MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jsheard | 2025-12-11 16:30:37+00:00
> The infographic had a statement about not training on CSAM and revenge porn and the like but the corpospeak it was worded in made it sound like they were promising not to do it anymore, not that they never did.

We know they did, an earlier version of the LAION dataset was found to contain CSAM after everyone had already trained their image generation models on it.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/20/24009418/generative-ai-i...
by mock-possum | 2025-12-11 16:30:48+00:00
When I was a youth I could get anything I wanted on the internet, even/especially things I wasn’t supposed to have.

I have no faith whatsoever that this ban would be effective, and further, evoking the perennial kiddy porn panic makes me extra suspicious of what the ‘real’ goal might be. You don’t tend to wring your hands and wail “won’t somebody please think of the children” unless you know you can’t make your case without the emotional appeal.
by dmix | 2025-12-11 16:31:53+00:00
> Content saturation works out very poorly for IP holders.

That really depends on how the culture of media consumption changes. It's very different than the world of movie theaters and TV. Most people are using social media to consume the majority of their content. This at least helps constantly inject their characters into the mainstream culture, when they can no longer dominate TV/cinema and streaming platforms already saturate their characters with high volume.

The biggest risk IMO is if the short content being produced is more entertaining than what they officially produce or it turns into a mini-culture they don't have influence over, and they struggle to profit off the old stuff.

They will essentially be competing with their own IP.
by deddy | 2025-12-11 16:31:54+00:00
This is confusing terminology in the field, but you generally talk about the cross sectional area in the plane of the conjunction (https://www.space-track.org/documents/SFS_Handbook_For_Opera...) to calculate the probability of collision.

It’s a conservative definition in the field. It’s generally defined as the hard body radius: take the smallest sphere centered at the center of mass that would entirely enclose the object, then use the maximum cross section of that sphere to define the potential “area” of the colliding object.

Maybe put more simply, it’s the worst case area size / orientation you could be looking at. So yes. Solar arrays have a narrow cross section from the side but looking at them head-on (which is the angle used for Pc calculations) they’ll be very large.
by iambateman | 2025-12-11 16:32:16+00:00
The point he’s making - that LLM’s aren’t ready for broadly unsupervised software development - is well made.

It still requires an exhausting amount of thought and energy to make the LLM go in the direction I want, which is to say in a direction which considers the code which is outside the current context window.

I suspect that we will not solve the context window problem for a long time. But we will see a tremendous growth in “on demand tooling” for things which do fit into a context window and for which we can let the AI “do whatever it wants.”

For me, my work product needs to conform to existing design standards and I can’t figure out how to get Claude to not just wire up its own button styles.

But it’s remarkable how—despite all of the nonsense—these tools remain an irreplaceable part of my work life.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-12-11 16:32:17+00:00
Reality isn't partisan.

- January 6th was an attempted coup of the government coordinated by Republican interest groups and antagonized by Trump.

- Vaccines do not cause autism.

- Climate change is real and anthropological in origin.

- The 2020 election was not rigged for Biden and there exists no evidence of impropriety of any kind.

- Haitians did not eat people's pet dogs in the USA. This was just plain, out-in-the-open racism.

- The US military is using the WMD, sorry, I mean the "drug boat" excuse on vessels 1,200 miles away from US waters to execute a dozen people at a time. They are providing no evidence and performing no seizures or investigations. Then they are violating international law and their own documents on war crimes and service member's duty to refuse by having them execute shipwreck survivors.

Everything above is a fact. Not an opinion. Not partisan. A fact.
by asmor | 2025-12-11 16:32:25+00:00
This is it. It doesn't replace the higher level knowledge part very well.

I asked Claude to fix a pet peeve of mine, spawning a second process inside an existing Wine session (pretty hard if you use umu, since it runs in a user namespace). I asked Claude to write me a python server to spawn another process to pass through a file handler "in Proton", and it proceeded a long loop of trying to find a way to launch into an existing wine session from Linux with tons of environment variables that didn't exist.

