MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by foxrider | 2025-12-09 12:20:39+00:00
I'm going to get pedantic. That's why I've been using this exact term "LLM" instead of "AI" for the last few years. The "artificial" implies that it has man-made origins, yet serves the *same* purpose. Richard here argues that it doesn't fit because it does not, in fact, serve the same purpose. You can argue that for certain people it can serve the same purpose, like if you're a CEO who replaces low-level support staff with chatbots - but then it's an artificial support staff, not artificial intelligence.
by curiousgal | 2025-12-09 12:21:15+00:00
I honestly don't know what code bases you guys are working with, for me I tried it with a large quant library (C++ 97) in an effort to modernize it and so far it's been nothing hit a waste of time. Similarly for a medium sized python quant codebase (3.6) trying to port it to 3.12, and it's also been a headache.
by torginus | 2025-12-09 12:22:05+00:00
We did the same. We replaced a proprietary build system with our own. The SaaS product we used was super expensive, had a very gougy licensing scheme, had a bunch of features that either didn't work for us, or were so overcomplicated, that we ended up not using them. Before the rewrite, we bypassed like 90% of the internal features, and relied on custom scripts to do everything.

Every SaaS feature in my experience ends up being a mess due to having to support a billion use cases, and figuring it out is more trouble than its worth, might not be able to do what you want, might be buggy.

But even if you do all that stuff, you end up with a mess that can be replaced with 5 lines of shell script. And many more people know shell scripting than figuring out the arcane BS that goes on inside that tool.

It's the eternal lowcode story.

> 'doesn’t make the beer taste better'

I'd say it did. Having a CI/CD pipeline where you don't have to wait for other people's builds, the build logic is identical to what's running on dev PCs, and everything is all-around faster, and more understandable (you can read the whole source) makes testing easier, and surprises less frequent.

All in all, making a hour-long CI/CD turnaround time into 5 minutes or less has been an incredible productivity boost.
by no-stegosaur | 2025-12-09 12:22:12+00:00
Microsoft had this shitty idea of "InstantGo" aka "InstantOn" aka "Modern Standby" aka "Connected Standby" (the namings alone give away whose idea it was). They think that people cannot wait the like 1 second when opening a laptop to return from suspend2ram / s3, and they think that laptops should be connected to networks all the time. What for I have no idea, they're not phones after all. So now laptops do not actually sleep anymore, at all. The merely run in a low power profile. The worst is that support for S3 got worse in many bios/uefi implementations, where either it doesn't work properly anymore or it is gone entirely :(
by IanCal | 2025-12-09 12:23:15+00:00
> He's famously a curmudgeon, not lazy. How would you expect him to respond?

Not lazily, clearly. You can argue he's not lazy, but this is a very lazy take about LLMs.

> Stallman's wider point (and I think it's safe to say this, considering it's one that he's been making for 40+ years) would be that debating the epistemology of closed-source flagship models is fruitless because... they're closed source.

You are making that point for him. He is not. He is actively making this fruitless argument.

> This criticism is so vague it becomes meaningless. No-one can respond to it because we don't know what you're citing exactly, but you're obviously right that the field is broad, older than most realise, and well-developed philosophically.

I don't get what you are missing here then. It's a broad field and LLMs clearly are within it, you can only say they aren't if you don't know the history of the field which is either laziness or deliberate in this case because RMS has worked in the field. I notice he conveniently puts some of his kind of work in this field as "artificial intelligence" that somehow have understanding and knowledge.

> embracing them without skepticism in your work

That's not a point I'm arguing with.

> as we can prove that we think and reason (and I don't think I need to cite this).

Can we? In a way we can test another thing? This is entirely distinct from everything else he's saying here as the threshold for him is not "can think and reason like a person" but the barest version of knowledge or understanding which he attributes to exceptionally simpler systems.
by Draiken | 2025-12-09 12:23:36+00:00
A bad system is still bad even if something else is worse.

> That system allocated resources to various monopolies who were too big to fail.

Like our banks today? Like OpenAI is trying to sell themselves as so the US government bails them out when they inevitably can't pay off their debts? Like all the other monopolies that are too big to fail?

I can't see the difference.

> turns out allocating capital based on who can make things that people want/need to buy, and do it with a profit, multiplies said capital way faster.

That assumes the stock market does that. It simply doesn't and history is proof. It's also a fact that free market capitalism has consistently done worse than before based on actual numbers.

I highly suggest you read 23 things they don't tell you about capitalism. It goes into a lot more detail and helps you understand things in a broader perspective.

