level now.
by pfortuny | 2025-10-08 18:52:50+00:00
Nope:

The rule of law establishes, first of all, that the Law does not distinguish any kind of person from another. This is why in order to have a true Rule of Law, the three powers (Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary) must be truly separated.

Decrees are exactly one way to subvert it: the executive acts as the legislative.

Also, in tyrannies (vid. Venezuela, Iran, etc.), the Judiciary is a slave to the executive.

The rule of law states, first of all, that people in Government are subject to the same laws as any other citizen.

It is obviously an unreachable optimum (like true "democracy" is), but that is the basic principle. Not that "Laws" govern the place.

Chat Control (and see especially the Danish Minister who said "common citizens should not expect to be able to use cryptography" or words to that effect) is suspicious under the rule of law because it differentiates ipso iure between "ordinary citizens" and "the executive".

Edit: whether you agree with him or not, reading "The road to serfdom" should enlighten you a lot about this topic.
by debugnik | 2025-10-08 18:52:54+00:00
> permission/ownership model added to GNATprove in recent years.

So recently that last time I tried Alire failed to install me a version of gnatprove that supported it. I hope next time I try it actually works though, because I do like the semantics they came up with from the examples I'd seen.

> that doesn’t prevent you from using controlled types - you just need to isolate them. [...] `pragma SPARK_Mode(Off)`

No need to elaborate, I know that SPARK_Mode => Off is the SPARK equivalent of unsafe in Rust; that is, regular Ada. So yes, it does exclude controlled types, and trying to twist SPARK's lack of semantics for them into a pro is not a good argument IMO.
by derbOac | 2025-10-08 18:52:56+00:00
I agree completely.

My own experience in watching citation patterns, not even with things that I've worked on, is that certain authors or groups attract attention for an idea or result for all kinds of weird reasons, and that drives citation patterns, even when they're not the originator of the results or ideas. This leads to weird patterns, like the same results before a certain "popular" paper being ignored even when the "popular" paper is incredibly incremental or even a replication of previous work; sometimes previous authors discussing the same exact idea, even well-known ones, are forgotten in lieu of a newer more charismatic author; various studies have shown that retracted zombie papers continue to be cited at high rates as if they were never retracted; and so forth and so on.

I've kind of given up trying to figure out what accounts for this. Most of the time it's just a kind of recency availability bias, where people are basically lazy in their citations, or rushed for time, or whatever. Sometimes it's a combination of an older literature simply being forgotten, together with a more recent author with a lot of notoriety for whatever reason discussing the idea. Lots of times there's this weird cult-like buzz around a person, more about their personality or presentation than anything else — as in, a certain person gets a reputation as being a genius, and then people kind of assume whatever they say or show hasn't been said or shown before, leading to a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of patterns of citations. I don't even think it matters that what they say is valid, it just has to garner a lot of attention and agreement.

In any event, in my field I don't attribute a lot to researchers being famous for any reason other than being famous. The Matthew effect is real, and can happen very rapidly, for all sorts of reasons. People also have a short attention span, and little memory for history.

This is all especially true of more recent literature. Citation patterns pre-1995 or so, as is the case with those Wikipedia citations, are probably not representative of the current state.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-10-08 18:53:07+00:00
> Task management apps are crutches. [...] All that you do is make people reliant on them, and everything disappears when the app is no longer around.

Welcome to ADHD management. At its core, its an executive function deficit. My wife and I both have it (my case is worse) and so do most of our children. External systems and environments have a huge effect on our ability to manage life, and that's not something that can change. The solution is to learn to work with it and tune our environments.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-10-08 18:53:22+00:00
This works as long as you have enough storage locally. Our photo library is ~3TB split over 2 users, and while you could theoretically use an external SSD for storage, that kinda cuts down on mobility. You could leave the drive attached and drag it around, or detach it and lose access to your photos on the go.

For a long time, I had a Mac mini running 24/7, where each user was logged in (via Remote Desktop), and that would synchronize photos to an external drive, and the Mac would then make backups (via Arq) to my NAS as well as a remote location.

I don’t count the Mac copy in my 3-2-1 as it is basically sync (each side, iCloud and Mac, are sync), and without versioning, ie APFS snapshots, if one side goes bad, so does the other.

I’ve since switched to using Parachute for day to day backups, and every ~6 months I make a manual full export of the photo library in case Parachute missed something.
by jvanderbot | 2025-10-08 18:53:24+00:00
As with all things - both are probably true.

It might be that we attribute post hoc greatness to a small number of folks, but require a lot of very interested / ambitious folks to find the most useful threads to pull, run the labs, catalog data, etc.

It's only after the fact that we go back and say "hey this was really useful". If only we knew ahead of time that Calculus and "tracking stars" would lead to so many useful discoveries!
by littlestymaar | 2025-10-08 18:53:38+00:00
Backdooring isn't OK because by definition you cannot selectively backdoor someone's phone, you need to have it backdoored by default to exploit it later, which is obviously terrible.

Wiretaping a suspect's phone on the other hand is a fine (and often necessary) police operation, as long as it must be approved by an independent magistrate.
by mothballed | 2025-10-08 18:53:42+00:00
No, just to ask you if you're using the app. After you say no a human comes on the intercom. The human doesn't have to suffer the abuse of asking about the app, wouldn't surprise me if part of that is because it's set lots of people in a rage so they let them just vent to a computer.

I have no idea what happens if you order through the app, maybe in that case it's 100% AI.
by lesuorac | 2025-10-08 18:54:00+00:00
> Firstly, regulating a thousand small players is much harder than regulating a few.

I don't agree with this.

Get you and a thousand friends to submit fake mortgages documents and let me know how many of you end up in jail. Compare that too how many people went to jail from Wells Fargo.

More smaller players is easier to regulate because you can literally use any punishments. If you dissolve Wells Fargo the economy is going to throw a fit (see Enron) but if you dissolve a tiny company then nobody cares.

Real Estate and Healthcare seem to be pretty highly concentrated industries imo. Even though there are a zillion agents/doctors they're part of a professional guild and that guild does the lobbying on their behalf. Like good luck getting antibiotics on your own but after a doctor looks at you for 1 minute you have a prescription for the same drug you always take for an ear infection.
by flykespice | 2025-10-08 18:54:26+00:00
Afaik gurudumps is a total jerk, constantly being hostile for no reason to newcomers.

Haze is almost always in conflict with mame lead Cuavas when trying to upstream his code, but his anger mostly justified.

Cuavas is a huge micromanager, he won't accept your code even if you just missed a typo in a line comment.

I respect his commitment to hold the codebase to absolute standards, but sometimes he takes his micromanagement too far that just makes the whole process unproductive.
by didericis | 2025-10-08 18:54:31+00:00
> Such laws cannot be enforced. Enforcement can only be arbitrary.

I am against criminalizing cryptography and largely agree about it being infeasible given the extent of proliferation and ease of replicating it/am playing devil's advocate:

Laws banning math related to manufacturing nuclear weapons can and has been enforced. It's important to take legal threats like ChatControl seriously and not just dismiss it as absurd/unenforceable overreach, even if that's likely true.