MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JustExAWS | 2025-11-11 13:34:55+00:00
I don’t have anything against Azure as a servíce. But Azure is mostly popular among “the enterprise” and government. Microsoft shops naturally tend to prefer Azure. If you want to work with startups and get out of “Big Enterprise”, Azure isn’t what you should be focused on.

On the other hand, going from .Net Framework to .NET Core + Azure may be the path of least resistance to get into a modern ecosystem. Despite what you read on HN, most developers work in boring old enterprises.

As far as startups, ageism is real. But it is more nuanced. They will hire older developers. But only in if you have the experience “you should”. They offer me jobs when they want someone strategic, and knows the modern tech scene.

But understand, the issue with focusing on “in demand” skills is that everyone is doing it and it’s almost impossible to stand out - it’s a shit show out here right now. You’ll have a lot less competition in the Microsoft ecosystem and it will be a lot easier to convincingly tell a tale about using modern MS technologies.

I am not however discouraging you from leaning deep into the JS ecosystem, its table stakes and has been for 20 years.
by flanked-evergl | 2025-11-11 13:35:14+00:00
But the LLM is not advertised as a lyrics DB, and it in no way guarantees that it will reproduce the lyrics accurately, and similarly the copyright holder will never know that it's reproducing the lyrics unless it snoops on my conversations with it, or go ask it directly.

But then with the analogy, if I'm a secretary and the copyright holder of lyrics calls me and asks if I know the lyrics of one of their songs, I don't think it's infringement to say yes and then repeat it back to them.

The LLM is not publicising anything, it's just doing what you ask it to do, it's the humans using it publicising the output.
by pajuhaan | 2025-11-11 13:35:22+00:00
t’s openly available to everyone—from professors to students.

The main paper, which derives the key phenomena of general relativity from quantum physics without spacetime curvature (no GR formalism), is intentionally written to be easy to follow.

By contrast, the parts on the emergent fine-structure constant (1/137) and the electron mass (+ leptons mass hierarchy) do require advanced math and physics.

If I learn which sections are unclear or most interesting, I’ll publish a more detailed, step-by-step guide with simpler math. That’s why I’m sharing the full manuscript with all details now publicly.

You can also invite me to public review communities for it.
by thisisit | 2025-11-11 13:36:04+00:00
This is such a bad take.

If that was case then Google wouldn't receive DMCA takedown of piracy links, instead offer up users searching for piracy content. Former is more prevalent than latter because one, it requires invasion of privacy - you have to serve up everyone's search results

two, it requires understanding of intent.

Same is the issue here. OpenAI then needs to share all chats for courts to shift through and second, how to judge intent. If someone asks for a German pop song and OpenAI decides to output Bochum - whose fault is that?
by dathinab | 2025-11-11 13:36:55+00:00
> That's not how laws and regulations work in European or even EU countries

yes, even if just looking at other court cases in Germany the role of precedent is "in general" not quite as powerful (as Courts are supposed to follow what the law says not what other courts say). To be clear this is quite a bit oversimplified. Other court ruling does still matter in practice, especially if it is from higher courts. But it's very different to how it is commonly presented to work in the US (can't say if it actually works that way).

but also EU member states do synchronize the general working of many laws to make a unified marked practically possible and this does include the general way copy right works (by implementing different country specific laws which all follow the same general framework, so details can differ)

and the parts which are the same are pretty clear about that

- if you distribute a copy of something it's a copy right violation no matter the technical details

a human memorizing the content and then reproducing it would still make it a copy right infringement, so it should be pretty obvious that this applies to LLMs to, where you potentially could even argue that it's not just "memorizing it" but storing it compressed and a bit lossy....

and that honestly isn't just the case in the Germany, or the EU, the main reason AI companies got mostly away with it so far is due to judges being pressured to rule leniently as "it's the future of humanity", "the country wouldn't be able to compete" etc. etc. Or in other words corruption (as politicians are supposed to change laws if things change not tell judges to not do their job properly).
by consumer451 | 2025-11-11 13:37:05+00:00
I used agentic LLM dev tools to build the core of my webapp. It took months, I had a QA person at the beginning, and I looked at every line of committed code. It was a revelatory experience and resulted in a very reliable webapp.

