MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vidarh | 2025-11-19 20:43:19+00:00
> Who said anything about AI vs humans?

I did, because it is a relevant comparison.

> The contest in this context would be AI vs classical deterministic code, algorithms, solvers

No, it is not. In cases where we know how to solve things that way, we probably should, on the assumption that if they can deliver good enough results they are likely cheaper.

Those are not the things we generally are trying to use LLMs for.

> I mean, you're right, but only sort of. Someone can use this same argument to justify the assertion that bogosort is really the pinnacle of engineering excellence. How would you respond?

That it is an obivously specious argument, because we have clearly lower cost sort algorithms, and so no, you can't use this same argument to justify that assertion.
by sleepybrett | 2025-11-19 20:44:11+00:00
Yeah i'll say, even to this day, when I need a quick script and bash just isn't doing it for me I'll just write it in the same perl I used regularly as far back as 1998... but it never goes further than that. If I have to take that script and build it into anything that will ever leave my laptop it's going to get rewritten in something else (probably golang since it is universal on my team).
Show HN: PublicRoadmap – turn your tweets into a public roadmap
by ivanramos | 2025-11-19 20:44:21+00:00
Indie founders tweet a lot of updates, bug fixes, ideas, and small wins.

But none of that ever makes it into a roadmap or changelog.

I built a small tool that uses those tweets as the source of truth and turns them into a public roadmap you can share.

Nothing fancy.

Just practical.

1. Connect your account 2. Drag tweets into Planning / Building / Done 3. Share your roadmap URL

Link: https://publicroadmap.to/

Would love your thoughts.
by a4isms | 2025-11-19 20:44:21+00:00
To continue a conversation from another thread on another post, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and out-of-band context required are all costs that just happen to act as moats for entrenched incumbents. And no surprise, such incumbents often have so much influence over politics that they literally write the laws that regulate them.

The folksy aphorism goes, The more wild cards and crazy rules, the greater the expert's advantage.
by godelski | 2025-11-19 20:44:34+00:00
Fair, but I think you missed the forest for the trees. You're right that I could be more clear but you also seem to understand that in context I'm discussing clients.

Nothing I've discussed has to do with protocol and everything has to do with clients, which is also in the context of what Thunderbird is. So I'm not sure why you're bringing up protocols as no one was discussing it until you brought it up.
by corry | 2025-11-19 20:45:24+00:00
"The best case scenario is that AI is just not as valuable as those who invest in it, make it, and sell it believe."

This is the crux of the OP's argument, adding in that (in the meantime) the incumbents and/or bad actors will use it as a path to intensify their political and economic power.

But to me the article fails to:

(1) actually make the case that AI's not going to be 'valuable enough' which is a sweeping and bold claim (especially in light of its speed), and;

(2) quantify AI's true value versus the crazy overhyped valuation, which is admittedly hard to do - but matters if we're talking 10% of 100x overvalued.

If all of my direct evidence (from my own work and life) is that AI is absolutely transformative and multiplies my output substantially, AND I see that that trend seems to be continuing - then it's going to be a hard argument for me to agree with #1 just because image generation isn't great (and OP really cares about that).

Higher Ed is in crisis; VC has bet their entire asset class on AI; non-trivial amounts of code are being written by AI at every startup; tech co's are paying crazy amounts for top AI talents... in other words, just because it can't one-shot some complex visual design workflow does not mean (a) it's limited in its potential, or (b) that we fully understand how valuable it will become given the rate of change.

As for #2 - well, that's the whole rub isn't it? Knowing how much something is overvalued or undervalued is the whole game. If you believe it's waaaay overvalued with only a limited time before the music stop, then go make your fortune! "The Big Short 2: The AI Boogaloo".
by bigfishrunning | 2025-11-19 20:45:52+00:00
Timestamps have the property of being easily comparable; you can always tell if one file is older then the other. If you were to use hashes for the same purpose, you'd have to keep a database of expected hashes, and comparing them would be a less trivial task, etc. It's doable, but it would be a very differently designed (and much more computationally expensive) program then make.
by hobofan | 2025-11-19 20:46:12+00:00
> A few projects have a clear set of members.

