MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jacquesm | 2025-12-08 15:37:09+00:00
I really think it is, this is the exact same thing that keeps going wrong in these conversations over-and-over again. There simply is no common sense, none at all, just a likelihood of applicability. To the point that I even wonder how it is possible to get such basic stuff for which there is an insane amount of support wrong.

I've had an hour long session which essentially revolved around why the landing gear of an aircraft is at the bottom, not at the top of the vehicle (paraphrased for good reasons but it was really that basic). And this happened not just once, but multiple times. Confident declarations followed by absolute nonsense, I've even had - I think it was ChatGPT - try to gaslight me with something along the lines of 'you yourself said' on something that I did not say (this is probably the most person like thing I've seen it do).
by rzerowan | 2025-12-08 15:37:13+00:00
To add to that i think their R&D labs along with HPE were one of the few to innovate on the memristor and actually build some fascinating concept machines.If i rememeber HPE's was 'The Machine'.

Athough i think they just di/dont know how to adapt these to market that isnt a enterprise behemoth , rather than develop/price it so more devs can take a hold and experiment.
by tapoxi | 2025-12-08 15:37:17+00:00
We switched to Redpanda's BYOC product because we couldn't use Confluent Cloud (contractual reasons) and BYOC was a third the price of Confluent for Kubernetes while also being a managed service.

I've been pretty happy with RP performance/cost/functionality wise. It isn't Kafka though, it's a proprietary C++ rewrite that aims for 100% compatibility. This hasn't been an issue in the 2+ years since we migrated prod, but YMMV.
by sophrosyne42 | 2025-12-08 15:37:18+00:00
I am not convinced it is above planetary scale, nor that these are monopolies. For one thing, all the companies you named have competitors, and no company has a distribution center or restaurant in the arctic. There are plenty of other more populated areas that those companies do not serve. Administrative work still requires overhead, and the internet does not remove that burden, otherwise companies wouldn't be scrambling to invest in AI which they expect to reduce this overhead. AI wont entirely remove the administrative overhead either; there are hard economic limits to the efficiency of a bureaucracy.

But more to the point, consider what you're saying. Is the world, viz-a-viz these companies/services that you refer to, worse off than before the internet? Obviously not. In fact, it is substantially better, because higher economies of scale mean mass production for mass consumption. There would be no way you and I could converse this way on our phones without the hyper extensive scaling of production caused by capitalism. This calls into question the concern over scaling. Large scaling and less firms is preferable when they perform a social function.

If co-ops were replaced by big business, this is something everyone should be grateful for. To go back to the industrial revolution example, there were a form of early mutualist co-op that dominated the non-farm market in the pre-capitalist era: the guilds. And the guilds had a stranglehold on handicrafts, apprenticeships, and all manner of specialized production. In order to increase guild profits, the guilds, through their noble patrons, regulated and limited production of all kinds, who was allowed to sell their craft, and all while being worker-owned. And yet these guilds were the true monopoly: they used legal privileges granted through lobbying to the kings to limit production and raise prices. Their products were exclusively for the wealthy and privileged. On the other hand, it was the capitalists that found a loophole in this system that condemned people to poverty and starvation: the mass production with unskilled labor by manufactories. And, through the manufactory system, they smashed the guilds, producing tons of goods for the everyday man, contributing greatly to the prosperity over and above the medieval system that we see today.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-08 15:37:45+00:00
And even if there is a 20% of executives actually believe in "We should learn from HashiCorp", usually not even that is enough to counter-act the default mode of operation which is squeezing customers. GLHF to remaining HashiCorp believers, but personally I'd try to find alternatives for the software you use from them if you haven't already.
by DennisP | 2025-12-08 15:37:54+00:00
You're assuming that the AI's true underlying goal isn't "make paperclips" but rather "do what humans would prefer."