Last month I thought: "OK, I have all kinds of rules, guardrails, and I am relatively excellent at managing context. Let's try to 'vibe code' some new features."

It has been a total disaster and worse than a waste of time. I keep finding entirely new weird bugs it created. This is just a React/Vite/Supabase app, nothing nuts. The worst part is that I showed these vibed features to stakeholders, and they loved it. Now I have to explain why recreating these features is going to take much longer.

I knew better, as the magic of vibe coding is to explore the MVP space, and I still fell for it.
by kiba | 2025-11-11 13:37:17+00:00
We shouldn't tax production but what people take, like land, or polluting our environment, or monopoly privileges granted by government.

Which all coincidentally tax billionaires a lot to the point there might not be billionaire, but it's not the 'fair share' that people thought of. It's not asking the rich people to pay more because they make more, but because they owned non-reproducible privileges or because they imposed a cost on our shared environment such as CO2 emission.

Don't tax what people produce, but what they took.

The tax revenue collected would be then be invested by government to boost the economy or else return to the people via the Citizen's Dividend.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-11 13:37:28+00:00
> You are right, Git for Windows is by random people.

In addition Git for Windows and MSYS2 are different projects, but Git for Windows ships a strapped down version of MSYS2, which is a bit annoying once you want to use anything else, as now you have two (incompatible) versions of MSYS2 around. I would like if they would backport Git for Windows into MSYS2 proper.
by ozim | 2025-11-11 13:37:51+00:00
PDF is fine as output format and for archiving.

Thing is people want to do bunch of things they shouldn’t with PDF like automated parsing, editing or adding forms to it.

Ideally you should have an API or other structured data to pass around but of course life is more complicated. Like PDF is all you get because API would cost more than it makes sense to do bad job parsing PDF.
by Proofread0592 | 2025-11-11 13:37:51+00:00
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-025-03206-7

> This suggests that chronically elevated arousal in AnxDs may increase neurometabolic demand for choline compounds without a proportionate increase in brain uptake, leading to reduced tCho levels. Reduced cortical NAA suggests compromised neuronal function in AnxDs. Future studies may clarify the clinical significance of reduced cortical tCho and the possibility that appropriate choline supplementation could have therapeutic benefit in anxiety disorders.
by zahlman | 2025-11-11 13:37:58+00:00
To save a click on the writeup:

> This is not a small amount but equates to a relatively minor increase when viewed in the context of nationwide emissions.

About 64,000 people worth (or as the article frames it, 0.02% of said nationwide emissions).

The study itself is https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ae0e3b .
by g-b-r | 2025-11-11 13:38:54+00:00
> Lobbyism is very easy to complain about and can easily devolve into corruption, but it has a very clear purpose: To prevent policymakers from writing regulations that harm the affected industries without gain.

Industries are not the only thing affected by policy, citizens are affected too.

Not harming industries often means harming normal people, and industries have a much stronger lobbying power than normal people,

Lobbying could be ok if every interaction with politicians were recorded and public, and if the money you have wouldn't matter on how easily you can reach the lawmakers.

If lobbying were illegal, lawmakers could inform their decisions by turning to independent experts, who provide some slightly more impartial information
by L_226 | 2025-11-11 13:38:55+00:00
> For the Five Eyes(Canada, US, UK, Australia, NZ) that don’t ever need to worry about conventional invasion

Australia is extremely at risk of conventional invasion, their current independence is a function of alliance to the strongest navy in the Pacific. Without a US that is willing and able to ensure Australia's free access to the surrounding ocean, AU is absolutely unable to deploy enough of their own military to fend of probably even Indonesia, let alone China. The coastline is just far too long, the military assets too few, and the country too depopulated to be able to stop a determined invasion.
by iamnothere | 2025-11-11 13:39:06+00:00
Fair enough, but I’m not convinced that a significant number of DAO members, contributors, and token holders couldn’t be identified and pressured into making changes. Such a push may not be successful, as ENS is widely distributed, but that doesn’t mean that the EU wouldn’t try if ENS usage became more common. Even if unsuccessful, this attack could have a chilling effect on uptake in the place where it is most likely to be needed.

