MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aprdm | 2025-11-12 16:45:30+00:00
Focusing on software engineering IME isn't that great, there's only so many variations of frameworks/programming languages that can keep me interested.

I'm usually more interested in solving business problems, then I work on industries or companies that are doing interesting things. I've worked in the hardware industry, cloud start ups, visual effects, and now AI.

I feel very satisfied pushing those industries forward with technology, basically the technology being a means to an end.

I usually join the company as some senior dev (more recently already joined as snr mgr) and end up in leadership roles - which seems to be at odds w. what you want.
by mattmaroon | 2025-11-12 16:45:31+00:00
It makes sense, it’s a simple expected value calculation.

There are trillions of labor dollars that can be replaced by software. The US alone has almost $12 trillion of labor annually.

If an AI company has a 10% shot of developing a product that can replace 10% of it, they are worth $120 billion in expected value. (These numbers are obviously just for illustration).

The unprecedented numbers are a simple function of the unprecedented market size. Nobody has ever had a chance of creating trillions of dollars of economic value in a handful of years before.
by HelloMcFly | 2025-11-12 16:46:00+00:00
OpenAI has seemingly done everything they can to put publishers in a position to make this demand, and they've certainly not done anything to make it impossible for them to respond to it. Is there a better, more privacy minded way for NYT to get the data they need? Probably, I'm not smart enough to understand all the things that go into such a decision. But I know I don't view them as the villain for asking, and I also know I don't view OpenAI as some sort of guardian of my or my data's best interests.
by jcc11 | 2025-11-12 16:46:16+00:00
Played around with the format a bit and made a Kaitai format if anybody else wants to play with it. Not confident about the year, but I have observed some timestamps based on date of manufacture if the device came out approximately 2016. The rest seems to line up rather well as bit-packed integers.

Kaitai Structured Output:

0 [BpMsg]: 2025-11-10 11:03 - SYS:137, DIA:113, OPP:121, MAP:121, PP:24, HR:67 unk1 = 0xA = 10 sys = 0x89 = 137 dia = 0x71 = 113 hr = 0x43 = 67 timestamp [Datetime]: 2025-11-10 11:03 yearMinus2016 = 0x9 = 9 month = 0xB = 11 day = 0xA = 10 hour = 0xB = 11 min = 0x3 = 3 paddedDay = 10 paddedHour = 11 paddedMin = 03 paddedMonth = 11 year = 2025 unk2 = 0x50 = 80 opp = 0x79 = 121 unk3 = 0x0 = 0 unk4 = 0x0 = 0 unk5 = 0x0 = 0 unk6 = 0x0 = 0 unk7 = 0x0 = 0 unk8 = 0x0 = 0 map = 0x79 = 121 pp = 0x18 = 24 1 [BpMsg]: 2025-11-10 11:31 - SYS:132, DIA:86, OPP:95, MAP:101, PP:46, HR:68 2 [BpMsg]: 2025-11-10 12:01 - SYS:126, DIA:84, OPP:90, MAP:98, PP:42, HR:82 3 [BpMsg]: 2025-11-10 12:35 - SYS:128, DIA:80, OPP:86, MAP:96, PP:48, HR:61

KSY:

meta: id: bp title: BP Msg Format endian: le seq: - id: msgs type: bp_msg repeat: eos types: datetime: -webide-representation: '{year:dec}-{padded_month}-{padded_day} {padded_hour}:{padded_min}' seq: - id: year_minus_2016 type: b4 - id: month type: b4 - id: day type: b5 - id: hour type: b5 - id: min type: b6 instances: padded_day: value: '(day <= 9 ? "0" : "") + day.to_s' padded_month: value: '(month <= 9 ? "0" : "") + month.to_s' padded_min: value: '(min <= 9 ? "0" : "") + min.to_s' padded_hour: value: '(hour <= 9 ? "0" : "") + hour.to_s' year: value: (year_minus_2016 + 2016).to_s bp_msg: -webide-representation: '{timestamp} - SYS:{sys:dec}, DIA:{dia:dec}, OPP:{opp:dec}, MAP:{map:dec}, PP:{pp:dec}, HR:{hr:dec}' seq: - id: unk1 type: u1 - id: sys type: u1 - id: dia type: u1 - id: hr type: u1 - id: timestamp type: datetime - id: unk2 type: u1 - id: opp type: u1 - id: unk3 type: u1 - id: unk4 type: u1 - id: unk5 type: u1 - id: unk6 type: u1 - id: unk7 type: u1 - id: unk8 type: u1 instances: pp: value: sys - dia map: value: (2 * dia + sys) / 3

