MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dangus | 2025-10-27 17:07:29+00:00
> This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking.

This is the paradox of tolerance is invoked.

The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now.

If you are “with that” then yes, you are against us.

This is not to say that I am intending to be hostile and unwelcoming to those who have been deceived by this regime. Germany had to go through the deprogramming process at the end of World War II. They didn’t just throw every single ordinary person who ever supported the Nazi party in jail or socially shun them for life, they went through a healing process.
by nickdothutton | 2025-10-27 17:07:30+00:00
If you are going to use AI to make a post, then please instruct it to make that post as short and information-dense as possible. It's one thing to read an AI summary but quite another to have to wade through paragraphs of faux "personality" and "conversational writing" of the sort that slop AIs regularly trowel out.
by frstrtd_engnr | 2025-10-27 17:07:41+00:00
These days, my work routine looks something like this - a colleague sends me a long, AI-generated PRD full of changes. When I ask him for clarification, he stumbles through the explanation. Does he care at all? I have no idea.

Frustrated, I just throw that mess straight at claude-code and tell it to fix whatever nonsense it finds and do its best. It probably implements 80–90% of what the doc says — and invents the rest. Not that I’d know, since I never actually read the original AI-generated PRD myself.

In the end, no one’s happy. The whole creative and development process has lost that feeling of achievement, and nobody seems to care about code quality anymore.
by cogman10 | 2025-10-27 17:07:55+00:00
Well, you see, we setup a system of private judges who decide cases like this. And of course, we need to monitor those judges, so we create a system of judge reviewers that, of course, you pay for to figure out if the judge being used is a good judge. But then you also need to make sure the reviewers are legitimate, so we make a private system of meta reviewers to make sure the reviewers are good.

And of course, in case the parties can't agree on the judges we put up a polymarket bet so we can crowd source which of the judges should be picked. And if that's disputed then we go out and hire a private police enforcement force to make sure the other party is complying with our desire for the right judges. Of course, we arm them just to be sure.

/s
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-27 17:08:08+00:00
> there was never a period when blogs were hand written.

I’ve seen exactly that. In one case, it was JPEG scans of handwriting, but most of the time, it’s a cursive font (which may obviate “handwritten”).

I can’t remember which famous author it was, that always submitted their manuscripts as cursive writing on yellow legal pads.

Must have been thrilling to edit.
by braza | 2025-10-27 17:08:27+00:00
> No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us human!

For essays, honestly, I do not feel so bad, because I can see that other than some spaces like HN the quality of the average online writer has dropped so much that I prefer to have some machine-assisted text that can deliver the content.

However, my problem is with AI-generated code.

In most of the cases to create trivial apps, I think AI-generated code will be OK to good; however, the issue that I'm seeing as a code reviewer is that folks that you know their code design style are so heavily reliant on AI-generated code that you are sure that they did not write and do not understand the code.

One example: Working with some data scientists and researchers, most of them used to write things on Pandas, some trivial for loops, and some primitive imperative programming. Now, especially after Claude Code, most of the things are vectorized, with some sort of variable naming with way-compressed naming. Sometimes folks use Cython in some data pipeline tasks or even using functional programming to an extreme.

Good performance is great, and leveling up the quality of the codebase it's a net positive; however, I wonder in some scenario when things go south and/or Claude code is not available if those folks will be able to fix it.
by garyclarke27 | 2025-10-27 17:08:33+00:00
I guess Claude maybe useful for finding errors in large Excel Workbooks. May also help beginners to learn the more complex Excel functions (which are still pretty easy). But if you are proficient at building Excel models I don't see any benefit. Excel already has a superb very efficient UI for entering formulas, ranges, tables, data sources etc I'm sceptical that a different UI especially a text based one can improve on this.
by vlovich123 | 2025-10-27 17:09:04+00:00
For sure. I’m highlighting the nastier parts of the system that Rust can’t help with. I love Rust but it’s important to understand its limitations, particularly for something like OS development. There’s a similar way to make Rust unsafe using 100% safe Rust where you poke /proc/self/mem to violate memory safety using safe IO :).
by tptacek | 2025-10-27 17:09:09+00:00
A request routed to a dead instance doesn't fall into a black hole: our proxies reroute it. But that's very slow; to deliver acceptable service quality you need to minimize the number of times that happens. So you can't accept a solution that leaves large windows of time within which every instance that has gone down has a stale entry. Remember: instances coming up and down happens all the time on this platform! It's part of the point.
by kulahan | 2025-10-27 17:09:23+00:00
Saw this similar quote:

>“One man came and said he took two bags because he went crazy when he saw the crowd,” Piotr said. “He apologized, and everything was fine. But there are also those who took dozens of tons.”

Literally always it's a few bad apples ruining the bunch. If a bunch of people came and took some for personal use, it would've been fine. I mean, still a problem, but the farmer would probably still have some damn crop left to sell or replant or whatever you'd do with those potatoes for the best recovery at that point.
by korse | 2025-10-27 17:09:41+00:00
:Edit, not anymore kek

Somehow this is currently the top comment. Why?

Most non-quantitative content has value due to a foundation of distinct lived experience. Averages of the lived experience of billions just don't hit the same, and are less likely to be meaningful to me (a distinct human). Thus, I want to hear your personal thoughts, sans direct algorithmic intermediary.
by extr | 2025-10-27 17:09:42+00:00
I used to live in Excel too. I've trudged through plenty of awful worksheets. The output I've seen from AI is actually more neatly organized than most of what I used to receive in outlook. Most of that wasn't hyper-sophisticated cap table analyses. It was analysis from a Jr Analyst or line employee trying to combine a few different data sources to get some signal on how XYZ function of the business was performing. AI automation is perfectly suitable for this.
by gabrielsroka | 2025-10-27 17:09:55+00:00
my minimal powershell code

$old = -1 while ($true) { $d = Get-Date $hour = $d.Hour if ($hour -ge 6 -and $hour -lt 19) { $light = 1 } else { $light = 0 } if ($old -ne $light) { Set-ItemProperty HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Themes\Personalize AppsUseLightTheme $light $old = $light echo $light $d } sleep -Seconds 2 }
by duxup | 2025-10-27 17:10:50+00:00
Lotta anecdotal type stories about the "why" here.

I have trouble believing Musk's odd behaviors really are playing a big part, now. I feel like workers sensitive to that behavior would have left a while ago. Or maybe that actually takes a while to really sink in for some folks?

In a world where AI talent is still in demand, competition combined with layoffs and similar actions in the AI space likely spur more movement than anything political or such IMO.
by rozenmd | 2025-10-27 17:10:58+00:00
I've run a business in this space since 2021, I am yet to meet a business that lets their marketing team own their status page.

You'll find most engineering teams will start owning a status page to centralise updates to their stakeholders, before eventually growing into the customer success/support org owning it to minimise support tickets during incidents.

Marketing has nothing to do with status pages.
by hinata08 | 2025-10-27 17:11:06+00:00
The internet : sees thoughts challenging facts

Someone : “Sucks to see how many people take everything they see online for face value,” one Proven employee wrote. “Sounds like a bunch of liberals lol.”

The company : Proven also had its lawyers file “multiple” DMCA takedown notices against the McNally video, claiming that its use of Proven’s promo video was copyright infringement.

When did facts and enlightenment started to be for "liberals lol" ?

Freedom of speech based on facts should be universal.
by didibus | 2025-10-27 17:11:35+00:00
The issue is more complex.

If groups of people are disadvantaged from birth and then throughout their life, it's unlikely they will be the best at anything.

But you could imagine that the person with the best potential was part of that group.

