MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by everdrive | 2025-12-09 14:21:47+00:00
I don't see advertisements often, but I had to fly for work recently and of course saw advertisements in the airport. One of the ads was for "Teen Instagram" with "automatic protections." Kind of depressing. It's a bit like someone selling teen cigarettes, they're a bit more mild and you can graduate to "adult cigarettes" when you're ready. I'm not sure government banning is solution, but there's clearly no good done by the existence of social media. It's a strange problem, and ultimately the issue is that people just cannot regulate their behavior in this area.
by GhosT078 | 2025-12-09 14:21:55+00:00
Yes it really was quite good despite all the hate it seems to get in internet comments. I used it for several years. The feature set, particularly config specs and dynamic views, was brilliant. The product was pretty mature and complete 25 years ago. I agree that administration was complicated and performance could be slow if misconfigured. We configured right, it was very intuitive and pleasant to use. IBM has effectively killed it by continuing to charge an excessive premium while adding nothing significant since they bought Rational (for Clearcase, DOORS, Apex etc.)
by virgil_disgr4ce | 2025-12-09 14:22:21+00:00
Hooray, actual user research and data!! This is what I tell all my clients: "We can speculate all day long, but we don't have to. The users will tell us the correct answer in about 5 minutes."

It's amazing that even in a space like this, of ostensibly highly analytical folks, people still get caught up arguing over things that can be settled immediately with just a little evidence.
by bigfishrunning | 2025-12-09 14:22:31+00:00
Except it isn't thinking. It is applying a model of statistical likelihood. The real issue is that it's been sold as thinking, and laypeople believe that it's thinking, so it is very likely that jobs will be eliminated before it's feasible to replace them.

People that actually care about the quality of their output are a dying breed, and that death is being accelerated by this machine that produces somewhat plausible-looking output, because we're optimizing around "plausible-looking" and not "correct"
by phyzome | 2025-12-09 14:22:45+00:00
Well, I don't know anyone who takes a full 1 hour lunch break -- back when I was in the office, I reckon it was more like 30-45 minutes? But people at all 4 office jobs I've worked did a standard 9-5 schedule.

But yes, "out the nose" is qualified by your particular situation. For me, that might be 2-3x my normal salary, which would mean I could take breaks for a few years or retire sooner.
by SigmundA | 2025-12-09 14:23:03+00:00
Sorry I was considering a standard container ship voyage at 30 days.

A 9m sphere of 1m thick Aerogel will probably cost above $500k just for the material.

Also lithium hydride itself reacts violently with water, not sure if you want to have a 9m radius 5 million pound sphere of it on a water vessel, this is the "safely" part.
by hirako2000 | 2025-12-09 14:23:56+00:00
OP provided details that make the analogy feel distant.

That's not just graduates. The main difference with the gen Z if OP is even one, is that they have a much longer future than those who already worked decades. Mature workers would just accept to do the remaining legs even if meaning keeps falling. The young have bigger stakes, projecting the trajectory leads to an absolute no go, for them.
by MarkMarine | 2025-12-09 14:23:58+00:00
I lucked out in when I was born, I developed before social media existed and my college was a later addition to Facebook. I think it just doesn’t affect me in the same way… like someone who has never won a dollar gambling looks at a gambling addict. I’ve got tremendous empathy for the people that are addicted to it and I can’t imagine how corrosive it would have been to my teen years, so much as I revile the politics behind Rahm who believes nothing and will stick his finger in the wind every few minutes and go where it takes him, I’m glad this is the way the winds are blowing. Social Media should be regulated like alcohol and cigarettes and drugs. All addictive, all tuned to hit dopamine centers, all bad for our health in different ways.
by necovek | 2025-12-09 14:24:28+00:00
I've actually had ChatGPT admit it was wrong by simply asking a question ("how is X achieved with what you described for Y"). It responded with "Oh, it's a great question which highlights how I was wrong: this is what really happens...": but still, it couldn't get there without me understanding the underlying truth (it was about key exchange in a particular protocol that I knew little about, but I know about secure messaging in general), and it would easily confuse less experienced engineers with fully confident sounding explanation.

