MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by l5870uoo9y | 2025-11-25 22:44:26+00:00
> These models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people.

The whole mess surrounding Grok's ridiculous overestimation of Elon's abilities in comparison to other world stars, did not so much show Grok's sycophancy or bias towards Elon, as it showed that Grok fundamentally cannot compare (generalize) or has a deeper understanding of what the generated text is about. Calling for more research and less scaling is essentially saying; we don't know where to go from here. Seems reasonable.
by toshinoriyagi | 2025-11-25 22:44:41+00:00
They don't have to have those. Depending on your definition of "kids", most people on HN I imagine are not giving their kids phones, laptops, or tablets at young ages (maybe less than ~13?). And if they do, I imagine the devices are somewhat locked down and monitored.

I think the more technologically literate a person is, the more wary they are of unfettered access to it for children. Hence, preferring a stationary desktop where use can be supervised.
by delaguardo | 2025-11-25 22:44:46+00:00
> From what I can understand from the specification, the EDN decoder will still need to run and cannot be streamed if the official specification is used

Sorry, you understand it wrong

There is no enclosing element at the top level. Thus edn is suitable for streaming and interactive applications.

> but I don't know if the existing one does

This implementation does not do streaming for now, but it understands a concept of "reading one complete" element from buffer. The only missing part is buffer managment.

> So, the extensibility is still restricted.

Could you explain how it is restricted if you are allowed to run whatever you want during reading of edn document? You can even do IO, no restrictions at all!

Consider this:

#init/postgres {:db-spec {:host "..." :port 54321 ,,,} :specs {:user ,,,}} [#user/id 1 #user/id 2 #user/id 3]

This allows you to have a program that can lookup postgres database during reading of a document validating every returned object using provided spec (conforming the value)

> In my opinion, ASN.1 (and ASN.1X) does it better.

Please show how it does better. I'm very curious
by miffy900 | 2025-11-25 22:45:14+00:00
What name calling? Calling the author 'an unserious person' isn't name calling. Might be worth reading the article:

> "If you like Windows 8’s look, you are a bad person. You are the one Steve Jobs was talking about when he said Microsoft had no taste."

yeah you don't need to read very much of this to know this author hasn't exactly written a substantive article; they certainly aren't bothering to backup their claims with any reasoning. the whole post itself is 'this version of windows was ugly, this one wasn't etc'.
by Viliam1234 | 2025-11-25 22:46:05+00:00
Sadly it's not a joke.

Most people suck at math. Those who don't suck usually have many well-paying jobs available for them. There are lots of schools, so many math teachers are needed.

Put these numbers together, and you realize that there is no way to have math teachers who are actually good at math. The numbers just don't add up.
by nobody9999 | 2025-11-25 22:46:16+00:00
I saw this and was confused.

But it actually seems to be true. Plex is charging you (and anyone you wish to share your media library with) to access your own media library remotely.

Huh? That should be a death sentence for Plex, right?

I can (and do) share my media library with jellyfin and other streaming servers. No one has tried to charge me for doing so.

One of the reasons I didn't use Plex back in 2019 when I was setting up my self-hosted streaming solution was that it required a log in on Plex's servers to play my locally hosted media. Which I thought was a bridge too far.

Now they're trying charge for accessing your own content? WTF?

Edit: I was unaware that Plex also provides "external" (e.g., not your local library) streams as well as locally hosted ones. As such, there's other stuff provided by the "Plex Pass" as well. Not sure if this makes a difference for users, but it certainly doesn't change my mind. That said, I wasn't going to use Plex anyway.

I hope those who do aren't too inconvenienced by the new charges/subscription requirements to play their own media.
by namibj | 2025-11-25 22:46:31+00:00
That was somewhat relevant for data centers years ago when inverters were much more expensive, and even then only for the 20 seconds it took to start the diesel by connecting a simple soft starter to the diesel's induction generator (bringing it up to 50/60 rps (1500/1800 rpm) in about 5 seconds, then waiting for the turbo to spool up before it can deliver full power).

