MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 7thaccount | 2025-11-07 14:58:44+00:00
Thanks for bringing up the PE distinction. This kind of argument comes up here ad nauseum. People have different views and we argue semantics.

There is engineering as a discipline (e.g., mechanical, electrical, industrial, civil, aerospace...etc.) and engineering in a more colloquial sense like "I did some hillbilly engineering and rigged up a pea sheller". Both involve solving problems.

The former typically involves the person going through a rigorous 4-5 year program where they take a bunch of advanced math and physics classes and a ton of other classes (including coding and robotics as well as more specific classes such as power electronics) that teach logical thinking and problem solving. I'm always amazed that I can more or less talk to any engineer across the country (different state, different university, different engineering discipline) and still recognize their training and that hyper analytical mindset and feel the kinship. That of course doesn't mean that there aren't similar analytical people that went in other directions, but the training is a real thing.

A professional engineer passed their fundamentals of engineering exam, got their degree, and then took their professional engineering exam. You used to have to get 4 years of work experience before applying, but I think they got rid of that. It's an awful 8-hour exam with a pretty low pass rate. Honestly though, the PE usually just means the engineer was willing to spend 3-6 months prepping for the exam and has a need for the license to stamp papers. A lot of engineers never get it if they don't need it. I believe you need it in some cases for court cases.

As far as software engineering goes. It seems to be a discipline that matches the second colloquial definition more in a lot of cases. In some cases they have actual software engineering degrees where the student takes all the standard intro engineering courses (calculus, linear algebra, statistics, differential equations, statics, dynamics, circuits, thermodynamics) before doing the core classes distinct to that major. In that case, I'd call them an engineer due to the training and think it's an appropriate job title even if they get a job slinging corporate java, which would not typically be viewed as traditional engineering. So they're an engineer...not necessarily doing engineering. Does that really make sense? My own definition breaks down if we apply this to the same engineer becoming a garbage man. They're still an engineer by training, but they're most definitely not doing engineering anymore.

Also, if Pete gets a job slinging code out of highschool...we can say he's doing engineering in the colloquial second sense, but is he an engineer in the first sense? No.

Clear as mud? As an engineer I now must flog myself for my own internal inconsistencies. In all seriousness, language is hard and sometimes imprecise. I didn't realize my rambling got so long and apologize.
by bad_haircut72 | 2025-11-07 14:59:02+00:00
Not really what the article is talking about but once I was playing a shooter called Americas Army and there was a popular map called Bridge Crossing which is a bridge over a huge alpine canyon, I was camped on the edge behind a pylon and needed to cough up a loogie so I just turned my head and spat over the side. Couple of minutes later I realised I had in fact not spat off the bridge, but on my curtains back in real life
by 4ggr0 | 2025-11-07 14:59:15+00:00
one of my favorite games i've ever played is Enderal: Forgotten Stories[0], total conversion mod for Skyrim. liked it way more than Skyrim, includes some new gameplay elements and the story is absolutely phenomenal. while playing it i was constantly in awe of the fact that this was a free conversion made by a low amount of people. played it for about 90 hours over a couple of weeks.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enderal
by jeffwask | 2025-11-07 14:59:16+00:00
Polymarket, Stake... you are crazy to gamble on unregulated gambling sites. Saw a video today of someone hitting $500k on Stake but not getting a payout. Unless their code is entirely open source, how do you know they aren't biasing the odds more than they normally favor the house. These are just mechanisms to separate fools from money.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-07 14:59:30+00:00
I think it's mostly us with lots of external gear (mostly audio related) that things get a bit wonky, and if you're running graphic-heavy applications that you're trying to resume at the same time. For example, Ableton for the longest of times couldn't handle resuming from hibernation for me, seems to work today (Windows 11), but still having the same issue with a running Houdini window, resuming from hibernation does something with the communication with the GPU (my hunch) and the window freezes when resuming.
by glenstein | 2025-11-07 14:59:47+00:00
It's fascinating the degree of defensiveness that shows up in comments on behalf of censorship, especially if it's Chinese. I think the reality is that these models are always going to be critically evaluated in terms of how they tailor AI to respond to topics they deem sensitive.

Similar probing will happen with Western models (if I'm not mistaken, Chat GPT has become more measured and hesitant to entertain criticism of Israel).

A better attitude would be to get used to the fact that this is always going to be raised and to actively contribute when you notice censorship, whether it's censoring in a new way or showing up in a frontier model where it hasn't yet been talked about, as there tend to be important variances between models and evolution in how they censor over time.