Then I specified "server to run in Wine using Windows Python" and it got more things right. Except it tried to use named pipes for IPC. Which, surprise surprise, doesn't work to talk to the Linux piece. Only after I specified "local TCP socket" it started to go right. Had I written all those technical constraints and made the design decisions in the first message it'd have been a one-hit success.
by afavour | 2025-12-11 16:32:47+00:00
When I became a parent I was really surprised at how much crap Disney puts out. My previous exposure had just been their blockbuster movies which showed a close attention to detail. But you scratch under the surface and it's an endless pile of awful quality clothing, crappy lunchboxes, that kind of thing. To the point where you assume it's an unauthorized rip off until you discover they license to anyone.

And to say nothing of the shoddy quality of their TV shows. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse's lazy CG animation and unimaginative storytelling is shocking given Mickey is supposed to be their signature character. They just don't care. And I think it does have an impact: my kids tired of Clubhouse very quickly and have little connection to Mickey and friends. Compare that to say, Dreamworks’ Gabby’s Dollhouse which they loved.

Disney is propped up by its tentpole features but their bench is incredibly weak. There are only so many Blueys you can buy to make up the difference.
by huntaub | 2025-12-11 16:32:51+00:00
> At scale, we still think scripts will be better for their cost, performance, and debuggability aspects

This actually makes a ton of sense to me in lots of the LLM contexts (e.g. seeing how we are starting to prefer having LLMs write one-off scripts to do API calls rather than just pointing them at problems and having them try it directly).

Thanks!
by randycupertino | 2025-12-11 16:32:54+00:00
Biovia is a scam anti-aging gene therapy company claiming to cure dementia but really serving overhyped junk.

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2024-11-09/liz-parri...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jul/24/elizabeth-pa...
by 9rx | 2025-12-11 16:33:00+00:00
> There is no way you don't know what vibecoding is.

I'm old. I don't keep up with the kids. Maybe the kids have changed what a compiler is too. Is that the point of contention here? If so, that's pretty silly. When I write "compiler" it means what I mean it to mean, not what some arbitrary kid I've never met thinks it means. How can someone use a word in a way that they don't even know exists?

> As we both know, the AI we are talking about uses natural language as input.

That is not what I am talking about. Did you press the wrong reply button? That would explain your deep confusion.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-12-11 16:33:01+00:00
"A chapter 7 bankruptcy terminates the company's operations and takes the company completely out of business."

It is essentially a judges forced death-sentence for a corporation.

An appropriate solution given Roblox manipulative behavior targeting kids, and a pattern of administrative negligence on the platform. Spend 5 minutes searching, and the history of the platform "problems" is trivially exposed.

Kids <16 should not be on there unsupervised, and there are lots of other better-quality games around people can play that offer far less "problems". =3
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-12-11 16:33:04+00:00
> Of course, if you fuel off of something like solar or natural gas you can do far better, but a lot of people are just stopping at the point they have electric and then patting themselves on the back as superior.

I don't think making up a smug EV owner is a very substantial comment. I haven't. met anyone who thinks like this. I imagine most people with electric vehicles would be happy if their energy came from cleaner sources.
by modeless | 2025-12-11 16:33:16+00:00
Yeah it would suck to lose Starlink for a few years. I wouldn't mourn spy telescopes. But most other satellites like weather satellites or ballistic missile detectors or GPS are in higher orbits and wouldn't be affected at all.

My point is that even the unlikely worst case scenario would be limited in time and extent. It couldn't possibly block us from reaching space or last for decades, as some people fear.
by knappe | 2025-12-11 16:33:36+00:00
Meanwhile that same Suncor facility that is keeping gas prices low is also routinely and continually violating EPA and Colorado air quality standards. [0]

It is so bad that the state has implemented fence line monitoring. [1]

As someone who lives in Colorado, I'd be happy to see Suncor go. Especially now that I just learned the oil they're refining is Canadian tar sand oil.