In effect, an unjust society that doesn't allow fair equal opportunities from birth and throughout life is sub-optimal at yielding the best candidates for any given role, as it artificially restricts the pool.

The other complexity is the inherent bias in the assessment process. How people assess who is best qualified has tons of bias. Again, that means the selection is sub-optimal at finding the actually best candidate.

It becomes hard to talk of meritocracy when most people's performance derive from circumstances like birth, wealth, connections. Someone else might have performed even better had they'd been given the same circumstances.

Finally, you have the problem of not maximizing everyone's potential even if they're not going to be the best.

Obviously we can't have the best at every job. Only one company will have the real best at any given role. Most jobs will be done by the average performer. That's a mathematical truth.

Thus raising the average has tremendous lift in raising quality of work accross the board.

In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower. That might mean some need more than others, disabled people are a good example, they'll need lots of compensating equipment and what not to maximize their potential and raise their overall effect to society.

To me, those are the basis problems that people were trying to solve. Obviously, a lot of the solutions to these became performative dances, but I think the problem statement aligns well with what you have too.

The idea being that the person right now that we seem best qualified is truly the best isn't true unless we achieve a better system at maximizing people's potential.

Thus true meritocracy demands accepting diversity, equity, inclusion and fair equal opportunities.

Without it, you're only circumstancially demonstrably the best, and you never know if you truly are the better one.
by latexr | 2025-10-27 17:11:37+00:00
> reviewing your own PRs is a very good idea.

In the sense that you double check your work, sure. But you wouldn’t be commenting and asking for changes, you wouldn’t be using the reviewing feature of GitHub or whatever code forger you use, you’d simply make the fixes and push again without any review/discussion necessary. That’s what I mean.

> open the view the reviewer will have and take a look. I do this all the time

So do I, we’re in perfect agreement there.
by thw_9a83c | 2025-10-27 17:11:50+00:00
> Because it doesn’t just fix your grammar, it makes you sound suspiciously like spam.

This ship sailed a long time ago. We have been exposed to AI-generated text content for a very long time without even realizing it. If you read a little more specialized web news, assume that at least 60% of the content is AI-translated from the original language. Not to mention, it could have been AI-generated in the source language as well. If you read the web in several languages, this becomes shockingly obvious.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-10-27 17:11:56+00:00
Value adds I get from Jellyfin:

- Each member of my family gets their watch progress individually tracked down to how many minutes they made it into each video, across devices.

- The server's GPU automatically transcodes video into the best format for the device, display resolution, and available bandwidth. Very helpful for streaming stuff off the home server while away from home to optimize battery life and bandwidth.

- Automatically pulling subtitles from opensubtitles. Very handy if you have a multingual family who enjoys foreign media shows together. The paid streaming services are mostly abysmal at subtitling.

- A soft reason: My family members are seriously impressed by how nice the web UI is compared to Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, etc. It's literally opened their eyes to how software doesn't have to be bad - capitalism makes software bad over time.
by kcatskcolbdi | 2025-10-27 17:11:58+00:00
This comment seems to not appreciate how changing the scope of impact is itself a gigantic problem (and the one that needs to be immediately solved for).

It's as if someone created a device that made cancer airborne and contagious and you come in to say "to be fair, cancer existed before this device, the device just made it way worse". Yes? And? Do you have a solution to solving the cancer? Then pointing it out really isn't doing anything. Focus on getting people to stop using the contagious aerosol first.
by iseletsk | 2025-10-27 17:12:00+00:00
PSF made their own choice based on their own politics and optics. Note that requirements had nothing against diversity or fairness. It was fairly specific: "discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."

DEI was weaponized in the USA, where in quite a few instances, people couldn't get promoted or hired because of their race (typically white or asian). It was about preferential treatment, where you would get hired because of your race, and not merit.

I am all for diversity, I am all for fairness, and I don't think we should exclude people based on the color of their skin or their socioeconomic status. Yet, that is exactly what DEI did, and I have seen it firsthand many, many times.

