MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crote | 2025-11-25 18:08:23+00:00
On the other hand, the presence of an alternative is the persuasion.

It's very easy to justify for yourself why you aren't addressing the hard problems in your codebase. Combine that with a captive audience, and you end up with everyone running the same steaming heap of technical debt and being unhappy about it.

But the second an alternative starts to get off the ground there's suddenly a reason to address those big issues: people are leaving, and it is clear that complacency is no longer an option. Either evolve, or accept that you'll perish.
by FuckButtons | 2025-11-25 18:08:36+00:00
Literally none of what you just said is true. All of those things happened because there was a market opportunity, there was a market opportunity because wealth was not just in the hands of the rich.

If you want to look at what historically has happened when the rich have had a sudden rapid increase in intelligence and labor, we have examples.

After the end of the Punic wars, the influx of slave labor and diminution of economic power of normal Roman citizens lead to: accelerating concentration of wealth, civil war and an empire where the value of human life was so low that people were murdered in public for entertainment.
by kiitos | 2025-11-25 18:08:38+00:00
> setting a field to true from potentially multiple threads can be a completely meaningful operation e.g. if you only care about if ANY of the threads have finished execution.

this only works when the language defines a memory model where bools are guaranteed to have atomic reads and writes

so you can't make a claim like "setting a field to true from ... multiple threads ... can be a meaningful operation e.g. if you only care about if ANY of the threads have finished execution"

as that claim only holds when the memory model allows it

which is not true in general, and definitely not true in go

assumptions everywhere!!
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-11-25 18:09:00+00:00
I found a chatbot helpful when I explicitly requested it, in detail, to argue the other person's side with me. I basically approached it as "I want advice on this particular conflict," I explained who the other party was, I explained my best summary of the situation as a whole, and I went back and forth.

I found it cathartic because I could basically argue with that person about it, without asking that person to do emotional labor or be subjected to my criticisms of where I felt they were wrong. Ultimately I landed on several points I did eventually go to that person with, I dropped several others that the chatbot pointed out weren't really something it was fair to criticize them for, and I think our friendship is overall better for it.

I don't think there was anything revolutionary there, it's basically journaling with an LLM, but it was more efficient if nothing else.

Edit: I would also caveat that I've attended a lot of therapy, individual and couples, so numerous concepts that some people may not know, things like emotional labor, boundaries, healthy communication, etc. are already very familiar concepts to me. So, I wouldn't recommend a chatbot as a FIRST stop? But if you've attended a lot of therapy and already know a fair bit about how your own feelings work, I think it can help, as long as you explicitly request that it doesn't just glaze you continuously.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-11-25 18:09:29+00:00
The history of modern ML is just fascinating, and as far as I can tell it's utterly unprecedented.

1945-2012 Let's figure out how we can build smart machines 2012-2017 Wait, what the hell... we just needed more gates? 2017-? Let's figure out how this machine we built actually works
by cb321 | 2025-11-25 18:09:44+00:00
You might enjoy https://nim-lang.org/ which has a Python-like syntax with even more flexibility really (UFCS, command-like calls, `fooTemplate: stuff` like user-defined "statements", user-defined operators, term-rewriting macros and more. With ARC it's really just about as safe as Rust and most of the stdlib is fast by default. "High quality" is kind of subjective, but they are often very welcoming of PRs.

Anyway, to your point, I think a newbie could pick up the basics quickly and later learn more advanced things. In terms of speed, like 3 different times I've compared some Nim impl to a Rust impl and the Nim was faster (though "at the extreme" speed is always more a measure of how much optimization effort has been applied, esp. if the language supports inline assembly).

https://cython.org/ , which is a gradually typed variant of Python that compiles to C, is another decent possibility.
by kldg | 2025-11-25 18:10:01+00:00
I lean toward the opinion there are certain things people (especially young people) should be steered away from because they tend to snowball in ways people may not anticipate, like drug abuse and suicide; situations where they wind up much more miserable than they realize, not understanding the various crutches they've adopted to hide from pain/anxiety have kept them from happiness (this is simplistic, though; many introverts are happy and fine).

