MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jsh1 | 2025-11-26 17:55:53+00:00
Most of this debate misses the real shift. AI isn't replacing programmers, it's replacing the parts of programming that were never craft in the first place. In the future, most people will prompt code they barely understand while a small minority who keep real depth will end up owning the hard problems. If anything collapses the culture, it won't be AI but our willingness to trade mastery for convenience.
by swaits | 2025-11-26 17:56:18+00:00
It’s some mixture of luddites, denial, ignorance, and I don’t know what else.

I’m not sure what these people are NOT seeing. Maybe I’m somehow fortunate with visibility into what AI can do today, and what it will do tomorrow. But I’m not doing anything special. Just paying attention and keeping an open mind.

I’ve been at this for 40 years, working professionally for more than 30. I’ve seen lots.

One pattern I’ve seen repeating is folks who seem to stop leaning at some point. I don’t understand this, because for me learning everyday is what fuels me. And those folks eventually die on the vine, or they become the last few greybeards working on COBOL.

We are alive at a very interesting time in tech. I am excited about that. I am here for it.
by busyant | 2025-11-26 17:56:27+00:00
Why do you say "apart from the brain"?

Also, as others have noted, your idea is not necessarily wild. Certainly, at the sub-cellular level, there is tremendous evidence that symbiosis played a part in creating "higher level" organisms (i.e., eukaryotes).

Many genomes are like a junk-yard with fossilized relics of infectious agent nucleic acid (e.g., viruses), etc. Apologies for the junk-yard / fossil mixed metaphor.
by Havoc | 2025-11-26 17:56:39+00:00
Yeah ebay. In general I've found buying enterprise stuff off ebay to be quite safe...all the shysters are in consumer space

>Any guidelines for what's a good used enterprise SSD?

Look at the sellers other items. You want them to be data-center stuff.

Look at how many they have to sell - someone clearing out a server won't have 1 drive, they'll have half a dozen plus.

Look for smart data in the post / guaranteed minimum health.

I mostly bought S3500/3600/3700 series intel SSDs. The endurance numbers vary so you'll need to look up what you find

>The endurance numbers on the enterprise drives are just so much higher.

That plus I'm more confident they'll actually hit them
by tracker1 | 2025-11-26 17:56:44+00:00
It's already in the box... there's a bunch of options from unwrap_or, etc... to actually checking the error result and dealing with it cleanly... that's not what happened.

Not to mention the possibility of just bumping up through Result<> chaining with an app specific error model. The author chose neither... likely because they want the app to crash/reload from an external service. This is often the best approach to an indeterminate or unusable state/configuration.
by mrandish | 2025-11-26 17:57:05+00:00
> "this new class of drugs should be rebranded from “weight loss” drugs to “weight management” drugs, which people may need to take indefinitely."

I suspect the manufacturers view this as a feature not a bug. :-) More seriously, I find the article's conclusions to be pretty much what I'd expect. Most medicines aren't permanent cures and obesity results from a variety of factors with lifestyle and diet being major elements.

I was seriously obese for decades and about 9 years ago, hovering on the edge of becoming diabetic and other serious obesity-related health issues (high BP, IBS/GERDS, chronic apnea, etc), I decided I had to do something. GLP-1's weren't available then but none of the other typical approaches, including medically supervised diets worked more than a few months. Doing my own research, I discovered keto (this was before keto became big) and decided to try it. It was hard at first but also remarkably effective. I lost over 100 pounds in 8 months, becoming fit and seeing abs for the first time in my life. As I lost the weight, all the other health issues resolved too. But I knew if I returned to my previous diet and habits, I'd eventually grow obese again. Many people will take GLP-1s, lose weight but then stop and regain the weight because they didn't change their underlying behavior. Just like many people do with dieting, keto or any other intervention. But any intervention that works can be an invaluable for the few willing to understand, use it as a tool and do the work.

