MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by o11c | 2025-11-26 17:07:29+00:00
Well, it's been a nice run. I've loved KDE since 2008 because it provided a lot of useful features (though its advantage over GNOME 2 was minimal at the time; it only became the obvious choice with the self-inflicted fall of GNOME 3).

But if KDE is no longer willing to provide the single most important feature of all - actually working in the first place, rather than just denying that bugs exist - I guess I'll have to hunt for a new DE.

It looks like the only serious possibilities are:

Cinnamon - my gut says this might have the most users? Often cited as the reason to use Linux Mint by people who don't know the difference between a distro and a desktop environment. LXQt - apparently has stabilized enough to obsolete LXDE (hopefully it isn't being developed by headless chickens like GNOME and now KDE) MATE - why must there be so many GNOME forks? (I know why) ... does this one even have anything to distinguish it? Xfce - the longest stable history as its own thing

(all other DEs are known to lack some combination of widespread support and essential features; there are a handful for which it is possible that support will arrive but it is not the case yet, and they will still lose on the "weight of history" stability criterion)
by catlikesshrimp | 2025-11-26 17:07:33+00:00
Virus are simpler and have challenged the definition of life for a long time already. This article excludes virus from life because they lack ribosomes.

Last time I checked, they are considered "not alive" when outside of a host, and "alive" when inside a host.

About size: "Genome size varies greatly between species. The smallest—the ssDNA circoviruses, family Circoviridae—code for only two proteins and have a genome size of only two kilobases;[61] the largest—the pandoraviruses—have genome sizes of around two megabases which code for about 2500 proteins"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus
by exasperaited | 2025-11-26 17:07:42+00:00
It is very obviously there. People are not simply accepting the AI-bro justification that one day they won't notice the difference so it's all fine.

Ordinary people are understandably either exhausted by or angry at AI content, because it is relentless and misleading, and because they know instinctively that the people who want this to succeed also want to destroy employment and concentrate profits in the hands of a few Silicon Valley sociopaths.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-11-26 17:07:47+00:00
> Ever since I got my hands on my first computer as a kid, I've been outsourcing parts of my brain to computing so that I can focus on more interesting things. I no longer have to remember phone numbers, I no longer have to carry a paper notepad, my bookshelf full of reference books that constantly needed to be refreshed became a Google search away instead. Intellisense/code completion meant I didn't have to waste time memorizing every specific syntax and keyword. Hell, IDEs have been generating code for a long time. I was using Visual Studio to automatically generate model classes from my database schema for as long as I can remember, and even generating CRUD pages.

I absolutely agree with you, but I do think there's a difference in kind between a deterministic automation you can learn to use and get better at, and a semi-random coding agent.

The thing I'm really struggling with is that unlike e.g. code completion, there doesn't seem to be a clear class of tasks that LLMs are good at vs bad at. So until the LLMs can do everything, how do I keep myself in the loop enough that I'll have the requisite knowledge to step in when the LLM fails?

You mention how technology means we no longer have to remember phone numbers. But what if all digital contact lists had a very low chance of randomly deleting individual contacts over time? Do you keep memorizing phone numbers? I'm not sure!
by naasking | 2025-11-26 17:07:49+00:00
Math is a tool for structured reasoning. We often want to reason about things that physically exist. Why should we use a tool that assumes the existence of something that literally cannot physically exist? That introduces the danger that of admitting all sorts of unphysical possibilities into our theories.

I think Baez's paper, Struggles with the Continuum, shows a lot of past difficulties we've had that resulted from this:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.01421
by cmckn | 2025-11-26 17:08:13+00:00
I agree it should not have happened, but I don’t agree that the database schema is the core problem. The “logical single point of failure” here was created by the rapid, global deployment process. If you don’t want to take down all of prod, you can’t update all of prod at the same time. Gradual deployments are a more reliable defense against bugs than careful programming.
by yosefk | 2025-11-26 17:08:27+00:00
"AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence."

I still can barely believe a human being could write this, though we have all read this sort of sentence countless times. Which "structure of power and violence" replicated itself into the brains of people, making them think like this? Everything "exists to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence" with these people, and they will not rest until there's anything left to attack and destroy
by mbreese | 2025-11-26 17:08:48+00:00
Don’t forget - at the time, even if you were pulling a static file, you were pulling it from disk. And disk was much slower… IDE was still common. If you had a good server, it could have been SCSI, but a white label Linux box could be quite slow. So, unless you had a good caching setup, you could still have issues sending even static data.

Also, when slashdotting was common, networks weren’t always the most robust. It wasn’t uncommon in the late 90’s for companies to have a single a T1 line for access to the internet. So, unless you had a good, well peered network provider, that was another potential bottleneck.

