MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ben_w | 2025-12-01 22:22:07+00:00
> My guess is that the "old guard" who made the original technical decisions all left, and since it's been almost impossible to hire a frontend engineer since ~2020 or so that wasn't a JavaScript/React-first developer the weight of industry fashion became too much to resist.

I very much hope not, but fear you're right.

I'm (theoretically) an iPhone app developer, and I really dislike the Reactive idiom: I can see the theoretical benefits, but in practice, the magic glue has never worked right, and comes at a painful performance cost. React is to me what LLMs are to LLM-skeptics.

I'm retraining anyway due to LLMs and how well they eat UI, but I don't yet know where I'll end up next.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-12-01 22:22:08+00:00
I wouldn't argue against that at all: OOBE is absolutely a feature.

Problem is, we don't all agree with what the OOBE should be. I, for example, always strip out menus, tabs, and other UI features. For me, the terminal that requires the least lines in the config file is probably going to be the winner (assuming no unfixable defects that effect me).
by bunderbunder | 2025-12-01 22:22:08+00:00
I've run into what I think might be an even bigger problem with the "just keep reading/outputting the next token" design: there's no going backwards.

This means that LLMs don't do well with input where text that comes later in the input alters how text that came earlier should be interpreted. Which is really quite common in practice.

Humans like to do things where you start with a dump of information, and then ask questions about it afterward. If a human reader didn't remember something pertinent to the question, they can go back and re-read now that they know what they're looking for. An LLM can't do that by itself. You can paper over that limitation with hacks, but they're hacky and unreliable.

Humans also correct misunderstandings and resolve ambiguities after the fact. LLMs have a really hard time with this. Once one way of interpreting some text has already made it into the LLM's context vectors, it can be surprisingly difficult for subsequent text to significantly alter that interpretation.

It's these sorts of aggravating failure modes stemming from a fundamental feature of the algorithm that seem to always produce the next AI winter. Because they tend to mean the same thing: research has gone down (and then, quote often, massively over-invested in) yet another blind alley that doesn't put us on a short easy path to AGI any more than the previous 75 years' worth of breakthroughs have. And getting out of it is going to involve not only fixing that one problem, but also a huge reset on some substantial portion of whatever tools and techniques were built up to paper over the previous algorithm's limitations in an effort to generate positive ROI on all that massive over-investment.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-01 22:23:03+00:00
The only possible way to return to open standards and protocols would be to make a closed protocol illegal.

That was vaguely the state of things before the DMCA here in the US. Sega had no legal ability to stop other companies from selling cartridges that played on a genesis for example, and in one court case the Judge ruled that the company was legally right to breach Sega's trademark rights to achieve that interoperability. Sony, Nintendo, and others all lost similar suits about trying to restrict interoperability with their products and software.

In fact, Sega was going to lose that case so badly, and the precedent was so clearly beneficial to the consumer and market, that they chose to settle it to prevent the precedent from being established. That this is something you can choose to do well after it becomes obvious how the case should end is an atrocious feature of the US "justice" system. You shouldn't get to take a case all the way to a verdict, and then have an appeals court poke holes in your claims and then say "actually we don't want any of this on the record anymore"

The DMCA as written makes it very easy to prevent interoperability by law simply with a bit of code here or there to make token efforts to prevent access.
by 0xbadc0de5 | 2025-12-01 22:23:38+00:00
No. The absence of evidence is not evidence of presence. There are solid scientific reasons to suspect we might be alone in our local volume of the universe. IMHO, these reasons now outweigh the arguments in favour of alien intelligence. The default scientific position is skepticism. It is an abundance of proof that is required to overcome it, not "belief." Belief in the absence of evidence is not a scientific position.

I do find it to be a curious coincidence that "belief" in aliens visiting earth shares so many characteristics with devout religious belief. Just replace OP's references to aliens with references to the deity of choice and you'll get the idea.
by alanbernstein | 2025-12-01 22:23:50+00:00
Before reading the article, I interpreted the quotation marks in the headline as addressing this exact issue. The author even describes dark patterns as a product of design.