I stayed strict keto for 5 years. Long enough to train my body and mind how to be fit and healthy as normal (not a temporary diet). Then I started a rigorous process of gradually transitioning away from strict keto over a period of two years and that's also worked. I still eat a pretty low carb diet averaging less than 100g or less a day and will for life because there is no "Eat whatever junk you want and stay fit", at least for my metabolism. Reading that article, the criticisms of GLP-1s would also apply to keto or just "eat less, move more". If you stop the intervention, the system returns to state. However, for me keto helped me break an insidious pattern driven by habit, metabolism and blood sugar levels. I was then able to adopt new patterns. I suspect GLP-1s could help others in a similar way. Obviously, there is no magic drug that "cures" obesity by making you immune to bad habits and the physics of calories in/calories out.
by Spivak | 2025-11-26 17:57:12+00:00
I'm not saying they should or will give up on these markets, just that their margins aren't likely to be great.

There's already so much AI porn right now. There's no reason to believe that OpenAI will be any better or able to command higher margins than their competitors. They also have the problem of being under a ton of public and regulatory scrutiny so the highest paying clientele, the people with niche unsavory fetishizes, won't be able to be serviced by them.

And that's ignoring the fact that getting into this space at all is pure HN speculation and unlikely to ever happen anyway.
by ryandv | 2025-11-26 17:57:29+00:00
No, it's quite real and has been reported on in the press. It's straightforward to get prescribed hormones for even the flimsiest of reasons [0]:

> This patient expressed no gender dysphoria, but he got hormones, too. I asked the doctor what protocol he was following, but I never got a straight answer.

[0] https://archive.is/eDKDR
by mrspuratic | 2025-11-26 17:57:41+00:00
Not problematic, minor pedantry. With much time spent reading (and occasionally writing) technical documentation it's octets, binary prefixes, and other wanton pedantry where likely to be understood/appreciated or precision is required.

FTR, ECMA-130 (the CD "yellow book" equivalent standard) is littered with the term "8-bit bytes", so it was certainly a thing then. Precision when simultaneously discussing eight-to-fourteen modulation, and the 17 encoding "bits" that hit the media for each octet as noted in a sibling comment.

Now, woktets on the other hand...
by pizlonator | 2025-11-26 17:57:45+00:00
> No nullable fiels.

If you take away nullability, you eventually get something like a special state that denotes absence and either:

- Assertions that the absence never happens.

- Untested half-baked code paths that try (and fail) to handle absence.

> formally verified

Yeah, this does prevent most bugs.

But it's horrendously expensive. Probably more expensive than the occasional Cloudflare incident
by ineedasername | 2025-11-26 17:57:53+00:00
Responding to and enumerating, in this case, the viewpoint of someone. It's the general process by which discussions take place and progress.

If the thread were about 1) the current problems and approaches AI alignment, 2) the poorly understood mechanisms of hallucination, 3a) the mindset the doesn't see the conflict whey they say "don't anthropomorphize" but runs off to create a pavlovian playground in post-training, 3b) the mindsets that do much the reverse and how both these are dangerous and harmful, 4) the poorly understood trade off of sparse inference optimizations. But it's not, so I hold those in reserve.
by dpark | 2025-11-26 17:57:58+00:00
> we know how to do it better, but nearly all of even the smartest engineers we can hire are not smart enough.

This seems like a contradiction. If the smartest engineers you can hire are not smart enough to work within formal verification constraints then we in fact do not know how to do this.

