MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by overfeed | 2025-10-21 18:58:33+00:00
> Business is stupid. They value busy-ness over productivity.

Not stupid, just entitled to all of your innovation and productivity while you're on the clock (if waged) and off the clock (if you're salaried). If you've shown yourself to be an outlier - that's great for the business - and congratulations, you've aet yourself a new baseline. Isn't class economics just delightful[1]?

The only employees who have a more direct linkage between productivity and income are sales folk, and it's boom or bust there. If you're an engineer that somehow doubles your employers profits, don't dream they'll double your salary, a once-off bonus is the best you can hope for, at the next evaluation cycle.

1. From each, according to his ability. To each, according to "market" rates, and his negotiation skills.
by JeremyNT | 2025-10-21 18:58:39+00:00
I love curl and use it all the time (copying requests from the browser is maybe the most common usage) but:

> Q: But Postman has testing and automation!

> A: So does cURL in a shell script with || and && and actual programming languages. You want assertions? Pipe to grep or write a 3-line Python script. Done.

IMO if you're reaching for an "actual programming language" it's probably time to put curl down and switch to libcurl or whatever native equivalent is in that language.
by godelski | 2025-10-21 18:58:40+00:00
Be careful of Lemon Markets[0]. The problem with them is that they create a stable low quality state. They tend to happen when product quality is not distinguishable at time of purchase.

Which I think we already see a fair amount of this in tech. Even as very tech literate people it can be hard to tell. But companies are definitely pushing to move fast and are willing to trade quality for that. If you're trying to find the minimum quality that a consumer is still willing to pay for, you're likely in a lemon market.

I mean look at Microsoft lately. They can't even get windows 11 right. There's clear quality control issues that are ruining the brand. Enough that us techies are joking that Microsoft is going to bring about the year of Linux, not because Linux has gotten better (also true) but because Microsoft keeps shooting itself in the foot. Or look at Apple with the new AirPods, they sound like shit. Same with Apple intelligence and liquid glass. A big problem (which helps lemon markets come into existence and be stable) is that competition is weak, with a very high barrier to entry. The market is centralized not only because the momentum and size of existing players (still major factor) but because it takes a lot of capital to even attempt to displace them. That's probably more money and more time than the vast majority of investors are willing to risk and the only ones with enough individual wealth are already tied to the existing space.

I think you also have it exactly right about LLMs and AI. A good tool makes failures clear and easy to identify. You design failure modes, even in code! But these machines are designed for human preference. Our methods that optimize for truth, accuracy, and human sounding language simultaneously optimize for deception. You can't penalize the network for wrong outputs if you don't recognize they are wrong.

A final note: you say velocity, I think that's inaccurate. Velocity has direction. It's more accurate to say speed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
by wat10000 | 2025-10-21 18:59:00+00:00
The safety requirement for the Commercial Crew program was a probability of fatality of no more than 1 in 270. Which would be absolutely atrocious for any other mode of transport. And Boeing couldn't even achieve that much.

I think the real issue is that it's just still very, very hard. Margins are extremely thin. Airliners are extremely safe despite existing in a realm that's inherently dangerous because they spend margin on safety. You could make an airliner that's way lighter than what's currently flying if you didn't care about making it robust against, say, hitting a weather balloon. But the ability is there to protect against adverse events like that.

Spacecraft have almost no margin. The distance between normal operation and having a bad day is really small because getting people into orbit at all is still just about at the limits of available technology.
by tptacek | 2025-10-21 18:59:40+00:00
I loved these things when I was a little kid (I started playing computer games around the time of Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide) and a bunch of years ago read an article about text adventures and picked up Hadean Lands, which is alchemy-themed and has a bunch of interesting (to me, at least) game affordances, and got sucked in for a couple hours. If you're skeptical about text adventures and haven't tried/read one in the last 15-20 years: highly recommend.
by ethmarks | 2025-10-21 18:59:41+00:00
Page 21 of their 2024 annual report[1] has expenses listed. About $3,000,000 for web hosting, about $100,000,000 for salaries and benefits out of $178,000,000 total.