[0] https://coloradosun.com/2024/02/05/colorado-suncor-air-pollu... [1] https://cdphe.colorado.gov/public-information/air-quality-an...
by maxjohan | 2025-12-11 16:33:42+00:00
Thanks for your reply! I've thought about that as well. Haven't tried it though. Two thoughts about it:

1. Running graphical from within tmux feels unsafe (?). Introducing another layer can't be the way to go. BUT this comes from a position of limited knowledge, so I might stand corrected on this one. Also, doing it once for debugging won't do any harm.

2. I'm pretty sure the errors are not printed by Sway itself, but some other OS module. Errors that Sway cause for other modules won't be included in the Sway log. So the problem remains, no?
by jkaplowitz | 2025-12-11 16:33:45+00:00
The penalties for unknowingly possessing or transmitting child porn are far too harsh, both in this case and in general (far beyond just Google's corporate policies).

Again, to avoid misunderstandings, I said unknowingly - I'm not defending anything about people who knowingly possess or traffic in child porn, other than for the few appropriate purposes like reporting it to the proper authorities when discovered.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-12-11 16:33:46+00:00
> "Hey claude, I get this error message: <X>", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could.

This is true, as for "Open Ended" I use Beads with Claude code, I ask it to identify things based on criteria (even if its open ended) then I ask it to make tasks, then when its done I ask it to research and ask clarifying questions for those tasks. This works really well.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-12-11 16:33:56+00:00
The amount of GUIs I've vibe-coded works against your claim.

As we speak, my macOS menubar has an iStat Menus replacement, a Wispr Flow replacement (global hotkey for speech-to-text), and a logs visualizer for the `blocky` dns filtering program -- all of which I built without reading code aside from where I was curious.

It was so vibe-coded that there was no reason to use SwiftUI nor set them up in Xcode -- just AppKit Swift files compiled into macOS apps when I nix rebuild.

The only effort it required was the energy to QA the LLM's progress and tell it where to improve, maybe click and drag a screenshot into claude code chat if I'm feeling excessive.

Where do my 20 years of software dev experience fit into this except beyond imparting my aesthetic preferences?

In fact, insisting that you write code yourself is becoming a liability in an interesting way: you're going to make trade-offs for DX that the LLM doesn't have to make, like when you use Python or Electron when the LLM can bypass those abstractions that only exist for human brains.
by yawpitch | 2025-12-11 16:33:59+00:00
Notice your own use of the German word “Nationalsozialistische” and not the word “Sozialistische”? They are two different words coined with intent to have two very different — in fact pretty much opposite — meanings. That’s a fact Hitler and his other very-definitely conservative friends knew and understood well, just like they’d have known that “Ich bein ein Berliner Pfannkuchen” is not the same as “Ich bein ein Berliner”… as often seems to be the case the actual facts directly contradict the alt-facts you seem to think you know.
by hilbert42 | 2025-12-11 16:34:14+00:00
This reply is far too polite, but I understand protocol and necessity dictates those words.

If you cannot say it then let me: that spiteful, revengeful petty-minded fuckwit needs to be told that it's a fucked decision of the first order, and that someone in his position has no right nor the time to be involved in grinding the minutiae of state so fine.

Heaven help us, please!
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-11 16:34:19+00:00
I'd like to pre-register my complaint! :-)

I think it depends on what they use it for. For fantasy stuff like cartoons, aliens and (not fantasy) dinosaurs it may be ok, and I guess they could train on old hand-animated cartoons to retain that charm (and cartoon tropes like running in place but not moving) if they wanted to. If they use it to generate photo-realistic humans then it's going to be uncanny valley and just feel fake.

It would be interesting to see best effort at an AI dinosaur walking - a sauropod using the trained motion of an elephant perhaps, which may well be more animal-like than CGI attempts to do the same.
by r721 | 2025-12-11 16:34:21+00:00
And after that he decided to become an ally of Russian government to help them spread conspiracy theories (about Seth Rich for example):

>In the end, the most charitable interpretation of Assange’s “dissembling” as Mueller calls it, in the Seth Rich hoax is that he genuinely couldn’t rule out the possibility that Rich was his source. The Mueller report demolished that final moral refuge. Rich had been dead four days when Assange received the DNC files.

https://archive.is/56RiI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich#WikiLeaks_...
by sfpotter | 2025-12-11 16:34:28+00:00
I had a completely different response reading the sentence. I've been programming in C for 20+ years and am very familiar with exactly the problem the author is discussing. When they referred to a "static variable", I understood immediately that they meant a file static variable private to the translation unit. Didn't feel contrived or made up to me at all; just a reflection of the author's expertise. Precision of language.
by theamk | 2025-12-11 16:34:34+00:00
Raymond's posts are always fun to read, but it sometimes he focuses more on the "proper" methods, and does not even acknowledge that there are hacky workarounds.