For an LLM which is fundamentally more of an emergent system, surely there is value in a concept analogous to old fashioned dark patterns, even if they're emergent rather than explicit? What's a better term, Dark Instincts?
by Milpotel | 2025-12-01 22:23:59+00:00
> I guess wikipedia doesn't agree with you:

Are you kidding? Bind has been the de facto standard for DNS servers for ages but it's just a badly engineered piece of software and had braindead vulnerabilities for decades:

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-64/p...

Already 20 years ago it was common knowledge to never use software that Paul Vixie had touched (bind, vixie-cron, sendmail ...) and we used alternatives such as djbdns. Good old times...
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-01 22:24:21+00:00
"The irony is with those who believe that thievery is wrong. She obviously didn't believe what she wrote because her actions reveal she was OK accepting when the thieve gave her your property to make up for the theft she suffered earlier"

FTFY.

She didn't steal from the thieve, she became complicit with the thieve stealing other people's work to get their money back (gracefully handed by the thieve).
Cloudflare timeout on using DeepSeek via Novita API
by t917910 | 2025-12-01 22:24:39+00:00
I use DeepSeek through the Novita service. Unlike Nebius, Novita has more models, new models appear earlier, and inference on them runs faster. But what do I see today when I try to use DeepSeek 3.2?

A timeout occurred Error code 524 Visit cloudflare.com for more information. api.novita.ai Host Error What happened? The origin web server timed out responding to this request.

In other words: the model is new, smart, thinks for a long time, the context is huge too, the server doesn’t respond for ages, and our beloved proxy Cloudflare (which has decided to replace the entire Internet) happily kills the connection. (yes, request body contains "stream": true)

Tell me (this is a rhetorical question): who exactly came up with the idea that in the OpenAI protocol the only option available is streaming? Which FAANG genius was that? In my opinion, this is how long-running requests to a server should work:

The client sends a request and immediately receives a task identifier. The client polls the server for the task status and reads the response (buffered in server) in chunks.

Is that hard to implement? Does it require ten interview rounds? Why is it that in my boring enterprise API, when working with, shall we say, leisurely third-party services, my API worked exactly the way I described above? And why didn’t these hyper-smart AI people (the world experts in high-speed matrix multiplication) do the same?

Tell me, what do you think: how exactly does Novita expect people to use long-thinking models if their proxy has a 60-second timeout?

After all, the SSH protocol has special empty keep-alive packets to prevent timeout disconnects. TCP has keep-alive packets.

Windows 2000 already supported SIO_KEEPALIVE_VALS for sockets. That was twenty-five years ago. Supported, as you can see, by Windows (the system that all real hackers despise), and modern data scientists despise it too (they have MacBooks, blue hair, and were born in 1999).

So why haven’t the geniuses of the AI industry thought of keep-alive in SSE? Their API could just send empty events so Cloudflare wouldn’t die.
by Estuary | 2025-12-01 22:25:00+00:00
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by maayan-crux | 2025-12-01 22:25:25+00:00
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by next_xibalba | 2025-12-01 22:25:29+00:00
"Small brainstorming" is a bad meeting flavor? Not sure I agree with that. I find that brainstorming meetings with >3 people turn into trainwrecks.

Otherwise, very good. I once did something similar for a company that I worked at. It made little difference, even though I presented it to 80+ office workers at my site. You really need some enforcement from a senior person to get this stuff to take hold. But its worth it. Meetings are a massive source of time waste for most companies.
by Mehvix | 2025-12-01 22:26:01+00:00
The gains from MoE is that you can have a large model that's efficient, it lets you decouple #params and computation cost. I don't see how anthropomorphizing MoE <-> brain affords insight deeper than 'less activity means less energy used'. These are totally different systems, IMO this shallow comparison muddies the water and does a disservice to each field of study. There's been loads of research showing there's redundancy in MoE models, ie cerebras has a paper[1] where they selectively prune half the experts with minimal loss across domains -- I'm not sure you could disable half the brain and notice a stupefying difference.

[1] https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/reap
by DeepSeaTortoise | 2025-12-01 22:26:12+00:00
IMO the goal is a bit different. It'd be just way too much data to track people successfully, even with on-device filtering, especially because everyone with ill intentions would just use non-backdoored devices for their malicious activities.

