MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by furyofantares | 2025-11-19 22:36:51+00:00
> Which you could argue is not a problem if it won’t be read by humans anyways anymore in the near future.

It's a problem right now for code that isn't being read by humans.

LLM-backed agents start by writing slightly bad code that's a little too verbose, too careful in error handling, writes too much fallback code, among other common minor LLM-ish flaws. And then it's next turn of the crank sees all that, both as an example but also as code it must maintain, and is slightly more bad in all those ways.

This is why vibing ends up so bad. It keeps producing code that does what you asked for a fairly long time, so you can get a long way vibing. By the time you hit a brick wall it will have been writing very bad code for a long while, and it's not clear that it's easier to fix it than start over and try not to accept any amount of slop.
by satellitemx | 2025-11-19 22:36:56+00:00
It's sad to see so many people are blinded by this. The current situation of RCS is just that Google saw Apple disguised iMessage as SMS and wanted to do the same. RCS is merely a vehicle for Google.

They could just layer their own chat platform on top of Google Messages but we all saw how Google's IM business went along: Chat, Hangouts, Alo, Meet etc. So they muddied the water so deep (to a carrier level) to make it look like it's Apple's issue for not adopting RCS. And people actually fall for it.

Nobody wanted RCS. Even carriers don't want to maintain RCS. They just use Jibe. And that's exactly what Google wanted. My RCS communication with friends don't even show up in carrier's usage. How is that ever different from iMessage...

You know who chose to selfhost their own RCS server? Yes, Chinese carriers! They call it 5G Message. New ad delivery channel for businesses hooray! Instead of plain text and a link, now your campaigns can even have MENUs inside! I can send SMS to a Chinese number, I can send iMessage to a Chinese number, but I can't send RCS. Truly "Universal" profile.
by Zigurd | 2025-11-19 22:37:02+00:00
Much of the point of transparency laws is to shine light on secret shenanigans between the wealthy and powerful, and the government. Communications that shouldn't be made public, like between crime victims and certain government officials should be treated with clearly delineated special handling. That should be rare. Not part of informal email exchanges. That's why various government bodies have closed sessions for certain meetings. Embarrassment after the fact isn't a good reason to redact. If Elon is unclear on the concept, maybe he shouldn't be doing government work.
by danaris | 2025-11-19 22:37:24+00:00
Exactly. Even if we grant what he says (I don't fully agree)—that doesn't warrant putting that kind of "conversational engine" in Windows as a first-class citizen.

I don't want to have a conversation with my computer about my Word docs. I just want to write my Word docs.

I don't want to have a conversation with my computer about the quarterly report. I certainly don't want it making up values for the quarterly report. I just want to write the quarterly report.

Having a conversation with a computer is cool. It's a fun party trick. If there were a way to reliably get it to know about all of my things, without the concern that it would then take all that data and feed it to its mothership, I might want to be able to converse with it about those things, under certain circumstances.

But, yes: if I want AI I'll actively seek it out and use it. Stop acting like me being upset that it's getting shoved in everywhere is the same as me saying "this is a meaningless achievement."
by londons_explore | 2025-11-19 22:38:03+00:00
I would like to see the law changed so secured debt (eg. Mortgages) do not become regular debts after the security is sold off.

Ie. You should be able to hand the keys to a mortgage company and walk away debt free.

Likewise you should be able to return the car keys to a loan company and walk away debt free.

Sure, it would mean loans would have to have slightly higher fees to cover the increased risk, but as a nation I think it would be worth it for the productivity gains of not having so many of the population in court over debts.
by marcosdumay | 2025-11-19 22:38:04+00:00
I'm not sure.

Complexity is clearly hired by lobbyists all the time, but uncertainty and ambiguity seem to me to be mostly caused by incompetence. It's not even clear if uncertainty benefits incumbents more; it can just as likely destroy a market or benefit new entrants, and you can't predict which will happen at the time you create it (otherwise it's not uncertain).

