MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mytailorisrich | 2025-12-07 14:44:38+00:00
Techo-optimism peaked in the 1960s. After that people became much more cynical or realistic about technology.

The last three recent major technological advances in term of impact on everyday life are the internet and mobile phone in the 1990s and then the smartphone as ushered by the iPhone in 2007. All three are intertwined and really what makes today different from 1990.

Amazon is a 1990s company. In the 2010s it was fully established and a giant. It's a retail and logistics company that understood the impact and possibilities of the internet.

AirBnb (founded 2008) understood and exploited that the internet and smartphone allowed a new approach to holiday lettings but isn't doing anything hard technologically.

Uber (founded 2009) has done the same for taxi cabs. Nothing technologically hard but making full use of the ubiquitous smartphone.

Perhaps you remember the 2010s as more exciting because it was when the smartphone was new so there was this burst of apps and services to make use of it.
by not_ai | 2025-12-07 14:44:41+00:00
There is no alignment, there is no sharing of rule files or other instructions. These are tools no different then an ide which people are also free to choose so why would we?

Also rule files and other "memory sharing" are crutches. If it's that important just put it in your readme or other documentation and the LLM can get the context from that just like your teammates.

Plus isn't it a little silly this extremely well capitalized companies can't figure out how to get an LLM to follow a readme effectively and instead wave it away by saying you need to now maintain yet another thing?
by vibecoder89 | 2025-12-07 14:44:57+00:00
One thing I've noticed is people are creating cool stuff with vibe coding, but running them as real products isn't what some builders want to focus on.

To help with that, I built a marketplace where builders can list their projects, and others can acquire them to take the projects further or use them as a starting point.

I would love feedback on if this is useful, and what features would make it better. Thanks!
by lapcat | 2025-12-07 14:45:16+00:00
> you can learn from the things you experienced during that time

Of course you can learn from your experience, and the author did learn from his experience, which is the entire point of the tweet, so the author doesn't need to be told that he can learn from his experience. He already knows!

Nonetheless, the author considers his time to have been a waste.

> meaning it wouldn't be a waste

This does not follow.

> I worked in the cryptocurrency industry, sold drugs, interacted with gangs, and a bunch of other stuff but none of them broadly harmed society

Ok...

> One could surely argue that making "paid browser extensions" somehow have a net negative impact on the world, and if that was proven, would that mean all the time you spent on those sort of projects were suddenly wasteful and you should have realized this up front?

If that was proven? Well, prove it. Go ahead, make my day. Otherwise, this is just a silly piece of sophistry with no applicability.
by rayiner | 2025-12-07 14:45:34+00:00
In general, the Attorney General is prohibited from granting an AOS if you have violated the underlying visa (8 USC 1255(c)): https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim... (“subsection (a) [allowing AOS] shall not be applicable to… (8) any alien who was employed while the alien was an unauthorized alien, as defined in section 1324a(h)(3) of this title, or who has otherwise violated the terms of a nonimmigrant visa.”).

Subsection (d) allows the attorney general to grant an AOS notwithstanding subsection (c) where an immigrant enters j to a bona fide marriage during proceedings regarding their immigration status. But under subsection (a) the AOS is entirely at the “discretion” of the Attorney General.

Indeed, section 1255 doesn’t grant anyone legal status. It contains various provisions where an AOS must be denied. Then, it allows but does not require the Attorney General to grant an AOS under other circumstances.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-07 14:45:49+00:00
Yup.

Microsoft pledged not to intervene like that again, reclassifying its legal interpretation of its own services, and added language to its contracts to guarantee that it would fight future US attempts to do so:

https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...

When the US manages to force Microsoft to do something, it responds by trying to protect itself from the same scenario in the future. Because it wants profits. The ICC leaving Microsoft is the last thing Microsoft wanted.
by rcxdude | 2025-12-07 14:47:10+00:00
I think often, though, people use LLMs as a substitute for thinking about what they want to express in a clear manner. The result is often a large document which locally looks reasonable and well written but overall doesn't communicate a coherant point because there wasn't one expressed to the LLM to begin with, and even a good human writer can only mind-read so much.
by andreygrehov | 2025-12-07 14:47:40+00:00
Once again, stricter protocols don't dismiss anyone, they adapt to 2025 realities: near-zero child covid deaths monthly vs. rare vax risks. Under the new FDA framework, kids aren't denied shots; they just require a doctor's consult for personalized recs. Your framing sounds like full denial, which is false and amps up the fear.
by jijijijij | 2025-12-07 14:48:08+00:00
> I qualify for citizenship since a few years, but this Wehrpflicht nonsense is why I haven't sent my application yet.

First world problems...