Even on the grid, batteries for sub-hour duration storage are cheap, as long as you place them at an already existing AC/DC converter site like a solar plant (or a modern internally-DC datacenter's centralized grid rectifier (AC/DC converter)).

Or even a HVDC transmission line.

Or a sufficiently modern aluminum/zinc smelter. Pretty much anything large enough to bother that has at least a boost-PFC on the input. Because with those you could just put them there, beef up the capacitor a bit or better yet, use a native 3-phase PFC that doesn't have strong 100/120 Hz ripple on that capacitor, and then literally just control the already there input transistors to do your grid jobs. If it was the very cheap low efficiency rectifier approach, it also needs the rectifier upgraded to be controlled, so just use it on the higher efficiency ones before upgrading the others. (It's like 1% efficiency difference on 240V, and 2% on 120V power supplies.)
by lelandbatey | 2025-11-25 22:46:48+00:00
Gradual growth =/= many tacked on features. Many tacked on features =/= technical debt. Technical debt =/= "everybody is afraid and frozen." Those are merely often correlated, but not required.

Whatsapp is a terrible example because it's barely a product; Whatsapp is mostly a free offering of goodwill riding on the back of actual products like Facebook Ads. A great example would be a product like Salesforce, SAP, or Microsoft Dynamics. Those products are forced to grow and change and adapt and scale, to massive numbers doing tons of work, all while being actual products and being software systems. I think such products act as stark rebukes of what you've described.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-11-25 22:46:50+00:00
> later switched to a low dose of much cheaper grey market semaglutide for maintenance.

Do you plan on staying on a 'low dose' of semaglutide Ad vitam æternam ?

I'm asking because I believe that's one of the negative of these kind of drugs, it's effective at losing weight but as soon as you stop you gain back all the weight whereas learning to eat healthy is slower but more durable.
by elric | 2025-11-25 22:47:21+00:00
Surely that's a conscious design decision? Deciding to create data-carrying POJOs with JPA annotations is a valid strategy. Mixing in a bunch of logic and non-JPA state with them is a recipe for disaster. If you want your classes to Do Stuff, you have to design them to Do Stuff.

I dislike the term "anemic domain model", it casts a value judgment which I think is unwarranted. There's a spectrum from anemic to obese (for want of a better word). There are tradeoffs all along that spectrum. Finding a sweet spot will depend heavily on what you're doing, why you're doing it, what your team is comfortable with etc.
by toraway | 2025-11-25 22:47:45+00:00
(too late to edit but I forgot to include)

A couple years before starting Zepbound I had tried a prescription for naltrexone for 3 or 4 months to reduce drinking which had pretty much zero effect for me. Naltrexone apparently helps for some people and has a similar theorized mechanism acting on reward/pleasure but didn't do anything to break that habit of pouring a drink within the first hour I was back home.

I might have drank slightly less as it was slightly less enjoyable but did nothing for the habitual element which for me was much more problematic than how the alcohol made me "feel" subjectively or the exact number of drinks I had per night.
by underlipton | 2025-11-25 22:47:59+00:00
>and therefore the only real differences that can remain are the genetic differences.

Incidence of undiagnosed digestive and sleep disorders, like celiac disease and sleep apnea, respectively. "Catch-up" growth occurs almost universally after treatment starts, which means that the growth trajectory was lower than the "genetic potential", and likely remains so for children who can't access treatment.

Multiply across any number of silent or untreated disorders, sensitivities, or insufficiencies.

Adult height also isn't 90% heritable in the US. It only reaches that high a percentage of heritability in studies involving closely-related populations. In which case, of course; in populations with low genetic and cultural diversity and moderate or high variability, small differences are magnified.
by vkou | 2025-11-25 22:48:14+00:00
China operates on the principle that as long as the country as a whole is making steady forward progress, it won't have to deal with revolution. Hundreds of millions of people have, in their lifetimes, gone from having to go outside to shit in an outhouse to first-world lifestyles.