We worked with what we had. Thankfully, everything is more robust now.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-11-26 17:09:01+00:00
Well, yes, the answer to basically any "can I do foo in Wayland" is "as long as you're on compositor bar or baz" because it was built in a way that guarantees fragmentation. There isn't a single way to take a screenshot, of course remote desktop is fragmented. But wayvnc is a good answer to the question, even including that caveat.
by wcarss | 2025-11-26 17:09:02+00:00
Neat! Yeah, that's a pretty complex context and I completely see what you mean about the new hardware being part of the rollout and necessarily meaning that you can't just run both systems. My comment is more of a strategy for just a backend or online processing system change than a physical brick and mortar swap out.

In my note about misreading the suggestion, I was thinking generally. I do believe that there is no reason from a PCI perspective why a given production system cannot process a transaction live and also in a dry mode on a new code path that's being verified, but if the difference isn't just code paths on a device, and instead involves hardware and process changes, your point about needing to deploy a dev box and that being a PCI issue totally makes sense, plus the bit about it being a bad test anyway because of the differences in actions taken or outputs.

The example you gave originally, of shipping to the lower stake exceptional stores first and then working out issues with them before you tried to scale out to everywhere, sounded to me like a very solid approach to mitigating risk while shipping early.
by menaerus | 2025-11-26 17:09:22+00:00
Right right, I get it. Pharma, structural engineering, discrete manufacturing, ..., all of the industries which are "too hard" to be conquered by some stupid statistical parrot. You're being delusional my friend but I am not going to be the one trying to persuade you to believe otherwise. I am here for sharing experiences and interesting discussions from which I can learn and I am not here for combating triggered and defensive strangers on the internet. And FWIW both of your conclusion and premise, and interpretation of my comment is wrong.
by dgrin91 | 2025-11-26 17:09:26+00:00
Here is a funny thought experiment - the distance from Voyager to Earth varies by approximately 16 light minutes throughout the year. Why? Because it takes ~8 minutes for light to go from the Sun to the Earth, so presuming the Voyager is roughly planar with the Sun/Earth (I'm just assuming yes), that gives a variance of ~16 minutes depending on where the earth is on its orbit.

Now I'm presuming they aren't using the actual Earth position, but rather an average Earth position (which is basically just the Sun's position). Since Voyager is ~30 light minutes away from being 1 light-day away, that means this ~16 minute change can affect our 1 light-day mark by up to ~6 months!
by dghlsakjg | 2025-11-26 17:10:25+00:00
Gotcha.

Just wanted to make you aware that you are using the terms and framing preferred by anti-indian immigration people in Canada that push a theory very similar to "great replacement" theory in the US. Essentially the claim is that Canadian culture is fundamentally changing from "high-trust" to "low-trust" because we have too many immigrants from "low-trust" societies. Oddly enough, the societies they think are low trust with too much immigration are pretty much always non-white.

I was thrown off by the ambiguity and this being a story about Canada.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-26 17:10:41+00:00
> If we replace this "busy work" with AI, we are becoming collectively more stupid.

I've seen this same thing said about Google. "If you outsource your memory to Google searching instead, you won't be able to do anything without and you'll become dumber."

Maybe that did happen, but it didn't seem to result in any meaningful change on the whole. Instead, I got to waste less time memorizing things, or spending time leafing through thousand page reference manuals, to find something.

We've been outsourcing parts of our brains to computers for decades now. That's what got me interested and curious about computers when I got my first machine as a kid (this was back in the late 90s/early 00s). "How can I automate as much of the boring stuff as possible to free myself up for more interesting things."

LLMs are the next evolution of that to an extent, but I also think they do come with some harms and that we haven't really figured out best practices yet. But, I can't help but be excited at the prospect of being able to outsource even more to a computer.
by MrDarcy | 2025-11-26 17:10:47+00:00
I honestly don’t understand why you’re presuming to tell me what I think.

I consider myself a craftsman. I craft tools. I also am a manager. I also am a consultant. I am both a subcontractor and I subcontract out.

Above all else I’m a hacker.

I also use LLM’s daily and rather enjoy incorporating this new technology into what I consider my craft.

Please stop arrogantly presuming you know what is best for me to think and feel about all of this.
by orwin | 2025-11-26 17:10:49+00:00
Each time an article on glp-1 is out, I will comment:

Yes, you can loose weight without it, I did, I'm even in the healthy range now.

No, you don't have to, if you need medicine help, take it.

When I lost weight, I had my first real job that I liked so much, it didn't felt like one, 11 weeks of vacation per year, a nice enough apartment I couldn't be evicted of, great emotional support and advices and support from a doctor.

The only thing draining my willpower every day was the calorie restriction, and nothing else to worry about.

If you're in a similar spot I was, maybe trying a diet without glp-1 is better since we don't have any long term study on it yet, but if you're not: obesity will destroy your body more than any long term side effects can. Please take them if you can afford it.