Additionally, the EU could block purchase of ENS from exchanges. This added friction, though minor, is enough to slow uptake. I look at Monero as an example. It is functional and stable and it does what it claims. Yet hardly anyone uses it, because it has been effectively fenced off through a series of very low hurdles. It is not hard to swap to Monero for privacy, so why don’t more people do it?

IMHO ordinary users are much more likely to install a resolver that doesn’t have any connection to cryptocurrency. (The media campaign against crypto has been very effective.)

I do think crypto people ought to keep trying to develop their tools: there is some utility in it, and it may be more useful as things evolve. But it’s not a panacea, and the fact that it is “digital money” makes operators legally more vulnerable to attacks and regulation under current laws and legal precedents. Distributed, digital-only, non-monetary, volunteer-run networks like Tor are legally very resilient for now, at least in the West. (That could change, but it hasn’t yet.)
by DonHopkins | 2025-11-11 13:39:32+00:00
Now how about a luxurious Ann Arbor Ambassador?

https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/Ann_Arbor_Ambassad...

https://vt100.net/annarbor/aaa-ug/section1.html

http://madrona.ca/e/aaa/index.html
by ants_everywhere | 2025-11-11 13:39:51+00:00
This is a different claim than what I was responding to, which is that the claim that the letter was based on science and common sense experts.

If you grant that it wasn't then we're in agreement, although your stating that people have been "duped" is somewhat begging the question.

At any rate, my goal here isn't to respond to every claim AI skeptics are making, only to point out that taking an anti-science view is more risky to Europe than a politician stating that AI will approach human reasoning in 2026. AI has already approached or surpassed human reasoning in many tasks so that's not a very controversial opinion for a politician to hold.

And it's a completely separate question from whether the market has valued future cash flows of AI companies too highly or whatever debates people want to have over the meaning of intelligence or AGI.
by estebarb | 2025-11-11 13:40:13+00:00
I think that is completely different. Piracy websites do only one thing. Chatbots are different.

My concern is that where are we going to put the line: If I type a copyrighted song in Word is Microsoft liable? If I upload a lyric to ChatGPT and ask it to analyze or translate it, is it a copyright violation?

I totally understand your line of thinking. However, the one I'm suggesting could be applied as well and it has precedents in law (intellectual authors of crimes are punishable, not only the perpetrators).
by LunaSea | 2025-11-11 13:40:28+00:00
> [...] feedback from established companies is valuable for doing that.

This is exactly what led us to fall behind in electric car development and construction.

It's the "unreasonable" rules that were unilaterally implemented that made car companies panic and finally start competing.

> Those lobbyists represent the interests of a good portion of the economy

No, they represent the interests of a few shareholders.
by LatteLazy | 2025-11-11 13:40:29+00:00
The most annoying thing about pieces like this is how easy it would be to actually test the hypothesis. They could just give people choline (double blind placebo including some participants who are not anxious). And test the effect on both choline levels and anxiety.

It’s also ready sold OTC.

Instead people just sit around and do meta studies on meta studies on correlation and publishing whatever statistical anomalies they can find.
by tgv | 2025-11-11 13:40:42+00:00
I visited Rumania around the year 2000. I remember being surprised by the sight of a whole bunch of similar Dacias at the end of a (muddy) street, in various state of disrepair. The person we visited explained that people were repairing their cars by taking parts from other cars, as there were no spares, or they were very expensive (the average Rumanian was pretty poor at that time). And since nearly everyone drove a Dacia 1300 (tried to guess the model; they looked like a Renault 12), there were plenty of donor cars around, and people learned how to fix their cars from their neighbours.

That can't last forever, of course, but it shows there are other ways.
by incomingpain | 2025-11-11 13:41:17+00:00
from my pov, tech people are still primarily on X. like 90-95%.

Meta's gemma team was on X recently looking for advice on MOE and reasoning for gemma.

Qwen announces on X: @Alibaba_Qwen or @JustinLin610

Basically all of linux and programming happens on X.

discord for sure has discussions. LM studio pretty much only exists there. Reddit is most just dead internet at this point.

