MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danaris | 2025-10-21 19:05:57+00:00
It's really hard to imagine how "truth is harder to find, more people lie with impunity, and convince others that their lies are true" could have a positive outcome.

Moreover, I think it's really hard overall to imagine a better future as long as all of this technology and power is in the hands of massively wealthy people who have shown their willingness to abuse it to maintain that wealth at our expense.

The optimistic future effectively requires some means of reclaiming some of that power and wealth for the rest of us.
by CjHuber | 2025-10-21 19:05:59+00:00
I'd say it depends on how coding assistants are used, when on autopilot I'd agree, as they don't really take the time to reflect on the work they've done before going on with the next feature of the spec. But in a collaborative process that's of course different as you are pointing out things you want to have implemented in a different way. But I get your point, most PR's you'd flag as AI generated slop are the ones where someone just ran them on autopilot and was somewhat satisfied with the outcome, while treating the resulting code as blackbox
by LakesAndTrees | 2025-10-21 19:06:21+00:00
This reminds me of my most recent real estate transaction.

Over and over, the agent kept insisting that I increase my counter offer. "Think about it - that's only like a latte a day".

Yes. A latte a day, that I don't already purchase. Over 25 years.

We were talking about close to $50,000.
by the_af | 2025-10-21 19:06:27+00:00
> One part that's kind of boring when playing a text adventure is trying things the original authors did not anticipate and getting a boring standard response.

This happens mostly with old text adventures. Modern Interactive Fiction is really sophisticated, and you don't get many boring responses.

Example: in "Spider and Web", you're a captured spy being interrogated by your captors. If you say random gibberish, your interrogator will tell you (playing the role of the parser, but in a more interesting way). If you say something nonsensical, your interrogator will say "I'm losing my patience. No, that's not how it went", etc. Parsers are really, really sophisticated and they can make sense of contextual, unsaid information (or ask for clarification).

For more than a few decades, parsers no longer reply "you cannot do that".
by jsonBorn | 2025-10-21 19:06:52+00:00
"..if you are a state or federal enforcement authority, and you have suspicion of any criminal activity of `Jay Gibson', be encouraged to immediately contact: Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram, Keybase and Wire @lorenzofb, or by email.
by cheeseomlit | 2025-10-21 19:06:54+00:00
I'm not advocating that people not be allowed to vote, I'm just pushing back on the dogma of more voter participation = better, IE. just because you can vote doesn't mean you should if you dont understand what you're voting for and don't really care enough to learn.

Seeing the constant barrage of campaign ads every couple years made me think about it- Why does campaign financing matter, how do they turn money into votes anyways? The answer apparently is ads, but I see these bottom-of-the-barrel slop political advertisements and wonder how that trash could possibly have a measurable effect on the outcome of an election. But it must work, otherwise they wouldn't spend so much money on it. And the fact that elections can be meaningfully influenced by the amount of ads a campaign can run is a signal to me that the democratic process is broken in some fundamental way. The votes of well-informed constituents are drowned out by the more numerous cohorts of partisans, reactionaries, and the apathetic just going through the motions to fulfill their 'civic duty', so it seems to me that increasing voter participation without changing anything else is only going to exacerbate the problem
by terminalshort | 2025-10-21 19:07:13+00:00
I think the situation here from NASAs perspective is that these were the choices:

1. Back a low risk moon mission that is basically a repeat of Apollo using proven, but extremely expensive tech that has a very low probability of failure.

2. Back a high risk strategy that relies on the development of new technology that can potentially deliver hundreds of tons of cargo to the lunar surface for a fraction of the cost of Apollo and support a sustained human presence on the lunar surface. This of course comes with a near 100% chance of significant delays and cost overruns, and also a high probability of total failure.

