MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitwize | 2025-10-21 15:42:46+00:00
Man, I totally get this. I've been an Emacs user for 30 years and counting; back in the mid-90s when I started on Linux, I learned that the truly wizardly hackers usually used one of vim or Emacs and because I disliked modal editing, I chose Emacs—only to find myself tumbling down a deep, deep rabbithole that opened into an unfathomable warren network it would take me decades to begin to make any sense of.

When I open Emacs, it's like I'm five years old again, seated at my VIC-20, confronted with the infinite possibilities of the machine, challenged to explore them. Except the possibilities are so much greater because computers can do so much more and Emacs—as the programmable way to program—puts them virtually all at my fingertips. It's all a bit overwhelming, and this essay does a good job of capturing that overwhelm and the shift in perspective needed to cope.

That said, it's likely to send most people screaming back whence they came, clinging ever more firmly to their Visual Studio Codes and IntelliJs, if they be programmers at all and if not, it may turn them off programming altogether. Because that perspective shift looks like utter madness from the outside. I don't think we as a species are ready for computers yet. The possibilities, the implications.
by RaftPeople | 2025-10-21 15:43:28+00:00
> Before people bring their pitchforks to this headline

In addition to your points, something people forget is that in the previous model of brick and mortar stores, the consumer is the person that did the walking around the store and picking the items off the shelf and carrying them to the checkout.

So a portion of what Amazon is automating used to be performed for free by the consumer. This was one of the big arguments about their business model for shipping books early on, the additional costs in a competitive retail market seemed like it would be unprofitable.
by daxfohl | 2025-10-21 15:43:28+00:00
Another interesting thing here is that the model presumably has some understanding of the passage of time. That's one thing that can be odd about chat models, in that they will respond the same no matter whether you respond a second later or a month later.

I think even for text models, "streams" could be useful. Perhaps if the LLM sees too long of a pause after explaining something and asking a question, they could interject a "do you need help?" or something. Pure chat GPTs don't have that ability.
by binoct | 2025-10-21 15:43:53+00:00
Ah, seems like I was missing some context where the fossil fuel and anti-renewable folks have been using the term in arguments against trying to change.

I’m not sure of Smil’s politics but to be fair, there’s nothing in that quote that is inherently misleading. I can see through how others could spin it, and I’ll be more careful knowing the term has some politics behind it now. To me his argument in the article is that it’s not practical to expect a transition in a 25-year timescale, not that it’s impossible or not worth working on.

Heat pumps are a good example where the practice has been a lot harder than we might hope. Sure COP > 4 for heating is great, but the units are very expensive today, and in most of the US and Europe with sub-zero winter temps operate with much worse efficiencies, making them significantly more expensive to operate. I’m sure with effort those issues will improve, and major policy shifts can help mitigate some of the costs. But especially without a strong will today those changes are practically too far off for the 2050 target.
by anarticle | 2025-10-21 15:43:55+00:00
Yes, this is why it's better to be a contractor/individual right now. You need to capture this efficiency yourself. You have access to the same tools faster than BigCos, so go hard in the paint. If you estimate 3h, and it takes 15m it's up to you how to reconcile this. Personally I bill the 3h.
by Nevermark | 2025-10-21 15:43:58+00:00
Your sidebar reminds me of the computer I learned to program on. A TRS-80 Model III.

I went through a short period of figuring out interesting peek/poke memory addresses for modifying the BASIC system, and found the "80" used as the scroll width. Setting that to 60 allowed me to create a non-scrolling status sidebar like that for my first programs/games.

It strikes me that it would have been great to have had a Forth machine back then. That early version of BASIC didn't have a (language accessible) stack! Not even a return address stack, aka GOSUB. So I used strings as a stack to implement a small text adventure parser. (And later, on a computer with graphics pixels, I used BASIC strings as a heap for defining and drawing simple 3D vector objects.) Then I learned Pascal.