Like for this case - sure, you cannot redefine the standard output handle, but that's not what the customer asked for, is it? They said "read" and I can see a whole bunch of ways to do so - ReadConsoleOutput + heuristic for scrolling, code inject into console host, attach debugger, set up detour on logging function, custom kernel module...

To be fair, as a MS support person, it's the exactly right thing to do. You don't want the person to start writing custom kernel module when they should redirect stdout on process start instead. But as a random internet reader, I'd love to read all about hacky ways to achieve the same!
by imtringued | 2025-12-11 16:34:39+00:00
I haven't found any asynchronous IOPS numbers on HDDS anywhere. The internet IOPs are just 1000ms/seek time with a 8ms seek time for moving from the outer to the inner track, which is only really relevant for the synchronous file IO case.

For asynchronous IO you can just do inward/outward passes to amortize the seek time over multiple files.

While it may not have been obvious, I have taken archiving or bundling of assets into a bigger file for granted. The obvious benefit is that the HDD knows that it should store game files continuously. This has nothing to do with file duplication though and is a somewhat irrelevant topic, because it costs nothing and only has benefits.

The asynchronous file IO case for bundled files is even better, since you can just hand over the internal file offsets to the async file IO operations and get all the relevant data in parallel so your only constraint is deciding on an optimal lower bound for the block size, which is high for HDDs and low for SSDs.
by kieranmaine | 2025-12-11 16:34:56+00:00
> Additionally, ICE sales have started recovering over the past few years now that EV subsidizes have started being phased out in most markets

I think this is a false dawn. EV sales in Germany have rebounded strongly after the removal of subsidies [1].

"Germany was the largest contributor, with more than 434,600 new EV registrations and one of the strongest growth rates in the bloc, up 39.4% year-on-year"

EU EV sales are up in 2025 in comparison with 2024 [1]

"Battery electric vehicles accounted for 16.4% of newly registered cars in the EU during the first ten months of 2025, according to figures from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA). That compares with 13.2% over the same period in 2024."

1. https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/11/25/the-electric-tr... 2. https://ev-database.org/uk/#group=vehicle-group&av-1=1&av-23...
by nosianu | 2025-12-11 16:34:58+00:00
> Would a human perform very differently?

How useful is the comparison with the worst human results? Which are often due to process rather than the people involved.

You can improve processes and teach the humans. The junior will become a senior, in time. If the processes and the company are bad, what's the point of using such a context to compare human and AI outputs? The context is too random and unpredictable. Even if you find out AI or some humans are better in such a bad context, what of it? The priority would be to improve the process first for best gains.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-12-11 16:35:11+00:00
writing HCL is so much more enjoyable than writing CF, even if HCL is fairly verbose (hey, it's not as bad as XML!). CF feels like a series of PM requirements dutifully codified with no dogfooding whereas HCL/TF feels like a tool that was developed by people who actually wanted to use it.
by xnorswap | 2025-12-11 16:35:45+00:00
Unironically I agree.

One under-discussed lever that senior / principal engineers can pull is the ability to write linters & analyzers that will stop junior engineers ( or LLMs ) from doing something stupid that's specific to your domain.

Let's say you don't want people to make async calls while owning a particular global resource, it only takes a few minutes to write an analyzer that will prevent anyone from doing so.

Avoid hours of back-and-forth over code review by encoding your preferences and taste into your build pipeline and stop it at source.
by malkia | 2025-12-11 16:35:56+00:00
For me, avoiding heap, or rather avoiding gc came when I was working (at work) on backend and web server using Java, and there was default rule for our code that if gc takes more than 1% (I don't remember the exact value) then the server gets restarted.