For things I don't understand deeply, I can only look if it sounds plausible and realistic, but I can't have full trust.

The "language" it uses when it's wrong is still just an extension of the token-completion it does (because that's what text contains in many of the online discussions etc).
by joshstrange | 2025-12-09 14:24:41+00:00
Good, I tried Fleet but it was like VSCode without the extensions (as in a community, they had support for plugins or whatever but the support wasn't there) and I don't like VSCode even with extensions. It was the worst of all worlds.

Let the people that want to build an IDE from the ground up have their fun over in VSCode land, please just focus on a powerful IDE that works out of the box.

PS: Agentic development is fine to pursue but so far things like Claude Code run laps around everything JetBrains has tried. Add "mount points" for agentic flows but please just focus on making a powerful IDE. Agentic development was unable to lure me away from JetBrains, double down on that, not trying to be Cursor.
by gethly | 2025-12-09 14:25:13+00:00
I'd say it is saturation fatigue. 20 years ago, people who were online were kinda power users. Nowadays, internet is full of normies. Nothing wrong with that but it also means competition for everything has increased ten fold. Social networks used to be filled with smart people, now they are filled with average people and smart people are now just static noise in the background.

Jobs in IT are the same. Instead of 5 smart people competing for one job, now you might have hundreds and thousands and as employer you might not be able to distinguish the good/skilled one from the average one. And now employers have to hire based on your skin color instead of skill, among other things, which dilutes the potential for a company to be successful in inventing, creating, competing disrupting...

You used to be able to create some fun side project and get few customers to pay your bills. Nowadays, everything is monopolised and behind red tape with insane cost of entry. Which discourages competition and creativity of an individual.

Software has hit a plateau with social networks, online communication, programming languages and whatnot. Now it is all about AI(which it is not but it is being sold as such) because that is the last software paramount.

Hardware stopped advancing too, mostly due to AI again. We had the smart phone revolution, tablet revolution, online video streaming revolution... then Elon Musk did some work with SapaceX(rockets + internet) and electric cars. But that is about it. Not much new came after that. Definitely nothing ground breaking or revolutionary. Again, likely because most effort and investments go into AI hardware.

So we are in a limbo when it comes to both - HW and SW. We've reached peak saturation in user base, we've hit ceiling in programming and hardware and there is nothing interesting behind the corner. Maybe except new-age nuclear reactors(smaller, more efficient) and quantum computing(though that is still decades away from commercial use and production).

But I think all of this is mostly because economic and demographic factors. The societies have peaked, at least the "western" ones, and are now heading into correction period that will stifle technological progress as the "west" overplayed the globalization card and has to pull back and start shifting towards manufacturing and blue collar jobs, as it became heavily service-based economically.

Also it is important to factor in the feminism and DEI aspect of modern societies that is causing (white)men to graduate less, partake in STEM less, be more absent in white collar jobs, HR departments hindering creativity at the work place and so on. It's a whole bowl of spaghetti of societal issues that has to get unwound and levelled before we can bounce back up.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-09 14:25:18+00:00
It's not a strawman.

> No, they haven’t coded a “country-wide kill kill-switch” but having the ability to kill individual accounts, and being in a jurisdiction that demands accounts to be disabled from time to time is equivalent to having such a thing.

That's preposterous. Disabling a couple of online accounts, versus disabling the computers of an entire nation, you think are the same thing?

I don't understand how you can make that argument in good faith. What are you even trying to achieve?
by radanskoric | 2025-12-09 14:25:18+00:00
Your thinking is sound. At the end of the day Rails default fixtures is nothing more than some code that reads yaml files and creates records once at the start of test suite run.