Our elites, on the other hand, are way too secure and confident in where they are at to even pretend to care about things like public progress.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-11-25 22:49:08+00:00
> I'd probably hold a reference to the vector or something

In a way that only changes the unsafe block?

> make_slice's responsibility to guarantee the underlying allocation stays alive, and it didn't do that

We çan talk about the simpler code example. How can my unsafe block make sure an allocation stays alive past the unsafe block itself?

> If you're putting responsibility on code in the same function, you're not really treating it as safe code. There's an unsafe{} around the entire function body that you should have written if you were going for maximum clarity

I'm not talking about what should've been done, I'm saying this is something to be aware of on projects with multiple people who may not catch something like this. People think bugs cannot happen in safe code. I just showed it happening. The bug was not in unsafe, or in the drop, it was in println.
by duffyjp | 2025-11-25 22:49:34+00:00
I've never studied it, but my understanding is that like Japanese, Tagalog has the pitched/stressed thing going on. My wife is Japanese and holy cow I can't tell the difference. Bridge or Chopstick? No idea, they sound exactly the same to my ears...

I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.
by shevy-java | 2025-11-25 22:49:43+00:00
> I think people way over-index Python as the language for data science. It has limitations that I think are quite noteworthy. There are many data-science tasks I’d much rather do in R than in Python.

R is kind of a super-specialized language. Python is much more general purpose.

R failed to evolve, let's be honest. Python won via jupyter - I see this used ALL the time in universities. R is used too, but mostly for statistics related courses only, give or take.

Perhaps R is better for its niche, but Python has more momentum and in thus, dominates over R. That's simply the reality of the situation. It is like the bulldozer moving forward, at a fast speed.

> I say “This is great, but could you quickly plot the data in this other way?”

Ok so ... he would have to adjust R code too, right? And finding good info on that is simply harder. He says he has experience with universities. Well, I do too, and my experience is that people are WAY better with python than with R. You simply see that more students will drop out from R than from python. That's also simply the reality of the situation.

> They appear to be sufficiently cumbersome or confusing that requests that I think should be trivial frequently are not.

I am sure the reverse also applies. Pick some python library, do something awesome, then tell the R students to do the same. I bet he will have the same problems.

> So many times, I felt that things that would be just a few lines of simple R code turned out to be quite a bit longer and fairly convoluted.

Ok, so here he is trolling. Flat out - I said it.

I wrote a LOT of python and quite a bit of R. There is no way in life that the R code is more succinct than the python code for about 90% of the use cases out there. Sorry, that's simply not the case. R is more verbose.

> Here is the relevant code in R, using the tidyverse approach:

penguins |> filter(!is.na(body_mass_g)) |> group_by(species, island) |> summarize(

This is like perl. They also don't adapt. R is going to lose grounds.

This professor just hasn't realised that he is slowly becoming a fossil himself, by being unable to see that x is better than y.
by keeda | 2025-11-25 22:49:57+00:00
I meant it more as an observation than an optimistic prediction, really :-)

The article is sound, but it's focus on large public failures disregards the vast, vast, vast majority of the universe of software projects that nobody really thinks about, because they mostly just work -- websites and mobile apps and games and internal LoB CRUD apps and cloud services and the huge ecosystem of open source projects and enterprise and hobby software.

Without some consideration of that, we cannot really generalize this article to reflect the "success rate" of our industry.

That said, I think the acceleration introduced by AI is overall a "Good Thing (tm)" simply because, all else being equal, it's generally better to fail faster rather than later.
by dustfinger | 2025-11-25 22:51:09+00:00
While that is partly what I meant, my notion was really about being creative, inventive and having a lot of fun hacking code or hardware without it being about work. I really meant these notions of hacking:

- https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

- https://stallman.org/articles/happy-hacking.html

- http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
by sershe | 2025-11-25 22:51:22+00:00
I was only talking about the US. I am not familiar with European problems, my outside view is if Europe were more like the US perhaps it wouldn't be poor compared to the US, but I don't know for sure.

In the US, you gave me a short term data and I just gave you a longer term view than gives a fuller picture, as you've tried to discount my taxes data before (even though that data included relevant tax reform years).