IMO NASA made the obviously correct choice here and it's not close. This is exactly the kind of thing that I want my tax money spent on.
by quantumcotton | 2025-10-21 19:07:25+00:00
Back when gpt 3.5 was released I was testing it for translating Tongan. A language that wasn't even on Google. It was doing okay. It lacks certain formalities and sort of contextual understandings in other languages like Tagalog or Spanish. But I noticed that if I put it into a character that is a native Filipino or Honduran. Or Tongan. It does do better. But gpt 5 really is leaps of evolution ahead compared to 3.5. It actually does really well now.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-10-21 19:07:25+00:00
It's because there are a significant number of us for who tinkering with and building shit is basically a compulsion. And software development is vastly more available, and quicker to iterate and thus more satisfying, than any other tinkering discipline. It's probably related to whatever drives some people to make art, the only difference being that the market has decided that the tinkers are worth a hell of a lot more.

For evidence towards the compulsion argument, look at the existence of FOSS software. Or videogame modding. Or all the other freely available software in existence. None of that is made by people who made the rational decision of "software development is a lucrative field that will pay me a comfortable salary, thus I should study software development". It's all made by people for whom there is no alternative but to build.
by AtNightWeCode | 2025-10-21 19:07:39+00:00
It is very basic. I have built my own version of this based on Chromium that integrates both Claude and ChatGPT in the browser. It can do a lot of tasks like translate or shorten the text I selected and so on. It took me like a couple of hours to build. The problem is the cost of using the LLMs, especially since they are still pretty stupid and requires huge prompts.

EDIT: I think I misunderstood your Q. Sorry. You can take a screenshot and post it to ChatGPT and get back what it is seeing, in theory. I mean, I use ChatGPT to post screenshots of my sites to get feedback on my layout and designs...
by shcallaway | 2025-10-21 19:07:57+00:00
Congrats LC team!

I don't have much experience w/ "vanilla" LangChain or the LC Python tools, but I've been an avid user of Deployments and the LangGraph TypeScript SDK for like a year now (started using Deployments back when it was still called "LangGraph Platform"). I think I might be one of the oldest users of both...

To be honest, my first impressions were mixed. The Deployments product was very early/new and rough around the edges (bad monorepo support, for example). And the LangGraph TypeScript SDK felt... not super TypeScript-y. (I get the sense they ported over a bunch of abstractions from the Python package).

But the benefits outweighed the costs. In September 2024, Deployments + the LangGraph TypeScript SDK was one of the only ways that you could say FOR SURE that your agent was going to (a) work and (b) run smoothly in production.

(Also, their team worked hard as hell to ramp myself and my teammates up on agents. I was really won over by this and will be a LC stan forever as a result.)

Over the past year, I've seen both products evolve and mature significantly - to the point where all of those initial problems seem to have been addressed.

I still feel that the overhead associated with building and hosting your own agent from scratch is too much for most teams to take on, even at large companies. (In particular, first-class support for streaming is massive; this would be a huge PITA to build in-house.) I'm happy to let LangChain take care of all of this for me.

Overall, I've been very impressed at LC's ability to iterate and absorb feedback - especially when some of it is... not delivered in the kindest way. They're a very humble and hardworking team. Makes me happy to see them winning.
by mk89 | 2025-10-21 19:08:13+00:00
I disagree.

With chatgpt I don't search, I ask. Chatgpt explains, I ask again, and refine and refine. Ask back for sources, etc.

When in doubt, I copy/paste a statement and I search for it with Google. And then Google LLM kicks in.

If it's consistent with chatgpt, I am still wanting to see the links/sources. If not, I notify chatgpt of the "wrong" information, and move on.

70-80% of search is dead. But of course searching for people or things like that, Google is still needed.

But search (the way we know it) was a paradigm that the old Internet created, because it was obviously easier to search for one or two keywords. Semantic search was always something they tried to implement but failed miserably.

Chatgpt is the new way to get information on the internet, like it or not. Even when you think that "it's only trained on recent data, etc", it's only partially an issue, because in many cases it's trained on good information coming from books. And that can be quite useful, much better than a crappy blog that is in the first Google page.