I don't think I have a clear-enough vision on how AI will evolve to say we should do something about it, though, and few jurisdictions do anything about minors on social media, which we do have a big pile of data on, so I'm not sure it's worth thinking/talking about AI too much yet, at least as it relates to regulating for minors. Unlike social media, too, the general trajectory for AI is hazy. In the meantime, I won't be swayed much by anecdotes in the news.

Regardless, if I were hosting an LLM, I would certainly be cutting off service to any edgy/sexy/philosophy/religious services to minimize risk and culpability. I was reading a few weeks ago on Axios of actual churches offering chatbots. Some were actually neat; I hit up an Episcopalian one to figure out what their deal was and now know just enough to think of them as different-Lutherans. Then there are some where the chatbot is prompted to be Jesus or even Satan. Which, again, could actually be fine and healthy, but if I'm OpenAI or whoever, you could not pay me enough.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-11-25 18:10:06+00:00
The lifetime syntax was taken from OCaml but it has somewhat different semarics than OCaml. I honestly get a bit tripped up when I look at OCaml code (a language I'm a beginner at), and see ordinary parameterized types using syntax that suggests to me, from a Rust background, "woah, complex lifetime situation ahead!"

I know that Graydon Hoare is a fan of OCaml and that it was a core inspiration for Rust, and I sometimes wonder if he gets tripped up too by having to switch between Rust-inspired and OCaml-inspired interpretations of the same characters.
by gpm | 2025-11-25 18:10:09+00:00
Nah, there's lots of times you need to specify the types of Vec, either because

1. You don't want the default `i32` integer type and this is just a temporary vector of integers.

2. Rust's type inference is not perfect and sometimes the compiler will object even though there's only one type that could possibly work.

Edit: The <Vec<T>>::new() syntax is definitely never used though.
by jfyi | 2025-11-25 18:10:09+00:00
You can't standardize the developer experience across different processors. I'm not trying to be negative here, just practical.

You are going to run into things like TSYS closing out batches every three days regardless of what happens.

The handling features for them and their customers thing is going to be a herculean task over even a couple different platforms. Not impossible, but it's big and you would do well to see what's out there before committing to a standard interface. Take a look at https://datacapsystems.com/ to see it done well.

Also, adding another layer like this, you better have an early plan to staff a support desk.

Oh, also, you are gateway, not a processor.
by iJohnDoe | 2025-11-25 18:10:28+00:00
People really miss the point about why military recruiting occurs so early at 18. The brain is not fully developed yet. At 18, people have not learned right from wrong, love, death, loss, true responsibility to someone else. Sure, someone at 18 have gone through these things and it hopefully helps guide them in life, but it may not penetrate the brain as a life lesson yet. The brain is basically a blur up until your thirties, because you don't have any of these experiences to compare to until you encounter them again.

That's why as you get older you start to understand what the heck is happening in your life, because you finally have multiple experiences to compare to. Then you can finally understand what is meant to be traumatic and what is right and wrong. The first time you went through something you were basically numb to the experience.
by mettakindness | 2025-11-25 18:10:56+00:00
Thank you . I'll take a look at the sites you mentioned.

For the record, I've been using standard ChatGPT 5.1, and even without a therapy-specific system prompt, it works quite well.

Just to clarify, when I mentioned "safely used as a supplement", I was thinking from a holistic emotional standpoint. I came across the post on "Chatbot Psychosis" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46045674) and it got me pondering...
by mindcrash | 2025-11-25 18:10:59+00:00
Every model (either local or cloud hosted) has a so called information cutoff date which basically is the date for which they have information stored internally. Outside of that date range they need a MCP service able to search and/or browse the World Wide Web to retrieve requested/required information.