[1]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/W...
by senordevnyc | 2025-10-21 18:59:48+00:00
I'll try to be more constructive: as someone who made a living with my writing for years, focused on a tech audience, what you're selling here in a business like this is YOU. People subscribe because they like you and the way you write about stuff. Passing off LLM writing as your own really undercuts whatever value you're trying to offer. Do it the hard way.
by whalesalad | 2025-10-21 19:00:33+00:00
From an outside perspective, this looks silly. Like fitting a square peg in a round hole. But I do ack "what if we could run vm's as easily as we run containers" use case and atm it seems like things like this (and katacontainers) are the only ways to do it. Wondering a few things: do all the layers of abstraction make things brittle and how is performance impacted?
by nunez | 2025-10-21 19:00:57+00:00
As a sales engineer, when I'm not pushing random PRs for random demos or infra I'm building, I'm searching for people on LinkedIn in hopes of getting introductions. I tested a really basic LinkedIn search on myself.

Atlas confidently failed successfully [0]; Kagi [1] and Google [2] nailed it.

This is a perfect example as to why I don't think LLMs should replace search engines any time soon. Search engines help you find the truth. LLMs tell you the truth, even when it's not.

[0] https://ibb.co/wrK2YQfG

[1] https://ibb.co/4wfhS2Sk

[2] https://ibb.co/spLNGYsv
by at-fates-hands | 2025-10-21 19:00:58+00:00
> An engineer at Ford isn’t developing cars that actively harms passengers.

Maybe not at Ford?

https://www.popsci.com/technology/tesla-lock-issue/

Firefighters recently resorted to breaking a Tesla’s window to free a 20-month-old child locked inside after one of the vehicle’s batteries died. The emergency rescue is the second of such incidents reported on this week by Arizona CBS news affiliate KPHO and reiterates the potential dangers of the EV company’s ongoing, under-addressed battery issues in extreme heat.

In July 2023, a 73-year-old man was reportedly forced to kick out a window in his Model Y after becoming trapped. A similar emergency occurred for a mother and her daughter in Illinois a few weeks later after renting a Tesla, while a California driver last month claimed she found herself stuck in her EV while waiting on an over-the-air software update that shut down her car. In the 40 minutes it took to complete the update, outside temperatures rose to 115-degrees Fahrenheit.

And yeah, if you know how, and can go through multiple steps: The only other workaround to battery issues appears to be a step-by-step solution in the owner’s manual that only opens a dead Tesla’s front hood by ostensibly hotwiring the car using external jumper cables. If this is the case, then people who find themselves locked out of their EV may need to continue relying on EMS—and their axes—until Tesla decides to address the glaring safety hazard.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-10-21 19:00:58+00:00
> I can easily generate videos suitable for reels using my GPU and those programs don't (visibly) watermark.

Curious what you used. I have an RTX 5090 and I've tried using some local video generators and the results are absolute garbage unless I'm asking for something extremely simple and uncreative like "woman dancing in a field".
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-10-21 19:01:02+00:00
Find an existing implementation that runs on some computer you already have, or have an emulator for.

Then find a computer you're really into, and port fig-Forth to it, just for fun. Don't copy the source across, type it in with your own changes as you go.

Edit: Don't forget to have fun. That's the most important thing. You're doing this because you *can*, and just to see what will happen.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-21 19:01:07+00:00
Yeah, It's an infamous strategy. Rotate out staff so and maximize turnover to minimize pay and potential uprisings.

It ran into the problem that workers are in fact a finite resource. And of course that at some point the juice ain't worth the squeeze. People aren't going to do part time work being ground to death and still not be able to pay rent. At least ridesharing and delivery is done on and around your own schedule
by terminalshort | 2025-10-21 19:01:42+00:00
When something goes wrong a one of Elon Musk's companies, it's clearly his fault. When something goes right, it's because he isn't actually running the company. Schrodinger's CEO!