So you can definitely use FactoryBot to create them. However, the reason I think that's rarely done is that you're pretty likely to start recreating a lot of the features of Rails fixtures yourself. And perhaps all you need to do is to dynamically generate the yaml files. Rails yaml fixtures are actually ERB files and you can treat is an ERB template and generate its code dynamically: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/testing.html#embedding-code-i...

If that is flexible enough for you, it's a better path since you'll get all the usual fixture helpers and association resolving logic for free.
by thunderbong | 2025-12-09 14:25:23+00:00
In most elevators around the world, there are buttons to keep the doors open and also to get them to close. I've only seen symbols on them. Once, however, in the US, one gentleman got in, and instead of pressing the close button, pressed on the open button. So the doors, which were just going to close, opened again.

He complained - Why do they have these symbols, why can't they they just write Open and Close?

I've wondered about this every since - is it an American thing to have an expectation to have text everywhere? I have never heard anyone complain about those symbols before or since!
by ben_w | 2025-12-09 14:25:24+00:00
> One of those shows several cars in the photo and a single bike.

Yes, and? "Cars are popular" is not a surprising claim that anyone has been contradicting, so far as I can see. (Also, Aberystwyth is tiny enough to get around entirely on foot, and hilly enough that bikers have to be exceptionally fit, and yet despite this, bike racks).

> The other two show pedestrianised areas, and all three show pedestrians without any indication of how they go there.

The Edeka in Briesen is one of the other two, I don't see a pedestrianised area, do you mean the car park owing to the open-air market set up in it?

The other one (Leigh Park) is literally in the middle of a typical UK conurbation with, as is normal in the UK, approximately universal pedestrian access. People can walk there easily from their homes, they can cycle, they can drive, they might even take a bus. One thing they're really not likely to do is come from very far away, because the only people who know about Leigh Park are the adjacent parts of the conurbation and they mostly look up their noses at it because it's poor.
by jgeada | 2025-12-09 14:25:55+00:00
Articles like this seem to keep highlighting a fundamental disconnect between what software teams really do vs what the people "managing" software teams a couple of layers above think those teams actually do.

The people up in the clouds think they have a full understanding of what the software is supposed to be, that they "own" the entire intent and specification in a few ambiguously worded requirements and some loose constraints and, being generous, a very incomplete understanding of the system dependencies. They see software teams as an expensive cost center, not as true the source of all their wealth and power.

The art of turning that into an actual software product is what good software teams do; I haven't yet seen anything that can automate that process away or even help all that much.
by whatamidoingyo | 2025-12-09 14:26:13+00:00
The company I've been at for awhile only uses .NET Framework. For all current projects, and anything new. It's frustrating, especially when I first joined. Could barely find documentation or tutorials regarding this tech stack.

The lead indeed rewrote the codebase to .NET Core, but had trouble publishing changes to the server (his current method of updating views, for example, is to copy some files from his local version and overwrite the files on the server). I guess he couldn't do this with .NET Code, so he just reverted back to .NET Framework. To me, it seemed... odd. Surely there's a way to publish changes in easy manner?
by alecco | 2025-12-09 14:26:35+00:00
- Let's limit children's use of social media and screens. - Great! Let's do it. - We need to identify who is 18+, so here's your digital ID for everything. And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job. - WTF! - That "WTF" just cost you 100 social credits.

UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and next USA. It's amazing how coordinated it is. They are using dog-whistles like CSAM, immigration, crime, and now children's wellbeing.
by spi | 2025-12-09 14:27:00+00:00
This is a very nice, detailed post! I have a few minor comments though (maybe a few are discussed somewhere, it's a _long_ article and I can't claim 100% coverage :-) ):

Calling it "training LLM" is a bit misleading. This is a small GPT-2-sized model (~160M params), while the "L" in "LLM" stands for large...