If they cannot access the information on the web for whatever reason (including Anubis and friends) this happens.

You can let them know their information cutoff date by simply politely asking them what their information cutoff date is. Do note however that some models, the model behind Copilot comes to mind, require some hard... convincing before they want to tell you. (I believe it was end of 2024 for Copilot when I asked)
by ascendantlogic | 2025-11-25 18:11:00+00:00
> "Go is often touted for its ease to write highly concurrent programs. However, it is also mind-boggling how many ways Go happily gives us developers to shoot ourselves in the foot."

In my career I've found that if languages don't allow developers to shoot themselves (and everyone else) in the foot they're labelled toy languages or at the very least "too restrictive". But the moment you're given real power someone pulls the metaphorical trigger, blows their metaphorical foot off and then starts writing blog posts about how dangerous it is.
by lawlessone | 2025-11-25 18:11:04+00:00
>I learned that the meaning of life has nothing to do with other people or their estimation of me.

i think of this as the 'no longer caring if my socks match' era.

why:

You can't see them, my jeans cover my ankles

why are you looking at my socks?

both socks have the same texture that's all that matters

who has time to sort socks?
by whearyou | 2025-11-25 18:11:23+00:00
“It's creating a strange feedback loop: students use an LLM to write the essay, and teachers use an LLM to grade it. It ends up being just one LLM talking to another, with no human intelligence in the middle.”

This was the plot to a recent South Park episode: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt27035146/
by makemethrowaway | 2025-11-25 18:11:32+00:00
It may not phone home now, but it can do it tomorrow, or it can in be enabled and immediately disabled in some minor releases. Even if people didn't catch those shenanigans immediately it will be evident from the commit history. I'd say opensource forces certain discipline.

Also there is point of rugpull, or the product is getting cancelled. Few people will step up to maintain it; atleast until most users migrate to a different product.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-11-25 18:12:00+00:00
> Take LFS/BLFS - you basically have extensive documention how to adjust Linux. Where is that available for BSD on an equal basis?

LFS is a process where a person can build a distro themselves by building all the many little pieces from disparate sources into a working whole. In BSD land, this isn't a thing because the system is built as a single thing in the first place; instead of having a long list of packages, each with its own download/configure/build steps, you just have 1. clone the (single) source, 2. configure with the standard tools, 3. build it all at once. I suggest reading about netbsd's build.sh ( https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-build.html ) as a good example of something that's better than GNU/Linux's offering.
by DanielVZ | 2025-11-25 18:12:10+00:00
Oh you are absolutely right. I’m not sure yet if it IS more harmful but it has had time to do so much more harm.

Starting with dumb challenges that risk children and their families life.

And don’t get me started with how algorithms don’t care about the wellbeing of users, so if it’s depressing content that drives engagement, users life is just a tiny sacrifice in favor the companies profits.
by ericmcer | 2025-11-25 18:12:12+00:00
It is probably a good time to view the root goals of education instead of the markers of success that we have been shooting at for a long time now (worksheets, standardized tests, etc.).

A one hour lecture where students (especially <20 year old kids) need to proactively interject if they don't understand something is a pretty terrible format.

> "Education seemed slow to adapt to the internet and mobile phones, usually treating them as threats rather than tools. Given the current incentive structure and the lack of understanding of how LLMs work"

Good point, it is less like a threat and more like... "how do we shoehorn this into our current processes without adapting them at all? Oh cool now the LLM generates and grades the worksheets for me!".

We might need to adjust to more long term projects, group projects, and move away from lectures. A teacher has 5*60=300 minutes a week with a class of ~26. If you broke the class into groups of 4 - 5 you could spend a significant amount of time with each group and really get a feel for the students beyond what grade the computer gives to their worksheet.
by jerf | 2025-11-25 18:12:14+00:00
That's not even remotely true. A randomized standardized test will still have some domain that it chooses its questions from and that domain will be perfectly susceptible to Goodhart's Law. It is already the case that no one is literally teaching "On the SAT you're going to get this problem about triangle similarity and the answer is C." When a fresh batch of students sits down in front of some year's SATs the test is still effectively "randomized" relative to the education they received. But that randomization is relative to a rigid standardized curriculum and the teaching was absolutely Goodhart'd relative to that curriculum.