Legislative houses need technocratic QA. And that QA needs to be independent from the law-writing process.
by chickensong | 2025-11-19 22:38:40+00:00
The pace is the format. Even if you're just watching turtles for 30 seconds, the loop and the switch to next video are fast-paced context switching, which is stimulating. I suspect it has similar mental effects to constant interruptions, like a bad day at work where slack and email prevent you from getting into flow state/real work.

The format also encourages maximum aggressive video editing where the short video is further chopped up with cuts and zooms etc, techniques designed to tickle your brain and keep you engaged, more stimulation.

Look at what twitter et al. did to long form reading. Short video is the same.
by benbucksch | 2025-11-19 22:38:52+00:00
(OFFTOPIC!)

I would not recommend that with any email clients. Most are built with the assumption that you have around 3 to 8 accounts. UI, speed, and configuration may become an issue. Esp. the unified inbox in Thunderbird was slow in my personal use.

What are these mailboxes? Are they changing a lot? That's also a factor to decide in your setup.

If you have hundreds of mailboxes, and you're posting on HN here, chances are you are technically competent. I would recommend a local IMAP server like Dovecot or Stalwart installed as Docker, and then fetchmail or similar to pull (copy) all the mail into a single inbox. And then your email client uses only that one account which has all emails.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-19 22:39:02+00:00
Metabolically, you will have different results eating lots of sausage vs eating lots of pork loin, even though both are "pork meat with fat"

Because the fat fraction matters.

Reclaimed chicken has lots of connective tissue and skin, which are fatty and has different makeup than say, the breast.

>When I make stock with a chicken carcass a lot of the stuff I consume came from the bones, ligaments, and tendons in the chicken rather than from lean meat. What makes extracting that into water different than extracting that into a paste?

In a stew, one or two chicken carcasses will leach lots of oil and fat into a large stew that fills ten bowls. Specific recipes will also explicitly call for you to remove that fat, and most consumers want soups that are fairly not fatty.

In reclaimed meats, one carcass gets you a couple nuggets. It's up to 30% fat, and unlike say 85% ground beef, will be mixed with thickeners and flour that will soak up that fat during cooking and not let it escape consumption.

Personally, I think mechanically separated meat and other sausage and "use the whole animal" systems are good and delicious. But I'm a fatty. And even I know not to eat baloney every day after one week where I ate a baloney sandwich every day and had rather negative bathroom experiences.

Fat isn't "unhealthy" like the 90s sugar industry wanted you to believe, but it is calorie dense and delicious, which drives you to eat more of it, and means eating the same volume of food will give you more calories.

One pound of skinned chicken breast is like 500 calories. One pound of nuggets is like 1000.

We aren't going to find a set of additives or preservatives or ingredients as the culprit because it's not about the chemistry. It's psychology and biology. The root of the problem is that PepsiCo makes more money if you eat chips and soda every day than if you don't. As long as PepsiCo makes more money from you eating yourself to death, that's going to be the outcome.

Plenty of you get angry about the "military industrial complex" but PepsiCo did significantly more revenue than Raytheon last year: $91 billion, and takes about a 10% profit margin.

The closest you can come in the "ingredient" dimension is things like regulating added sugar and added salt and added colors and added fats, but that's easy to bypass. Your soda wont have added sugar, it will have something like "Apple juice" as an ingredient that is almost itself entirely sugar and water.
by Ancapistani | 2025-11-19 22:39:13+00:00
> Is any of that actually true though?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don’t think it matters.

Google has the capital to spend, and this effort needn’t succeed to be worthwhile. My point is that the scope of the potential future risk more than justifies the expense.

> and in doing so damaged their product

Only in objective terms.

The overall size of the market Google is operating in hasn’t changed, and I’m not aware of anyone positioned to provide a better alternative. Even if we assume that Google Search has gotten worse as a result of this, their traditional competitors aren’t stealing marketshare. They’re all either worse than the current state of Search, are making the same bet, or both.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-19 22:40:09+00:00
> remainder from the article showing this guy just failed to do the right thing:

Huh? That's a quote from a banking spokesperson. It's not even related to any of the (several) stories in the article - it's a quote she gave to the BBC.