Desperate times. Desperate measures. But Forth would have been great.
by throwawayq3423 | 2025-10-21 15:44:08+00:00
> Show me where exactly in the Eastman memo, the so called "coup plot", it calls for a group of protesters to go into the Capitol?

Really cynical stuff. The Eastman memo was the blueprint on how to actually stop Biden's certification. That was the paperwork, the legal attack. January 6th was the kinetic attack.

Just because both actions were not detailed in the same piece of paper does not mean they weren't both part of a clearly coordinated action (of which the special counsel agreed).

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/20/eastman.memo.pdf

> You mean the cases that were thrown out by the courts?

Wrong again. His findings were not thrown out. He ended the case himself because he knew Trump would shut him down anyway once back in office.

Look, I get it. This is a narrative that is very important to you. You can't believe that your side are the violent ones or your president is the lawless one. So much of this is a waste of time.

Just know that this is your narrative and it has no connection to reality.
by ModernMech | 2025-10-21 15:44:27+00:00
> Why is Musk allowed to be worth half a trillion dollars again? ... An ethical steward of capital he is not.

You answered your question! Capitalism does not optimize for ethical stewards, and has nothing at all to say about morality or ethics. If a scam is profitable, capitalism says "that's okay!". Doesn't matter if it's illegal, immoral, amoral, destroys the environment, or even decapitates people leaving their head bouncing down the highway.

That's why Elon Musk is allowed to be worth half a trillion dollars. The system optimized for it; fraud, deception, and lawbreaking is a competitive advantage under capitalism. Someone has to be worth the most, and under this system, that person is going to be whomever is the most eager to wield his considerable wealth and power to commit crimes and defraud people.
by wbshaw | 2025-10-21 15:44:39+00:00
If you think outright financing is bad, try leasing a car and then giving it back when they screw up the residual value estimate. Dealers will try to Jack you with every imaginable fee to get you to buy the car from then at the end of the lease.

You also need to walk in the door with your own financing. Even if they give you financing through your preferred bank, it's not uncommon for them to juice the interest rate for some additional profit without any kind of disclosure.
by sofixa | 2025-10-21 15:45:32+00:00
> An exceptionally challenging problem is unlikely to be enough to cause so much fumbling because, regardless of the complex mistakes behind it, a DNS misunderstanding doesn't have a particularly large "surface area" for diagnostic purposes and it is supposed to be expeditely resolvable by standard means (ordering clients to switch to a good DNS server and immediately use it to obtain good addresses) that AWS should have in place

You seem to be misunderstanding the nature of the issue.

The DNS records for DynamoDB's API disappeared. They resolve to a dynamic bunch of IPs that constantly change.

A ton of AWS services that use DynamoDB could no longer do so. Hardcoding IPs wasn't an option. Nor could clients do anything on their side.
by joenot443 | 2025-10-21 15:46:24+00:00
Actually, there are more internet users today than at any point in history. The internet is far from dead.

The commenter in question is the CTO of the company which makes Wordfence. My instinct says they're not on the OpenAI payroll and you're looking at a normal comment and not advertisement.

I think you should check your priors man; it's worth thinking critically before you toss out accusations like that.
by ninthedition | 2025-10-21 15:46:48+00:00
Article says:

> TESTS: ON DAY OF

> Study very intensely RIGHT before the test.

> DURING THE TEST

I have one other hack, really helpful and fully legal: As soon as the test starts, do a braindump onto scrap paper, especially the items just crammed beforehand. That effectively produces a cheat sheet, which is easiest to do when the information is freshest.