"The only way for students to pass is to learn the material."

Part of Goodhart's law in this context is precisely that it overdetermines "the material" and there is no way around this.

I wish Goodhart's law was as easy to dodge as you think it is, but it isn't.
by fidelity2482 | 2025-11-25 18:12:20+00:00
There is nothing to engage with. I think tersely. Some researchers could learn.

I find it annoying that a large part of research is the obsession of taking a perfectly smooth, gradual phenomenon and introducing artificial boundaries, sometimes even with formal labels. And then we spend the next few decades rolling it back as we inevitably find out that reality is nuanced, and the arbitrary categorization is more of a distraction than a meaningful tool. But I'm sure this fantastical finding was great for somebody's career.
by thunky | 2025-11-25 18:12:23+00:00
> Nobody is telling you what not to name your branches.

> Nobody has said you can't use whatever name you want.

This is reductionist. The git people didn't pull this idea out of their butt. It came about because a lot of people were saying that we should not name our branches master.

I have no problem with what the git people did. Easy enough for them to change it, and it puts a dumb issue to bed (for them).

But I think it's fair for anyone to point out that the motivation was dumb, and to explain why it's dumb and how the word "master" is actually not an unreasonable choice in this context.

> Nobody has said you can't use whatever name you want.

Sure, until somebody makes the mistake of not renaming all of their old "master" branches and gets shamed by the word police over it.

Of course you're welcome to disagree.
by sershe | 2025-11-25 18:12:24+00:00
Here's the long term trend, of course https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...

Ratio was very similar in 1965 and 1995, for example and not much higher than previously after the housing bubble. So, not much to do with deregulation and welfare state in the 80ies or whatever.

Then this has median house size over time https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/programs-surveys/a...

Median house is not affected by average issues you indicate, and it increases steadily over time including when price to income is falling or staying low.

Also, since housing costs for most people are substantially affected by interest rates, the pre covid period would look even better.

Where is the data for the poorest, and what does the poorest mean, 1%, 10%, 0.1%?

Of course, housing prices, especially local, are mostly due to underbuilding, and underbuilding is to a large extent caused by zoning, and environmental/etc review. Nothing to do with "current system", unless by current system you mean too much government and too much democratic input over other people's property :)

Oh btw here's hard to use long term doc.https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending....

Spending on housing was 29.5% in 1960, 30.8% in 1973, 32.8% in 2001, as far as it goes.
by MisterTea | 2025-11-25 18:12:32+00:00
> Where are they coming from?

One is in lives in Brazil and I think the other lives in the Middle East. They both have old second hand 32 bit laptops from the 00's.

> but you seem to paint it as some kind of affordability frontier...

Yes because there are people still using old hardware because they have no choice. Also, whats the problem with supporting old architectures? Plan 9 solved the portability problem and a prominent user recently ported it to cheap MIPS routers so we can run Plan 9 on cheap second hand network hardware. We have the tool chain support so we use it.

And believe me, I understand a raspberry pi or whatever is much faster and uses less power but I would rather we reduce e-waste where possible. I still run old 32 bit systems because they work and I have them.
by Animats | 2025-11-25 18:12:35+00:00
> You can pen a horse by painting stripes on the ground around it.

No way. Horses are quite good at evaluating ground obstacles. I've never had a horse hesitate at a painted line.

There are some breeds of cattle which will not cross a painted imitation of a cattle guard, but those are beef animals bred to be dumb and docile.
by tobinfekkes | 2025-11-25 18:13:07+00:00
Pro: they abstracted away the intricacies of getting "KYC" approval to take payments and abstracted the merchant services integration, so a developer could be up and taking payments in hours, rather than weeks/months.