The only thing I earned beside uncomfort and pain when I lost weight without drugs are internet points on hacker news, and the ability to say 'i did it' (also glp-1 didn't exist, so less long term health issues from obesity). Honestly if I had to redo it, I would take the drug despite a similar situation. Weight loss is hard, and not being able to do it without help is not an indictment on you or your character, but on your situation.
by JustExAWS | 2025-11-26 17:11:03+00:00
You really think that people at BigTech are doing it for the “enjoyment” and not for the $250K+ they are making 3 years out of college? From my n=1 experience, they are doing it for the pay + RSUs.

If you see what it takes to get ahead in large corporations, it’s not about those who are “passionate”, it’s about people who know how to play the game.

If you look at the dumb AI companies that YC is funding, those “entrepreneurs” aren’t doing 996 because they enjoy it. They are looking for the big exit.
by glenstein | 2025-11-26 17:11:10+00:00
You're exactly right and thank you for carefully reading! I very explicitly said that there was a multi year round trip for information even in the best case (e.g. Alpha Centauri), to get out ahead of the well-actually's.

As you noted, some of the gains could be signal power, redundancy, the ability to maintain a quality signal over arbitrary distance; but most importantly, seeing the universe from the perspective of the lead probe in the relay, some arbitrary distance away.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-11-26 17:11:21+00:00
I just realized that other industries are way larger than AI. Assuming they capture the entire advertising market, only $390 Billion was spent in the US last year. Compare that to health care, where 4.3 Trillion was spent in the US last year, or commercial banking's revenue of 1.5 Trillion, commercial real estate's 1.5 Trillion, gasoline stations' 1.10 Trillion, etc. What's amazing is, despite the fact that AI isn't making much money, is taking on considerable debt, and isn't even assured to be all that useful, one third of the stock market is now just AI crap. The economy is going to collapse because of a small, brand-new industry. This... shouldn't be possible.
by gosub100 | 2025-11-26 17:11:24+00:00
Google are experimenting with different filters that intentionally blur the lines between real and fake video in their shorts. A creator I follow who makes human-in-shot videos suddenly looked fake, like some animation filter was applied. I commented on how bad it looked, and someone said YT are doing it to people's videos as some sort of "trial". The effects were to make the human look more AI generated. The only use for this I can surmise is to make AI content even harder to detect.
by vessenes | 2025-11-26 17:11:32+00:00
"If they had a perfectly normalized database, no NULLing and formally verified code, this bug would not have happened."

That may be. What's not specified there is the immense, immense cost of driving a dev org on those terms. It limits, radically, the percent of engineers you can hire (to those who understand this and are willing to work this way), and it slows deployment radically.

Cloudflare may well need to transition to this sort of engineering culture, but there is no doubt that they would not be in the position they are in if they started with this culture -- they would have been too slow to capture the market.

I think critiques that have actionable plans for real dev teams are likely to be more useful than what, to me, reads as a sort of complaint from an ivory tower. Culture matters, shipping speed matters, quality matters, team DNA matters. That's what makes this stuff hard (and interesting!)
by rzerowan | 2025-11-26 17:11:36+00:00
The main thread through the case laid out has a fundamental flaw "assumes a spherical cow in a vaccuum" . There are cheaper/faster more open competitors out there doing as much as OAI and getting integrated in real product pipelines across the planet.

Its not a Blueray vs HD-DVD situation (winner takes all and competition dies on the vine) or early Google vs Yahoo Search i would posit its more like bitkeeper vs git - and will probably eveolve into a git/hg/bazaar type situation. Costs will only keep dropping and the easiest/cost effective options will get faster uptake in the backend dev world where it matters.If im integrating a LLM and the whole field can kinda do the equivalent capex/opex will push the decision.
by flatline | 2025-11-26 17:11:40+00:00
Almost every bit of work I've hired people to do has been through an intermediary of some sort. Usually one with "contractor" or "engineer" as a title. They are the ones who can organize others, have connections, understand talent, plan and keep schedules, recognize quality, and can identify and troubleshoot problems. They may also be craftsmen, or have once been, but the work is not necessarily their craft. If you want anything project-scoped, you have a team, there is someone in a leadership role (even if informally), someone handling the money, etc. Craftsmanship may or may not happen within that framework, they are somewhat orthogonal concerns, and I don't see any reason to disrespect the people that make room for it to happen.

Of course you can also get useless intermediaries, which may be more akin to vibe coding. Not entirely without merit, but the human in the loop is providing questionable value. I think this is the exception rather than the norm.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-26 17:11:59+00:00
Creative people are on the whole a lot better at keeping AI slop out of art and craft fairs than they have been with the lazier output of 3D printers, CNC, laser engravers and off-the-shelf resin mould art.