Using the following hex dump as my source "binary":

0a89 7143 9b52 c350 7900 0000 0000 0000 ..qC.R.Py....... 8456 449b 52df 505f 0000 0000 0000 007e .VD.R.P_.......~ 5452 9b53 0150 5a00 0000 0000 000a 8050 TR.S.PZ........P 3d9b 5323 5056 0000 0000 0000 0094 5d41 =.S#PV........]A 9b53 4050 6700 0000 0000 0000 795c 4a9b .S@Pg.......y\J. 535e 506a 0000 0000 0000 007b 5341 9b53 S^Pj.......{SA.S 5f50 5a00 0000 0000 0000 7b4f 4e9b 5381 _PZ.......{ON.S. 5058 0000 0000 0000 PX......
by tgv | 2025-11-12 16:46:23+00:00
I don't see how ad-blocking is unethical.

There are companies that make money by placing ("out of home") ads in the public space. Not looking at those would then also be unethical? Priests sermoning on "thou shalt not hide thy eyes from the fancy displays in the bus stop"? An ad-police, the Conscious Ethical Viewing Effort Force Edict? That's some low-key dystopian thought.
by visarga | 2025-11-12 16:46:33+00:00
You can use the LLM, but you don't also have the rest of the data they relied on. A LLM can generate everything if it starts from a minimal prompt, but this is a recipe for slop. If you come with materials, discuss them, their implications, express your POV and then generate, the article will reflect your ideas and the data if was fed.

I know it is fashionable to put everything a LLM outputs in the slop box, but I don't think it reflects reality.
by benchly | 2025-11-12 16:46:46+00:00
> sacred knowledge?

I think you might be romanticizing this, a bit. When you convince the public that not talking about something is the best course of action, they become a lot easier to control. We learned this during WWII with the propaganda machine that was fully employed on all fronts, and arguably before that with the work of Edward Bernays and people like him. If public discourse and debate could be quashed, then it was much, much easier to simply tell everyone what their opinions of a thing should be.
by memsom | 2025-11-12 16:47:05+00:00
MVC is a design pattern, ASP.NET MVC is a framework that used MVC as its go to pattern. But MVC is not in any way only ASP.NET MVC. There are plenty of other UI frameworks that use MVC and the Wikipedia article lists a lot of them for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93con...
by moregrist | 2025-11-12 16:47:22+00:00
This puts far too much emphasis on weapons and far too little on the diplomatic soft power that made the threat of these weapons effective.

I don’t think we would have had decades of stability without the Marshall plan investing in western Europe. Similarly the US investment in post-WWII Japan and South Korea gave the US strong allies that had common purpose.

It’s not separate; soft diplomacy made the extensive network of US military bases palatable to foreign governments.

I think pointing to nukes as the only factor neglects a lot of other important work. Stability requires the status quo to be another intolerable for governments and their people. The mutually-assured destruction of nuclear deterrence alone doesn’t give you that.
by mothballed | 2025-11-12 16:47:30+00:00
>What analysis when you don't even have a good estimate of the probabilities involved?

Without some analysis, the decision would be irrational. What you're alluding here by discounting a rational analysis but also discounting (in your prior comment) irrationality is that you've set a clever fallacious (and ultimately circular) trap where being rational is irrational and being irrational is rational, therefore you have produced clever gotcha where any counter argument loses. Of course all the meanwhile, appealing to the risk/benefit factor of the probability of extinction of the specious.

>Min-maxing on the other hand is a recipe for extinction as a species, so not a viable strategy

This doesn't come into play on the contextual claim, as there are plenty enough people reproducing in jurisdictions with no effective alimony or child support to continue the species, if somehow everyone were to come to such a decision, which in any case doesn't seem to be a given.

>How specifically is it better?