Freenode's hostile takeover during covid pretty much ended irc. An official end to the IRC era.

>Where did they go? I have found a few, but not many, on Mastodon and Bluesky.

The USA dominates tech to be sure, so the USA political polarization would disproportionately impact this sure. But it was temporary as mastodon and bluesky declined and everyone seems to be back to X.
by tremon | 2025-11-11 13:42:35+00:00
countries don't use legal precedents from other countries, as they obviously have different laws

The seminal authority for all copyright laws, the Berne Convention, is ratified by 181 countries. Its latest revisions are TRIPS (concerning authorship of music recordings) and the WIPO Copyright Treaty (concerning digital publication), both of which are ratified by the European Union as a whole. It's not directly obvious to me that EU member states have different laws in this particular area.

That said, the EU uses the civil law model and precedent doesn't quite have the same weight here as it does under common law.
by gradus_ad | 2025-11-11 13:43:25+00:00
>“These are marketing statements driven by profit-motive and ideology rather than empirical evidence and formal proof,” the scientists write in the letter.

This statement itself seems ideological, born of upset at being left behind in the AI race by the US. AI is absolutely approaching general human cognitive ability and in many ways has already far surpassed it. Is passing the LSAT, SAT, proving a helpful research assistant to Terrence Tao, etc not proof enough?

Elsewhere in this discussion I see the point being made that to fight the supposedly irrational market is hopeless and the EU's wise and noble bureaucrats should stoop, however begrudgingly, to the exuberance of the US to win, but this is just the EU's fatal conceit speaking, the idea that it knows best and that its rationally structured and orchestrated policies are superior to the irrational and disorganized market. Perhaps AI is really delivering on the hype and the ludicrous valuations of today will seems reasonable in a few years time. We won't actually know until a few years actually pass and we have the luxury of hindsight. Until then, the EU should just let things happen and stop constantly getting in its own way.
by DonHopkins | 2025-11-11 13:43:45+00:00
>Sadly, so far as I know, there is no such detailed documentation or test-suite for terminals and terminal emulators. Because they’re fundamentally about visual output, it’s quite difficult to properly test them.

>A special shout-out to vttest which does try to exercise a bunch of corner-cases of VTxxx emulation. Unfortunately, it can only really be used interactively, so it's not useful for automated testing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vttest

https://invisible-island.net/vttest/

>Vttest was written in 1983-1985 by Per Lindberg at the Stockholm University Computing Center. The last version was 1.7b (1985-04-19). Per Lindberg later distributed 1.7b via the Usenet mod.sources group (Volume 7, Issue 16, September 2, 1986). It became an established part of the Unix source archives, e.g,. as noted in these postings from 1988.

It even tests for obscure commands like ESC # 8: video alignment test-fill screen with E's

http://www.braun-home.net/michael/info/misc/VT100_commands.h...

(I know that because I wrote a VT100 emulator in PostScript for NeWS that passed vttest.)

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/utilities/term...

/hash-prefix { 56 eq { test-pattern } if reset-termulator } def /do-hash { /termulate-char //hash-prefix def } def /test-pattern { Columns 0 ne Rows 0 ne and { Columns string 0 1 Columns 1 sub { 1 index exch 69 put } for 0 1 Rows 1 sub { Lines exch get 1 index exch copy pop } for pop } if slow-refresh } def

It would detect that it was being tested with vttest by noticing undefined erroneous escape codes, and contemptuously changing the cursor to a hand flashing "the finger" 20 times to anyone who insisted on testing it (Hugh Daniel and Nick Turner at Wedge Computer Inc, all RIP):

/shape-error-cursor { % - => - gsave ClientCanvas setcanvas cursor-can /Mapped false put newpath CharWidth CharHeight scale .2 0 moveto 0 .3 lineto .1 .5 lineto .2 .5 lineto .2 .55 lineto .3 .6 lineto .4 .55 lineto .4 .95 lineto .5 1 lineto .6 .95 lineto .6 .55 lineto .7 .6 lineto .8 .55 lineto .8 .5 lineto .9 .55 lineto 1 .5 lineto 1 .3 lineto .8 0 lineto closepath cursor-can eoreshapecanvas cursor-can setcanvas 0 fillcanvas cursor-state { cursor-on } if grestore } def
by linsomniac | 2025-11-11 13:43:47+00:00
You seem to be setting a high bar (AI success stories don't ring true), while taking the study as fact. This feels like a cognitive bias.