Exactly.

I'm not too versed in political theory, but one thing from my perception that provides coherence/continuity in nations is the immobility of participants (for better or worse of the individual). E.g. if you have 70/30 election outcome you still have to factor in the needs of the 30% as they may provide important economic functions and can't just leave on election loss.

In contrast, in an open source project, even if you can clearly delineate membership and based on that voting rights for a democratic process there is very little preventing the "losers" from forking (it almost entirely comes down to brand). The outcome of that would just be an empty brand shell with a good chunk of their contribution activity gone.
by ovo101 | 2025-11-19 20:46:36+00:00
Thanks for pointing to Gibson’s DNS Benchmark — it’s definitely a classic and set the stage for this kind of testing. This project takes a different angle: it’s CLI‑first, scriptable, and designed for both quick “top” checks and deeper “benchmark” runs, plus a monitoring mode for ongoing resolver health. Glad you’re giving it a try, feedback is welcome.
by kevin42 | 2025-11-19 20:46:38+00:00
That's a pretty condescending take.

To some extent I agree that the upgrade path is lacking. I recently helped a friend move out of the ino file model into building regular c++ applications because his design was getting pretty complicated. Once he realized that he knew more of c++ than he thought he did, it was a game changer for him.

At the same time, people have done some pretty amazing stuff using the Arduino platform without knowing how to use the things you mention. What you call eternal beginners have accomplished a lot. James Bruton does some pretty impressive robotics work using Arduino.
by windowshopping | 2025-11-19 20:47:25+00:00
I'll give you my two cents - I took a job in Perl in 2017 and set about learning it and found its community to be the most snobbish and unfriendly of any programming subcommunity I had ever encountered.

The language had many strange quirks and every question I posted about its particularities was greeted with responses along the lines of "Are you even trying? How do you not get it? Did you even read the docs?"

Well, yes, I did, and I still didn't understand, because I found them unclear.

I left the job and dropped the language and moved on to greener pastures without much regret. And it seemed like many, many people I spoke to had similar experiences with it.
by vidarh | 2025-11-19 20:47:41+00:00
> This argument doesn't carry because it is beside the point. Human vs. LLM utility parity isn't a sensible stop-goal for improvement. New technology isn't adopted for its legacy parity. Nor are there any specific technical barriers around human parity.

This is just utter nonsense. New technology is sometimes adopted because it is better, but just as often adopted even when the quality is strictly worse if it is cheaper.

But apart from that you appear to arguing against a point I never made, so it's not clear to me what the point of your response is.

> Fewer mistakes than humans, by definition, delivers unique value.

Yes, but that is entirely irrelevant to the argument I made.

> Given that demand, the value of avoiding any mistake, and the many people working on it, error rates will keep falling indefinitely.

And this is also entirely irrelevant to the point I made, and not something I've ever argued against.
by maxlybbert | 2025-11-19 20:48:32+00:00
I remember being very enthusiastic about helping people on, say, Stack Overflow. It didn’t take much extra effort to be nice and made me happy.

But I also burned out relatively quickly. I’d happily answer new questions nicely, but the third or fourth time I saw the same question I spent much less effort to give a welcoming answer than I had the first time I saw it.

Of course, getting the same question repeatedly may suggest something should be redesigned.

I don’t know any good way to keep helpful volunteers helpful for a long time. The best idea I have is constantly recruiting new experts to continually replace the ones that burn out and chase off newbies.
by codexb | 2025-11-19 20:48:34+00:00
Look at any hobby and there are lots of beginners and casuals and far fewer people who are very skilled at it. The Maker hobby is no different. It's certainly not a problem of the microcontrollers available. Arduino is the simplest, but there are plenty of others.

The "blinky LED" roadblock is really just a result of the fact that more complex "maker" projects require some amount of electrical or engineering or fabrication knowledge and skill, which takes some trial and error and practice -- the same thing that limits progress in lots of other hobbies.