You will always be able to object military service, it's not difficult at all and absolutely won't be any time soon. I have a hard time imagining you to be forced to do alternative service. In case of actual war, when mobilization becomes a reality, well... your origin country will likely be involved too.
by themgt | 2025-12-07 14:48:13+00:00
See also Hope:

In the previous sections, we first discussed Continuum Memory System (CMS) that allows for more persistent storage of memories and defines memory as a spectrum of blocks with different frequencies of update. Due to the larger capacity and constraints for scaling the parameters, often CMS requires simple learning rule but higher capacity to store more persistent knowledge. On the other hand, in the previous section, we discussed the design of a self-modifying Titans, where it can generate its own keys and so learning update to better adapt to the context. Contrary to CMS, the self-modifying Titans has a small capacity but is using a complex and expressive learning rule. Accordingly, these two systems seem to be complementary and their combination can enhance the model expressiveness from different aspects.

To this end, we present Hope architecture: A neural learning module that incorporates self-modifying Titans followed by Continuum Memory System.

https://research.google/blog/introducing-nested-learning-a-n...
by nerdypepper | 2025-12-07 14:49:06+00:00
relatedly, i have been using literate haskell to document my advent of code journey this year:

- day 5's solution for example: https://aoc.oppi.li/2.3-day-5.html#day-5

- literate haskell source: https://tangled.org/oppi.li/aoc/blob/main/src/2025/05.lhs

the book/site is "weaved" with pandoc, the code is "tangled" with a custom markdown "unlit" program that is passed to GHC.
by BDPW | 2025-12-07 14:50:00+00:00
I just read the 'original affluent society' and (most of) your linked essay, I kind of agree with you. That said, the conclusions of Kaplan lead to estimates or 35-60 hours a week (excluding some depending on the group) and that surprised me a lot. That's very different from the image I got from some other comments in this thread talking about extremely long days with constant back-breaking work. Would you agree?
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-07 14:50:07+00:00
> Plenty of third generation Turks still don't consider themselves German, then someone with black skin adopted as a child might consider themself German

You seem to exactly know what I'm babbling about. Parent commentator somehow confused "looks like" for "is citizen of", something you seem to grasp perfectly well.

For all we know, 100% of the people the parent saw were actually "Young Germans", as you cannot tell people's nationality by just looking at them. Unless of course, "Young Germans" is actually referring to something else, not people's nationality.
by brandensilva | 2025-12-07 14:50:12+00:00
I've heard from users they are burnt out on the UI many apps support. Buggy components everywhere across web, mobile, etc. e.g I can confirm that QuickBooks mobile app has so many bugs still in it for example and it's like 1/10th their web app.

I know personally I hit buggy forms and UI way more than I should preventing me from proceeding.

So I think there is an opportunity to instead have n permutations in natural language where the interface is consistent towards how the user inputs, it will just be up to the developers to support some UI for confirmation and structuring more complex input within chat itself. The biggest issue will be become discovery of what you can and cannot do without stationary UIs hinting at capabilities.

Anyways we are in new territory so it will be interesting how this plays out.i like to think of it as on demand UI but curious how others are toying with this paradigm.

We are testing a mostly display only interface for output where the majority of input comes in from chat and chat UI components right now just to see how this would work in practice.
by jamesbelchamber | 2025-12-07 14:50:36+00:00
"Don't Repeat Yourself" is a great rule of thumb which, at least in writing Terraform configuration, became absolute tyranny. Strange webs of highly coupled code with layers of modules, all in an effort to be DRY - almost everywhere I've seen Terraform.

Trying to explain why a little duplication is preferable to bad abstractions, and specifically preferable to tightly coupling two unrelated systems together because they happened to sort-of interact with the same resource, was endless and tiring and - ultimately - often futile.
by CerryuDu | 2025-12-07 14:51:05+00:00
> LLMs are superlative at reading comprehension, able to process and meaningfully comprehend documents effectively instantly.

I couldn't disagree more. (In fact I'm shocked that Bryan Cantrill uses words like "comprehension" and "meaningfully" in relation to LLMs.)

Summaries provided by ChatGPT, conclusions drawn by it, contain exaggerations and half-truths that are NOT there in the actual original sources, if you bother enough to ask ChatGPT for those, and to read them yourself. If your question is only slightly suggestive, ChatGPT's tuning is all too happy to tilt the summary in your favor; it tells you what you seem to want to hear, based on the phrasing of your prompt. ChatGPT presents, using confident and authoritative language, total falsehoods and deceptive half-truths, after parsing human-written originals, be the latter natural language text, or source code. I now only trust ChatGPT to recommend sources to me, and I read those -- especially the relevant-looking parts -- myself. ChatGPT has been tuned by its masters to be a lying sack of shit.