Assuming that by "this guy" you mean the first guy mentioned in the article, he had an interest-only mortgage. So sure, he was overextended, but exactly how much accommodation do you think he was going to get? The second guy did have an accommodation with his bank (also on an interest-only mortgage), and it is... he'll be repossessed if he goes more than eight thousand pounds into arrears.

The first guy seems to have a legitimate grievance. He wasn't allowed to sell the home to cover the mortgage. Here's the way the article actually ends:

> As for Mr Da Costa Diogo, his bank has repossessed the property.

> In the same month it was repossessed, the BBC saw a similar three-bedroom property in the same Thetford street as Mr Da Costa Diogo's on the market for £160,000 - almost double the amount he owed.
by gwbas1c | 2025-11-19 22:40:19+00:00
> if your core business function depends on some capability, you should own it

I fear this is easy to misconstrue.

For example, I was at a company that, as I learned how everything worked, realized that we were spending $20k / month for cloud services to basically process about as much real-time data as a CD player processes.

I joked that we should be able to run our entire product on a single server running in the office. (Then I pointed out that this was a joke and that running in the cloud gave us amazing redundancy that we didn't have to implement ourselves.) My point was to show that our architecture was massively bloated and overengineered for what we were doing. (IE, the cost of serialization to send messages was more than the actual processing that was happening. The cost was both money, and the fact that we were spending more time working on messaging than the actual product.)

BUT: There's many times where we could easily say, "this would be so much easier if we had our own server in the office." And, if we misconstrue the above quote, we could convince ourselves to run our own server in the office.
by benatkin | 2025-11-19 22:41:30+00:00
They're dumping competition on two other open source python libraries LiteLLM and simonw's llm. Unlike these two, Mozilla's any-llm doesn't have to make money. I'm sure simonw will be welcoming because he's a friendly kind of guy, but it might seem frustrating to LiteLLM which has a paid offering, for which they'd prefer organic competition rather than whatever magic 8 ball Mozilla uses.
by senbrow | 2025-11-19 22:41:49+00:00
Hah, that exact transition was my last project there before I decided I had had enough!

The GPM team was hugely passionate about music and curating a good experience for users, but YT leadership just wanted us to "reuse existing video architecture" to the Nth degree when we merged into the YT org.

After literally years of negotiations you got... what YTM is. Many of the original GPM team members left before the transition was fully underway because they saw the writing on the wall and wanted no part of it. I really wish I had done the same.
by creer | 2025-11-19 22:41:50+00:00
A professional medium might have been gate-kept being paying coursework. Perl was not: the super-complete documentation was right there, in the distribution; the remarkably intelligently written course book was right there on everyone's shelves and in your local public library; the in-depth books same thing; And quickly enough even free on the net; the expert-built module library was all there to use and study; the experts were giving their time freely, writing deep dive articles at the simple prompt of worthy questions in addition to columns on topics which I guess were not getting enough questions.

For a professional medium, the only lack that I can tell is from a marketing point of view: installing the distribution for example, probably did not highlight enough how extensive the documentation was.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-19 22:42:16+00:00
The eye-watering salary you probably have in mind is for a manager at Meta, same company that just laid of 600 actual developers. Why just Meta, not other companies - because they are blaming poor LLama performance on the manager, it seems.

Algorithmic efficiency improvements are being made all the time, and will only serve to reduce inference cost, which is already happening. This isn't going to accelerate AI advance. It just makes ChatGPT more profitable.

Why would human level AGI help spin up chip fabs faster, when we already have actual humans who know how to spin them up, and the bottleneck is raising the billions of dollars to build them?

All of these hard take-off fantasies seem to come down to: We get human-level AGI, then magic happens, and we get hard take-off. Why isn't the magic happening when we already have real live humans on the job?
by Ancapistani | 2025-11-19 22:42:44+00:00
> I'm just random tech guy who has not built a big successful company and honestly have very little clue how to make money this way.