The real "Maker" movement is the demand that drives so many consumer level fabrication tools and components that were only available as expensive industrial and commercial orders in the past -- 3d printers, laser cutters, microcontrollers, IC sensors, brushless motors -- there are so many options now that just weren't available at all 20 years ago.
by notahacker | 2025-11-19 20:48:37+00:00
No, the definition of corruption is offering illicit personal incentives

Pointing out that Tesla might be prepared to do x, y and z in the state in only the regulatory framework concerning p and q is compatible with their plans is plain old lobbying. Whether this is more good because it means lots of jobs for Texas or bad because the existing regulatory framework does an excellent job of protecting roads/labour/investors is exactly the sort of decision we give to elected representatives, for better and for worse. If the regulatory framework gets changed and then Tesla sets up a new plant, we probably see the governor issue press releases about it. Same goes for if local government chooses to subside the plant construction to "bring jobs to the state". That doesn't mean all the questions any politician or government agency actually trying to do the right thing should ask to establish the credibility of the proposal should be asking aren't legitimately trade secrets.
by pembrook | 2025-11-19 20:48:48+00:00
Unfortunately politics has become the religion of modernity.

Nuance and sober analysis like you've suggested do not mix well with religious dogma. It's much easier for people to react emotionally to symbols.

For many here, 'GDPR' is a variable that equals 'privacy' in their brain computer. So any criticism of it or its implementation realities, no matter how well argued, will not be met with reasoned response, but instead religious zeal.
by shagie | 2025-11-19 20:48:52+00:00
The question is "what do you want to use it for?"

There are a few places where you might dig and find a perl script under the covers. Some that aren't replaceable with bash (and sed and awk).

I suspect that my "diff these two java deployments and create a file by file update script to run on the remote machine" in perl is still running for doing incremental deployments... and if someone uncovers it its still something reasonable to understand.

However, if I was tasked with that today... dunno. I'm not sure I'd reach for the same tools as I did then.

> In devops is turtle all way down but at bottom is perl script.

https://x.com/DEVOPS_BORAT/status/248770195580125185 (2013)

> If you can not able use Perl for answer, you are ask wrong question.

https://x.com/DEVOPS_BORAT/status/280900066682757120 (2012)

... and while I can't find the original - this might be your answer.

> We have 3 strike rule for devops: 1 strike we are take away Perl. 2 strike we are take away bash. 3 strike we are give PowerShell.

https://gist.github.com/textarcana/676ef78b2912d42dbf355a2f7...
by duxup | 2025-11-19 20:48:59+00:00
I feel like American unions really don't help themselves much.

The way American unions operate they seem fit for less skilled jobs or very tracked jobs where there's a cookie cutter path for advancement and so on.

But beyond that American unions seem inflexible / a bad fit for quickly changing careers / dynamic jobs, and with my own experience, their own sort of bureaucratic hell.
by olyjohn | 2025-11-19 20:49:00+00:00
Regardless of the capacity, the Ridgeline is not a small truck. There are no small trucks anymore. The Ranger and Colorado are not small trucks, they are mid size. Compare them to the pre-2019 Ranger, and the pre-2011 Colorados and S10s.

Sure, the Maverick is kinda small. But and does fine for most people, but it's not really built like a truck. For some reason, I can't handle this thing, because it's replaced real small trucks. It's just an Escape under the covers, and nobody considers the Escape to be a workhorse. Yet, I can give the Baja a pass, because it was honest in the fact that it's a car with a bit of a utility bed.
by sunaookami | 2025-11-19 20:49:02+00:00
Agreed 100%, that's why I would recommend Codex for e.g. logfile analysis. Had some annoying php warnings in the logs from a WordPress plugin because I've used another plugin in the past (like... over 10 years ago) that wrote invalid metadata for every media file into the database and it didn't annoy me THAT much that I wanted to invest much time into it. So I gave codex the logfile and my WordPress dir and access to the WP-CLI command and it correctly identified the issue and wrote scripts to delete the old metadata (I did check it & make backups of course). Codex took a LOT of time though, it's veeeeeeery slow as you said. But I could do other things in the meantime.
by varispeed | 2025-11-19 20:49:40+00:00
GDPR was never about privacy, but to legitimise data trade. It was two step process - first train people to Agree to anything by introducing "harmless" Cookie Law, then once people just click Agree to anything, create legal basis for data trade, where it is no longer a grey area as most users give consent. With Chat Controls coming back, never assume EU is doing anything for the benefit of general public. What is particularly bad, is that they are not honest about it, just keep gaslighting.
by exceptione | 2025-11-19 20:50:01+00:00
Valid question. What the OP talks about though is that these things were not for sale normally. My takeaway from his essay is that a few oligarchs get a pass to take over all energy, by means of a manufactured crisis.