Also, as fatigue sets in, it is harder to recall lots of facts, so doing a braindump as the very first task was a big win for me.
by immibis | 2025-10-21 15:46:54+00:00
In Europe you should probably not do a class action - you should just sue Tesla, directly. They do things differently over there. In Germany (which is what I know) the lawyer and court costs are a fixed percentage of the amount of money you want refunded, the loser pays for all of that in the end, and deliberately misleading advertising is illegal.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. You should consult one.
by flat_zoo | 2025-10-21 15:46:59+00:00
As a fun fact, both me and my wife can detect ex-USSR immigrant from afar (even those who have been living here in the US for some time). There is something different in how we look, walk, behave etc. Not wrong, just different, and not everybody of course. Humans are very observing when it comes to cultural code and a big part of it is subconcious, you don't even realize it.
by philippejara | 2025-10-21 15:47:20+00:00
After it took over and solidified itself as the world leader at it of course there was no need to steal IP anymore, most of it is registered there already and to the benefit of their nation. I'm sure people a hundred years from now will be having similar conversations if china or someone else takes the us's place and naturally starts caring about IP(and the runner ups stop caring).
by cool_man_bob | 2025-10-21 15:47:27+00:00
> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun.

I feel the same, and especially about video games.

I would never work in the modern video game industry. It seems really miserable to be overworked and underpaid to work on some design-by-committee game that I don’t even care about.

But I hear stories of some Of the companies back in the 90s that seemed to magically muster the capital to sit down and put out effectively what was a passion project, but also commercialize it.
by mlhpdx | 2025-10-21 15:47:29+00:00
True for certs but not the log bucket (but it’s still going to be in a single region, just doesn’t have to be Virginia). I’m guessing those certs are cached where needed, but I can also imagine a perfect storm where I’m unable to rotate them due to an outage.

I prefer the API Gateway model where I can create regional endpoints and sew them together in DNS.
by PKop | 2025-10-21 15:47:46+00:00
> energy, water, food, shelter becomes too cheap

AI is currently making energy more expensive. Shelter and these other commodities aren't made cheaper if population expands along with any capacity increases (like lanes on a highway). Lots of "ifs" in this statement that don't seem to match with observation of reality. The point of the discussion here is that AI in many ways is making workers less efficient.
by dns_snek | 2025-10-21 15:48:15+00:00
So your take is that every real software developer I know is simply bad at using this magical tool that performs on the level of mid-senior level software engineer in the hands of a few chosen ones? But the chosen ones never build anything in public where it can be observed, evaluated, and critiqued. How unfortunate is that?

The people I talked to use a wide variety of environments and their experience is similar across the board, whether they're working in Nodejs, React, Vue, Ruby, PHP, Java, Elixir, or Python.

> Productivity, especially when dealing with code, is hard to quanitfy.

Indeed, that's why I think most people claiming these obscene benefits are really bad at evaluating their own performance and/or started from a really low baseline.

I always think back to a study I read a while ago where people without ADHD were given stimulant medication and reported massive improvements in productivity but objective measurements showed that their real-world performance was equal to, or slightly lower than their baseline.

I think it's very relevant to the psychology behind this AI worship. Some people are being elevated from a low baseline whilst others are imagining the benefits.
by pjc50 | 2025-10-21 15:48:38+00:00
> they said that it seemed like I never actually properly entered the system, but had just began

Can be quite a risk for people who entered a long time ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal

> Bureaucracy can be crazy at times, and sometimes it seems like data just gets lost, for whatever reason.

The easiest way of reconciling data with reality if the rules don't allow changing the data is to change reality. By deporting people.
by dmoy | 2025-10-21 15:48:42+00:00
Yea not birth certificates from the hospital, but there is documentation. Well, there was for awhile. My grandpa definitely didn't have a birth certificate back in the 1930s (or 1920s? lol) in Taishan, but also no docs of any sort whatsoever..

But my MIL from Mao era has docs from the local officials that's all notarized, as does my wife. The dates might be... you know, not exactly right, but they're close, and importantly they're accepted by both the Chinese government and also other foreign governments for official purposes (immigration, etc).

I think I the article here we're talking about something fundamentally different from the last 70-ish in China. They're talking about people with like no official docs whatsoever, can't get healthcare, national ID card, anything. Very different from China 70 years ago, and very different from even pre civil war China.
by palata | 2025-10-21 15:48:43+00:00
> if energy, water, food, shelter becomes too cheap to meter due to rapid technology advances

"If", of course, but it's all but certain. The energy situation, today, is that we as a species depend on fossil fuels, and they are depleting. And we don't have a solution to replace them (renewables are not remotely replacing oil today, those who believe it say something like "we've done 1% of the job, it proves that we will reach 100%!").