Hey, me too :)

I’ve been at this for a couple of decades, though, and from what I’ve seen the key to building a “successful” company is to ride the wave of popular interest to get funding, build an effective team, and then (and only then) try to find a way to make it profitable enough to exit.

I do think “AI” (really, LLMs, and GPTs in particular) are going to have a transformative impact on a scale and at a rate we’ve never seen before - I just have zero confidence that I can accurately predict what it’s going to look like when the dust settles.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-19 22:42:50+00:00
If Golang was around, it might have killed python then I think. To many, the 2->3 jump made little sense. I honestly wish they just started a new language instead.

I still to this day stumble upon code I have to use 2.7 on, thankfully things like pipx make it easy these days. but still,switching back and forth could be a pain.

But you're right, it wasn't like Perl 6. People moved to python and php mostly from perl. what were going to move to from python 2? Ruby?
by hn_user82179 | 2025-11-19 22:43:06+00:00
Same, I would love this as a quirky detective-type series. There's something very adorable about the man buying himself a bright green parrot to comfort himself that he must not be very good at his job if he can't convince someone to leave an enema-cult (I swear, that reads like something out of some author I love but I can't think of the name). But also the amount of love and empathy it'd take to do this kind of work, and also almost private-investigator-type scheming (taking the tour through the religious library and passing by the eastern spirituality section to establish a common ground and level of trust) just adds so many layers
by 2muchcoffeeman | 2025-11-19 22:43:11+00:00
Many OpenSource forums and software are like this. None of the help is there to help you use the system. It’s there for you to gain some deep knowledge that you don’t care about.

But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. some Linux distro needs to adopt some hardware line and partner with them to release a known good line of computers and polish the hell out of it. Like System 76 but nicer.
by andrewmutz | 2025-11-19 22:43:32+00:00
I use bazzite linux for gaming full time and can't say enough good things about it. You don't need to do anything at all to maintain it. Every Windows game I've ever tried just works perfectly out of the box. Sometimes I will see a warning telling me that a certain game is not certified for a good experience by Steam, and it all just works perfect anyway.

When I was running Windows on the same machine I was constantly trying to diagnose why things stopped working, and downloading drivers.

Perhaps my experience with Windows was worse than average, I don't know. But from my perspective there is zero reason not to run Linux full time for gaming.
by djhworld | 2025-11-19 22:43:43+00:00
My gaming PC sits next to the TV in my living room and I use it like a console, I have one of those cheap blutooth wireless keyboards with trackpad for the really basic iteractions and then I just use a game controller for playing games.

Windows 11 has been fine for me, I don't interact with it much other than seeing it for a bit when launching games.

I honestly wouldn't mind giving Linux a go, the only downside is I made the mistake of buying an nvidia graphics card, I'm not sure how much of a pain it is these days but last time I tried it was a bit of a nightmare - the general wisdom at the time was to go with an AMD card.
by panick21 | 2025-11-19 22:43:45+00:00
No the fundamental problems was the econmists at the time believe in fixed exchange rates and that's why the got suckered into Bretton woods despite it being a crappy deal, specially for Britain. I didn't help that the American at the meeting was a Soviet spy who wanted to destroy Britain.

And Bretton woods solved nothing at all, it was a system that took a very long to implment, much longer then people think and was unstable almost as soon as it was implemented.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-11-19 22:43:52+00:00
But when people told him his cars sucked and they wanted their horses back, he didn-

Wait, no, that never happened. People bought his cars voluntarily and came back for more. If Ford had stolen horses out of peoples' barns and left cars in their places, then said, "You just don't like change!" when they objected, that would be more like modern-day Windows.
by egonschiele | 2025-11-19 22:43:57+00:00
esp32 already exists, so there's a hardware alternative. What's the primary issue -- is it the lack of competition to the Arduino IDE? I have dabbled in Arduino but don't know enough to understand, but my impression was on the hardware side there are already alternatives that are better.