When a private company can construct what is essentially a new energy city with no people and no elected representation, and do this dozens of times a year across a nation to the point that half a century of national energy policy suddenly gets turned on its head and nuclear reactors are back in style, you have a sudden imbalance of power that looks like a cancer spreading within a national body.

He could have explained that better. Try to not look at the media drama the political actors give you each day, but look at the agenda the real powers laid bare

- Trump is threatening an oil rich neighbor with war. A complete expensive as hell army blowing up 'drug boats' (claim) to make help the press sell it as a war on drugs. Yeah right.

- Green energy projects, even running ones, get cancelled. Energy from oil and nuclear are both capital intensive and at the same time completely out-shined by solar and battery tech. So the energy card is a strong one to direct policy towards your interests.

If you can turn the USA into a resource economy like Russia, than you can rule like a Russian oligarch. That is also why the admin sees no problem in destroying academia or other industries via tariffs; controlling resources is easier and more predictable than having to rely on an educated populace that might start to doubt the promise of the American Dream.
by xfeeefeee | 2025-11-19 20:50:16+00:00
I can't wait until it is easy to rotoscope / greenscreen / mask this stuff out accessibly for videos. I had tried Runway ML but it was... lacking, and the webui for fixing parts of it had similar issues.

I'm curious how this works for hair and transparent/translucent things. Probably not the best, but does not seem to be mentioned anywhere? Presumably it's just a straight line or vector rather than alpha etc?
by aerhardt | 2025-11-19 20:50:21+00:00
The idea of giving it a task that may take six hours and reviewing it also gives me shivers.

I'm a very happy Codex customer, but everything turns to disgusting slop if I don't provide:

(1) Up-to-date AGENTS.md and an excellent prompt

(2) A full file-level API with function signatures, return types and function-level guidance if it's a complex one

(3) Multiple rounds of feedback until the result is finely sculpted

Overall it's very small units of work - one file or two, tops.

I've been letting the above standards go for the last couple of weeks due to crunch and looking at some of the hotspots of slop now lying around has me going all Homelander-face [1] at the sight of them.

Those hotspots are a few hundred lines in the worst cases; I'm definitely not ready to deal with the fallout of any unit of work that takes even more than 20min.

[1] https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/050/702/ab7...
by tyre | 2025-11-19 20:51:00+00:00
> We work to train Claude to be politically even-handed in its responses. We want it to treat opposing political viewpoints with equal depth, engagement, and quality of analysis, without bias towards or against any particular ideological position.

I mean this is kind of ridiculous as a goal. I know they have to protect against politics in the US, but ethically all positions are not equally valid.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-19 20:51:01+00:00
> There is a vast chasm between what we, the users, and them, the investors, are “sold” in AI. We are told that AI will do our tasks faster and better than we can — that there is no future of work without AI. And that is a huge sell, one I’ve spent the majority of this post deconstructing from my, albeit limited, perspective. But they — the people who commit billions toward AI — are sold something entirely different. They are sold AGI, the idea of a transformative artificial intelligence, an idea so big that it can accommodate any hope or fear a billionaire might have.

> Again, I think that AI is probably just a normal technology, riding a normal hype wave. And here’s where I nurse a particular conspiracy theory: I think the makers of AI know that.