Moreover I gave you BLS consumption data. Spending on housing went from 29 to 32% from 1960 to 2000, with no obvious changes in trend. While the median house is 1.5-2x big and quality and safety regulations became more strict. Oh and household sizes decreased iirc. Housing may be becoming less accessible since covid, sure. Any 1980ies welfare state etc changes don't have much to do with that.

Then, Detroit in fact has a massive number of abandoned houses, so yes prices did effectively go to zero. Presumably if they could be sold to anyone they would be, but they are not worth owning https://detroitmi.gov/news/deputy-mayor-detroit-land-bank-au...

Thanks for providing me with this great argument for supply and demand, I will use it in future ;)

"Market gud, democracy bad and I am very smart”, I see"

Vibes, vibes. There's tons of data on this, from micro data to between city comparison. There's even more data on costs, delays and cancellations for larger projects due to reviews and lawsuits. There's a reason California is currently trying to preempt local zoning to encourage more housing, and municipalities are trying to find loopholes around it. That is not data but you can just go on nextdoor and find a bunch of people outraged that developers upzoning their neighbor lot dared to remove 2 trees without a public hearing. If I was choosing between this and Robert Moses with no compromise possible, the latter is definitely a lesser evil than democratic input, and I say it as someone who doesn't usually like the government.

On healthcare you can check this: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o...

Which incidentally also dispelled my previous belief that it was doctor salaries, that is while closer to reality than blaming the insurance (that is a small fraction of the difference between the US and other countries, provider costs being the main issue and insurance being a sin eater), is still mostly wrong. Frankly at this point I'm half supportive of Medicare for all. It won't improve much but at least people will have stfu about evil corporations in this area.

Americans are just very rich. Hence as percentage spent on necessities decreases, percentage spent on other things must increase. Bigger houses too, a little bit; however labor intensive industries with infinite extra spending potential like healthcare, education are "the best positioned" to suck up the increased disposable incomes
by danudey | 2025-11-25 22:51:35+00:00
I'm not sure what your argument is here. We shouldn't be making a fuss about all these prompt injection attacks because they're just inevitable so don't worry about it? Or we should stop being surprised that this happens because it happens all the time?

Either way I would be extremely concerned about these use cases in any circumstance where the program is vulnerable and rapid, automatic or semi-automatic updates aren't available. My Ubuntu installation prompts me every day to install new updates, but if I want to update e.g. Kiro or Cursor or something it's a manual process - I have to see the pop-up, decide I want to update, go to the download page, etc.

These tools are creating huge security concerns for anyone who uses them, pushing people to use them, and not providing a low-friction way for users to ensure they're running the latest versions. In an industry where the next prompt injection exploit is just a day or two away, rapid iteration would be key if rapid deployment were possible.
by Aloisius | 2025-11-25 22:52:01+00:00
> A person with dyslexia, for example, will perform worse on these tests irrespective of their learning speed, learned knowledge, intellectual curiosity, or creativity. This is a form of bias.

No, it's what they were designed to do - help identify people that may need specialized help because issues like learning disabilities.

> To further complicate things these measures typically only account for academic intelligence. Other forms of intelligence include social intelligence, spatial intelligence, creativity, conscientiousness, and so forth.

The two major IQ tests (Stanford Binet and Wechsler) test visual-spatial reasoning, abstract reasoning, verbal and nonverbal reasoning, working memory, processing speed, inductive/deductive reasoning, attention, concentration, etc.

These tests, if properly administered (individually in person by a professional) work well for figuring out who in school needs extra attention or requires further evaluation. Their use beyond that is questionable.
by defrost | 2025-11-25 22:53:29+00:00
Hell of a name for an operation launched to appease a request by the Mexican Government to return labourers to Mexico.

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

If I'm reading that correctly the US wanted the labour, and the Mexican Government wanted the US to enforce stricter control:

Pressure from Mexican agribusiness owners to return laborers from the United States to Mexico prompted increased action by the Mexican government. The labor problems caused crops to rot in Mexican fields because so many laborers had crossed into the U.S. Meanwhile, American agriculture, which was also transitioning to large-scale farms and agribusinesses, continued to recruit illegal Mexican laborers to fulfill its expanding labor requirements.