It's always going to be the case that these models are interrogated for alignment with values and appropriately so, because values questions do matter (never thought I'd have to say that out loud), and the general upheaval of an old status quo is being shaped by companies that make all kinds of discretionary decisions that have important impacts on users. Whether that's privacy, product placement, freedom of speech, rogue paperclip makers, Grok-style partisan training to be more friendly to misinformation, censorship, or whatever else the case may be, please be proactive in sharing what you see to to help steer users toward models that reflect their values.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-11-07 14:59:50+00:00
> I think we should normalize saying that tech stack choices are subjective and preference-based. We're not robots. The social and aesthetic parts of a stack matter to people

I would just like to distinguish "subjective and preference-based" from "social and aesthetic" and also clarify some notions.

1. The social is objective. We are social animals. It is essential to what it means to be human. We need social relations to grow and develop and to become more human.

2. The aesthetic is objective. We confuse taste with beauty, and this is perhaps the legacy of influence of certain philosophical traditions on our thinking. Beauty has to do with the fullness with which some thing instantiates a form and realizes some end/good. So, when it comes to artifacts like programming languages, a beautiful language will satisfy some human purpose more perfectly than a less beautiful language. Taste is a matter of subjective disposition to beauty. Someone with bad or poor taste might prefer the inferior over the superior, for example, or fail to discern between the two.

We sort of create mystery about preference here, as if they were just arbitrary, immutable, inexplicable brute facts. But preferences can be more good or less good or even bad. Note the relation between preference and taste.

> We're not robots.

3. Typically - and I do not accuse you of this - this is meant to mean that what makes us human compared to robots is that we have emotions. But it isn't that. Many animals have emotions. What makes us distinct as human beings is the intellectual and the rational, which robots (as computational instruments) are not.

4. Post hoc rationalizations may not stand behind the actual motivations, but the content of the rationalization may remain true and valid nonetheless.
by Lord-Jobo | 2025-11-07 15:00:15+00:00
Mechanically it’s probably the same as allergy exposure therapy(https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/04/08/1168714...), which comes in a lot of varieties including oral/digestion.

It’s effective in a clinical setting and honestly too dangerous to recommend in home settings without several layers of precautions.

But, in theory, highly specialized exposures to particular local allergies would be more effective than most of the clinical studies. And that’s what I would expect is driving the folk remedy.

Worth noting, almost all of the treatments like this are VASTLY more effective when done at younger ages. But they are also even more dangerous. So please speak to an allergist first and don’t do stuff you just read online.
by vintermann | 2025-11-07 15:00:19+00:00
That's not the right comparison. The question should rather be, would they care if 10% of their tax revenue came from heroin sales?

And the answer would depend on where the externalities from all that heroin sale happened (e.g. if it was abroad), whether the government would be expected to carry the cost of them (e.g. by having a public healthcare system), and probably also on how actually democratic they are.
by mensetmanusman | 2025-11-07 15:01:14+00:00
Everyone complains about the media, but few offer solutions.

My favorite type of solution is something along the lines of taxing organizations whose viewers are more disconnected from statistics on the ground (by a bipartisan independent board choosing the types of knowledge sets that a well informed population should have). We could also subsidize organizations that are doing well informing people.

This is a way of dealing with the externalities brought about by people having so much misinformation in their day-to-day decision-making.
by glenstein | 2025-11-07 15:01:33+00:00
And who knows for how long? My experience with very early iterations of Deepseek had direct answers to questions about Hong Kong, but later applied some kind of updates that stopped engaging with the topic. What was especially fascinating to me was some kind of hasty retrofitted layer of censorship, where Deepseek would actually show you an answer and then right in front of your eyes would replace it with a different answer saying it couldn't address the topic.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-07 15:01:48+00:00
This isn't a political spectrum problem. It is a people problem. You can live in a successful society with high touch government, or low touch government. They can both work, The problem with the former is that government power attracts people like you who have some end (keeping Zuck down or whatever) you want that people don't agree with (hence why you must co-opt existing institutions rather than build them) and so reasonable safety regulation turns into protectionism and industry handouts, etc, etc.
by michaelscott | 2025-11-07 15:02:18+00:00
I am not young, but I have never seen a major institution (including governments) caring about citizens in aggregate in my lifetime. To me, this is an artifact of the 50s or 60s, some bygone era (which is funny, because the government did not care about citizens in aggregate back then either).

I can only imagine how the younger kids see things. They're bombarded by public knowledge of nasty things institutions did in the bigoted/ignorant past, underhanded things they're definitely doing now, an anger/fear inducing news cycle and endless social media conspiracy theories (some of which end up being true) engineered for clicks. Extreme cynicism is a logical conclusion.
by gruez | 2025-11-07 15:02:50+00:00
>"state run" is also probably incorrect. AFAIK Mamdani will be the mayor of New York City, which is a city, not a state.

"state" in this case refers to "government", not US "states". You see this type of usage elsewhere, for instance "state" schools[1], which are often operated at the city/county level, not state level.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_school
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-11-07 15:03:00+00:00
Like everything else there’s obviously nuance in that discussion.