If we want to improve our world we need to move past the faults of the current capitalist system and the soviet union. We need better incentives. Profit has proven to be too disconnected from actual value.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_Things_They_Don%27t_Tell_Yo...
by xandrius | 2025-12-09 12:23:37+00:00
I could ask you a similar question: why play an RPG if you don't care about playing? Go watch a movie.

The point of many posters, I imagine, is that there is too much non-playing parts all at once, it's not strictly about them not being skippable.

This is especially damning when the long unskippable cutscene is during a boss fight or something which you might fail afterwards and cannot save.
by fcpguru | 2025-12-09 12:23:52+00:00
You really need to understand what happened in 2010 to understand pairing. In 2010 BLE (bluetooth low engery) launched. Before this pairing was the only way. Bluetooth Classic only supported point-to-point links and had no concept of just connect without identity.

You needed pairing to prevent speakers blaring random people’s audio, keyboards typing into strangers’ laptops file transfers being hijacked...
by pdimitar | 2025-12-09 12:24:06+00:00
Yeah true, the downfall of most SaaS services I used was that they were too careful trying to build too much moat and sabotage any competing efforts.

If they were a little more chill then I'd think they could make much more money. I personally would pay a few services, even as an individual, right now, if I knew I could always get a good database / JSON dump of everything at a 5-minute notice, and build my own thing on top of it.

They don't get this psychological aspect at all.
by carlosjobim | 2025-12-09 12:24:57+00:00
I can't understand why you're so sure about that. First of all, every person in the world spends money. The first dollar identifies a customer interested in your product, absolutely. But that means your product, not any random product in the world. So it's not a signal at all for being a good advertising target.

That's like thinking that a girl is likely to sleep with everybody because she has a boyfriend. "She's already sleeping with one guy, so why shouldn't she sleep with everybody?".

Of course your current customers are excellent targets for your own upsells and your other products. But not much else.
by henwfan | 2025-12-09 12:25:09+00:00
Nice comparison. It is pretty similar in spirit to the woodpecker method.

In chess you repeat the same positions until the patterns feel automatic. Here it is LeetCode problems. You keep seeing the same core patterns and rebuild the solution step by step. For each step and line there is a small objective first, and then a short first principles explanation after you answer, so you are not just memorizing code but training pattern recognition and understanding at the same time.
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-09 12:25:16+00:00
> low-fi hacking experience that developers love

Well I'm a hacker too and I don't really prefer low-fi hacking experiences, or at least not that flavor. I prefer getting stuff done since my free time after work is limited.

Oh and I used to work with eink displays for a living, but they always end up gathering dust for my hobby projects because it's only good for very few niche use cases that most of the time are better served by the more flexible and practical available solutions, unless of course, your uses case is showing it off on the internet for clout because this time what makes it special is it uses eink even though it adds no benefit.

Like I said, the Rust of displays.
by Tina-Fet | 2025-12-09 12:25:42+00:00
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by theshrike79 | 2025-12-09 12:25:58+00:00
Learning things the hardest way possible isn't always the best way to learn.

In a language context: Immersion learning where you "live" the language, all media you consume is in that language and you just "get" it at some point, you get a feel for how the language flows and can interact using it.

vs. sitting in a class, going through all the weird ways French words conjugate and their completely bonkers number system. Then you get tested if you know the specific rule on how future tenses work.

Both will end up in the same place, but which one is better depends a lot on the end goal. Do you want to be able to manage day-to-day things in French or know the rules of the language and maybe speak it a bit?
by hex-m | 2025-12-09 12:27:17+00:00
It can't handle OpenDocument files (odt, odp, ods) well. Only a one-way import is supported. https://helpcenter.onlyoffice.com/docs/userguides/document_e...

There are parts that are not released under a Free Software license but that's unclear from their marketing-communication. #openWashing
by M95D | 2025-12-09 12:27:27+00:00
I do acknoledge the better society that socialism can create, but I'm still not convinced it's possible/achievable long-term. My only concern is corruption.

Some people (we could call them psychopaths and narcissists, even though that's a rather strong word and only describes the worst of them) have a natural tendency to exploit other people to get to the top of whatever social structures exist. There are many of them, somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of the population depending on criteria used.

In capitalism most of these people become managers, CEOs, politicians, cops, TV stars, etc. and satisfy their tendencies by legal means. Still bad for society, but at least legal. In a socialist society, when exploitation isn't easy and "VIP" doesn't mean very much, they tend to become corrupt officials, which in time fundamentally break the entire society. This happend in all East-Europe communist countries.

