MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by abe94 | 2025-11-07 13:47:13+00:00
A liquor store and a grocery store aren't the same thing, they were set up for different reasons, have different policy goals and are run differently. Also if the goal is helping with "food deserts" - which seems like a tenuous claim already for a city with a ton of bodegas there are better less costly solutions. When comparing actual state run grocery store pilots (in the US) they have been a disaster - see the kansas city example here (https://www.kcur.org/news/2025-08-12/kansas-city-grocery-sto...)

Denver is the best example in the US that saw limited success, and one of the very few - in most places similar approaches were tried (in the US), we were worse off then just keeping police as the primary responders. In NYC specifically we tried a pilot recently, and it was (unsurprisingly) ineffectual - where police had to be called as backup 65% anyway(https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-of-the-behavioral-...). So no in NY at least police don't make the situation worse thats a myth.
by hatsuseno | 2025-11-07 13:47:19+00:00
How many centuries did it take for civil engineering, for example, to become the codified, standardized, and respected calling it is now? While I'm sure "software development" will leapfrog that span of time, but it's only been 75 years since the discipline was invented to begin with (Lovelace's work was more applied math than anything else, but the starting point is arguably between then and, let's say, FORTRAN?).

That is to say, as a programmer, I feel like we're wading in an ocean of unknown size and depth. As we learn, by trial and error, the confines of that space will fuel the standardization and codification of the craft will only increase as a function of time until it isn't craft, but applied science.

Edit: s/applied science/engineering/
by nijave | 2025-11-07 13:47:21+00:00
Our bigger issue is SaaS like CircleCI and Quay also being in us-east-1. We have a working DR strategy (albeit about a 4-6 hour exercise) to switch regions but a lot of 3rd party dependencies are tied to us-east-1

It's a bit of a circular problem since it's usually useful to colocate in the same region for latency or security (privatelink)
by cholantesh | 2025-11-07 13:47:35+00:00
ChatGPT is the product of a private, 300B USD evaluated company whose founder has whose net worth outpaces that of over 99% of humans alive. It's compute infrastructure is a subsidized by one of less than ten companies that has a market cap over 1T USD. It is practically embedded into the governments of the US and UK at this point.

I would say it's a crazy world where an educated adult would see it as an antipode to the establishment.
by sheepscreek | 2025-11-07 13:48:08+00:00
Macs on the other hand are extremely stable. In my 4 years of using my MacBook Pro M1 Max, I’ve only restarted during OS updates. There were maybe a handful instances where it froze and I forced restart. Other than that, I only put it to sleep every time and it works like a charm. I use it for heavy duty software development and experimentation with local models, so it’s even more surprising!
by fcpguru | 2025-11-07 13:48:33+00:00
this is good feedback. I think there are others though that are on the side of too shy didn't make that connect and leave the event with 0. And it really matters the type of event business vs. dating. If you install the 222.place app and do their questionaire you'll see the direction I'm thinking of really asking "_who_ do you want to broadast _what_ information too."
by jitl | 2025-11-07 13:48:50+00:00
I want improvements like “dropdown menu of tags not limited to 50 items” and “one button forecast on any graph”. Unsure if any SQL query language will solve my annoyance that stuff in Datadog was one click, and in Grafana is 14 clicks or impossible without referencing a Book of the Arcane.

Heck I’m dying for “I can copy a graph between dashboards”. Grafana allows this but if any variable is in the graph but doesn’t exist in the destination, pasting just creates an empty graph.
by rjmunro | 2025-11-07 13:49:09+00:00
It's not a database, it's just files. And they are hosted by Cloudflare so they can cope with a lot of downloads.

I think he should make the files smaller my removing the second half of the hashes, i.e. reduce it from 40 hex digits to 20. This increases the change of a false positive (i.e. I enter my password, it says it was compromised but it wasn't, it just has the same hash as one that did) from 1 in 10^48 to 1 in 10^24 (per password), but that's still a huge number. (There's less than 10^10 people in the world, they only have a few passwords each). This will approximately halve the download, maybe more because the first half of each hash is more compressible (when sorted) the second half is totally random.
by lukas_souhrada | 2025-11-07 13:49:32+00:00
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by ben_w | 2025-11-07 13:49:46+00:00
> Just the robotaxi business alone could be worth hundreds of billions a year in avoided insurance costs and save the average Western family about $5k in transportation costs annually. If it works. Most people don't think it will, but most people thought Amazon wouldn't work either.