Con: they abstracted the relationship a merchant has with their processor, so now they stand between you and your money, they decide whether you get it or not, or if you're banned or not, and you have no recourse if they decide your story isn't compelling enough.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-11-25 18:13:41+00:00
I don't think it's an awful choice, but I'll admit that pipes in lambdas are not my favorite bit of syntax. I'm not a fan of them in Ruby either. I personally prefer JavaScript-ish => for lambdas. But I'm not gonna try to bikeshed one syntax decision made over a decade ago that has relatively minor consequences for other parts of the language. The early Rust core team had different taste than I do essentially, and that's fine.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-11-25 18:13:56+00:00
> I've always thought that I'm just extremely late to mature. I'm 36 now and haven't really felt like I sort of "get" things until my early 30s.

I'm 43 and I'm still not convinced that I'm not three kids stacked in a trench coat.

I remember being 33 and buying a house and thinking "Someone call the cops, this banker is letting a child sign mortgage papers".

When I put on nice clothes for a fancy dinner, I feel like I'm cosplaying as a functional and responsible adult, despite having a great career (Staff-level engineer that will likely be promoted to Principal in a few months). I fly First Class and feel out of place, like First Class is reserved for people that have their shit together.

Someone said that this feeling goes away when your same-gendered parent dies, but my dad passed in 2019 and it's still pervasive.
by jkl5xx | 2025-11-25 18:14:12+00:00
This is smart and a good first step. Everyone can't be trusted to do the security dance flawlessly, though. We need sane defaults. Least privilege by default for 3rd-party code. Deno's headed in the right direction with this. But I think the solution needs to exist deeper in the stack. The surge in popularity of `curl -fsSL https://my-cool-ai-starup.ai/install.sh | bash` style installers is particularly concerning to me in this regard.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-25 18:14:21+00:00
>Maybe lower their standards to the point that they can be satisfied by a real person, not a text completion algorithm that literally worships the ground they walk on and outputs some of the cheesiest, cringiest text I've ever read.

The vast majority of women are not replacing dating with chatbots, not even close. If you want women to stop being picky, you would have to reduce the "demand" in the market, stop men from being so damn desperate for any pair of legs in a skirt.

They are suffering through the exact same dating apps, suffering through their own problems. Try talking to one some time about how much it sucks.

Remember, the apps are not your friend, and not optimized to get you a date or a relationship. They are optimized to make you spend money.

The apps want you to feel hopeless, like there is no other way than the apps, and like only the apps can help you, which is why you should pay for their "features" which are purposely designed to screw you over. The Match company purposely withholds matches from you that are high quality and promising. They own nearly the entire market.
by watwut | 2025-11-25 18:14:40+00:00
> We played tag at building sites, jumping gaps meter wide and five deep, made explosives out of match sticks

As someone who thinks kids should have freedom, like kids in Germany or Japan have, I hate it when ridiculous arguments like these show up.

Look, if you was regularly doing all that, you probably should not have all that freedom. But, most kids are actually more reasonable, if raised right.
by hackinthebochs | 2025-11-25 18:15:06+00:00
Just when the "brain doesn't finish developing until 25" nonsense has finally waned from the zeitgeist, here comes a new pile of rubbish for people to latch onto. Not that the research itself is rubbish, but how they name/describe the phases certainly is. The "adolescent" and "adult" phases don't have any correspondence to what we normally think of as those developmental periods. That certainly wont stop anyone from using this as justification for whatever normative claim they want to make though. It's just irresponsible.
by dang | 2025-11-25 18:15:14+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Meta Segment Anything Model 3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45982073 - Nov 2025 (133 comments)

p.s. This was lobbed onto the frontpage by the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308) and I need to make sure we don't end up with duplicate threads that way.