I don't see a working succesful socialist or communist society without some means of empolying these people in a way that they find satisfying, but still not allow them to break society.
by ifh-hn | 2025-12-09 12:29:40+00:00
I wonder as a resident being forced to pay for this, and therefore part owner, whether I'd be within my rights to first tape over the cameras, and then "accidentally" break it...

/s

Actually I'd likely seriously consider this exactly. Who's making the money here. The residents are paying for it. The building management must be getting paid by both the residents and that parasite company that produces this shit.

Dystopia 101.
by benjiro | 2025-12-09 12:29:51+00:00
> To make everything scale, it's super distributed, but having everything so distributed has a huge cost

Its more then a huge cost, its often insane... We are not talking 10x but easily 100x to a 1000x. Its like when i see some known database makers that scale, write how they can do a million writes per second. Ignoring that they rented a 1000 servers for that, each costing $500 per month. That same software is also 10x to 100x more slower, then a single postgresql database in reads.

So you ask yourself, how many companies do a million writes per second. Few ... How much of those writes may have been reduced by using smarter caching / batching? Probably a factor of 10 to 100x...

The thing i like about scalable solution, is that its way easier to just add a few nodes, vs needing to deal with postgres replication / master setup, when the master node got moved / need to upgraded.

For fun, i wrote my own ART database, and a LSM database using LLMs ... Things do 400 a 500k inserts / second on basic cheap hardware. So wait, why are some companies advertising that they do a million inserts/s, on 500k/month hardware? Some companies may need this ability to scale, as they will not run a 1000 server but maybe 10.000, or more. But 99% of the companies will never even smell close to a 100k inserts/second, let alone a million.

People forget that network latency is a huge thing, but the moment you want consistency and need something like raft, that means now your doing not just 1x the network latency of a write but 4x (send write, verify receive, send commit, verify commit, confirm).

Even something as basic like sqlite vs postgres on the same server, can mean a difference of 3x performance, simply because of then network overhead vs in-function. And that network overhead is just local on the same machine.
by epolanski | 2025-12-09 12:30:04+00:00
I like the idea, and you've got yourself a customer :)

The lifetime membership + launch discount was a good marketing bait I felt for.

Not really understanding the negativity here. We know for a fact that most of the people that master intellectual problems do so via pattern recognition, not by reasoning.

You show a chess master a position, he/she can instantly tell you what the best moves are without "thinking" or "calculating" because it's mostly pattern recognition.

Maths and algorithms fall in the same category. When approaching new problems, masters don't really start processing the information and reasoning about it, instead they use pattern recognition to find what are very similar problems.

The thing I really don't like is the lack of TypeScript or at least JavaScript, which are the most common languages out there. I really don't enjoy nor use Java/Python/C++.
by mapt | 2025-12-09 12:30:15+00:00
Another possibility: For perishable goods in the sort of SKU counts typically offered, it can't work unless it has a certain minimum scale. Local supermarkets supported by a largely automated (and has been for 30 years) regional distribution center have that scale from walk-in traffic. A new delivery service using high-density storage could save on real estate and labor costs on the backend, but it has to have runway to replace a lot of the local market (which may take a decade), and the whole time you're scaling, these low-velocity SKUs are literally spoiling while these expensive, high-throughput robots are mostly idle. The frontend costs of delivery are a separate category of problem.

Replacing the regional distribution center instead with even higher levels of automation, and getting your groceries delivered from the same warehouse the supermarket is, would give you the scale from the start... but then that increases your frontend delivery costs and more importantly your frontend delivery latency; High latency is a much worse thing with milk than with books or hammers.
by strken | 2025-12-09 12:30:40+00:00
Toasts are like a tourniquet, for me. You slap them on a problem to stop the bleeding, and they're often preferable to the alternative, but nobody actually likes them and you really shouldn't keep them long-term or apply them frivolously.

E.g. you join a project with little to no error handling or success feedback. Slap some default toasts on everything! And then remove them page by page as you fix the horrible UI you inherited.

GitHub is large enough that they don't benefit from or want such a crutch, but not everyone is GitHub.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-09 12:30:48+00:00
I would very much like to be better at building websites that handle assistive technologies like screen readers well. I don't have a lot of blind users to worry about because they don't let you be a firefighter if you're blind.