For me, it's not that FSD will never work, it's that they're obviously at least 6 years behind Waymo.

For humanoid robots, again, it's not that it will never work, it's that not only is there plenty of competition that's already beating Tesla to the market for the "mostly remote controlled with a bit of automation" model (which is useful, I don't want to undersell that), but also that there will be at least a 5-10 year gap between the AI hardware necessary for a level-5 self driving car fitting in the power envelope of a car, and the hardware fitting in the power envelope of a humanoid robot that can get into a car and drive it (and that a fully autonomous humanoid robot is harder than level-5 self driving).

Energy? Again with the competition: they're one of the worst current brands in the world market — it's not the idea's wrong, it's just that they're the Blockbuster to a dozen would-be Netflixes.

Even with cars, competition from cheaper better models from China and Europe would already be biting Tesla's global sales even if Musk was not angering a significant fraction of what used to be Tesla's core market (upper-middle-class environmentalists).
by karaterobot | 2025-11-07 13:50:14+00:00
Some programmers are engineers, but not all programmers are engineers. A lot of us are plumbers, basically. We connect together things other people have engineered. There's nothing wrong with plumbing; it's an important, honorable profession. It's just a different thing than engineering. And I'm not saying that a really good programmer transforms into an engineer by virtue of being really productive, or smart, or whatever—I'm saying engineering is a specific activity that most of us don't do every day as part of our jobs. So, to the point of this article, I'd like evidence to be gathered from engineers, specifically, and not programmers like me.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-11-07 13:50:29+00:00
Where is ChatGPT picking up the supportive pre-suicide comments from. It feels like that genre of comment has to be copied from somewhere. They're long and almost eloquent. They can't be emergent generation, surely? Is there a place on the web where these sorts of 'supportive' comments are given to people who have chosen suicide?
by apalmer | 2025-11-07 13:50:42+00:00
This again? In general, Software Engineering is not engineering.

It's not a technical issue, it's a 'software doesn't really kill people so government doesn't intervene in it'. In the case where the software is life and death it's generally developed in ways similar to 'real' engineering

Fundamentally folks built building/structures without engineering, just so consistently caused death and destruction that govt stepped in and started requiring licensed trained folks, approval trails etc. without this real world intervention regular physical 'engineering' the same crap shoot as software engineering.
by anotheryou | 2025-11-07 13:50:59+00:00
How do you feel about the chat logs here?

I have to wonder: would the suicide have been prevented if chatGPT didn't exist?

Because if that's not at least a "maybe", I feel like chatGPT did provide comfort in a dire situation here.

Probably we have no way not at least saying "maybe", but I can imagine just as well, that chatGPT did not accelerate anything.

I wished we could see a fuller transcript.
by joshmn | 2025-11-07 13:51:30+00:00
It started as a proof of concept and graduated to a free site, and eventually I put a paywall up to see if anyone would be willing to pay. Internally, I hoped nobody would—I wanted to have a social life and not be beholden to old men telling me their ghetto streaming site was broken—and I expected nobody would.

The first purchase was for $100 on a "pay what you think it's worth" model, and after watching the value that others were willing to pay, I had a good idea as to what I would ultimately charge.
by giantg2 | 2025-11-07 13:51:51+00:00
"For example, a mechanical engineer is someone that designs mechanical systems. In order to do that, they will need specialized and very expensive equipment, and the end result will be produced with machines costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars."

Not really. The difficulty to manufacture something isn't tied to the ability to engineer it. In fact, good engineers try to make the item easier/cheaper to manufacture. Take the AK-47 vs the M-16 - one used more exotic (for the time) materials with a more expensive and involved production process. The other was made with looser tolerances out of cheap stamped steel and wood that could be cranked out quickly. Yet they were both (eventually) of similar effectiveness.

These days, we have CAD and 3D printing available to craftsmen. If you want to build it out of metal and make it reproducible, you can build and print the parts to create molds to cast them from. Same thing for people how have a lathe and/or milling machine. In some cases you can get them used for a few hundred dollars. Record your dimensions and process and you can crank out copies of items with great results - no engineering training needed.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-07 13:52:09+00:00
The guy threw a sandwich at a cop. Is this something that should be legal and have no consequences? Is there a limit to the size of the sandwich? What kinds of ingredients are allowed?

I find it strange that people can go from this man was over-charged for a minor assault to thinking of him as a victim. The man was a bystander who assaulted a police officer - do you think that should be allowed if you agree with the bystander about the law?