Making sure that the latter is the actual goal is the problem, since we don't explicitly program the goals, we just train the AI until it looks like it has the goal we want. There have already been experiments in which a simple AI appeared to have the expected goal while in the training environment, and turned out to have a different goal once released into a larger environment. There have also been experiments in which advanced AIs detected that they were in training, and adjusted their responses in deceptive ways.
by markus_zhang | 2025-12-08 15:38:32+00:00
I think we had a good run with computer technology since the 50s and accelerated by the 80s when micro computers made history.

My view of technical climate change is: it's usually good for the ordinary, educated people in the first few decades, because diversity and competition make the old caste difficult to keep up so they need to adjust and wait until the whole movement slows down. And then they swallow the whole thing down.

We have had a good run and now it is time for them to reap the fruits.

The other thing that I'm a bit more worried is, each technological advance first IMPROVES but eventually REDUCES the rate of success of violent revolutions. And violent revolution is the antidote for human societies.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-08 15:38:34+00:00
...yes?

I like good recommendations better than bad recommendations. The value I get is better recommendations.

Like, I literally update the categories of things I'm interested in, in my Google profile, so I get less useless ads.

People complain about bad and useless recommendations and irrelevant ads all the time. Personalization is how you get better ones.
by noahbp | 2025-12-08 15:39:03+00:00
The Paramount+ user interface on my Samsung TV is horrendous.

It frequently crashes after displaying ads, forcing me to re-open the app and watch ads again.

When watching ads does succeed (all 3 minutes of them…) and playback of my show begins, it shows the enormous pause button, the giant fade-to-black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, and covers up the subtitles, as though I had pressed ‘Play’.

And trying to pause requires you to press the pause button TWICE.

I tried to play a series, but instead of starting from the last-played episode + 1, it always plays the most recent episode since it’s a rewatch. This happened every time until I got caught up.

So I strongly disagree. If only to be able to watch all of this content without all of frustrating design flaws.