But let's pretend for a minute that you're right and all Elon Musk does is hire great people that then do all the work building the company for him and keep him at arms length doing nothing. The skill to hire like that alone still puts him in the top 0.01% of CEOs.
by 235ylkj | 2025-10-21 19:01:43+00:00
Here's a simple key-value store inspired by D.B. Cooper:

~/bin/cooper-db-set =================== #! /bin/bash key="$1" value="$2" echo "${key}:${value}" >> /dev/null ~/bin/cooper-db-get =================== #! /bin/bash key="$1" </dev/null awk -F: -v key="$key" '$1 == key {result = $2} END {print result}'
by theshrike79 | 2025-10-21 19:02:14+00:00
The Google style guide is a good reference: https://google.github.io/styleguide/shellguide.html#s1.2-whe...

- If you are writing a script that is more than 100 lines long, or that uses non-straightforward control flow logic, you should rewrite it in a more structured language now. Bear in mind that scripts grow. Rewrite your script early to avoid a more time-consuming rewrite at a later date. - When assessing the complexity of your code (e.g. to decide whether to switch languages) consider whether the code is easily maintainable by people other than its author.
by xorcist | 2025-10-21 19:02:35+00:00
The obvious problem with smartphone voting is that it's hard to combine with voter secrecy. An abusive spouse or someone bribing the voter could demand to see what vote was cast.

And if anyone can make up a reason to doubt the outcome of the election, it will fail it's objective: Peaceful transfer of power.

The usual way to try to solve this is the ability to override previously cast votes, in secret. But the combination of that and the ability for all interested parties to independently verify the count is not trivial. But not impossible either, much has been written on the subject since e-voting was all the rage in the 90s. One would do good to study this work before designing yet another voting system.
by DANmode | 2025-10-21 19:02:50+00:00
I believe the biggest issue is that the ONLY lever the email gave the user to pull (the Opt-Out of these emails link) was broken. (FYI: It's working now.)

I still don't even know if that does what I think it does (it sounds like marketing list opt-out).

/ /

How is a user, who has been signed up for your services without their knowledge, meant to "opt out" of the trial, or account, after the point of receiving the email,

if they never even initiated the account on your end?
by tptacek | 2025-10-21 19:03:04+00:00
You don't know how any of these could be developed in good conscience? How about: anti-proliferation intelligence work is going to happen whether it requires human intelligence or CNE, and CNE is less costly and harmful?

I get where you're probably coming from: this same technology is used all over the world to target journalists and dissidents in countries with and without the rule of law. A very real concern. I wouldn't do this kind of work either (also, it's been over a decade since I had the chops even to apprentice at it).

But there are very coherent reasons people are comfortable doing this work for NATO countries. Our reflexive distrust of law enforcement and intelligence work is a fringe belief: a lot of families are very proud to include people working in these fields.

The most important thing I guess I'd have to say here is: our opinion of this stuff doesn't matter. At current market rates every country in the world can afford CNE technology, and it's a market well served by vendors outside of NATO.
by anlsh | 2025-10-21 19:03:05+00:00
I've got [a bit of neovim config](https://github.com/anlsh/nvim/blob/8b61520a5ecd752427abffc45...) which sends you straight to `neogit` (which is basically equivalent as far as I use it) when a certain env var is set.