The new paradigm is to use chatgpt as an assistant / someone you can ask information to, in order to answer a question you have. The old paradigm, on the other hand, requires that you start from zero. You need to know already what to search for, in order to get to the fact you wanted to know in the first place. Now it's there, as long as you know a few words.
by mmooss | 2025-10-21 19:08:19+00:00
You said that people using that language were ridiculed, as if that should be a factor in their behavior. So should they stop because their opponents use ridicule?

> I don’t see people changing camps because of wording

I still don't see what evidence you have. I've presented evidence that experts and practioners have long invested a lot of resources in using language in this way. Just look at Fox News - it's almost their entire reason and means.
by gbxk | 2025-10-21 19:08:21+00:00
It uses Kata with Firecracker which gives you as light of a boot as it gets. Subsecond booting for instance is accessible with a lighter rootfs, which is also on the roadmap (one of the easiest items, actually). The k8s layer doesn't add overhead either compared to any other VM. If you want to compare to bare containers, depending on workload, you could see a 5% overhead due to virtualization. Exact overhead would depend on workload.
by I_dream_of_Geni | 2025-10-21 19:08:37+00:00
(looks outside at the street) I'm wondering why would traffic be less because of AI search?? SO I asked AI. Its answer? "By analyzing data and demand in real-time, AI is able to predict peak travel times and adjust train, subway, and bus routes as needed, reducing overcrowding and, in the case of buses, traffic congestion."
by mlsu | 2025-10-21 19:08:47+00:00
the company charter is not product and engineering it's "we are going to invent THE machine, the singular fulcrum upon which the infinite lever of history, the transcendent union of man and machine, the birth of a new GOD, rests."

I mean, ok, you're product and engineering, fine. You get $20/mo out of your million or so paying users and $200/mo from a small handful of freaks. what does that mean for the valuation? what does that do for sama's patek phillipe collection?? nothing good I assure you. the AI product and engineering landscape is insanely competitive, like actually competitive.

that's what I'm saying, the circle doesn't square here.
by bruce511 | 2025-10-21 19:09:00+00:00
20 years ago I attended an international conference on electronic voting. There were various papers on the form of elections (not on specific products.)

The huge takeaway for me was not the technology (or lack thereof). Ultimately all existing (and proposed) systems have flaws. The key was public trust in the result.

The first step to sidestepping democracy is to attack the legitimacy of elections. One can attack the process, software, hardware, ballot security, eligibility, and so on. It doesn't really matter what you attack - it doesn't matter if your gripe is legit or not. It only matters that you erode trust in the result.

If you can make people think the elections are rigged, then you can bypass them and move straight to authoritarianism.

Quibbling over open-source or not is irrelevant. We can cast doubt on the software either way. Quibbling over electronic or paper voting is equally irrelevant (there are plenty of paper-only elections worldwide that are very suspect.)

Naturally the Open Source company promotes Open Source voting machines. But in truth being Open Source has no (real) benefit. Software is easy to tweak, Open or not.
by ActorNightly | 2025-10-21 19:09:03+00:00
This honestly smells really strong like made up shit. Or the guy is very much a low key player.

Generally, if you develop exploits, you should be completely aware of every single possible attack vector. If you are working for a company like Trenchant, and you know what you are doing, the last thing you do is use Apple devices (at least fully, most of the time you have a public phone and much more secure private phone)

The reason is, when you take an Apple phone, connect it to a router that proxies through a computer so you can inspect traffic, you can see the vast amounts of shit being sent back to Apple which you have no control of.

Meanwhile, if you do the same with my custom rooted, de-googled android phone that I take overseas, you will see only ntp traffic, and that is only so I don't have to deal with cert issues because my clock is wrong.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-21 19:09:12+00:00
You have already abandoned the debate and moved into stalking and personal attacks. That is not a sign of strength. It is proof you ran out of substance and are trying to win by humiliation instead.

You dug through my profile to manufacture a narrative about my character because you could not answer a single technical point. That is petty and dishonest. It is also exactly the kind of behavior moderators and civil participants call out. If you actually cared about truth you would stay on topic. Instead you weaponized the comment section to attack me personally.