EDIT: They also end each episode with 2-3 minutes of ads. So you had to exit the show, then re-enter to not get hit with two ad breaks in a row.
by jtbaker | 2025-12-08 15:39:14+00:00
``` BREAKING CHANGE The following packages are removed from the Pyodide distribution because of the build issues. We will try to fix them in the future: arro3-compute arro3-core arro3-io Cartopy duckdb geopandas ... polars pyarrow pygame-ce pyproj zarr ```

https://pyodide.org/en/stable/project/changelog.html#version...

Bummer, looks like a lot of useful geo/data tools got removed from the Pyodide distribution recently. Being able to use some of these tools in a Worker in combination with R2 would unlock some powerful server-side workflows. I hope they can get added back. I'd love to adopt CF more widely for some of my projects, and seems like support for some of this stuff would make adoption by startups easier.
by thesz | 2025-12-08 15:39:28+00:00
> We know this because we can test what aspects of neurons actually lead to practical real world effects.

Electric current is also quantum phenomena, but it is also very averaged in most circumstances that lead to practical real world effects.

What is wonderful here is that contemporary electronics wizardry that allowed us to have machines that mimic some of thinking, also is very concerned of the quantum-level electromagnetic effects at the transistor level.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-12-08 15:39:51+00:00
I don't even know when I ran into a game that didn't run off Steam on Linux. There's some fiddling gamescope on Wayland to get them to perform well, but most just run out of the box with great performance.

The stuff that doesn't work typically don't work because kernel level anticheats, so a few competitive titles but even in that space many titles still run.
by xpe | 2025-12-08 15:39:52+00:00
I don't recommend this article for at least three reasons. First, it muddles key concepts. Second, there are better things to read on this topic. You could do worse that starting with "Conflating value alignment and intent alignment is causing confusion" by Seth Herd [1]. There is no shame in going back to basics with [2] [3] [4] [5]. Third, be very aware that people seek comfort in all sorts of ways. One sneaky way to is convince oneself that "capability = alignment" as a shortcut to feeling better about the risks from unaligned AI systems.

I'll look around and try to find more detailed responses to this post; I hope better communicators than myself will take this post sentence-by-sentence and give it the full treatment. If not, I'll try to write something more detailed myself.

[1]: https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/83TbrDxvQwkLuiuxk/confl...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignment

[3]: https://www.aisafetybook.com/textbook/alignment

[4]: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/paul-christiano-c...

[5]: https://blog.bluedot.org/p/what-is-ai-alignment
by coldtea | 2025-12-08 15:40:02+00:00
>but simply because they operate at the level of words, not facts. They are language models.

Facts can be encoded as words. That's something we also do a lot for facts we learn, gather, and convey to other people. 99% of university is learning facts and theories and concept from reading and listening to words.

Also, even when directly observing the same fact, it can be interpreted by different people in different ways, whether this happens as raw "thought" or at the conscious verbal level. And that's before we even add value judgements to it.

>All they store are language statistics, boiling down to "with preceding context X, most statistically likely next words are A, B or C".

And how do we know we don't do something very similar with our facts - make a map of facts and concepts and weights between them for retrieving them and associating them? Even encoding in a similar way what we think of as our "analytic understanding".
by scotty79 | 2025-12-08 15:40:36+00:00
> The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database.

It's the cost of it being out of control of any single party. Efficiency and convenience are worth nothing if you have a system someone can just wipe out or manipulate.

Have you experienced hyperinflation in your lifetime? Have the generational assets of your family been seized by totalitarian government? I think you'd understand better if you lived through events where your wealth very painfully was just an "entry" in the efficient system someone else controls (badly).
by zucked | 2025-12-08 15:40:54+00:00
Was this with the little turle as your cursor? Seeing the "older" kids who could manipulate that program/language to make stopmotion movies might have been the moment that set me on the path of "technology enthusiast" for the rest of my life. The scene of the dimmed computer lab with a whole group gathered around someone's monitor to watch the newest creation is forever etched in my memory.
by nosianu | 2025-12-08 15:41:09+00:00
The human world model is based on physical sensors and actions. LLMs are based on our formal text communication. Very different!

Just yesterday I observed myself acting on an external stimulus without any internal words (this happens continuously, but it is hard to notice because we usually don't pay attention to how we do things): I sat in a waiting area of a cinema. A woman walked by and dropped her scarf without noticing. I automatically without thinking raised arm and pointer finger towards her, and when I had her attention pointed behind her. I did not have time to think even a single word while that happened.