A much more achievable goal is digging up dirt on specific people and opponents. In the end governments can struggle to justify how they got their hands on info about an affair you had or that you shocked dogs ~~on stream~~.

Such device backdoors are just a get-out-court-free card and a way for the media to justify not asking any serious questions.
by grvdrm | 2025-12-01 22:26:32+00:00
Could NYT also produce two more guides?

1. How To Use Teams/Slack/Etc.

2. How To Use Email

Meeting optimization is great, but I don't want to spend my entire day in Teams/Slack messages with people that start messages saying "hi" with no follow-up.

Same with email. Email is not chat! Don't send me 10 1-line emails a day. Call me instead. Or send me 1 10-line email. Make email intentional and high-value.

Point being: if any one of (1) email, or (2) chat, or (3) meetings is not working well, I bet you have problems in either or both of the others.
by verdverm | 2025-12-01 22:26:34+00:00
I've been working on a custom coding agent and the experience has only raised more questions like yours.

One thing I've done is have some tool calls not return the result directly, but rather write them to a shared state, where they are put into the system context on the next turn. I did this because the LLM kept calling the `read_file` tool and blew up it's context. This "shared cache" fixes that by only allowing one copy of a file to ever be in the context/prompt. There was also emergent behavior of them using the cache for storing plans or thoughts, so I made that a first class principle and it "works" pretty great (making, following, updating the plan), but it is unclear if it actually results in better outcomes (insufficient evaluation capabilities, generally in the field)

I'm still unsure if the file-in-cache idea is a good one, but at least I can now find out with the deep access and customization of my agentic setup

One piece of advice I received just before starting this journey was...

"Give your agents great tools and then get out of the way"
by bookluvr416 | 2025-12-01 22:26:35+00:00
Location: Philadelphia, PA Remote: preferably remote, open to on-site/hybrid Willing to relocate: no Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, HTML, HTML5, CSS, CSS3, Ruby on Rails, Next.js, GraphQL, Tailwind CSS, Node.js, FHIR, AWS, SQL, MySQL Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wM8WgWAht1_NE5M2Xir6EDaijJZzIkLV/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108591034527128282853&rtpof=true&sd=true Email: amandawitecki(at)gmail(dot)com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-witecki-586334135/

About me: I'm a senior software engineer with over 10 years of strong engineering experience in the healthcare IT space. I have a proven track record of delivering impactful web applications across full-stack and front-end development, and I bring to the table not just technical skills but engineering leadership skills. I've advocated for best practices, helped shape my team's direction, and contributed to leadership discussions in addition to leading technical investigations and leading/facilitating aspects of agile sprints such as planning, pointing, and demos.

I'm not limiting myself to opportunities using the technologies I already know; I would love to continue growing my technical skills.
by prescriptivist | 2025-12-01 22:26:46+00:00
Unless there is not something I am seeing, people aren't racing to move to rural New England. Maybe it's retirees, red to blue state migrations, or remote workers. But I haven't seen a ton of evidence of that. People didn't really migrate out here before covid and I don't think enough people have to justify the rise in prices.

Personally I think people that otherwise would be selling are sitting on their homes because of the interest rates and this is causing a strange feedback loop of low turnover causing low supply which in turn causes new buyers to accept the prices (probably with a hope that interest rates will come down and they can re-fi in the years to come). I also think a non-trivial number of houses that on the market due to the owners passing or going into retirement homes are sitting there on the market because prices are so high but the only money the family is out is taxes. Or they are being turned into rental units, since rental prices are out of whack in these areas too.

My point I guess is where I live we haven't seen a big influx of population (probably the opposite) or significant job or wage growth to make sense of the increase in housing prices. I guess at the end of the day people are just stretching themselves further and sending more money to the banks in the form of interest to get into homes that were literally half the price in 2019. Strange times.
by ethbr1 | 2025-12-01 22:27:16+00:00
On the location vs price front, I think that's a bit of a red herring.

Because people generally want to live close to their jobs.

If cities have a lot of demand, it's partly because they have a lot of jobs, which means that the price of housing in cities relative to income is still an important metric.

Viewed by holding more of those things constant, the urban medianHousePrice : medianIncome is how much of people's lives we're requiring they dedicate in order to have a roof over their heads.
by 999900000999 | 2025-12-01 22:27:22+00:00
I've tried switching to hardware sequencers multiple times.