So in my .profile I've got

``` alias gg="NEOGIT_SLAVE=1 nvim" ```

It's definitely not perfect but it's good enough to work for basic committing/rebasing flows and it's faster than booting up emacs for the same purpose.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-10-21 19:03:06+00:00
For me just now, I had to take a bit of a breather and calm down for a second, as soon as I saw "Exploring IRC" I was taken back 30 years in time or so, when IRC was brand newish, and it paid to have a text file somewhere full of details to join the network and find out, in realtime, what was happening in the world.

Oh, how woolly things were before the web.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-10-21 19:03:09+00:00
I see a some violent protesters, but I don’t see a violent coup. You’re welcome to call that distinction without a difference, but it’s really not. We’ve had years of violent protest, that’s not what a coup is.

The videos of inside the capital show the majority of people wandering around being idiots.

If you wanna keep re-litigating this for the next three years of Trump’s presidency, you’re welcome to do so, but it’s not going change anything, and clearly the American people weren’t too concerned about it when they voted him in.
by the_af | 2025-10-21 19:03:10+00:00
Heh, I was just browsing Exalted Funeral for unrelated reasons!

Re: TTRPGs... I think that's difference. There's no expectation that when two groups play a D&D session, even with the same module, that the story will play out the same (note: I never played one of those strict adventures with predefined story beats).

But with computer games, which includes Interactive Fiction (the modern name for text adventures), you do expect the same experience. People remember Planetfall because of the story and how it plays out. People remember that in Colossal Cave Adventure there was "a maze of twisty little passages, all alike", so much so that it became a bit of early internet/hacker knowledge.

I think you lose this if the LLM is making up too much stuff, and so far it's proven very hard to reign them in.
by bravetraveler | 2025-10-21 19:03:17+00:00
I fail to see the problem! "Time to lean, time to clean" is fine for someone billing/paid by the hour.

As someone on a salary, when the work is finished... I am too. What's overtime? I believe some paperwork had the word 'exempt' on it. My unvested shares are an incentive to save the place from immolation over the next N years. Where's this 'must be at work doing something else' in the contract, again?

"Where's the loyalty?" I hear someone ask. It passed with a family member and employers that had no compassion.

All this to say, I fully support your testing of the water. It's a strategy I've picked up/adapted, too. The poster above should enjoy the time saved by automation/hike. I shitpost.
by lucideer | 2025-10-21 19:03:21+00:00
Yeah. I think it's the best voting system in the world because I've yet to encounter one I think is better but you're right, it's far from perfect.

That said, surplus distribution tends to be the main flaw raised time & time again, & whenever improvements are discussed the general conclusion tends to be that the current distribution mechanism goes a very long way toward fair representation of the actual preference distribution. It's notable that the more computationally intensive alternatives to get "fairer" outcomes are pretty recent inventions & it's really hard to justify the effort given the tiny number of cases affected.
by carlosjobim | 2025-10-21 19:03:31+00:00
> then doesn't that imply that not having self-checkout is going to be more expensive than you overall

Yes, certainly it does! I'd rather that my money goes to pay salaries for cashiers, than pay for the goods that thieves steal. The first option is sustainable, honest, and good for the community. The second option breeds crime and decay.

I'm not an atomized production-consumption unit, I'm a human being, and so are the cashiers. Plus that service is friendlier and faster with cashiers. We're not supposed to be psychotically seek efficiency and cost-savings in every nook and cranny like some of these store owners.
by X-Ryl669 | 2025-10-21 19:03:36+00:00
No you can't since the compiler will likely inline the syscall (or vsyscall) in your functions. So there's no way to know the instruction pointer is in the right section. The only way is to pay for no-inline cost and have a wrapper that's calling the syscall, so it's a huge cost to pay for a very rare feature (cancelling a thread abruptly is a no-no in most coding conventions).
by quantumcotton | 2025-10-21 19:03:38+00:00
Maybe you wait for all the dust to settle and then like not people realizing their entire economy is in shambles before addressing their future potential as a superpower. . Superpower requires lots of money. Something Argentina does not currently have. Their entire business structure and government structure is not changing. They are being bailed out and whenever you enable somebody to fail they become dependent.

Could they be a superpower? Yeah. But it's more likely some small country in Africa does first with an investor and AI.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-21 19:03:52+00:00
Why should I bother, when I share James Gosling opinion regarding using Emacs on the 21st century?

https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/dont-use-emacs-says-jav...