It would seem that Eisenhower wanted cheap Mexican labour and the Dual US/Mexico programs that provided it - the enforcement to cap the numbers was a condition imposed by Mexico to keep the agricultural labour agreements in place.
by pxc | 2025-11-25 22:53:36+00:00
I don't remember all of the details so I can't remember if that came up in the episode I listened to. But I did listen to an episode where he talked to a (Chinese) guest about China. I discussed it with a Chinese friend at the time, and we both thought the guest was very interesting and well-informed, but the interviewer's questions were sometimes fantastical in a paranoid way, naively ideological, and often even a bit stupid.

It being the first (and so far only) interview of his I'd seen, between that and the AI boosterism, I was left thinking he was just some overblown hack. Is this a blind spot for him so that he's sometimes worth listening to on other topics? Or is he in fact an overblown hack?
by kulahan | 2025-11-25 22:53:38+00:00
I wonder how much dirt cheap labor plays into the affordability of Chinese cars. Is this simply Korea 2.0, where we have a nation on the absolute verge of being a leading nation (economically speaking), but their standard of living hasn't caught up yet, but soon will?

China has a social contract that they've been suffering in poverty for years, rather than experiencing immediate economic benefits, to boost their nation. It's one of the reasons they're so anti-immigration at the moment: they're on the verge of being rewarded for their suffering, at least as far as the general populace is concerned. Obviously how that plays out in reality will be a different question.

Anyways, once these cars start being made by someone who makes a salary that doesn't look like a joke to someone from a modern nation, I imagine their prices will rocket up to match other manufacturers.

I still don't get why people are so shocked that Chinese products are cheap. It has been this way for decades at least.
by asolove | 2025-11-25 22:53:55+00:00
Yes it does.

Today on X, people are having fun baiting Grok into saying that Elon Musk is the world’s best drinker of human piss.

If you hired a paid PR sycophant human, even of moderate intelligence, it would know not to generalize from “say nice things about Elon” to “say he’s the best at drinking piss”.
by teunispeters | 2025-11-25 22:54:34+00:00
Honestly, rust is slightly more readable than obfuscated perl. I think I prefer K&R C, and I don't like K&R C. In terms of readability, maybe equivalent to early Win32 API? [3000 lines to set up API, then call to activate].

With C++ you have a range of readable from - easy and very approachable - to 2000s era Microsoft STL. (where not only is it close to unreadable, many many hidden bugs are ... somewhere. And behaviour is not consistent).

I will admit I don't find Rust quite as unreadable as the 2000s era Microsoft STL, but the latter's one of the things that pushed me far more into Linux dev.

Rust is the kind of language that would push me to write a new language that isn't rust. And maybe work on supporting all the zillion platforms rust doesn't support. Or maybe just stick to C. I'm not a fan, but there are worse, and yeah - there are some C++ libraries out there that are worse. Lots that are better, too, eg llvm source.
by Quothling | 2025-11-25 22:54:45+00:00
I think it depends on where you work. I do quite a lot of work with agentic AI, but it's not like it's much of a risk factor when they have access to nothing. Which they won't have because we haven't even let humans have access to any form of secrets for decades. I'm not sure why people think it's a good idea, or necessary, to let agents run their pipelines, especially if you're storing secrets in envrionment files... I mean, one of the attacks in this article is getting the agent to ignore .gitignore... but what sort of git repository lets you ever push a .env file to begin with? Don't get me wrong, the next attack vector would be renaming the .env file to 2600.md or something but still.

That being said. I think you should actually upscale your party doomsaying. Since the Russian invasion kicked EU into action, we've slowly been replacing all the OT we have with known firmware/hardware vulnerabilities (very quickly for a select few). I fully expect that these are used in conjunction with whatever funsies are being build into various AI models as well as all the other vectors for attacks.