But a lot of firefighters are people who simply did not do well in school, even the very senior ones, and that's because they are often very clever people who are of an age where things like dyslexia were just not diagnosed early or often.

So now I deal with a lot of people who use assistive technologies to help with dyslexia and related comorbidities. I have dyscalculia that wasn't diagnosed until I was 19 and at uni, and even then it was diagnosed initially by my mate's Educational Psychology undergrad girlfriend in the pub one evening. That was in the early 90s and we're better at it now - but not by much.
by _heimdall | 2025-12-09 12:31:04+00:00
I also take issue with the electoral college system, but to claim that a representative democracy is not a democracy based on the intermediary representation seems like a fairly hollow concern.

My bigger issue with regards to how democratic we are would be more related to campaign finance laws, corruption, and the immense power wielded by those in charge that can be pointed at political challengers if the politician is so inclined.
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-09 12:31:25+00:00
This is only true if the code it wrote is something you can just sit down and write without any reference.

Now do something like I did: An application that can get your IMDB/Letterboxd/Goodreads/Steam libraries and store them locally (own your data). Also use OMDB/TMDB to enrich the movie and TV show data.

If you can write all that code faster than read what Claude did, I salute you and will subscribe to your Substack and Youtube channels :)

Oh btw, neither Goodreads, IMDB nor Letterboxd have proper export APIs so you need to have a playwright-style browser automation do it. Just debugging that mess by writing all the code yourself is going to be hours and hours.

The Steam API access Claude one-shotted (with Sonnet 3.7, this was a long time ago) as well as enriching the input data from different sources.
by rkomorn | 2025-12-09 12:31:44+00:00
I play RPGs for the fun of turning time and grind into more advanced abilities (eg going from getting slaughtered by dragons in Skyrim to being the one doing the slaughtering).

There are few games where the story has mattered to me, and even basically no games where the cutscenes did.

Edit: the presence of story and cutscenes in a game I enjoy is basically correlation and not causation (for me).
by joshstrange | 2025-12-09 12:32:20+00:00
To give an example, Dublin, OH is like this. There are many restrictions on signs/advertisements and it’s quite nice. I grew up there so it felt normal but I’ve had friends who have visited comment on it. Some have complained (mostly joking) about how all the buildings all look similar, the McDonalds is a nice brick building with a relatively small sign [0] which looks similar to the bank next door [1] but for whatever is “lost” in boundless creativity is gained in the lack of eye sores IMHO.

[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/wFod1vA58Fr2VWu66

[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/xduhC7S7UBTPFwt67
by naikrovek | 2025-12-09 12:32:35+00:00
> As an avid reader (and sometimes writer) of technical books, it's sad to see the, perhaps inevitable, decline of the space.

When I think about this, I get a little bit scared. Imagine books going away, even if it's just the subcategory of technical books.

The printed word has been around for a long time. The number of things that have been printed has always gone up. It really bothers me that that's changing.

PDFs and websites are no substitute for printed paper bound in a cover. PDFs and websites are a fallback when the preferred media isn't available, they are not supposed to be the preferred media. All of the of the reasons that people have given over the years are applicable when it comes to why paper is superior for this.
by trymas | 2025-12-09 12:33:12+00:00
> Have you ever thought that you would be compared to a gasoline engine and everyone would discuss this juxtaposition from purely economic perspective?

Not sure if by accident or not, but that’s what we are according today’s “tech elite”.

Therefore, the most profitable disposition for this dubious form of capital is to convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/55660903-patchwork-a-p...
by IanCal | 2025-12-09 12:33:27+00:00
You're assigning something different to his argument. Here's from the linked page

> There are systems which use machine learning to recognize specific important patterns in data. Their output can reflect real knowledge (even if not with perfect accuracy)—for instance, whether an image of tissue from an organism shows a certain medical condition, whether an insect is a bee-eating Asian hornet, whether a toddler may be at risk of becoming autistic, or how well a certain art work matches some artist's style and habits. Scientists validate the system by comparing its judgment against experimental tests. That justifies referring to these systems as “artificial intelligence.”

This is nowhere near arguing that it should be able to make new versions of itself.
by Lapel2742 | 2025-12-09 12:33:43+00:00
>Neither torture nor genocide is recognized anywhere as a human right. After WWII we held trials.

What do you want to tell me? Of course torture is not a human right. That doesn't change a bit that human rights apply to everyone. Even to the torturer. Sure, we should put him/her in prison for a long time but never does even the torturer loose his/her humanity. That is exactly what distinguishes us from the nazis/fascists.