Come to think of it, I disagree with a lot of rules about driving, particularly the price of a city sticker for a motorscooter. What can I throw at the woman who works at the DMV?
by vidarh | 2025-11-07 13:52:10+00:00
> 1. Humans intellect is Turing computable. 2. LLMs are based on Turing-complete technology. 3. Therefore, LLMs can eventually equal human intellect.

Yes, with an emphasis on can. That does not mean they necessarily will. Though I would consider it unlikely that they won't, we the only way of proving that they will would be to do it.

> But if that is the right chain of assumptions, there's lots of issues with it. First, whether LLMs are Turing complete is a topic of debate. There are points for[0] and against[1].

It's trivial to prove that a system comprised of an LLM with a loop is Turing computable. A single inference step can not be Turing computable, but one with a loop only requires the LLM to be capable of executing 6 distinct steps with temperatur set to 0. You can wire up a toy neural network by hand that can do this.

This is in fact a far more limited claim than what the paper you linked to makes.

The article you linked to, on the other hand, is discussing if an LLM can act like a Turing machine without that loop. That is why "state management" matters. State management is irrelevant when you wrap a loop around because you can externalise the state, and you only need 2 states (and 3 symbols, or 3 states and 2 symbols) for the smallest known universal Turing machine.

The entire article is thus entirely irrelevant to this question. Sure, you will struggle to make an LLM act as a Turing machine without going "off the rails". But that is irrelevant - you only need it to be able to execute one state transition by deterministically producing the right next tape operation and next state when given the next symbol and current state.

From that you can build up to arbitrarily complex computation, because for every given Turing machine, you can construct a larger Turing machine that uses additional symbols or states to encode an operation that takes multiple steps for the smaller machine.

> The processor I'm using to write this might be able to perform all the computations needed for human intellect, but even if it could, that doesn't mean it can do it quickly enough to compute even a single nanosecond of actual human thought before the heat-death of the universe, or even the end of this century.

Irrelevant, because absent physics that exceeds the Turing computable, the human brain is an existence-proof for the possibility of computing everything the human brain does in a package the size of an average human brain.

It is very likely that we will need architectural changes to compute any given model efficiently enough, but to suggest it is not possible is an extraordinary claim not supported by anything.

If you take LLM to mean a very specific architecture, or specific computational methods to execute a model, then you have a point. If so we are talking about very different things.
by infecto | 2025-11-07 13:53:24+00:00
We are talking about ads and promoted videos. Nothing to do with what it is recommending unless I am entirely conflating the root of this subject. If that is true, then of course you would never have seen these as a premium user.

Scam videos are the chum box ads of the video world. Usually the lowest cost ads and so if you block tracking or are viewing a video in a private session you will have the highest chance of hitting these ads.
by lawnchair | 2025-11-07 13:53:24+00:00
Definitely agree. Most teams don't choose a language for purely rational reasons, and we're not pretending we did.

We like OCaml, it makes us excited to build. We know the language deeply, which means we can reason about performance and behavior before we run the code. We can onboard new engineers quickly because the type system forces clarity.

The runtime is simple enough that we can predict what it's doing. So yes, part of it is that OCaml feels good to use. But that feeling comes from years of watching it make complex systems simpler to reason about, not harder.
by sotix | 2025-11-07 13:53:29+00:00
Careful with this method. I was unable to purchase plane tickets from Southwest or even change my email address because they changed their parsing rules on me and silently dropped the plus. I found out most airlines don't have a ticket counter to buy a ticket the old fashioned way! But the premier help can issue tickets. Took me two months to have CS get someone to run a DML to remove my "bad" email address.
by sausagefeet | 2025-11-07 13:53:50+00:00
Hello, CTO of Terrateam here, the creators of Stategraph.

As you said, the common practice is to use locks on state to guarantee that operations don't step on each other. This works, however the cost is that if it takes 5 minutes to perform an operation, only one person can be doing an operation at a time, so if 5 devs are modifying infrastructure, the last one has to wait 25 minutes just to get back the plan, even if those 5 people are not changing overlapping resources in the state.

The way that most people deal with this is they take their infrastructure and break it up across multiple root modules, and then when those root modules, break it up again, etc.

Stategraph is solving the problem of getting all of the performance benefits of breaking up your root modules without breaking up your root modules. It dynamically determines which resources each of those 5 devs are operation on and, if the resources do not overlap, can run them in parallel.