The early discussion and worries about truncating strings look a bit weird. The author then realizes they're anyway not even going to use 30% of the total available data, so who cares if for each given string we're only using the first 1024 tokens? (And anyway, even if doing more epochs, he doesn't discuss the obvious solution to avoid throwing away data, i.e. not clipping always the tail but starting from a random point each epoch - maybe after a punctuation or something)

At this level of simplicity, setting up a validation loop might be an unneeded complication (for the autoregressive pretraining part, not the instruction-tuning of course). That's because anyway the model is training for < 1 epoch, so no data is seen twice (*). One might as well just track the training loss, it's slightly less "clean" because it's evaluated each time on different data, but the sheer size of it makes up for the issue. The final plot shows that the two curves are similar - train is noisier of course, but nothing a bit of rolling smoothing couldn't solve.

The choice to load all tokenized text into RAM feels odd... it works, and it's possibly slightly faster than loading on-the-fly, but only if you have enough RAM to "waste". PyTorch loads data on separate processes in a non-blocking way, so it feels like having it on disk and loaded on-the-fly would be safer and not make any hit on runtime. But well, if it fits, it's certainly easier that way (although, as the author remarks, it only works if you can store it as a numpy array or torch tensor of some internally supported dtypes like int or float; if they are any Python "object" types, they get replicated per dataloader worker, and OOM is guaranteed)

The choice to concatenate everything into a long string is a bit outdated nowadays. Because it trains with attention between different sentences that have nothing to do with each other, and could cause a bias or anyway suboptimal results. Nowadays people use masked attention ("document masking"), which is so popular it's even supported by FlashAttention: https://github.com/Dao-AILab/flash-attention/issues/654

(*) Of course, the data is dirty enough that there _will_ be some duplicated stuff here or there, but the same is true for a random train/validation split. Also such a small model would have very little risk to memorize, even if some data were replicated.*
by spuz | 2025-12-09 14:27:48+00:00
That's a bit of an uncharitable summary. In bases 8, 12, 16, 24 and 32 their model achieved 99.7% accuracy. They would never expect it to achieve 100% accuracy. It would be like if you trained a model to predict whether or not a given number is prime. A model that was 100% accurate would defy mathematical knowledge but a model that was 99.7% would certainly be impressive.

In this case, they prove that the model works by categorising inputs into a number of binary classes which just happen to be very good predictors for this otherwise random seeming sequence. I don't know whether or not some of these binary classes are new to mathematics but either way, their technique does show that transformer models can be helpful in uncovering mathematical patterns even in functions that are not continuous.
by gethly | 2025-12-09 14:28:11+00:00
I have very little experience this, despite having decades of programming under my belt. The +1 with each master branch merge proved to not be the best as we have seen many programs to switch to year and month type of versioning. Which makes sense as it clearly communicates WHEN the current version was the most up-to-date and it leaves no place for ambiguity.

On the other hand, unlike products, libraries still make sense to version semantically as it is technical information for the users of those libraries that clearly communicates breaking changes.
by markisus | 2025-12-09 14:28:27+00:00
On the contrary, I think it demonstrates an inherent limit to the kind of tasks / datasets that human beings care about.

It's known that large neural networks can even memorize random data. The number of random datasets is unfathomably large, and the weight space of neural networks trained on random data would probably not live in a low dimensional subspace.

It's only the interesting-to-human datasets, as far as I know, that drive the neural network weights to a low dimensional subspace.
by jerf | 2025-12-09 14:28:37+00:00
I haven't played the first one but I played Grandia II on the Dreamcast and I think it's still my favorite battle system in a JRPG to date. Not only does it have the obvious details you can see on a YouTube playthrough, but higher-end play with it also requires managing positioning, which is easy to miss as an option at all in the menus, or to think it has no purpose. A low-level challenge run would probably be a lot of fun.

Unfortunately in my casual playthrough I accidentally broke the combat system and by the end of the game nothing was a challenge; as with many other games there are "resistances" and "vulnerabilities" but also as with most non-Shin Megami Tensei games of the era, they aren't really strong enough or frequent enough to matter. I just pumped all my upgrades into Fire upgrades until eventually my routine end-game battle was one character to wipe all the enemies in one move, move to next battle. You could easily pump an elemental bonus enough to overwhelm the resistances the enemies had. More resistances and immunities distributed around would have helped prevent a degenerate strategy.