Is it harmful to have hyper-realistic, graphic depictions of violence fed into your brain for hours on end? What absolute moron would say “absolutely not” to that?

It’s ridiculous. It’s junk food for your brain. Yes, I like violent video games every now and then, I’m a well balanced adult. I enjoy in moderation.

Now take some kid who’s being pumped full of SSRIs since he was five years old because mommy and daddy didn’t want to spend time reading to him so they just shoved an iPad in his face. Is that “absolutely” the same calculation?

It doesn’t mean we need to legislate or get government involved in anything.

But, at least being honest about the nuance would be a good start. It has to be bad for some people. That has to be acknowledged.
by simonw | 2025-11-07 15:03:06+00:00
> If the industry continues its current focus on maintainability and developer experience, we’ll end up in a world where the web is built by LLMs using React and a handful of libraries entrenched in the training data. Framework innovation stagnates. Platform innovation focuses elsewhere. React becomes infrastructure—invisible and unchangeable.

So I guess I'm in agreement with the author: let's actively work to make that not happen.
by thomasmg | 2025-11-07 15:03:22+00:00
I find floating point NaN != NaN quite annoying. But this is not related to Rust: this affects all programming languages that support floating point. All libraries that want to support ordering for floating point need to handle this special case, that is, all sort algorithms, hash table implementation, etc. Maybe it would cause less issues if NaN doesn't exist, or if NaN == NaN. At least, it would be much easier to understand and more consistent with other types.
by mtlynch | 2025-11-07 15:04:01+00:00
This whole post is written in LinkedIn broetry style[0] and ends, unsurprisingly, with an invitation to connect with the author on LinkedIn.

[0] All single line paragraphs of 1-3 short sentences, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/why-are-these-p...
by reaperducer | 2025-11-07 15:04:12+00:00
These things are really magazines that run once a year. The notion of a magazine is a weird concept that doesn’t compute for anyone younger than 35.

Ageism aside, your stereotype of young people today is about a decade out of date. It doesn't sound like you've been to a book store in America since 2015.

I see high schoolers gathered around the magazine racks at the book store every time I visit, which is at least weekly.

In a lot of ways, nothing has changed. Blue jeans, concert shirts, and someone always walks away with a Rolling Stone.
by yomismoaqui | 2025-11-07 15:04:16+00:00
For technical questions the agreeableness is a problem when asking for evalation of some idea. The trick is asking the LLM to present pros and cons. Or if you want a harder review just ask it to poke holes in your idea.

Sometimes it still tries to bullshit you, but you are still the responsible driver so don't let the clanker drive unsupervised.
by lazide | 2025-11-07 15:04:34+00:00
There is an entire military who has as its purpose things like stopping the US power structure from being held accountable to foreign powers. The only way Trump is going to be in front of a court is if the US loses a total war, or if the US gov’t ends up wanting him there.

And it’s very unlikely any future or current president will want any past president in front of a court, because next time it may be them.
by bko | 2025-11-07 15:04:41+00:00
I don't think that's what woke means.

Woke to me in the simplest sense if a form of extreme egalitarianism, collectivism with some blank-slatism.

Let's take your example: poor and Black people don't live on LI with equal representations based on other groups. Let's unpack that:

1. You have some definition of "Black" that's very broad. What does someone from Sub-Saharan Africa whose ancestors came here on a slave boat have to do with a 0 generation Nigerian immigrant who is significantly better off than the median American? Then you have the whole "Brown" category which is equally ham-fisted.

2. Ignoring any differences in group preference and autonomy. There could be no reason that the proportion of said group would be unequal in that area if not for some force outside of their control. You ask why aren't there enough of [group] in some extremely competitive professional field, but you don't work backwards. For instance, federal judges -> prestigious law school graduates -> prestigious undergrad graduates -> high school graduates -> parents in home. Woke ignores the chain and usually just jumps to the end result. Of course this is ignored in some domains. No one argues that prisons are overly harsh (lenient) on men (women) when it comes to criminal punishments relative to each other. Or why are there so many central / South Americans in MLB. It's uncritical.

3. Groups are the organizing force (collective guilt). [Oppressor] group did this to [oppressed group] so we need to change the balance of power of [oppressed group] in relation to [oppressed group], when in reality there are only individuals.

Overall, things are simplified to oppressed vs oppressor. It's an oversimplification and leads to bad things like shutting down accelerated math programs because we don't like the makeup of the student body
by freedomben | 2025-11-07 15:05:01+00:00
Disagree. The most common reason I've seen for this is the recruiters using largely or entirely automated tools to comb LinkedIn, Github, and many other sources and auto-blasting out those cold emails. They don't even look at the resume until you reply with interest. It's not (usually) the hiring manager's fault. They frequently don't even know that is occurring.