I suppose I could play Socratic method here as well, and ask why it's better that the species doesn't go extinct. There is no way to objectively prove that's true, so I'll yield we're both making assertions that are subjectively better rather than by some universal law of the universe that it's better off to be under constant threat of imprisonment by the state if you can't come up with enough an extra 20%+ of (imputed, not even actual, so theoretically could be above 100%) income and be hated rather than enjoy some entertainment with AI.
by eddieroger | 2025-11-12 16:47:50+00:00
I had one, too, and in hindsight I regret what an ass I was to the poor substitute teachers who had one job to do for the day and couldn't because I thought it was funny to turn the TV off when they bend down to turn on the VCR.

I also had the one that could do IR messages with other watches, and that was a lot less disruptive and still pretty fun.
by jijijijij | 2025-11-12 16:48:18+00:00
I think this is a fallacious expectation. For most environments, I don't see why there would be selective pressure towards plastic degradation. That is, "burning" plastic as fuel would likely require the absence of an alternative. Obviously this hasn't happened with coal or oil, although those are energy dense fuels. There are already organisms which have the enzymatic means for the break down of some plastics. Given the omnipresence of plastic pollution, if there was selective pressure, we would probably have seen some specialization already. Especially for microbes. It took a looong time before fungi were able to breakdown lignin. Before that, the only thing removing dead trees was fire. So... there is a good chance we are going to see shit all. Especially on land.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-12 16:48:20+00:00
What? The claim is true. The nuance is us discussing if it should be true/allowed. You're simplifying the moral discussion and overall just being rude/dismissive.

Comparing rope and an LLM comes across as disingenuous. I struggle to believe that you believe the two are comparable when it comes to the ethics of companies and their impact on society.
by delecti | 2025-11-12 16:48:27+00:00
Quarters might be premature, but the half-cent was discontinued when it was worth a (modern equivalent) of $0.12-17. Even 20-30 years ago, when I was just starting to interact with money enough to have an opinion, I thought it was a hassle to deal with anything smaller than a quarter. The same logic behind getting rid of pennies (they cost more to make than the face value) also supports doing at least nickels.
by m0llusk | 2025-11-12 16:48:46+00:00
All of the serious problems I have seen with Waymo navigation so far have had to do with busy urban streets. Trying to make use of blocked non through way alleys, turning around in driveways when other vehicles are exiting, coming to a complete dead stop on busy one way streets, failing to brake predictably for pedestrians walking into lanes, suddenly backing up a half block from stopped at a red light in order to change lanes, and so on. Freeways are a simplified driving environment that should suit current technologies well.
by deater | 2025-11-12 16:48:50+00:00
at the time, just out of undergrad, I ended up working for the remnants of the #9 Video Card company that had been bought by S3 and was masking a last effort at making a Linux-based Transmeta-powered "web-pad" (tablet): the "Frontpath ProGear" (new management wouldn't let them give it a Beatles related name that #9 equipment used to get)

in any case due to the unfortunate timing of the dot-com implosion it never really went anywhere (I wish I had managed to keep one, they used to appear on ebay occasionally)

the one thing I remember is that it was memory limited, it had 64MB but I think the code-morphing software really wanted 16MB of it which really cut into the available system memory
by pessimizer | 2025-11-12 16:48:55+00:00
What's more contemptible: that CNN refused to spend the 30 seconds that it would take to do the math; or that it interviewed a "spokesman" that also didn't spend 30 seconds to do the math, and was sure that nobody would check?

This is the kind of article that should be written by AI (or not written, really.) If you completely fictionalized the empty interviews, nothing would be lost.

Maybe the "spokesman" has been told to angle for a government subsidy for the inconvenience of losing pennies? And from a gas station, which add that goofy fraction of a cent at the end of their pricing.
by deltoidmaximus | 2025-11-12 16:49:28+00:00
Was RealPlayer really that horrible or was it just trying to do streaming media on an extremely low bandwidth connection without hardware accelerated and sophisticated codecs? I only really used it with a 28.8K modem netscape and Windows 95. The experience was poor but the experience viewing moderately sized images wasn't great either. I remember at the time encountering MPEG decoder add-in cards (that nobody used), although I suspect video cards started to add these features during the 1990s at some point.
by aprdm | 2025-11-12 16:49:44+00:00
> Also I care too deeply about the quality of the software being developed and am very much perfectionist, which usually translates into lots of frustration for both me and the team.

This is at odds with business needs, very usually. So it doesn't surprise me that you feel people don't listen. Very few business are making money trying to pursue perfect software or quality software - if any.