Most of what we do does not involved any words or even just "symbols", not even internally. Instead, it is a neural signal from sensors into the brain, doing some loops, directly to muscle activation. Without going through the add-on complexity of language, or even "symbols".

Our word generator is not the core of our being, it is an add-on. When we generate words it's also very far from being a direct representation of internal state. Instead, we have to meander and iterate to come up with appropriate words for an internal state we are not even quite aware of. That's why artists came up with all kinds of experiments to better represent our internal state, because people always knew the words we produce don't represent it very well.

That is also how people always get into arguments about definitions. Because the words are secondary, and the further from the center of established meaning for some word you get the more the differences show between various people. (The best option is to drop insisting of words being the center of the universe, even just the human universe, and/or to choose words that have the subject of discussion more firmly in the center of their established use).

We are text generators in some areas, I don't doubt that. Just a few months ago I listened to some guy speaking to a small rally. I am certain that not a single sentence he said was of his own making, he was just using things he had read and parroted them (as a former East German, I know enough Marx/Engels/Lenin to recognize it). I don't want to single that person out, we all have those moments, when we speak about things we don't have any experiences with. We read text, and when prompted we regurgitate a version of it. In those moments we are probably closest to LLM output. When prompted, we cannot fall back on generating fresh text from our own actual experience, instead we keep using text we heard or read, with only very superficial understanding, and as soon as an actual expert shows up we become defensive and try to change the context frame.
by spicybbq | 2025-12-08 15:41:15+00:00
> And if you are starting a new project, why would you pick Java over Kotlin?

I've written multiple production services in Kotlin Spring Boot. Now, we're building a new system and using Java 21 (25 soon).

Why? Kotlin the language is great, but there are corresponding tradeoffs in interop. Meanwhile, Java the language has improved to the point that it's good enough, and Java feels like it's headed in the right direction. In my opinion, AI models are better at Java than Kotlin. If you prefer a weaker claim, the models are trained on more Java code than Kotlin code.

Finally, from an enterprise perspective, it is a safer long-term investment for a Java shop to own an application written in Java rather than in Kotlin.
by zephen | 2025-12-08 15:41:30+00:00
IMO, Python was an acceptable lisp even before it grew generators and decorators.

True lisp adherents view lack of differentiating syntax as an unalloyed good, but that cuts against the grain of how humans have communicated with each other for millennia.

You'd think the current crop of people who grew up texting each other without syntax might be a better fit for it, but then you run smack dab into the fact that the minimal required syntax is, in fact, actually required, and very important, to boot.
by kachapopopow | 2025-12-08 15:41:57+00:00
When I was in japan the earthquakes were oddly exciting rather than scary, had three different ones while I was there that visibly shook rather heavy objects around. Two being in a building and one outside.

It was rather interesting seeing things shift around leaving a permanent imprint that there was in-fact an earthquake and it wasn't some kind of illusion when earthquakes these size couple of decades ago would cause non zero amount of damage.

Although, I am scared for tokyo about the predicted earthquake that would push all these systems near the breaking point and even beyond it, but hopefully the past in not prediction of the feature and instead it'll just be a lot of smaller earthquakes.
by ifh-hn | 2025-12-08 15:41:57+00:00
This looks good. I'm currently enjoying nushell. I like the built in http server and appreciate the built in mysql functionality. For me though sqlite would be a better fit for a language like this, small and portable that it is.

Sometimes simplicity passes complexity into the user. One of the reasons I'm likely nushell is the built in functionality, for example, the ability to natively open CSV,JSON,XML,etc files.

Are there plans to add other functionality?
by ralferoo | 2025-12-08 15:42:02+00:00
It was relatively OK to deal with when the pages were created by coders themselves.

But then DreamWeaver came out, where you basically drew the entire page in 2D and it spat out some HTML tables that stitched it all back together again, and the freedom it gave our artists in drawing in 2D and not worrying about the output meant they went completely overboard with it and you'd get lots of tiny little slices everywhere.

Definitely glad those days are well behind us now!
by keehee | 2025-12-08 15:42:04+00:00
Just wanted to verify how far you are willing to go to get a list generated for you that’s probably not even that unique from the other Y number of people who love being suggested obvious information.

How many combinations of the restaurants around you do you think exist and are needed to provide that information? Certainly need Uber guzzling down Terabytes of data to rank the local Chiles over the local Applebees.

Lets be honest, restaurant suggestions aren’t a real problem anyone has.
by morkalork | 2025-12-08 15:42:04+00:00
The allegation that driver payouts are manipulated to:

1) Hook new drivers with better than average rates before tapering off 2) Take into account the age/model/value of the vehicle and what payments for it would look like in the market and dole out enough to cover costs but not "too much" that they're getting ahead of other drivers

Totally baseless and sourceless hearsay tho. Still, if true, really plays into the image of "there's no depth they won't go".
by hoistbypetard | 2025-12-08 15:42:09+00:00
That depends on your workload. I've been using Excel since 1993, and I find the things I've listed help me get things done just as well as Excel does, unless I have a pile of macros and vbscript I need to interop with.

This is not theoretical; I learned it by needing to get shit done in a context where having an activated copy of Excel wasn't practical. Excel was paralleled and in one case surpassed.
by ilkhan4 | 2025-12-08 15:42:22+00:00
A few questions/comments after skimming the docs:

- How does authz work? Can I use Postgres RLS? If not, how would you address row or column-level permissions in a system that uses this? - If you're using logical replication to sync with PG, is there a limit to the number of clients you can have connected? I see there is a lot of work around de-duping live queries, but how well does that work in practice? - Any thought to making an extension for Postgres? My main hesitation right now is that I have to go through an NPM package to use this but a lot of our tooling expects a plain Postgres connection. - REALLY looking forward to seeing how the schema migration story looks.

Overall, it seems to address most of the use-cases where I'd reach for an ORM or API server so I'm really interested to see where this could go.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-08 15:42:41+00:00
https://www.protondb.com/dashboard

> Top 10 - 20% Platinum - 30% Gold - 10% Silver - 30% Bronze - 10% Borked

I'd probably say at least Gold is "reliably click and play without fiddling", so probably we're around 20-50% there right now, if we consider the top 10 games on Steam. Once you start considering top 100 or top 1000, it starts to look a lot better. But still, mainstream games are lagging seemingly.
by bhawks | 2025-12-08 15:42:47+00:00
J2ME was an alphabet soup of incompatible implementations stuck somewhere between Java 1.2 and 1.3. Getting code to run across device manufacturers was a huge engineering burden. In fact doing something like JetPack for that world would be technically impossible.

If Sun was offering some technically relevant foundation for the smartphone era, it would have been able to actually have some adoption. They were starting from a leading position (obviously - see blackberry or Nokia), and in the space of 3 to 4 years they completely disappeared.
by igogq425 | 2025-12-08 15:42:53+00:00
You have articulated the same freedom twice here.

I live in a city where I can be fairly certain that I will not be the victim of a robbery. I don't need to carry a weapon or otherwise appear defensible. This type of crime simply does not exist here (or only to a very limited extent). That is “freedom from.” If I had the right to carry a firearm to defend myself in the event of a robbery, that would be “freedom to.” These two forms of freedom can be distinguished in a very clear-cut way. One allows you to do certain things. The other ensures that negative events do not occur. In North America, the cultural focus seems to be primarily on “freedom to.” But I would consider it a massive restriction of my freedom if I could not walk through my neighborhood at night without worry, even if I had the right to carry a firearm for protection.

Your semantic sleight of hand cannot reflect the difference between someone who feels safe because they believe they can and are allowed to defend themselves against danger (freedom to defend oneself) and someone who feels safe because they believe there is no danger (freedom from danger). However, there is a clearly discernible qualitative difference between these two freedoms. Otherwise, there would be no difference in terms of freedom between walking through Caracas, Tijuana, Port-au-Prince, or Pietermaritzburg with a firearm in your pocket and walking completely unarmed through Abu Dhabi, The Hague, or Trondheim.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-12-08 15:42:54+00:00
I think you've got it back to front.

DEI is to prevent the kind of favouritism/nepotism that prevails in a lot of society (e.g. "the old boys club"). A suitable example would be the recent hires by the U.S. administration - people are being given high ranking jobs just because they're loyal/friendly to a certain person and nothing at all to do with their competency to do the particular job.

The purpose of DEI is to allow the most qualified person to get the job despite the overt racism and sexism in society.
by tapoxi | 2025-12-08 15:43:13+00:00
I'd just go AMD. The drivers there are much more mature due to Google and Valve contributions, and the performance of an 9070 XT is great while being cheaper than the equivalent 5070 Ti. FSR4 is a solid competitor to DLSS and works in any game that supports FSR 3.1.

Anti-cheats won't work, I keep a Windows drive just for Battlefield 6.
by rtkwe | 2025-12-08 15:43:14+00:00
That's proved to be an idea only held up by the fig leaf of norms like the independence of the DOJ and the idea of the other two branches actually acting as a check on the others. Instead after the 70 year project we now have a compliant Supreme Court rubber stamping practically every action and flirting with ratifying the unitary executive as law. That plus a compliant Congress either ideologically aligned or cowed by the idea of his power over the voters means we very much have a President able to exert huge amounts of influence over companies.