MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by input_sh | 2025-12-29 12:18:31+00:00
Some years (decades?) ago, a sysadmin like me might half-jokingly say: "I could replace your job with a bash script." Given the complexity of some of the knowledge work out there, there would be some truth to that statement.

The reason nobody did that is because you're not paying knowledge workers for their ability to crunch numbers, you're paying them to have a person to blame when things go wrong. You need them to react, identify why things went wrong and apply whatever magic needs to be applied to fix some sort of an edge case. Since you'll never be able to blame the failure on ChatGPT and get away with it, you're always gonna need a layer of knowledge workers in between the business owner and your LLM of choice.

You can't get rid of the knowledge workers with AI. You might get away with reducing their size and their day-to-day work might change drastically, but the need for them is still there.

Let me put it another way: Can you sit in front of a chat window and get the LLM to do everything that is asked of you, including all the experience you already have to make some sort of a business call? Given the current context window limits (~100k tokens), can you put all of the inputs you need to produce an output into a text file that's smaller in size than the capacity of a floppy drive (~400k tokens)? And even if the answer to that is yes, if it weren't for you, who else in your organization is gonna write that file for each decision you're the one making currently? Those are the sort of questions you should be asking before you start panicking.
by sanskritical | 2025-12-29 12:18:54+00:00
The statute says "or" and an a) b) c) bullet point listing in a statute also means "or". Maybe you are unfamiliar with boolean logic, but I was listing the relevant lines of the statute which allow someone who did not call for violence to be prosecuted, and the standard interpretation used by prosecutors to prosecute people for non-violent, non-threatening, insulting speech.

What about Elizabeth Kinney, arrested for a simple slur in a private text message to a friend about the man who assaulted her, minutes after being beaten? What about the tens of thousands of people arrested who did not threaten violence?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c703e03w243o

Just like Elizabeth Kinney, this man did not threaten violence at all. He just said "they should not be allowed to live here."
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-29 12:19:11+00:00
> avoid working for companies they find morally objectionable

I don't really think of it that way.

I didn't work for "not-bad" companies. I worked for a good company.

The attitude makes a difference. If the only way I can feel good about myself, is to define myself by what I'm against, I find life is bleak.

I prefer to define myself by what I'm for.
by flr03 | 2025-12-29 12:19:41+00:00
Law is always subject to interpretation and as imperfect as it sounds it is better than no law at all. And I'm not talking about hate speech specifically. Using this as a tool to silence opposition is possible and made easy in countries that do not value and nurture independence of institutions and have rampant corruption, often countries with authoritarian leadership.
UK is not exempt of criticism, it would be unhealthy not to, but comparing Russia/Putin with UK/Starmer makes it evident that you are more concerned by pushing a political agenda that by facts and reason.
by skylurk | 2025-12-29 12:19:59+00:00
> SteamOS is probably the most commercially well-supported consumer desktop Linux

Yeah, this basically, and they have good hardware too.

> the Chromebook/Android train

I am not really interested in getting back into the google world. If I buy hardware it needs to support a real linux distro.

> putting a community-supported distro on whatever hardware you've got

With the Macbook, my only option is Asahi. If things keep going the way they are going, I may well end up there. But it is 13 inches and I don't love the keyboard.

I would rather something with an 11 inch screen (for travelling) that can drive a full-size monitor when at home. And use the keyboard I like regardless.
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-29 12:20:11+00:00
Exactly. People who are stupid enough to afford dysfunction peddle stupid policy that makes everyone's lives worse. They don't care because they're not affected and when they are it's not bad enough to make them question the beliefs that got there.

All the stuff the "rich but not nobility" people did to pour gas on the fire in the lead up to the french revolution is a good comparison point IMO.
by poszlem | 2025-12-29 12:20:26+00:00
The flaw in your argument is that it assumes a clear and workable distinction between "a joke" and "obvious hate speech." Yet one of the strongest objections to the very concept of "hate speech" is precisely that we lack a reliable way to stop the term from expanding indefinitely.