Like security, trying to be perfectionist won't move any business need/project forward as we all have the real world to deal with, constraints on time / budget / scope are part of decision making
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-12 16:49:48+00:00
> MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great.

And in-between those we had Media Player Classic together with the Combined Community Codec Pack, and once you had MPC + CCCP installed, you could finally view those glorious aXXo-branded 700MB files found on a random DC++ hub.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-12 16:50:19+00:00
I'm not sure about Supercruise (although I am pretty sure its the same), but I know blue cruise is only available in places where there are no stop lights, and that is pretty much 95% interstates only. Supercruise and blue cruise are way under Tesla's FSD, and Tesla is a bit of a ways under Waymo.

You may be thinking of the ACC these cars offer, which is a standard feature, but different than their premium "self-driving" services they offer.
by kjs3 | 2025-11-12 16:50:20+00:00
The goal is to build digital “twins” of the experts on how they debug, architect, and maintain these systems in practice.

The goal is to replace people to 'save money'. And I'm always amused at startup founders who so obviously never worked with real people in real environments (outside of the startup bubble) that they think people are too stupid to see this for what it is. I look forward to their explanation to their investors as to why their product didn't meet expectations because after taking 5-6 seconds to figure out what this new 'tool' was intended to do, the users spent all of their time figuring out how to feed it garbage so it didn't become their besty twin replacement.

We’re curious to hear your thoughts and feedback, especially from anyone who’s worked with mainframes or tried to modernize legacy systems.

Lol.
by timpera | 2025-11-12 16:50:42+00:00
Thanks for sharing! It's pretty rare to see a balanced take from Ed Zitron.

> I also cannot reconcile these numbers with the reporting that OpenAI will have a cash burn of $9 billion in CY2025. On inference alone, OpenAI has already spent $8.67 billion through Q3 CY2025.

This is insane.
by buildbot | 2025-11-12 16:51:12+00:00
Oh someone else is as silly as I am? I hacked this together a few months ago as well! I guess I should have written it up.

I’ve been getting llama.cpp going on various weird, old systems as I can and qwen3.c where llama.cpp has no hope. So far, I’ve tried various sparc generations (IIi, IIIi, Fujitsu M10, and an Oracle M7), a C8900 PA-RISC, some riscv boards, an Alpha 21264, POWER 9, and many X86 and ARM systems of course.
by epolanski | 2025-11-12 16:51:37+00:00
So is the documentation and specs that I'm provided by stakeholders...but I can't prove it..

Suddenly they write very long and detailed documentation, yet they can't remember what's in it.

My gf says that in her banks she suspects half the written communications are ai-authored, which is driving productivity to the ground. Her bank moreover is very aggressive with endless workshops on AI usage (they have some enterprise gemini version).

The more I see the impact of AI, the more worried I am.

I'm not saying it doesn't have use cases, I myself leverage it when coding (albeit I use a man-in-the-middle approach where I ask questions and tinker with it, I never let AI write code except in some very rare boilerplate-y scenarios) and have built products that leverage it.

But it seems like the trend is to increasingly _delegate_ work to it, and I'm seeing more negatives than positives.
by pyrale | 2025-11-12 16:51:41+00:00
All things people used to own 10 years ago. It’s not like the people doing that stuff have vanished.

Cloud’s big promise was speed to market and price, and let’s be honest, price is no longer there compared to a decent operation.

The one thing where clouds remain kings is speed for small teams. Any large enough company should probably Ask themselves whether running their own operation using ias would be a better choice.
by nimbius | 2025-11-12 16:52:26+00:00
Kubernetes is powerful, yes. it is also a feckless rats nest of bolt-ons and ride-alongs. its sharepoint levels of byzantine tuning so complex that, like sharepoint, it comes with its own bespoke administrators that often have little or no knowledge of basic networking or operating systems --only kubernetes--.

- Upgrading a kubernetes cluster may as well be an olympic sport. its so draconian most best practice documentation insists you build a second cluster for AB deployment.

- load balancers come in half a dozen flavours, with the default options bolted at the hip to the cloud cartel. MetalLB is an option, but your admin doesnt understand subnets let alone BGP.