Obviously not discounting what a huge blow this is (and right when I was planning to explore Arduino more), but practically speaking, what can we do to help?
by hombre_fatal | 2025-11-19 22:44:08+00:00
I started using NixOS a month ago.

Knowing nothing about how to configure it, I installed it with the graphical installer, booted into a tty, installed claude-code, checked the config files into git, and proceeded to vibe-code a basic sway (now niri) environment to see what it would feel like.

A month later, my NixOS environment is so much better than my heavily optimized macOS environment that I sheepishly use it inside a VM on macOS (UTM) or VNC to my desktop machine so I can use it from my bed.

LLMs really open the doors of desktop Linux since you can git clone all of your deps locally (your window manager, keepassxc, waybar, your apps, nixpkgs, home-manager, even the linux kernel, etc., etc.) and the LLM can dig into source code and web search to do things for you or debug issues. And NixOS adds a level of observability into what's going on since any changes show up in git-diffed config files.

If anyone is like me and used macOS because you used to use Linux but couldn't be bothered anymore when you'd run into a rough edge, you might find it fun to use NixOS + claude-code (or equivalent) running in ~/nix-config.
by toddgardner | 2025-11-19 22:44:16+00:00
Yea totally. this is a balance.

Very few times should you manage the actual hardware yourself.

But often a cloud is overly complex for what you need. 10 years ago we left MS Azure and started leasing dedicated hardware in OVH. Our costs were cut by 90%, our performance tripled, and our reliability improved. We did have to take on some effort to make our systems portable with ansible and containers, but we greatly simplified our vendor stack.

I am never confused why something goes down, and I have confidence that I can stand up with another vendor without re-writing anything.

If I can't own it, it should be as simple and commoditized as possible. Most clouds are not that.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-19 22:44:32+00:00
> Not cutting social media would make these difficult-- e.g., limiting exercise to just stationary machines where they can watch Tiktok and reach their dopamine hit goals for the day.

If you force exercise to be boring, people will just avoid it more.

People can scroll their phones or watch YouTube on an exercise bike. It might make them exercise longer and make them more likely to go to the gym than to avoid it.

I knew someone who only allowed themself to scroll their social media platform of choice while working out. The result? A lot of time spent working out.
by ginko | 2025-11-19 22:45:04+00:00
Maybe it’s because I studied in Austria where universities generally provide very little handholding to students but I don’t understand the point of compulsory attendance in university lectures. If students think they can pass exams without attending the lectures then they should be able to do that. I certainly did that once or twice when I realized I needed some more credits before the end of the term. It’s a different thing with lab/exercise sessions but your lack of participation there would be noticed anyway.
by throwawayffffas | 2025-11-19 22:46:06+00:00
All of them seem to view the repossession as the worst thing that could possibly happen.

Though if the repossession covers the remainder of the loan it's really not, they are going to be free of debt again.

Their credit score is going to take a hit which will make renting harder, but not impossible.

The first guy for example couldn't possibly hope to get a better outcome. He is no longer paying a mortgage on his ex-wife's house.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-19 22:46:19+00:00
> How much value they extract from it exactly is likely something not even Google knows. But given that it can be exchanged on dark data broker markets in perpetuity,

Companies like Google and Meta don't sell your data, on dark markets or otherwise.

They keep it in-house for advertising targeting purposes.

If they sold it to other companies it would reduce their competitive advantage. It's not even worth it for them.

Google doesn't want to sell your data. They want to keep it internal as much as possible so their ad platform is valuable.
by dyslexit | 2025-11-19 22:46:24+00:00
I think you might have a different definition of "merit" than OP. "Merit" to me means how much value the company brings to society. If I'm reading correctly about your point of it being legal, to you it seems like "merit" means how much value they bring to their investors.

Social media companies becoming more consolidated and influential might be legal and good for their stakeholders but it doesn't mean it's a net positive for the rest of the world. And unfortunately, as much as so many people like to believe otherwise, being a net negative to society absolutely does not lead to a company becoming irrelevant.