The case of Count Dankula is a textbook example: it is plainly a joke, and interpreting it as Nazi promotion or hate speech requires an extraordinary degree of bad faith. And yet, that is exactly how it was treated.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/youtube-count-dankula-mark-m...
by bananaflag | 2025-12-29 12:21:22+00:00
It all boils down to one thing: whether humans have some irreplaceable special sauce ("soul") or not.

If yes, all those fancy economic arguments (Jevons blah blah) actually apply.

If not, we are cooked.

EDIT: No idea why I am downvoted for stating the obvious. (I say this at the risk of looking unselfaware.)
by Havoc | 2025-12-29 12:22:27+00:00
How expensive something is is a very poor starting point for what we should attempt to automate with nascent technology that still has a pretty high miss rate

It’s not entirely irrelevant to the commercial case but you really need to start with technical feasibility and how resilient the job is to mistakes.

And something that is high risk, high leverage and very softskills/experience driven is a bad place for AI imo

Anthropic‘s shenanigans with their AI vendor should illustrate how far we are from credible AI CEOs
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-12-29 12:23:30+00:00
In slovenia and neigboring countries there's a huge mesh of probably hundreds of nodes, some connected via radio, some via mqtt with people only working on expending the mesh and nothing else....

the result is predictable... a few "test? can anyone see this?" every few days and most of the radio channel is used up by signalization between the nodes. Then somone adds a new node in some area further away (parents' place, work, whatever), sets up mqtt, connects two such meshes together, and we get the same 'test?' but now in italian.

Making it smaller (city-wide) and have people actually talk there would be much better, but for now, everyone just wants to make it bigger.
by ramon156 | 2025-12-29 12:23:39+00:00
I get the "Why Claude Code", just not the "Why a REST API". It doesn't seem to solve a problem at all.

Check the "Who It's For"

> Solo founders who use Claude Code daily and want to use it in toolchains

I can do that just fine without a REST API

> Backend developers adding AI capabilities to services and APIs

You can interact with Claude Code just fine. In fact I wouldn't use CC here since I want control over how it's ran, and CLAUDE.md just doesn't have that power.

> AI tinkerers building agentic workflows, automation, and experiments

Ditto.

> Data engineers who need structured, typed LLM output in pipelines

This has nothing to do with the REST part. I don't see how this is better than just an SDK with structured output.

> Platform teams exposing Claude Code to internal services

I guess I see the appeal a bit here, but anthropic has a platform that can handle agents for you, and this seems like a better fit than a clunky REST API between a CLI tool.
by godelski | 2025-12-29 12:23:40+00:00
Have you tried filters?

If you're getting flickers that's probably the best thing to do. This will cut your total power but you'll get a smoother signal. If it is visible then that is relatively low frequency but you might want to play around with it. The easiest thing to test (because you're more likely to have the parts accessible) is a pi-filter and then if that seems to be working you can either stick with that or use a better filter.
by Valodim | 2025-12-29 12:24:01+00:00
Sorry, but no. This is not a 50/50 situation where a bonkers position is inexplicably backed by half the populace. There is one faction that is a single person on a large lever, and another who are everybody else. Werner made it clear he will accept nothing less than an unquestioning BDFL hierarchy, but has over many years demonstrated no competence to actually fill that role (TFA being a small example of this).
by samiv | 2025-12-29 12:25:23+00:00
Hello

Yes sure I've heard that Qt6 improves the integration and type safety but I haven't tried that yet myself.

Communicatingn with signals and slots and using Qt Property system is straightforward yes but even more straightforward is to when you don't have to use it. The real problem is when you change your properties or your underlying types or the methods, their names or signatures and NOTHING tells you which part of your QML code will be affected. You just have to.. kinda know. In practice you'll of course miss something and then it'll just blow up at runtime with some "bla bla is undefined" error.