- It is infested with the cult of immutability. pod not working? destroy it. network traffic acting up? destroy the node. container not working? time to destroy it. cluster down? rebuilt the entire thing. At no point does the "devops practitioner" stop to consider why or how a thing of kubernetes has betrayed them. it is assumed you have a football field of fresh bare metal to reinitialize everything onto at a moments notice, failure modes be damned.

what your company likely needs is some implementation of libvirtd or proxmox. run your workloads on rootless podman or (god forbid) deploy to a single VM.
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-12 16:52:38+00:00
This is really interesting and way more compelling evidence to me of gender bias in the LLM than response bias in the prompt and context.

Thank you for taking the time to approach this scientifically and share the evidence with us. I appreciate knowing the truth of the matter, and it seems my suspicion that the bias was from the prompt was wrong.

I admit I am surprised.
by zahlman | 2025-11-12 16:52:43+00:00
As it happens, I do get thus misidentified (per my self-perception) fairly often, because I use a female-presenting avatar on some social media (it relates to prior work). If I notice, and it seems like the other person might care, I do explain; but this is never with any offense (because I have taken none) but only amusement or confusion ("zahlman" matches s/(?<!wo)man/ and I'm not looking at my own avatar generally). I can't recall anyone ever persisting in such "misgendering", but I would not care.

For all I know, countless people refer to me with female pronouns in discussions I can't observe. I get the impression that many people are constantly bothered by such a possibility. I only ever think about it when this exact discussion comes up, and then I simply do not care. I consider that the people in those discussions have the absolute right to do so.

Speaking of which, I have had this exact discussion many times in the last several years, and it's only because of the asking-about-pronouns culture that this is possible. In the decade or more that I knew transgender people in my life before that, none of this mattered and I could get on with my life, and have the same friendly relations with transgender people as cisgender people. There is more social friction now than there was then.
by ethmarks | 2025-11-12 16:53:05+00:00
That's a fair point. Thanks for the detailed response.

I'm curious as to what the scam ads you mention actually are. I use an adblocker most of the time, and most of the adverts that I do see are annoying but fairly innocuous. Furniture, insurance, charter schools, social media apps, shitty mobile games, et cetera. I've seen plenty of slightly scummy adverts, but I can't recall seeing many that are really harmful or blatantly fraudulent. I'm curious to hear what adverts other people are seeing that are so outrageous.
by huevosabio | 2025-11-12 16:53:52+00:00
No, I don't have anything against using LLMs to write. My problem is that I enjoy reading people in part for diversity of style.

I already spend too much time reading LLM outputs on my own interactions. And I get sick of their style because of it. So when I read it during leisure time, it just triggers a gut rejection.

Especially because they are so formulaic / template-y.
by proteal | 2025-11-12 16:54:00+00:00
I tried the new battlefield game and it’s bizarre how some of my friends play it. There’s this expansive battle pass (pay $20/quarter for access, on top of $70 base game) where you’re given tasks in game to make progress towards cosmetics. My friends only play to complete these tasks - the actual combat gameplay loop almost feels secondary to their enjoyment of the game. The modern trend of games becoming chore simulators is worrisome to me because -call me old fashioned- I believe the core gameplay loop should be fun and addictive, not the progression scaffolded on, even if that gameplay loops is a little “distasteful” like GTA.
by bigmealbigmeal | 2025-11-12 16:54:07+00:00
I'm personally a little frustrated with these music theory answers. Trust me folks, these answers are nearly impossible for a non-musician to understand (and even as a musician it's a bit impenetrable).

E minor gives you the exact same amount of options as C major. The options are just shuffled around a little bit. You literally get the same amount of notes in either, just a slightly different set. It isn't any more complex. Listeners aren't going to notice a difference, except one will probably sound happy and one will probably sound sad/angry. The "acceptance volume", to use the blog author's term, isn't any different.

At best, it can change things a little bit for some instruments. For example, with a vocalist, their voice can only go so high. They might be able to hit up to a high C, but not even higher up to an high E. If you're in C major, that's great, the vocalist's highest note (C) is the 'home note' which sounds great (playing a C in C Major makes the song sound like it's 'finished'). If you're E minor, the 'home note' is E, and as mentioned they wouldn't be able to hit that note. So you wouldn't really be able to 'finish' on a high note.

Ultimately, I doubt the author is a musician. It was a strange example to make their point.