I believe you are talking about the study: Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity. It is an interesting data point, but it's far from conclusive. It studied 16 developers working on large (1MLOC+) codebases, and the AI tooling struggles with large codebases (new tools like Brokk are attempting to improve performance there). The authors acknowledge that participants dropped hard AI-disallowed issues "reducing the average AI-disallowed difficulty". Some of the selected developers seem to have been inexperienced at AI use.

Smaller tools and codebases and unfamiliar code are sweet spots for the AI tools. When I need a tool to help me do my job, the AIs can take a couple sentence description and turn it into working code, often on the first go. Monitoring plugins, automation tools, programs in the few thousand lines of code, writing tests, these are all things the AIs are REALLY good at. Also: asking questions about the code.

A few examples: Last night I had Claude Code implement a change to the helix editor so that if you go back into a file you previously edited, it takes you back to the spot you were at in your last editing session. I don't know the helix code nor Rust at all. Claude was able to implement this in the background while I was working on another task and then watching TV in the evening. A few weeks ago I used Claude Code to fix 600+ linting errors in 20 year old code, in an evening while watching TV, these easily would have taken a day to do manually. A few months ago Claude built me a "rsync but for block devices" program; I did this one as a comparison of writing it manually vs vibe coding it with Claude, and Claude had significant advantages.

But, I'm guessing these will fall into the "does not ring true" category, probably also "no real objective validation". But to me, personally, there is absolutely evidence that AI is actually getting things done.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-11-11 13:44:01+00:00
I have this idea that constantly retreating, away from desktop, away from phone, away from google, away from apple, is just going to leave people in a tiny corner, until the corner goes away too.

How would we go about actually exerting political pressure in the other direction? Expanding rights and expanding freedoms outside one small corner, so that more people become aware of them and start exercising them.
by tgtweak | 2025-11-11 13:44:24+00:00
There is one parity bit per 8 data bits, which is decently resilient - plus the recovery is pretty simple on the occasional bit flip. Combine that with the fact you can reference other sources to make up for missing/corrupted files - I think the chance that this is recoverable is pretty high provided the machine reading it is high quality. Checksumming on the source was unfortunately not commonplace until Unix 7, so it's unlikely there was any software-level integrity checks here. The tape looks like it was stored in a sealed container which is a very good sign. Those older tapes are actually more resilient than the later generation of tapes, and don't usually degrade the same way even with exposure to humidity.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-11 13:44:39+00:00
I don't use templates for that at all. Instead of:

Class * object = new (...);

I do:

Class * object; object = malloc (sizeof Class); if (nullptr == object) // ... error handling new (object) Class (...);

or if the constructor needs to fail:

Class * object; object = malloc (sizeof Class); if (nullptr == object) // ... error handling new (object) Class (); if (!Class::init (object, ...)) { object->~Class (); free (object); // ... other error handling }
by bitwize | 2025-11-11 13:45:55+00:00
For general software engineering, the accepted thought is you're not really an engineer without the use of AI. Because engineering consists of using the right tool for the job, applying best practice, making tradeoffs, and justifying every decision from a technical standpoint. And it's anti-engineering to write the code yourself rather than putting your ego aside and taking advantage of AI's huge productivity gains.

Game dev is... different. Game devs fancy themselves more as artists, and using generative AI is an affront to those sensibilities.
by tyleo | 2025-11-11 13:46:38+00:00
I’d say overreaction.

The real world is full of tradeoffs and I’ve seen people try to get minutia like this correct in convoluted contexts which actually broke the core application logic.

Given the limited time we can spend on things, supporting proper plurality falls below some of my other UI priorities like proper accessibility settings.

I don’t think plurality is bad, just low in the stack rank of things that matter.