Coming (back then) from C/C++ gamedev - I was puzzled, then I understood the mantra - it's better for the process to die fast, instead of being pegged by GC and not answering to the client.

Then we started looking what made it use GC so much.

I guess it might be similar to Go - in the past I've seen some projects using a "baloon" - to circumvent Go's GC heuristic - e.g. if you blow this dummy baloon that takes half of your memory GC might not kick so much... Something like this... Then again obviously bad solution long term
by ssrc | 2025-12-11 16:36:07+00:00
Some patterns in the GoF book only apply to C++/Java as they were in 1994, but I don't see any reason why other languages would have no useful patterns. The Linux kernel (C) is full of patterns for example.

Funny thing, Peter Norvig also has this position, that patterns only apply to languages like Java, but his book on Lisp and the Python course he had on Udemy (?) are super-pattern-y.
by hamburglar | 2025-12-11 16:36:50+00:00
> They haven't. And you really think changing to Calibri benefitted anyone?

The wild thing is that even if you don’t respect the switch to Calibri on the grounds that it doesn’t really benefit anyone and is therefore wasted effort for little or no gain, the decision to switch back is a decision to double that wasted effort.

That said, it’s clear from the daring fireball story linked in the thread that this is being super overblown and Rubio isn’t really making an argument that Calibri is wasting money. This is an arbitrary decision.
by evanelias | 2025-12-11 16:37:00+00:00
Yes, a decent number of SaaS businesses do this. It requires a lot of automation on the ops side, but it's definitely doable.

I primarily work on schema management (migration) software for MySQL/MariaDB, and some companies leverage my product's built-in sharding support [1] for this type of per-customer sharding scheme.

When using per-customer shards, it's particularly important to avoid shard schema drift. Once your number of shards gets relatively high, you can end up with problems where an ALTER TABLE failed on just one shard, due to a network blip for example.

For this reason, at large scale with many shards, a declarative approach to schema management often works quite well: you express the desired state purely as a set of CREATE statements, and the tooling figures out the correct DDL to run to bring each shard into that desired state. This inherently solves drift because you can use a simple reconciliation loop to retry failures, i.e. running the tool repeatedly until there are no remaining changes to apply to any shard.

It's also important to support a flexible layout/mapping between shards and database servers. Initially, you can likely fit all the shards in the same server / DBMS daemon; but as the number of customers increases, you'll need to span multiple servers.

[1] https://www.skeema.io/docs/features/sharding/
by vintagedave | 2025-12-11 16:37:01+00:00
Delphi was designed to be COM-compatible, so the vtable layout was compatible, for example. Its interfaces, via the inbuilt interface keyword, use COM-compatible reference counting. It has inbuilt RTL types for handling a lot of common COM scenarios. It did this back in the 90s and remains extremely useful for COM still today.

Then late 2010s, C++Builder (its sister product) dropped ATL to DAX -- Delphi ActiveX aka COM -- and using COM from C++ uses the same inbuilt support, including keyword suggestions and RTL types. It's not quite as clean since it uses language bridging to do so, but it's still a lot nicer than normal C++ and COM.

Seeing someone do COM from first principles in 2025 is jarring.
by bulletsvshumans | 2025-12-11 16:37:27+00:00
I think the prompt is a major source of the issue. "We need to improve the quality of this codebase" implicitly indicates that there is something wrong with the codebase. I would be curious to see if it would reach a point of convergence with a prompt that allowed for it. Something like "Improve the quality of this codebase, or tell me that it is already in an optimal state."
by overfeed | 2025-12-11 16:37:35+00:00
> [...] they wanted to contribute to the project or to have strong architectural opinions

Also the worst kind of tech line-manager - typically promoted from individual contributors , but still want to argue about architecture, having arrived at their strong opinion within the 7 minutes they perused the design document between meetings.

If you're such a manager, you need to stop, if you're working with one, change teams or change jobs - you cannot win.