It is as if the relatively unspoken feelings about the downsides of technologies as a gateway to art have been rapidly refined to deal with AI (and of course, even the CNC and laser engraver people have common cause).

But I think it is fair to say that if they feel success, there will be a growing pushback against the use of 3D printers, eufyMake resin printing and CNC in a niche where hand tools used to be the norm.

And speaking even as someone who has niche product ideas that will be entirely 3D printed/CNC cut/engraved, I don't really disagree with it. I am mostly not that kind of creative person (putting aside experimental photography techniques) and I see no reason why they shouldn't push back.

The reality is that "craft" fairs are an odd mix of people who spent a lot of time refining their art and selling things that are the work of hours of expressive creativity and effort, and table upon table of glittery resin mould art and vinyl cut stencil output stuck on off-the-shelf products. I think AI might help people refine their feelings about this stuff they once felt bad/incorrect/unkind about excluding.

It's a bit like the way the art photography market is rediscovering things like carbon printing, photosensitive etching and experimental cyanotype, and getting a lot more choosy about inkjet-printed DSLR output.
by jimbohn | 2025-11-26 17:12:11+00:00
I did. He has a 6-month-old account with apparently no personal information attached. And, if there is personal identifying info in some comment, it will conveniently allow him to "not get involved" for his own security. But he felt the need to tell us how we should be welcoming of russians. Worked well in the past centuries; I am sure it will work well in the future.
by NewsaHackO | 2025-11-26 17:12:13+00:00
It is to the point of yellow journalism. They know that the "OpenAI is going to go belly up in a week!" take is going to be popular with AI skeptics, which includes a large number of HN viewers. This thread shot up to the top of the front page almost immediately. All of that adds to the chances of roping in more subscribers.
by barbazoo | 2025-11-26 17:12:17+00:00
> They are assuming that people _want_ automated content enough to pay for it.

I’m assuming gen ai will supplement so instead of ten artists producing content you’ll have three orchestrating and correcting but the output will be indistinguishable from what it was before. Just now the margin is much higher.

I never think of direct to consumer sales in this context.
by roeles | 2025-11-26 17:12:22+00:00
> All of the things you mentioned are designed and tested incrementally.

In a different way that what is proposed in this thread. We don't build a small bridge and grow it. We build small bridges, develop a theory for building bridges and use that to design the big bridge.

I don't know of any theory of computing that would help us design a "big" program at once.
by MetaWhirledPeas | 2025-11-26 17:12:27+00:00
Well there's more than just one hacker circle. That was never really the case and it's less and less the case as the earth's technologically-inclined population increases.

Culture is emergent. The more you try to define it, the less it becomes culture and the more it becomes a cult. Instead of focusing on culture I prefer to focus on values. I value craftsmanship, so I'm inclined to appreciate normal coding more than AI-assisted coding, for sure. But there's also a craftsmanship to gluing a bunch of AI technologies together and observing some fantastic output. To willfully ignore that is silly.

The OP's rant comes across as a wistful pining for the days of yore, pinning its demise on capitalists and fascists, as if they had this AI thing planned all along. Focusing on boogeymen isn't going to solve anything. You also can't reverse time by demanding compliance with your values or forming a union. AI is here to stay and we're going to have to figure out how to live with it, like it or not.
by dpark | 2025-11-26 17:12:37+00:00
A glass of water in a cold environment radiates away heat until it freezes, decreasing its local entropy and increasing global entropy.

> If you can’t understand the distinction I’m making then you do not have the imagination and creativity to create new understanding.

Perhaps you could explain your distinction instead of insulting people. It’s possible you have some interesting and insightful distinction but as of now you’ve not explained it nor given any examples of this “more abundant” life.
by hearsathought | 2025-11-26 17:12:43+00:00
"We"? Okay buddy.

> USA is weak in 2020s but strong in the 2030s.

The US is the largest economy with an unparalleled military at the moment. What are you talking about?

> The US Navy is getting huge upgrades and a few years of delay makes an incredible difference.

For what? The US Navy will play no role in a war between china and taiwan.

No offense, but who gives a shit about taiwan? Not americans. Only chinese people care about taiwan.
by chimeracoder | 2025-11-26 17:12:46+00:00
> If someone shows up with a testosterone level of 700 you can (and should) explain that low testosterone is not the explanation for whatever they’re suffering from.

I'm not going to say TRT clinics are the best actors here, but to an actual endocrinologist, diagnosing hormone issues isn't so simple as looking at single point-in-time measurement of total testosterone.

Testosterone levels naturally vary even for a given individual - two readings at the same time of day on different days even a short period apart can be dramatically different - and that's not even taking into consideration the fact that total testosterone levels aren't the sole (or even primary) mechanism for diagnosing androgenic endocrine issues.