That being said if you're comfortable to use it and find it works for you more power to you. I'll just stick to my widgets. :)
by CraigJPerry | 2025-12-29 12:25:53+00:00
> The statute says "or" and an a) b) c) bullet point

There is no c) bullet point, the part you misinterpreted as an or is an AND:

"with intent to cause that person to believe that immediate unlawful violence will be used against him..."

>> A plasterer who admitted to stirring up racial hatred...

Admitted?
by lioeters | 2025-12-29 12:26:02+00:00
> multi-ton granite block .. suspended from the ceiling of the building

That's fun to imagine. I've heard of vibration isolation for machines, using springs and such, but this is on a whole another scale. Sounds like the building must be designed for it specifically to withstand this kind of pull.

And to be able to take an image of an individual atom, what an experience.
by adastra22 | 2025-12-29 12:26:02+00:00
Cats love boxes for a reason :)

Growing up my cat would get antsy and stressed if she hadn’t gone outside in a day. I can see how people can mistake this for needing space, but it wasn’t relaxing for her. She had to go out to remark her territory, and seek out any stray cats encroaching on her space. Noticeably very stressful for her! In the end when she couldn’t retainer her territory anymore, she went in fast decline.
by Devasta | 2025-12-29 12:26:19+00:00
You've always been able to do it, doesn't even need to be HTML, serialise as XHTML and you can include the tags on your own namespace and have separate CSS for them.

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html

xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"

xmlns:ns1="mynamespace"

xmlns:ns2="yournamespace"

>

<body>

<CustomElement>Hello</CustomElement><!-- Custom element in the XHTML namespace -->

<ns1:CustomElement>Hello</ns1:CustomElement>

<ns2:CustomElement>Hello</ns2:CustomElement>

<style type="text/css">

@namespace ns1 "mynamespace";

@namespace ns2 "yournamespace";

CustomElement {

color:green;

}

ns1|CustomElement {

color:red;

}

ns2|CustomElement {

color:blue;

}

</style>

</body>

</html>
by zelphirkalt | 2025-12-29 12:27:46+00:00
To play the devil's advocate for a moment:

Since businesses need to start somewhere/when and most startups fail, I think most people who even get into the role of CEO, are doing it successfully. However, this is a lot due to circumstances and many factors outside of their control. There are also many CEOs ruining their businesses with bad decisions. It is not certain, that an "AI" wouldn't do at least as good as those failing CEOs. Similarly, many developers ruin things they touch, introducing tons of complexity, dependencies and breaking user workflows or making workflows cumbersome without listening to user feedback and so on.

In short many people do a bad job and businesses are carried by others, who do a good enough job to make a net positive for the final product. Or consequences of messing up are happening slowly, like a slow user drain, or a user replacement with bad actors until good actors start to leave, or any other possibility.

About the pay argument: Well, these days you still need a good crew of developers to make the shiny AI toys do what you want them to do, so you are not replacing all of the developers, so you can't calculate like that. If we calculate some Silicon Valley CEO making 2 million and a developer making 100k-200k, then we are still at a ratio of 10x-20x. If we manage to make only one CEO obsolete or 2 out of 3 CEOs 1.5x as efficient, we have achieved a cost saving of 10-20 developers! Yay!...
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-29 12:27:47+00:00
Autism is a developmental disorder, and there are indications that it cannot be cured - because the damage is already done. Even if we could resolve the cause in an adult, the effect will stay. The brain had only one chance to develop, and it has developed wrong. This is why autism, unlike many other mental disorders, fails to respond to medication.

Something in the brain development has gone off course - and by the time you see the early symptoms, it has been off course for a while already. Early interventions help considerably, but you might have to intervene extremely early, before any clinical symptoms show, to prevent it. Even if you knew exactly how to spot the risk so early on and what to do to intervene, which, we really don't.
by tomaytotomato | 2025-12-29 12:28:09+00:00
I think the current "path" of AI will come to a dead end. Until we have AGI, we are just relying on specialised LLMs or other models as components to do various tasks; whether its guessing the next word or picking out objects from an image.