AI is making us use more energy, and our use of energy is what is killing the world. Again, the consequences of abundant energy are global warming, mass extinction and political instability as the fossil fuels get less and less available.
by LexiMax | 2025-10-21 15:48:53+00:00
I would agree with you, but mmaunder has a registration date of 2007 and has a bio filled out with easily-verifiable information.

...is what a reasonable argument against would sound like. But in truth, nobody really knows who is running that account. There's nothing stopping anybody from passing off their HN account to someone else, having it stolen from them, or even selling it. They could possibly even be who they say they are, but have an undisclosed vested interest in the thing they're promoting.

Internet communities aren't dead, but social media sure is, and Hacker News is ultimately a social media site.
by mastax | 2025-10-21 15:49:19+00:00
> About 41% of American workers earning between $300,001 and $500,000—and 40% of those making over $500,000—say they’re living paycheck to paycheck, according to a new report from Goldman Sachs.

https://am.gs.com/en-us/advisors/insights/report-survey/reti...

The only reasonable conclusion is "are you living paycheck to paycheck" is a useless survey question.
by unkn0wn_root | 2025-10-21 15:50:21+00:00
I don’t personally use Postman, but at work we use .http files, which are easy to version and manage with Git. The downside is that you’re almost entirely tied to VS Code and the REST Client extension. I’m not a big fan of VS Code myself (I use Vim), so if anyone interested, I created resterm [0] - a terminal client that works with .http or .rest files and adds some extra "nice-to-have" features. I’m currently working on adding OpenAPI spec importing.

https://github.com/unkn0wn-root/resterm
by xnorswap | 2025-10-21 15:50:29+00:00
This is in some ways a circular argument / problem.

Because, what does a well-specified formalisation of a problem solution look like? It looks like a programming language.

Since COBOL, the dream has been a language which is formalised for computers while being understandable and able to be written by "business users".

We've been promised this future by COBOL, Visual Basic, SQL, and many others.

And what does the reality look like? It looks like the business users being upset by the fussiness that formalisation adds.

That's why Excel is still king.

Does adding better visual descriptors of program execution really help communicate solutions?

LLMs are actually a great bridge between, "Here's an idea" and "Here's the idea formalised as a set of problem and solution statements".

They're really good at it. Claude Sonnet 4.5 will output a dozen pages of formalised steps for solving a problem that acts as a good bridge between the domain expert and the programmer.

It makes mistakes. It misunderstands things sometimes. Sometimes it understands things better than the programmer or the domain user, such as when it recently corrected me on my understanding on the OAuth2.0 spec, because I was using a non-standard parameter that Cisco Meraki had mistakenly added to their documentation.
by throwawayq3423 | 2025-10-21 15:50:37+00:00
> Black Lives Matter riots (Funny, you can never say those words. It's always an abbreviation).

> the BLM comparison

Hey look, you did it again.

> provide context for what the country was going thru at the time

No, it's a shameless whataboutism trying to justify your side's riot with a clear political goal with the other side's riots that were more a spontaneous reaction to a horrific crime.

Both were riots but the circumstances and purpose of each could not be further apart.

> and J6 was partly a counter protest.

I know. You need that to be true. But it's not.

> he won many of those cases on appeal

No, he didn't. He lost every single major court case (E. Jean Carroll Defamation Case, civil fraud case, Georgia Election Interference Case, Falsified Business Records), except for one appeal that kept him on the ballot in Maine despite his coup attempt.

https://news.syr.edu/2024/09/10/donald-trump-has-survived-th...

> won the election after which his opponents closed those cases

Yes like I said.

> He avoided prison by overcoming the legal system.