I think those committing billions towards AI know it too. It's not a conspiracy theory. All the talk about AGI is marketing fluff that makes for good quotes. All the investment in data centers and GPU's is for regular AI. It doesn't need AGI to justify it.

I don't know if there's a bubble. Nobody knows. But what if it turns out that normal AI (not AGI) will ultimately provide so much value over the next couple decades that all the data centers being built will be used to max capacity and we need to build even more? A lot of people think the current level of investment is entirely economically rational, without any requirement for AGI at all. Maybe it's overshooting, maybe it's undershooting, but that's just regular resource usage modeling. It's not dependent on "coding consciousness" as the author describes.
by nyrikki | 2025-11-19 20:51:22+00:00
Correct sorry I don't use the web-ui's and was confusing oVirt, I forgot that you are using perl modules to call qemu/lxc.

I would strongly suggest more work on your NUMA/cpuset limitations. I know people have been working on it slowly but with the rise of E and P cores, you can't stick to pinning for many use cases and while I get hyperconvergence has it's costs, and platforms have to choose simple, the kernels cpuset proc system works pretty well there and dramatically reduces latency, especially for lakehouse style DP.

I do have customers who would be better served by a proxmox type solution, but need to isolate critical loads and/or avoid the problems with asymmetric cores and non-locality in the OLAP space.

IIRC lots of things that have worked for years in qemu-kvm are ignored when added to <VMID>.conf etc...
by Telaneo | 2025-11-19 20:51:26+00:00
Of all the things to yield on, the GDPR really isn't it. The cookie banner problem is one caused by site owners consistently preferring using dark patterns over just not doing the stuff that makes you need a banner. If anything, the EU should have put the hammer down and enforced its regulations on those cookie banners consistently having 'accept all' being the default option and the alternative be more difficult to access.

The central browser controls they mention will hopefully be a more sucessful version of the 'do-not-track' header. An equivalent of that will be fine (although an opt-in version would be better), but it still needs to have legal enforcement behind it to work, which the old one didn't, and the cookie banners aren't feeling.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-11-19 20:51:26+00:00
Short form is no good to consume anyway.

The moment the content gets interesting - the athlete is about to cross the finish line, or the voiceover is about to explain HOW they got the turtle out from the barbed wire - the video restarts!

Then there is a mix of annoyance and curiosity - at the content not going deep enough - and that jolts me out of the addiction loop.
by Diggsey | 2025-11-19 20:51:41+00:00
There were two things I think went extremely poorly here:

1) Lack of validation of the configuration file.

Rolling out a config file across the global network every 5 minutes is extremely high risk. Even without hindsight, surely one would see then need for very careful validation of this file before taking on that risk?

There were several things "obviously" wrong with the file that validation should have caught:

- It was much bigger than expected.

- It had duplicate entries.

- Most importantly, when loaded into the FL2 proxy, the proxy would panic on every request. At the very least, part of the validation should involve loading the file into the proxy and serving a request?

2) Very long time to identify and then fix such a critical issue.

I can't understand the complete lack of monitoring or reporting? A panic in Rust code, especially from an unwrap, is the application screaming that there's a logic error! I don't understand how that can be conflated with a DDoS attack. How are your logs not filled with backtraces pointing to the exact "unwrap" in question?

Then, once identified, why was it so hard to revert to a known good version of the configuration file? How did noone foresee the need to roll back this file when designing a feature that deploys a new one globally every 5 minutes?
by antonvs | 2025-11-19 20:51:57+00:00
> There are many languages still in use today that have all kinds of warts and ugliness, but they remain in use

What's an example of a language that's as bad as Perl, that's used as widely as Perl was, that's still in use today?

Perl died because everyone who mattered knew it was a bad language, knew it had to undergo drastic changes, but that essentially meant implementing a new language.

Perl 6 was the symptom, not the cause.

---

Note: by "bad language", I mean bad for anything much beyond the kind of thing you might use awk for. It was bad not because of subjective aesthetic issues, but because it was difficult to maintain non-trivial code bases. Its "write only" reputation was well-deserved - the original author of a non-trivial Perl program might be able to maintain it, but once a team is involved, forget it.