If formal verification hinges on having perfect engineers then it’s useless because perfect engineers wouldn’t need formal verification.
by teeray | 2025-11-26 17:57:59+00:00
This quote is basically the TL;DR:

> memory suppliers have both the motive and precedent to coordinate behavior, even tacitly, in order to keep prices high. When only a handful of firms control the taps, it doesn't take a formal cartel for them to collectively benefit from constrained supply. Each firm knows that flooding the market would hurt all of their profits, so a form of unspoken coordination can occur, and this is next to impossible to prove. The backdrop of past cartels makes it hard not to be cynical when hearing that "AI demand" is solely to blame for increased prices. Whether or not any collusion is happening now, it's clear that memory companies are profiting immensely from the current crisis. After bleeding financially during the last oversupply downturn, the major DRAM makers are now seeing record-high earnings in the third quarter of 2025 thanks to the price surge, and to put it bluntly, the shortage is great for business.
by cr1st1an | 2025-11-26 17:58:04+00:00
Thanks for the detailed reply. Let me try to clear up a few things, because I think we are talking about slightly different use cases.

The plugin is not trying to replace Cloudflare, Squid, Minio, or any other origin setup. It also is not an offloader. WordPress still stores the files and keeps whatever transformation pipeline you already use. The plugin only rewrites the final image URL so the request hits a Worker that fetches the file on demand and caches it in R2. That is the entire idea.

You could absolutely build something similar with Squid or Minio or a reverse proxy. There are many valid ways to do this if you are comfortable managing the infra yourself. The plugin exists for the large group of WordPress users who are not going to set up their own proxy, or Minio, or custom rewrite rules. They just want their existing images to load faster without touching their hosting stack.

On the managed plan, you are right that I need good safeguards. I agree that self hosted R2 or self hosted S3 makes the most sense for larger or more active sites. My plan is to encourage that path when usage grows so the shared bucket does not become a liability for anyone.

The idea of WordPress having a separate “base image URL” setting would actually solve a lot of problems. Until that exists, this plugin is basically trying to fill that gap for non technical users.

If you have suggestions on how to simplify the worker pattern further, or how you would package your Squid setup so it is accessible to others, I am definitely interested in hearing more.
by jitl | 2025-11-26 17:58:26+00:00
Whoops, I thought I was replying inside this thread tree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46059256

> I tried Wayland earlier today on my home lab with Plasma and FreeBSD. It seemed pretty great for a bit and ran my monitor at 120Hz.

> Until it hard crashed my machine after I opened discord in firefox. Konqueror crashed on opening.

I lost track of the indentation on my phone
by rdtsc | 2025-11-26 17:58:38+00:00
I would guess at the individual team level they probably still behave like any other tech shop. When the end of the year comes the higher-ups still expect fancy features and accomplishments and saying "well, we spent months writing a page of TLA+ code" is not going to look as "flashy" as another team who delivered 20 new features. It would take someone from above to push and ask that other team who delivered 20 features, where is their TLA+ code verifying their correctness. But, how many people in the middle management chain would do that?
by ihaveajob | 2025-11-26 17:58:54+00:00
What I really miss was the moderation system. There was a simple 1-5 score and a main trait (insightful, funny, flamebait, underrated, overrated...). To moderate you had to earn points which would you then spend, so careful consideration mattered. The result was that you could filter for 5+Insightful and get the core of the discussion, or 5+Funny and have a good time, etc.
by doug_durham | 2025-11-26 17:59:14+00:00
Thank you for expressing well what I was thinking. I derive intense joy from coding. Like you my over my 40 year career I've been exploiting more and more ways to outsource work to computers. The space of software is so vast that I've never worried for a second that I'd not have work to do. Coding is a means to solving interesting problems. It is not an end in itself.
by RHSeeger | 2025-11-26 17:59:28+00:00
I've never done anything like road/construction work. But I've done restaurant work, being on my feet for 8+ hours per day... and mentally, it just doesn't compare to software development.

- After a long day of physical labor, I come home and don't want to move.

- After a long day of software development, I come home and don't want to think.
by FatherOfCurses | 2025-11-26 17:59:40+00:00
In my very humble opinion, the impact that software has on our lives is getting to the point where software engineering should become a true profession like the other engineering branches (electrical, mechanical, etc).

There should be things like professional certifications that engineers have to maintain through continuous education, a professional code of ethics, a board of review, and other functions.