PSF is just being stupid (or pragmatic) about it.
by vlovich123 | 2025-10-27 17:12:15+00:00
How do we know animal language isn’t structured, in similar ways? For example we now know that “dark” birds are often colorful, just in the UV spectrum they can see and we can’t. Similarly there’s evidence dolphin and whale speech may be structured, we just don’t know the base rules; their speech is modulated at such rapid frequency our computers until maybe recently would struggle to even record and process that data realtime (probably still do).

Just because we don’t understand something doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.

Also, I’m not so sure human language is structured the same way globally. There’s languages quite far from each other and the similarities tend to be grouped by where the languages originated. Eg Spanish and French might share similarities of rules, but those similarities are not shared with Hungary or Chinese. There’s cross pollination of course but language is old and humans all come from a single location so it’s not surprising for there to be some kinds of links but even a few hundred thousand years of evolution have diverged the rules significantly.
by somat | 2025-10-27 17:12:39+00:00
On that subject I would be fine if the browser always rendered in standard mode. or offered a user configuration option to do so.

No need to have the default be compatible with a dead browser.

further thoughts: I just read the mdn quirks page and perhaps I will start shipping Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml as I don't really like putting the doctype in. It is the one screwball tag and requires special casing in my otherwise elegant html output engine.
by jancsika | 2025-10-27 17:12:39+00:00
> If you’re using an LLM to spit out text for you, they’re not your thoughts, you’re not the one writing, and you’re not doing a good job at communicating. Might as well just give people your prompt.

It's like listening to Bach's Prelude in C from WTCI where he just came up with a humdrum chord progression and uses the exact same melodic pattern for each chord, for the entire piece. Thanks, but I can write a trivial for loop in C if I ever want that. What a loser!

Edit: Lest HN thinks I'm cherry picking-- look at how many times Bach repeats the exact same harmony/melody, just shifting up or down by a step. A significant chunk of his output is copypasta. So if you like burritos filled with lettuce and LLM-generated blogs, by all means downvote me to oblivion while you jam out to "Robo-Bach"
by afavour | 2025-10-27 17:12:43+00:00
> reviewing your own PRs is a very good idea

It is, but for all the reasons AI is supposed to fix. If I look at code I myself wrote I might come to a different conclusion about how things should be done because humans are fallible and often have different things on their mind. If it's in any way worth using an AI should be producing one single correct answer each time, rendering self PR review useless.
by tptacek | 2025-10-27 17:12:56+00:00
What a weird thing to say. I wrote my first OSPF implementation in 1999. The point is that we noticed the solution we'd settled on owes more to protocols like OSPF than to distributed consensus databases, which are the mainstream solution to this problem. It's not "OMG we just discovered this neat protocol called OSPF". We don't actually run OSPF. We don't even do a graph->tree reduction. We're routing HTTP requests, not packets.
by kypro | 2025-10-27 17:13:06+00:00
I was playing around with WASM and WebGL a few years ago to see if it could be used to increase JS performance on certain computationally heavy tasks. I might be misremembering but if I recall correctly the answer was generally always no because of the overheads involved in JS -> WASM -> JS.

Additionally JIT optimisations means that even if you're doing very computationally heavy tasks unless they're one-offs or have a significant amount of computational variance JavaScript is surprisingly performant.

So unless you need to compute something for several seconds and it's done as a one-off typically there will be very little (if any) gain in trying to squeeze out a bit of additional performance in this way.

However this is all off the top of my head and from my own experimentation several years back. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
by kakacik | 2025-10-27 17:13:15+00:00
Why not simply quietly refuse to jump on that train? Maintain velocity, keep working as per your contract, not a second more. Don't pick up phones outside work hours, weekends are for yourself, recharging and family. You know, humane working conditions, the only setup sustainable long term without risking permanent (both mental and physical) health damage.