Given that was in 2008, I would update his remark from Netbeans, to any of JetBrains products, Eclipse or whatever.

In any case, you can get those features using Windows Resource Toolkit on the old days, a mix of findstr and other similar improvements on Windows NT linage, nowadays Powershell will be enough.
by mmooss | 2025-10-21 19:03:52+00:00
> where are all those LLMs without the billions upon billions of lines of text written by humans? A not insignificant number coming from Wikipedia?

Where is Wikipedia without all the learning and information from other sources, many of which it put out of business?

> Also, LLMs don't produce truth. They don't have a concept of it. Or lies for that matter. If you are using LLMs do study something you know nothing about the information provided by them is as good as useless if you don't verify it with external sources written by a person. Wikipedia isn't perfect, nothing is, but I trust their model a shitload more then an LLM.

Wikipedia produces consensus that correlates with truth to some degree. LLMs produce statistical output, which in a way is a automated consensus of the LLM's input, that also correlates with truth to some degree - and the correlation is hardly zero.

I agree that information has no value if you don't know its accuracy; it's always a sticking point for me. IMHO Wikipedia has the same problem: I have no idea how accurate it is without verifying it with an external source (and when I've done that, I've often been disappointed).

Has anyone researched the relative accuracy of Wikipedia and LLMs?
by magicalhippo | 2025-10-21 19:04:15+00:00
> For example, given the same piece of software under development with a comparable number of lines, Turbo Pascal development cycle was about 5 seconds, while Turbo C gave you 40 seconds of a round-trip time at best.

I mentioned it here recently but, we use Delphi at work, the Turbo Pascal successor. A full release build of our main project is about 2 million lines of code, and compiles and links in about 40 seconds on my laptop which has an Intel i7-1260P. A mere compile is of course typically much faster.

I haven't benchmarked it recently myself, but back in the 2000s code generation was quite decent. It was good enough I decided to stop handwriting assembly, as writing compiler-friendly code was significantly faster and much more readable.
by vict7 | 2025-10-21 19:04:16+00:00
America has higher levels of inequality than any of its post-industrialized peers [0]. It’s absolutely an issue here. Combine that with the ability to purchase political power, and you get the mess we have today.

I think we actually agree on most things; I generally agree with all the rest of your points. Liberals may as well be controlled opposition now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...
by xpe | 2025-10-21 19:04:41+00:00
> train on bad data, get a bad model

Right: in the context of supervised learning, this statement is a good starting point. After all, how can one build a good supervised model if you can't train it on good examples?

But even in that context, it isn't an incisive framing of the problem. Lots of supervised models are resilient to some kinds of error. A better question, I think, is: what kinds of errors at what prevalence tend to degrade performance and why?

Speaking of LLMs and their ingestion processing, there is a lot more going on than purely supervised learning, so it seems reasonable to me that researchers would want to try to tease the problem apart.
by rfwhyte | 2025-10-21 19:05:18+00:00
Very telling / depressing that literally 3 out of their top 4 highlighted examples of the "Amazing" features this browser provides are just ways to help you be a good little consumerist drone and buy more crap you don't really need and that won't actually make you happy from some approved list of vendors that are likely paying openAI to promote their products.

Personally, the notion of using some kind of AI glorified "Virtual shopper" where the AI doesn't actually work for me but rather some greedy, soulless megacorp is beyond dystopian. I have literally no way to tell if the products being recommended to me are actually the best products for my needs (Or if I even need the products in the first place) and the AI companies certainly don't seem keen on disclosing whether or not they are being paid to promote the products they are "Recommending."

At least when I do a web search for a product there's clear information available to delineate the ads from the organic results, but from everything I've seen thus far there is precisely nothing being done to protect consumers and disclose when the "Product recommendations" being given by these AI agents aren't actually what would best serve the consumer (Ie., the best or cheapest products), but are rather just whatever crap some company is paying the AI company to promote.

The fact none of these AI companies are even talking about how they are going to protect consumers and provide disclosures when the products they are recommending are nothing more than thinly veiled ads is very, very telling. The current advertising rules don't really apply as the regulators are way behind the curve with AI technology, and the AI companies certainly aren't going to be pushing for the rules to be updated to include AI product recommendations themselves, as they will happily con, deceive and lie to their customers if it means they'll make more money.