And of all the battle systems to have a degenerate strategy for, this one hurts the most because it is otherwise so good.

(Sadly, Grandia III was never completed. It was released... but it was never completed. The game as shipped has visible gaping holes in it, which is sad because what is there was quite good.)
by crazygringo | 2025-12-09 14:28:49+00:00
I don't think you understand.

Citations need to generate reference lists. Footnotes require automatic placement at the bottom of each page. Your examples of numbered tables are numbering the rows, not the tables. And figure numbers need to be referenced in the text.

None of what you're pointing to does what academic papers need. Why are you trying to push this agenda?
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-09 14:28:50+00:00
The novel When the Sleeper Wakes is based on a situation where a tax loophole meant that one particular suspended-animation quasi-corpse inherited (eventually) over half the property on Earth. His trust becomes a de facto world government, and his body, fully cured of its fatal flaw, lies in state in a sort of mausoleum/temple/seat of government.

And one day he just wakes up.
by Volundr | 2025-12-09 14:28:54+00:00
FTA

> I've had Claude Code write an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours (300+ tests) for a fairly complex internal tool. This would take me, or many developers I know and respect, days to write by hand.

I have no problem believing that Claude generated 300 passing tests. I have a very hard time believing those tests were all well thought out, consise, actually testing the desired behavior while communicating to the next person or agent how the system under test is supposed to work. I'd give very good odds at least some of those tests are subtly testing themselves (ex mocking a function, calling said function, then asserting the mock was called). Many of them are probably also testing implementation details that were never intended to be part of the contract.

I'm not anti-AI, I use it regularly, but all of these articles about how crazy productive it is skip over the crazy amount of supervision it needs. Yes, it can spit out code fast, but unless your prepared to spend a significant chunk of that 'saved" time CAREFULLY (more carefully than with a human) reviewing code, you've accepted a big drop in quality.
by DigitalPaladin | 2025-12-09 14:29:26+00:00
A relative of mine was in the late-stages of cancer, and was not able to find ANY trials willing to accept them. The worst of those trials was out of Baltimore (MD USA), and they ghosted my relative after initial in-person consults that required by relative to drive out of state. Despite the patient's repeated and dogged outreach to the trial authors after that point, there was never an explicit "no" that would let the patient move on, just radio silence instead and that felt cruel to me.
by ajross | 2025-12-09 14:29:30+00:00
No, he's missed the mark here. The retreat to imprecise non-statements like "ChatGPT cannot know or understand anything, so it is not intelligence" is a flag that you're reading ideology and not analysis. I mean, it's true as far as it goes. But it's no more provable than it is for you or I, it's just a dance around the semantics of the words "understand" and "know".

In particular the quip that it's really just a "bullshit generator" is 100% correct. But also true for, y'know, all the intelligent humans on the planet.

At the end of the day AI gets stuff wrong, as far as we can tell, for basically the same reasons that we get stuff wrong. We both infer from intuition to make our statements about life, and bolt "reasoning" and "logic" on as after the fact optimizations that need to be trained as skills.

(I'm a lot more sympathetic to the free software angle, btw. The fact that all these models live and grow only within extremely-well-funded private enclosures is for sure going to have some very bad externalities as the technology matures.)
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-12-09 14:29:31+00:00
> The European 'peace dividend' that was invested into social safety nets is backed by American might

Do you have any evidence for where the peace dividend went? Like, if you look at entitlements over the past 30 or so years, you can see that they've gotten worse in a bunch of European countries (UK, Germany probably not France).

It looks a lot more like the peace dividend went into caring for old people, as it will in basically all Western countries over the next while. Not sure there's a better solution, apart from letting old people die.