No amount of money is worth that, despite many otherwise brilliant people get into tunnel vision (mortgage, some investment, chasing some top performer image or whatever else) and then SHTF.

Maybe its my European perspective, maybe I am old enough to realize its just a job and life satisfaction and legacy is defined by very different things, maybe I don't give a fuck anymore. Maybe all of it.
by arjie | 2025-10-27 17:13:17+00:00
On the whole, I think Western medical authorities manage to balance public health vs. risk fairly well[0]. Their principles of parsimony of intervention are sound.

I think the consensus across Western nations around the COVID vaccine to allow for shared clinical decision making rather than a universal recommendation is well-informed.

My daughter, like almost every child in the West, didn't get the BCG vaccine at birth either (I did). If this (and forgoing the COVID-19 vaccine) are mistakes, then that's life. Those of us who make those choices must live with the consequent regrets.

But she's got two surgeons as grandparents. And they're aligned with the CDC and STIKO schedules. I'm comfortable with the decision-making process.

0: errors like allergen management are unusual, and fairly quickly resolved; even the errors in COVID response were adaptively handled
by x0x0 | 2025-10-27 17:13:19+00:00
fwiw, I'm happily running a company and some contract work on fly literally as aws, but what if it weren't the most massively complex pile of shit you've ever seen.

I have a couple reasonably sized, understandable toml files and another 100 lines of ruby that runs long-running rake tasks as individual fly machines. The whole thing works really nicely.
by goostavos | 2025-10-27 17:13:30+00:00
It destroys the value of code review and wastes the reviewers time.

Code review is one of the places where experience is transferred. It is disheartening to leave thoughtful comments and have them met with "I duno. I just had [AI] do it."

If all you do is 'review' the output of your prompting before cutting a CR, I'd prefer you just send the prompt.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-27 17:13:30+00:00
> you will quickly realize how much friction Bevy/Rust create

For me the experience is completely the opposite. ECS as a pattern lets me build way larger games with more complicated and interesting gameplay than I could build before without ECS. It's something about about easy it makes to create de-coupled functions and being able to easily put things under automatic testing that makes the whole process so much smoother. Before moving to Bevy I mostly used Unreal Engine and on two projects Unity, FWIW.

> I judge the viability of a game engine/framework based on its commercial success. This may be a bit harsh

I don't think it's harsh at all, I'd do the same if I was trying to build mainstream games, and I think many other peoples do so to.

But that's also very different than "Nobody makes games in Bevy though" which is what you said at first, which is a lot less charitable than what you wrote in your comment now. I understand it's an exaggeration, but it reads as you're sour about it, rather than being interested in a conversation about it.
by namirez | 2025-10-27 17:13:40+00:00
No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us human!

I do understand the reasoning behind being original, but why make mistakes when we have tools to avoid them? That sounds like a strange recommendation.
by paulpauper | 2025-10-27 17:13:52+00:00
Quality , human-made content is seldom rewarded anymore. Difficulty has gone up. The bar for quality is too high, so an alternative strategy is to use LLMs for a more lottery approach to content: produce as much LLM-assisted content as possible in the hope something goes viral. Given that it's effectivity free to produce LLM writing, eventually something will work if enough content is produced.

I cannot blame people for using software as a crutch when human-based writing has become too hard and seldom rewarded anymore unless you are super-talented, which statistically the vast majority of people are not.
by coldpie | 2025-10-27 17:15:11+00:00
You'll probably enjoy this article from one of the original creators of the Passkey ecosystem:

> Since then Passkeys are now seen as a way to capture users and audiences into a platform. What better way to encourage long term entrapment of users then by locking all their credentials into your platform, and even better, credentials that can't be extracted or exported in any capacity.

https://fy.blackhats.net.au/blog/2024-04-26-passkeys-a-shatt...

Fingers crossed the Passkey user experience remains so bad no one accepts them & they just die on the vine.