I think we're done here. You're just really interested in remaking reality so that your worldview still makes sense.

Political violence, once it starts, is almost impossible to stop. So when I see people excuse it, I get especially angry.
by stillworks | 2025-10-21 15:50:55+00:00
Maybe. Was attempting to end this cliffhanger on a positive note without judgement.

He had the means so he paid off his mortgage, invested in another property, took care of college fund.

Decided he didn't want to spend rest of his days wringing his mind and drenching off energy into deciding and debating whether it is ok to call a lambda from another lambda (yes I have seen this in production and the more experienced engineer decided to do it because he had been there longer and decided that's what he wanted to do... don't ask me which company was this but it was a FAANG) or setup a step function to orchestrate the two lambda calls... or some such equivalent problem he might have come across in his SGI days.. and instead picked a job that required little amount of cognitive effort compared to what he would have done if he was still in the same line of work but still managed to support the rest of his life/needs/responsibilities.

Might as well have been an artist, construction worker or he might as well have done nothing, absolutely nothing, and it could have been everything that one would have thought it could have been.

I won't judge knowing what I know at my age. People do what they do.

Feel free to imagine what you would imagine this ex-SGI engineer's life to have been and make it negative if you want it to be. No one knows until OP throws in more details if they have any.
by HardCodedBias | 2025-10-21 15:51:21+00:00
Amazon culture is entirely powered by recruiting.

Even L6 managers feel this, but it becomes more clear as one goes up in levels. Recruiting is job one.

If Amazon runs out of recruitable engineers (unlikely, they are one of the most prestigious firms in the world) then they will simply lower the bar. HC must be filled.

The company is well structured, it will survive.
by iamleppert | 2025-10-21 15:51:21+00:00
The absolute worst place to be right now is in a B tech startup. Not only do you need to build some kind of app or product, you also need to build some kind of AI feature into the product. The users don't want it and never asked for it. It sucks all the resources out of your actual product that you should be focusing on, doesn't actually work or works non deterministically, but you are held to the same standards if it was another kind of software. And the only lever you have to pull is a lengthy model re-training or fine tuning/development cycle. The suits don't understand AI or what it takes to make it successful. They were sold on the hype that AI is going to save money, and forgot to budget for the team of AI engineers you'll need, infrastructure for training, extensive data annotations and reams of data that most startups don't have.

Tell me again how this isn't pure hell and the cuck chair?
by dingnuts | 2025-10-21 15:51:25+00:00
Cinnamon? Really? In a KDE Connect thread?

KDE actually was built around the Windows paradigm; Gnome is a Mac clone. Cinnamon is a fork of Gnome maintained as a side project from a distro with a bad security and management track record. Really the only thing it adds is a launcher; KDE optionally provides the same style if the user wants it.

Go find a thread where your pet software is on topic. This thread is about KDE Connect. Does Cinnamon support that? Does Cinnamon offer anything like it?
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-10-21 15:51:29+00:00
That's a really nice coop. I don't have to deal with anything bigger than raccoons or possums so my coop is pretty basic: built from a leftover grain bin.

But this is a nice reminder that I've been meaning to automate the door. It gets dark earlier than I expect and so far I've been lucky that the raccoon that was showing up at dusk and climbing into the run has taken a hiatus for now.

Have a couple car window actuators. Just need to remember to pick up some solar cells from Amazon since it's too far from the house to run power.
by vvolhejn | 2025-10-21 15:51:45+00:00
Author here. I think it's more of a capability issue than a safety issue. Since learning audio is still harder than learning text, audio models don't generalize as well. To fix that, audio models rely on combining information from text and audio (having a single model that consumes/produces both text and audio tokens) and the audio tokens basically end up being an integrated speech-to-text/text-to-speech. This reflects my colleagues' experience working on Moshi, and it seems to be the case for other models too, see the Conclusion section.

Part of the reason can also be synthetic data: if you fine-tune on data generated from text via a text-to-speech, the tone of the voice doesn't have any information, so the model learns to ignore it.