Do not mistake tone for argument. I stood on evidence and logic. You offered sneers, a mock sign off, and then tried to moralize. That is not persuasion. It is performative virtue signaling layered over an exit strategy.

If you want to be taken seriously, stop the profile policing, stop the personal diagnostics, and engage the claims you think are wrong. Make one focused counterargument. Otherwise your behavior will read to everyone as what it is: a public temper tantrum disguised as concern.

You can keep doing this. It will not change the facts. It will only make readers pity the quality of your argument and worry that you are the kind of person who cannot have a grown up debate. If you are interested in a real exchange, show it. If not, spare the thread the noise.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-10-21 19:09:21+00:00
Yup. I am old enough to have posted cassettes rather than 5.25" floppies, although I was using a Z80-based machine that ran Forth and took 5.25" floppies as late as the early 90s. Wildly specialised bit of kit, and I wish I'd stolen it when I had the chance because it's probably been thrown over the side of an oil rig by now.

The first Forth machine I used was the Jupiter Ace, which was a home computer sold in the UK by a couple of guys who spun their company off from Sinclair. It was a bit too underpowered and a bit too late and a bit too weird to really "land" - everyone either had a ZX Spectrum or a Commodore 64 by then, and schools and rich kids had BBC Micros (I got right into 6502 machine code on the one we had in school when I was about 9, and then got my hands on its predecessor, the Acorn Atom). I also had a couple of Epson HX20s that the company my dad worked for had used as data loggers, which had Forth ROMs fitted. That's how I got right into 6809 programming, and that chip is ludicrously suitable for Forth!

I got Cosmic Conquest working on an Apple II emulator but the support code around getting it working is frankly terrifying. I used a fig-Forth disk, and wrote my own implementations of the graphics words used there, which I guess is what the original author did.

Tracking them down has so far proved impossible, and it's quite likely they are no longer around.
by codyb | 2025-10-21 19:09:29+00:00
Configuring editors, dot files, and dev environments consistently adds value by giving you familiarity with your working environment, honing your skills with your tools, and creating a more productive space tailored to your needs.

Who else becomes the go to person for modifying build scripts?

The amount of people I know who have no idea how to work with Git after decades in the field using it is pretty amazing. It's not helpful for everyone else when you're the one they're delegating their merge conflict bullshit too cause they've never bothered to learn anything about the tools they're using.
by gedy | 2025-10-21 19:09:39+00:00
You might be misunderstanding what I mean by "prepare". I mean companies that expect you to have crammed algorithms/leet code/CS new grad before their interviews. Then if you don't, they treat you like you are a huge imposter/liar who cannot code.

I certainly am mentally prepared when I speak with a company and treat them professionally. I expect the same basically.
by cardanome | 2025-10-21 19:09:55+00:00
The worst thing for me is that I am actually good at LLM-based coding

My coworkers that are in love with this new world are producing complete AI slop and still take ages to complete tasks. Meanwhile I can finally play my strength as I actually know software architecture, can ask the LLM to consider important corner case and so on.

Plus, I am naturally good at context management. Being neurodivergent has given me decades of practice in working with entities that have a different way of thinking that me own. I have more mechanical empathy for the LLM because I don't confuse it for a human. My coworkers meanwhile get super frustrated that the LLM can not read their mind.