My reasoning is that we are at the point where a software "engineer" can make a mistake that can have the same impact as a civil engineer making a bad calculation and causing a bridge collapse.

There's different levels to this, of course. An app for booking restaurant reservations wouldn't need that much oversight. But we've seen some outages having massive impacts that quite frankly did not happy twenty years ago.
by shagie | 2025-11-26 18:00:18+00:00
Voyager 1 is traveling at 16.9 km/s.

New Horizons (which has the distinguishing feature of being the fastest human-made object ever launched from earth https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/life-unbounded/the-f... ) is traveling at 12.6 km/s.

The key part there is that it got multiple gravity assists as part of the Grand Tour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program . You can see the heliocentric velocity https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10346/why-did-voya... https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-voyagers-odyss...

The conjunction for the Grand Tour is once every 175 years. While you might be able to get a Jupiter and Saturn assist sooner, it is something that would take the right alignment and a mission to study the outer planets (rather than getting captured by Jupiter or Saturn for study of those planets and their moons).

While I would love to see a FOCAL mission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft) which would have reason for such a path, I doubt any such telescope would launched... this century.
by xoa | 2025-11-26 18:00:28+00:00
The three other replies you've gotten so far have given some generically applicable though still good answers, but I want to address something regard Cloudflare specifically: a major part of their entire core goal and value proposition revolves around being able to defend their customers from continuously scaling ever larger hostile attacks. This isn't merely a case of "natural selection" or what a company/VCs might desire, but that it's hard to see how under the current (depressing, shitty) state of the Internet it'd be possible to cheaply defend against terabit-plus class DDOS and the like without Cloudflare level scale in turn. And "cheaply" is in fact critical too because the whole point of resource exhaustion attacks is that they're purely economic, if it costs many times more to mitigate them then to launch and profit from them then the attackers are going to win in the end. Ideally we'd be solving this collective action problem collectively with standards amongst nations and ISPs to mitigate or eliminate botnets at the source, but we have to trundle along as best we can in the mean time right? I'm not sure there is room for a large number of players in Cloudflare's role, and they've been a pretty dang decent one so far.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-26 18:00:41+00:00
> For a tool, I expect “well” to mean that it does what it’s supposed to do

Ah, then LLMs are actually very reliable by your definition. They're supposed to output semi-random text, and whenever I use them, that's exactly what happens. Except for the times I create my own models and software, I basically never see any cases where the LLM did not output semi-random text.

They're not made for producing "correct code" obviously, because that's a judgement only a human can do, what even is "correct" in that context? Not even us humans can agree what "correct code" is in all contexts, so assuming a machine could do so seems foolish.
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-11-26 18:00:47+00:00
I don't know what the moneyed insiders think OpenAI is about, but Sam Altman's public facing thoughts (which I consider to be marketing) are definitely oriented toward making it look like they are all-in on AGI:

See:

(1) https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity (June, 2025) - "We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be."

- " It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year; or from a major materials science breakthrough one year to true high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces the next year."

(2) https://blog.samaltman.com/three-observations (Feb, 2025) - "Our mission is to ensure that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) benefits all of humanity."

- "In a decade, perhaps everyone on earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today."

(3) https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections (Jan, 2025) - "We started OpenAI almost nine years ago because we believed that AGI was possible, and that it could be the most impactful technology in human history"

- "We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it."

(4) https://ia.samaltman.com/ (Sep, 2024) - "This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there."

(5) https://blog.samaltman.com/the-merge (Dec, 2017) - "A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced species). Most guesses seem to be between 2025 and 2075."

(I omitted about as many essays. The hype is strong in this one.)
by parados | 2025-11-26 18:00:50+00:00
True, and I agree, but from their report they do seem to be doing Root Cause Analysis (RCA) even if they don't call it that.