That means Stategraph is manipulating state in a bit more sophisticated way than standard Terraform/Tofu, and we need to be careful we don't get it wrong.
by sampo | 2025-11-07 13:53:52+00:00
> More than 20 years ago, I corresponded with famous UFO researcher Stanton T. Friedman. His central claim was that “the evidence is overwhelming that some UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft”.

I don't believe in UFOs. But if I had to believe in UFOs, this would be my position:

We have had modern humans for 500 000 years [1]. If it takes 10 000 years to make it from stone age to space age, we have theoretically had time to make that 50 times over. Maybe there was a previous version of a human civilization [2], then wiped out by ice ages or something, but a small number of highly advanced humans have survived and keep hiding from us. I think this could be somewhat more plausible than interstellar travel.

[1] Or maybe 1 million https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45510582

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
by imglorp | 2025-11-07 13:54:18+00:00
This is closely related to why Sussman and Abelson stopped teaching SICP: it is not possible to engineer software any more because systems are too complicated to completely understand and abstractions hide too many behaviors. So now we do "programming by poking" to understand what the system does instead of making it correct by construction.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5335

We just tinker. That's all we can do to get stuff done.
by z3t4 | 2025-11-07 13:54:41+00:00
The thing with software is that you need to feel the pain in order to learn something. For example, when you lose all your work due to a bad HDD, you learn the importance of backups. But we also learn from others telling you that you need backups. So you make a copy of your data, but on the same hdd. Because you really haven't learned the lesson. Same with test driven development, you can have an entire career without software regression bugs, so you have no reason to use TDD. No pain no gain!
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-11-07 13:54:41+00:00
Not true. My experience is the UX is okay to good, but often there's click-bait ad-serving friction and distraction.

You never know if your search is get you what you want, bring up a pop-up of HotLonelyBabes4U (when you're looking for kids cartoons), or take you to a scam site that wants you to download a "helper."

Aside from that, the experience is rarely terrible - like the trad video streaming sites that give you endless horizontal scrolling lists sorted very broadly by topic, kind of, with an entertaining randomness about the categories.
by Havoc | 2025-11-07 13:54:47+00:00
I'd absolutely hate being on the receiving end of some of these. e.g.

>I gave my users lists of those posts and encouraged them to comment

A service doing this would instantly be on my shit list. I'm trying to buy a service in exchange for money, not get spammed about being someone's guerilla marketing team for free / and or getting roped into a referral scheme.

I don't mind organically advocating for things I've had a good experience with but not like this
by koliber | 2025-11-07 13:54:48+00:00
People try to define the manager's job. There are many decent definitions, but one I really like is:

The essence of a manager's job is to push context down and pull information up. Here's a short article that explains it well: https://jacobian.org/2021/apr/19/the-fundamental-purpose-of-...

Everyone should be empowered to make as many decisions as possible. It gives people agency.

To make good decisions, you need context, knowledge, good judgement, and clear boundaries. The context gets built by managers who do a good job.

I've spent a decade of my career at 15Five where we've built a system of doing just that based on a weekly check in. When done well it worked marvelously.
by tmerc | 2025-11-07 13:55:06+00:00
That's unfortunately not true.

In the US, this song is unavailable on Spotify where I found it, but available on YT music. Preface by Man Without Country. Given another 5 minutes, I could also find a song that is not listed on one but available on another.

https://music.you tube.com/watch?v=bvWjybBBFYs
by iso1631 | 2025-11-07 13:55:32+00:00
My TV has ad block for youtube. I pay 20 minutes salary per month and see no adverts at all, on TV, on phone, on computer.

I never understand why well-paid HN commentators refuse to pay for their entertainment.

On the web at large, sure use an ad blocker, there's no choice there. There is on youtube though.
by sausagefeet | 2025-11-07 13:56:29+00:00
Exactly! OCaml is the language I like to solve problems in, and I'm excited to solve problems in, so that's why Terrateam uses OCaml (I'm the CTO). You can do a lot (but not all) of this in Go, or TypeScript, but I don't get excited about those languages. Certainly I'll use them if I have to (our UI is written in Svelte) but building your own company is a grind, and using OCaml makes the grind just a bit more exciting, and that's an edge.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-11-07 13:57:22+00:00
The burden? We're not in court, to me it seems similar so I was asking the commenter for a response.

I've used LLMs in this way a couple of times. I'd like to see responses; there's obviously no obligation to 'defend', but the OP (or others) may have wished to ... like a conversation.

Somewhat ironically, this is a way that LLMs are preferred and why people use them (eg instead of StackOverflow) - because you don't get berated for being inquisitive.