That said, LLMs are getting better. My advantage will not last. And the more AI slop gets produced the more we need LLMs to cope with all the AI slop in our code bases. A vicious cycle. No one will actually know what the code does. Soon my job will mostly consist of praying to the machine gods.
by Laremere | 2025-10-21 19:10:06+00:00
SpaceX's lander bid was in large part so competitive because they were already planning on developing 90% of the technology anyways. Low earth orbit service was developed for NASA, but has found other paying customers. The moon has to have more people who would be interested in paying. Also the moon remains a good stepping stone for technological development for getting people to Mars, the stated main goal of the company. Also it's almost certainly not happening in the next few years anyways so they may only need to wait for the next administration.
by ragequittah | 2025-10-21 19:10:54+00:00
I'm not so sure this is much worse than Chrome. Really in today's world if you're not browsing the web like multiple people are looking over your shoulder you're probably doing it wrong. And most of the steps people do to mitigate privacy violations (TOR, pihole, VPNs, etc.) probably make any signal you do put out more scrutinized. The one solution I do like is the iCloud private relay which I hope some reputable VPN vendors pick up soon.
by quantumcotton | 2025-10-21 19:10:59+00:00
Those are midwits. Truly intelligent people see past the facade and don't really go into the topics with others outside of subject matter expert groups. Because the areas being focused on by the general population or media are so deviated from the cause or solution.

So, are they suppressed? I highly doubt that's the proper word.

Less ambitious? Perhaps, but not suppressed.
by themafia | 2025-10-21 19:11:00+00:00
Candidates drop out, die, or become ineligible in all kinds of ways. Paper is not strictly better and can create costs and complications on the day of the election itself.

Electronic voting is fine. Why can't we just have a printer in the polling booth? I run my ballot, then hit print, then I can manually verify it, and then drop the printed ballot in a box.

Literally the easiest thing to do.
by matthewkayin | 2025-10-21 19:11:18+00:00
Someone made a similar argument to me recently about AI, talking about how programmers used to have stacks of reference books at their desks and how many of the old guard had to have trainings convincing them to use google as a reference.

I guess this argument was supposed to convince me to stop being such a luddite and accept the inevitable future, but really, in an increasingly post-truth world, it made me want to go and get myself a stack of reference books.
by nakamoto_damacy | 2025-10-21 19:11:21+00:00
Our metaphorical / analogical muscle is too well developed. Maybe there is a drug we can take to reduce how much we lean into it.

If you look at two random patterns of characters and both contain 6s you could say they are similar (because you’re ignoring that the similarity is less than 0.01%). That’s how comparing LLMs to brains feels like. Like roller skates to a cruise ship. They both let you get around.
by fatbird | 2025-10-21 19:11:26+00:00
Aggregate health outcomes in the US are worse than every other country with UHC. Life expectancy is worse in the US than every other country with UHC. You cannot claim socialized medicine sucks when it produces better outcomes overall, and for every NHS horror story you throw down, I've got two American stories caused by poverty, HMOs, or culture war swings.

ETA: also, every country with UHC spends less on it as a portion of GDP than US public funding of non-universal health care.
by cloverich | 2025-10-21 19:11:38+00:00
Related, i dont know what the technical term for this is, but was thinking about how because of speed, being in two places at once (collision) the equation depends greatly on speed. Simplistically, if planes traveled at the speed of light then an object on ANY point of their trajectory would collide.

Much more complex than simply amount of space times size of objects. Knowing theres a whole science / engineering behind this, Im just so curious about the people and practices that go into this part of travel especially air and space travel.
by Yizahi | 2025-10-21 19:13:22+00:00
Watching this "IT revolution" being presented on the extremely lagging website is very ironic :) . Interesting how many unnecessary layered graphics they've used. First outline of the pseudo windows were rendered, then windows in one color, then windows in another color... And getting video player fully visible in the frame took me a few tries, fighting lagging scroll. :)
by Analemma_ | 2025-10-21 19:13:30+00:00
I'm not actually sure that having multiple suppliers reduces extortion? If you have a policy of "no single supplier", then supplier #2 can extort you just as much as supplier #1 does under a single-supplier policy, because you have no choice but to keep funding them.

I'm pretty sure this is what's been happening with Blue Origin: in 25 years they've delivered close to nothing, but they keep getting contracts because "we need a SpaceX alternative". What is that if not extortion.

(EDIT: the sibling comment correctly points out that Boeing is an even more obvious case. Starliner is a money pit, but we have to keep throwing more money down it so that there's no single supplier)