It's almost like we have various functional parts of a brain but not synapsed with some AI-bus. How do you build a performant API for that, which will be as good as a human?
by turtleyacht | 2025-12-29 12:28:37+00:00
Was a misstep to set up a slipbox with the ideas first. Mostly accumulated notes in technology and programming, so hard to categorize anyway. Better to let it grow organically, and later link relevant pieces to the original.

For each idea, Syntopicon has an intro and then outlines. Maybe in the new year could at least cover the former in each. Never got past Angel, as if the reading itself was a harder slog than others.
by eb0la | 2025-12-29 12:30:49+00:00
I believe we're in the middle of a "perfect storm" and AI is not the only one to blame:

- Right now A LOT of PCs are getting out of date because Windows 11 wants some new hardware that's missing in older PCs.
- At the same time, smartphones were starting to use and need more memory.
- Modern cars (mostly electric) have much more electronics inside than older ones... they're now distributed systems with several CPUs working together along a bus.
- The cloud needs to upgrade and newer servers have much more memory than older ones with almost the same foorprint (wich means you need to lease less datacenter space).
- And GPUs for AI are in demand and need RAM.

But only AI is to blame although we're living in a perfect storm for RAM demand.
by kolektiv | 2025-12-29 12:32:33+00:00
Ok, there's some context missing from those summaries though, no? In the first case it's not just "arrested for praying" it's "arrested for being in an exclusion zone specifically designated to try and stop you harassing people undertaking a lawful activity". They would have been arrested regardless of activity, it's effectively a restraining order and describing it as "for praying" is nonsense.

In the second case, it was not about misgendering someone - they were accused of a campaign of persistent harassment, something which the Daily Mail fails to mention except as a minor aside near the end of the article (not untypical of the Mail, naturally).

The Linehan case was debatable, and the approach taken probably wrong in some forms by the police (as admitted) but they were not arrested for simply voicing an opinion, but for behaviour which was sufficiently threatening and/or assaulting for the police to believe that a crime may have been committed and thus warrant further action.

There are cases of overreach, that applies outside of the speech issue as well - and indeed for any country with a reasonably effective policing system, it's never perfect. But these cases are not the simple slam-dunk that people will try and paint them as.
by goku12 | 2025-12-29 12:32:58+00:00
Considering that these CEOs are talking about replacing all skilled and unskilled labor under them with LLMs, I don't see why they can't be replaced too. In reality, LLMs are overhyped. Even Grok says it straight - LLMs are probability models with condensed human knowledge that decides what the next word/letter should be. Original thoughts isn't its forte.

(Surprisingly though, that's enough for them to recognize that you're a human. Their models can identify your complex thought progression in your prompts - no matter how robotic your language is.)

The REAL problem here is the hideous narrative some of these CEOs spin. They swing the LLMs around to convince everyone that they are replaceable, thereby crashing the value of the job market and increasing their own profits. At the same time, they project themselves as some sort of super-intelligent divine beings with special abilities without which the world will not progress, while in reality they maintain an exclusive club of wealthy connections that they guard jealously by ruining the opportunities for the others (the proverbial 'burning the ladder behind them'.) They use their PR resources to paint a larger-than-life image that hides the extreme destruction they leave behind in the pursuit of wealth - like hiding a hideous odor with bucketfuls of perfume. These two problems are the two sides of a coin that expose their duplicity and deception.

PS: I have to say that this doesn't apply to all CEOs. There are plenty of skilled CEOs, especially founders, who play a huge role in setting the company up. Here I'm talking about the stereotypical cosmopolitan bunch that comes to our mind when we hear that word. The ones who have no qualms in destroying the world for their enjoyment and look down upon normal people as if you're just fodder for them.
by ninalanyon | 2025-12-29 12:32:59+00:00
> anyone has a good chance of success. .. discipline is the primary factor. You have to live below your means, there is no exception.