I find that practice disgusting personally and will never do it myself or condone it in others, but it does seem to work.
by lukebuehler | 2025-11-07 15:05:06+00:00
Woah, describes me quite accurately.

It actually took me quite a long time to learn this about myself. I do need a base-line of pressure to get the juices flowing. If pressure falls below base-line, my productivity tanks.

I'm also just starting to learn how to deal with the downside for my family. It's hard. I can very much relate to the yo-yo.
by lasereyes136 | 2025-11-07 15:05:32+00:00
Any experience can alter your perception of reality, it doens't change reality. That doesn't mean it can't be a problem that needs to be addressed. It can also be a benefit and help people experience situations that would be dangerous to experience in real life so they get the skills to deal with them without being in danger. Think airline pilots practicing airplane failures in a simulator. The professional airplane simulators are so detailed, it really looks and feels like being in a plane.
by the__alchemist | 2025-11-07 15:05:34+00:00
I did a deep dive into cosmology simulations ~a year ago. It was striking how much is extrapolated from the brightness of small numbers of galaxy-surface pixels. I was looking at this for galaxies and stars, and observed something similar. The cosmology models are doing their best with sparse info, but to me it seemed that the predictions about things like Dark Matter and Dark Energy are presented in a way that's too confident for the underlying data. Not enough effort is spent trying to come up with new models. (Not to mention trying to shut down alternatives to Lambda CDM, or a better understanding of the consequences of GR, and the assumptions behind applying Newtonian instant-effect gravity in simulations).

Whenever I read things like "This model can't explain the bullet cluster, or X rotation curve, so it's probably wrong" my internal response is "Your underlying data sources are too fuzzy to make your model the baseline!"

I think the most established models are doing their best with the data they have, but there is so much room for new areas of exploration based on questioning assumptions about the feeble measurements we can make from this pale blue dot.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-07 15:05:52+00:00
> Could you explain where this comes from?

I mean, the fact that this administration flat out lies and bullshits about everything more or less as a matter of Surkov-type policy and is essentially run on weaponised bad faith does not encourage any other conclusion.

Also, I repeat: the guy responsible for that navy command is stepping down in terms that appear to be highly unusual.

The most significant thing you can do for your understanding of this situation is to understand that this is not inside baseball, niche knowledge, nuanced interpretation stuff. It's Calvinball.
by doyougnu | 2025-11-07 15:06:05+00:00
Not a game dev. Besides profiling, I would create game scenarios that exercise certain parts of the game engine.

For example, I would create a game fight scenario where the player has infinite health and the enemy just attacks super fast at some settable rate. That way you could monitor whats happening in extreme abnormal conditions with the hypothesis that if the game works in extreme conditions then it will work in normal conditions.

Another example. If you have random encounters like in old school JRPGs then I would create a scenario where a fight happens per step of the player, the fight loads, then the enemy immediately dies, rinse wash and repeat. That should allow you to asses how the game performs after 100s of fights quickly.

The idea here is to create tests that improve your signal to noise ratio. So you create a scenario that will create a large signal so that then you can more easily diagnose the performance issues.
by simonw | 2025-11-07 15:06:15+00:00
> Frameworks are abstractions over a platform designed for people and teams to accelerate their teams new work and maintenance while improving the consistency and quality of the projects. [...] I was just left wondering if there will be a need for frameworks in the future? Do the architecture patterns we've learnt over the years matter? Will new patterns for software architecture appear that favour LLM management?

Yes! That's exactly what I was trying to get at.
by GuB-42 | 2025-11-07 15:06:38+00:00
About the military, from my limited experience, they are significantly behind the civilian state of the art, except for technology that has has few applications outside of the military, like stealth.

In fact everything secret tends to be behind. Secrecy is a huge burden, and seriously limits all forms of collaboration.

In addition, because military projects are often big and highly politicized you get all the inefficiencies that goes with that. Classification is also convenient for hiding screwups and corruption.
by hajile | 2025-11-07 15:07:01+00:00
Audience matters here. Most book sales have been falling. The one increase has been in romance porn with those books accounting for some 50% of all paperbacks sold at this point (they are dominating for the exact same reason porn dominates internet video content).

Personally, I don't count pornhub traffic the same way I count Youtube or Netflix traffic and I think the same applies here.
by gf000 | 2025-11-07 15:07:02+00:00
I can only quote (from the top of my head) the Android team's findings, that having a C++ codebase extended with Rust cut down significantly on the number of memory safety-related issues. The reasoning was that since the stable C++ codebase was no longer actively changed, only patched, and new features were implemented in Rust, the C++ codebase could go through this stabilization phase where almost all safety issues are found.