RCA is a really bad way of investigating a failure. Simply put; if you show me your RCA I know exactly where you couldn't be bothered to look any further.

I think most software engineers using RCA confuse the "cause" ("Why did this happen") with the solution ("We have changed this line of code and it's fixed"). These are quite different problem domains.

Using RCA to determine "Why did this happen" is only useful for explaining the last stages of an accident. It focuses on cause->effect relationships and tells a relatively simple story but one that is easy to communicate - Hi there managers and media! But RCA only encourages simple countermeasures which will probably be ineffective and will be easily outrun by the complexity of real systems

However one thing RCA is really good at is allocating blame. If your organisation is using RCA then, what ever you pretend, your organisation has a culture of blame. With a blame culture (rather than a reporting culture) your organisation is much more likely to fail again. You will lack operational resilience.
by casenmgreen | 2025-11-26 18:00:50+00:00
So, two or three things.

1. You replied here, and stated and reasonably and rationally Hetzner's case. That's excellent.

2. I emailed Hetz two days ago, explained the situation (passport a no-no, friend has PP, but I'm signed up with bank transfer so could I just use that).

Hetz replied saying account has now been enabled and I'm good to go.

Also excellent.

3. The observations in this reply about passport - if you've been hacked and not noticed yet, all passports passing through your hands are being exfiltrated (assuming attackers cares about them, of course). You'd only realize how long its being going on for once the breach is detected. I'm not worried about what you are going to use it for, I trust you - the concern is that security is basically impossible and everyone gets breached sooner or later. There's nothing you or any organization can say or do to ameliorate this concern. The basic ground working assumption is : everyone is hacked, if not already, then sooner or later, and it won't be noticed for some time. Given that, how do we behave? what do we do? how do we act? obviously, identity via passports is off the menu.

Finally, there's no info during sign about about passport document being held only for a short time; seems potentially useful to have that.
by imglorp | 2025-11-26 18:00:55+00:00
I missed the linked article from April about how close to human death CFT-1 came. If they had lost 6DOF they would not have been able to reenter or dock, just sit there and spin until they ran out of air.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/the-harrowing-story-of...

At the time, the astronauts gave some interviews about how wonderful the ship was. This was clearly PR and they were clearly in their public facing role at that point. They never said "Whew! We almost died out there!" which would have been accurate.
by viharkurama | 2025-11-26 18:00:57+00:00
Hi, I’m Vihar, co‑founder of Plane (we’re building Plane, an open‑core Jira alternative). Atlassian is sunsetting its self‑hosted Jira/Data Center products and pushing everyone to the cloud. Over the last months we’ve seen a surprising amount of inbound from partners and enterprises who can’t or don’t want to go all‑in on Atlassian Cloud.

This post is our honest take on what Atlassian’s move really means for self‑hosting, what happens to Jira+Confluence heavy installs, and how to treat this as a rare opportunity to clean up workflows and possibly move to a lighter, more modern stack (including, but not only, Plane).

I have an obvious conflict of interest, so feedback/pushback is very welcome.
by fireflash38 | 2025-11-26 18:01:05+00:00
My experience with using AI is that it's a glorified stack overflow copy paster. It'll even glue a handful of SO answers together!

But then you run into classic SO problems... Like the first solution doesn't work. Nor the second one. And the third one introduces a completely different coding style. The last one is implemented in pure sh/GNU utils.

One thing it is absolutely amazing at: digesting things that have bad documentation, like openssl C api. Even then you still gotta be on the watch for hallucinations, and audit it very thoroughly.
by vkou | 2025-11-26 18:01:33+00:00
The first rule of politics is that you don't want to get into fights with people who can beat you.

The second rule of it is that the right questions (have you stopped beating your wife?) can always be spun to make your opponent look like a complete idiot. Always control the framing of a situation.

The third rule of politics is that while intelligent people can see through charades #1 and #2, and if they aren't your target demographic, you don't need to give a shit about what they think.