The people living on two dead end jobs that don't properly feed their families and leave them vulnerable to dismissal if their car breaks down so they can't get to work really do not have 'a good chance of success'.

They are not in a position to live below their means without imposing monastic levels of discipline and deprivation on their children.

Horatio Alger was a mythologist, not a documentarian.
by DeepSeaTortoise | 2025-12-29 12:36:11+00:00
> I disagree that builders “owe” anyone anything

I disagree, but I think "owe" carries too much of a negative connotation. Through your project you enter both a relationship with yourself, having taken on a commitment to achieve what got you interested in starting your project in the first place, and the community (who also could be nobody but yourself) you want to benefit from your project, who want to rely on your project to some degree.

These relationships lead to obligations, few, if any, of them being legal or moral ones. Instead they are obligations put onto you by your own interests. You do not observe them because e.g. your project's community demands them (who, I'd like to point out again at this specific point, may still be nobody but yourself!), but because they are important to you. What is important to you can and will change, of course.

> I strongly disagree with goal of as much profit “as possible”.

TBH, I consider the "within the rules they think should be followed" part essential to the statement.

> obligation for maximal profits - something that I personally hold responsible for all the mass enshittification going on these days.

I'm not sure, but I don't think that's the case, sad enough, IMO the reason is to be found a bit to the opposite:

As a group, the people we're overall aligned with in our values (on this issue), having found fulfilling success in goals way less influential than money.
by andrepd | 2025-12-29 12:36:59+00:00
My Pentium 3 in 2005 could do chat and video calls and play chess and send silly emotes. There is no conceivable user-facing reason why in 20 years the same functionality takes 30× as many resources, only developer-facing reasons. But those are not valid reasons for a professional. If a bridge engineer claims he now needs 30× as much concrete to build the same bridge as he did 20 years ago, and the reason is his/her own conveinence, that would not fly.
by librasteve | 2025-12-29 12:37:53+00:00
I also wonder whether brainfuck (ie turing machine like) coding would be a more efficient interface to LLMs

For those who want to try it, there’s always the https://raku.org module…

use Polyglot::Brainfuck;

bf hi {
++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>+<<<<-]>
+>+>->>+[<]<-]>>.>---.+++++++..+++.
>>.<-.<.+++.------.--------.>>+.>++.
}

say hi.decode; # Hello World!

bf plus-two {
,++.
}

say plus-two(buf8.new: 40).head; # 42
by troupo | 2025-12-29 12:38:04+00:00
> I think it's a beautiful, elegant solution

Very confused by statements like these.

They are extremely verbose.

They are too high level, preventing many low-level optimizations.

They are too low-level, preventing you from using/implementing them without going into the details of how they actually work.

They break many platform assumptions and conventions, creating no end of problems both for end users and implementers, and needing dozens of new specifications to fix glaring holes that exist only because web components exist. All of those specs? A heavy dousing of Javascript of course.

Even the people who push them heavily cannot agree on what they are good is and what the goal of them is
by huhkerrf | 2025-12-29 12:38:36+00:00
DB is continually the worst train experience I have in Europe. I have never been on a train in Germany that's on time or that stops at the right station. Several times I've had to find someone young (and who speaks English) and say, "I'm just going to follow you to the next train."

I've been told that the UK is worse, but I don't have much experience with it outside of Eurostar.
by f6v | 2025-12-29 12:38:56+00:00
There're certain kinds of rewards to encourage traveling by rail in Europe. For example, a training course I attended refunded part of your travel expenses if you took a long-distance train. And there're people who believe in not flying for the sake of the planet.

But at this point, I'm convinced you should avoid any train in and around Germany. This includes Denmark as well. Just take a plane, but don't have a layover in Germany. The same could probably be said about France. My first train from Paris to Nancy stopped for about 2hrs in the middle of nowhere. As the machinist said: "The train is tired."

Other countries like Italy or Spain seem to actually have well-functioning rail though.