I just don't like it. I came of age making beats in Fruity Loops. I'll gladly drop another 200$ or 300$ just to make things easier.

I do have some dreams of making an open source sequencer that runs directly off a raspberry pi. Something like a fully open source MPC.

Some projects like this exist, but it's still more difficult than I'd like.

Maybe one day in the distant future Apple will make affordable laptops. A MacBook that takes a standard 2280 SSD would be amazing.

Never going to happen though. That's where the money is.
by vladsh | 2025-12-01 22:27:25+00:00
LLMs get over-analyzed. They’re predictive text models trained to match patterns in their data, statistical algorithms, not brains, not systems with “psychology” in any human sense.

Agents, however, are products. They should have clear UX boundaries: show what context they’re using, communicate uncertainty, validate outputs where possible, and expose performance so users can understand when and why they fail.

IMO the real issue is that raw, general-purpose models were released directly to consumers. That normalized under-specified consumer products, created the expectation that users would interpret model behavior, define their own success criteria, and manually handle edge cases, sometimes with severe real world consequences.

I’m sure the market will fix itself with time, but I hope more people would know when not to use these half baked AGI “products”
by tacker2000 | 2025-12-01 22:27:28+00:00
yea, 40k is not the "real cost" of the birth, if he includes his + the wife's health insurance premiums in the calculation.

$25,680 premium + $14,300 deductible = $39,980 annual cost

So actually if we compare this with a European country, it would be an almost similar amount in the end: there is no deductible, but health insurance/social security taxes can absolutely reach around 2k-3k per month if you earn enough.
by simoncion | 2025-12-01 22:27:31+00:00
> ...Elden Ring uses EZ Anti-Cheat and it works on linux and that game is infested with PvP cheaters.

I would question how good Elden Ring's use of EAC actually is.

Given that -at launch-

* Players who were using a Japanese locale couldn't play the game unless they removed EAC

* Removing EAC substantially reduced the amount of incredibly noticeable hitching and stuttering

my hunch is that EAC was hastily slapped on very, very late in the process due to demands from some US-based PHB.
by estimator7292 | 2025-12-01 22:27:54+00:00
It's been a weird experience for sure. Last week I spent 20 minutes sorting wires while the AI did a refactor that would have taken 2-6 hours by hand.

I'm not sure how I feel about it. On one hand, in certain situations it speeds up my work 10x. On the other, it's way, way too easy to just stop thinking and have the AI iterate on a problem for an hour or two only to end up with utter gibberish, revert everything, and realize the fix was trivial with the slightest application of critical thinking.

I'm certainly a faster programmer with AI, but I'm not sure if I'm any more productive or producing better code instead of just more.

The one thing it's utterly amazing at is my most hated part: going from a blank page to something. Once there's some code and a hint of structure, it's much easier for me to get started.

I will say that I was shocked at how well codex handled "transform this react native typescript into a C++ library". I estimated a week or two of manual refactoring. Codex did it in half an hour (and used 25% of my weekly token budget).
by Nevermark | 2025-12-01 22:28:09+00:00
> You're blind to all the negative side effects

I didn't comment on negative effects one way or the other.

Most of the problems you point out are enabled and motivated by conflict of interest business models. I.e. surveillance that enables and incentivizes targeted ads, targeted manipulation, and addictive media.

Parasitical, privacy violating and dark pattern business models are like bad security. We can't afford them any more. AI is going to make that already very clear point clearer and clearer ... until maybe people wake up and legislate those types of businesses away.

Blaming AI (for those kinds of problems) won't achieve anything. As with any tool, AI is just getting more effective. Might as well blame faster processors too.

And it gives the actual culprits, the people who profit from poison, a pass and cover.

Profitable, scalable, conflicts of interest are poison.
by bmandale | 2025-12-01 22:28:18+00:00
So to summarize: a. you're paying that for health insurance, not for the birth of the child. If you, your wife, your children had any other diseases then those would be covered as well. This is a significant benefit. b. all the systems that subsidize health care for those less well off don't apply because you're wealthy. So you are bearing the full cost of extremely high quality health insurance in a western country.