I've recently asked ChatGPT a factual question: I asked it about the identity of a public figure (an artist) whom I had seen in a video on youtube. ChatGPT answered with "Person X", and even explained why Person X's contribution was so great to the piece of art in question. I knew the answer was wrong, so I retorted only with: "Source?". Then ChatGPT apologized, and did the exact same thing, just with "Person Y"; again explaining why Person Y was so influental in making that piece of art so great. I knew the answer was wrong still, so I again said: "Source?". And at third attempt, ChatGPT finally said "Person Z", with a verifiable reference to a human-written document that identified the artist.

FUCK ChatGPT.
by Xunie | 2025-12-07 14:51:08+00:00
On a very related note, I've been seeing a lot of what I coined as "schizophrenic design" in technology over the past 10 years. I started using this term to describe technology making you question yourself or the state of the system.

Did I just get shadowbanned or does no one find my posts interesting? Am I shadowbanned or are my posts just deranked but still visible? Why does changing my profile picture trigger me to now require a phone to continue using the website? Did it mark me as a spambot or is this a normal sign up procedure? Did I get banned or did the group get deleted? Did I really forget to untick that "I'd like to receive marketing" checkbox?

I can't really put my thumb on it. Now imagine this stuff with personalization and algorithms that know you're pregnant before you do. If anything, food intake is probably a very high quality signal on biological changes such as pregnancy.

If you don't control the technology, the technology controls you.
by kkoncevicius | 2025-12-07 14:51:09+00:00
A lot of art from the middle ages is anonymous. Painting itself is an extension of the artist, containing the intension of the person producing it and hence no name is necessary. This is a theoretical state of quality, where activity is not measured in numbers or on a scale but is seen as expression of a particular unique human being. Then comes the renaissance and painters begin to attach names to their works. Here starts a crucial shift - a turn from quality to quantity. Certain artists are better than others and hence quality itself is now measured (quantified) using a name of the person. After that the name becomes so prevalent that some works begin to be valuable only because a certain name was responsible in producing that work. Think - Picasso. Quantity starts to take over. Then comes film and comics and ads where the painter is expected to have no individuality, and he is praised for having a style and technique that is replaceable. Same is true for corporate software development by the way. Here the name (the intermediate state connecting quality and quantity) starts to disappear and is often replaced by a name of a "golem" - a corporation. Quantity dominates - more and faster is better, and the more "nameless" the better. Ten years ago one might think that this is the limit of dehumanisation and it cannot move any further. But now we have AI - where a work of art (or other kind of work) cannot be associated with any quality (cannot be given a name) in principle. And quantity (more, faster, cheaper) dominates. When you think in these terms, the "techno-optimism" is just a place somewhere in this arrow moving from quality to quantity. Or in other words moving from a qualitative anonymity (my work is an extension of my being) to quantitative anonymity (the work is not associated with any being). Hence, it is not a stable position.
by ColonelPhantom | 2025-12-07 14:51:49+00:00
Touchegg kinda sucks (gestures are not 1:1 but rather just "triggered"), and you also don't need it. KDE and Gnome (as well as some WMs like Niri) have native touchpad gesture support on Wayland. Using my touchpad for history navigation also works flawlessly on Firefox with two fingers (essentially just horizontal scrolling).
by CaptainZapp | 2025-12-07 14:51:59+00:00
> and they were charlatans who wanted funding and hype, or signal how cutting edge they are

Interesting that those same hucksters and shysters who spread the gospel of the blockchain immediately jumped on th AI bandwaggon when this was the shiny new thing.

Or, maybe, 40 years working in IT turned me slightly cynical.
by Octoth0rpe | 2025-12-07 14:52:15+00:00
I can appreciate this answer, but I don't think it's really what I'm asking.

I think I'm more looking for some kind of standardized struct definition that translates easily to llvm IR and is flexible enough for a wide variety of languages to target.

Something like this: https://gist.github.com/thomaswp/8c8ef19bd5203ce8b6cd4d6df5e... (Which doesn't meet my criteria because AFAICT isn't used by anything, but is reasonably close to what I want) or this: https://docs.rs/sap-ast/latest/src/ast/lib.rs.html#1-83 (which seems specific to SAP, I would like something more general)
by shusaku | 2025-12-07 14:52:16+00:00
Checking each citation one by one is quite critical in peer review, and of course checking a colleagues paper. I’ve never had to deal with AI slop, but you’ll definitely see something cited for the wrong reason. And just the other day during the final typesetting of a paper of mine I found the journal had messed up a citation (same journal / author but wrong work!)
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-12-07 14:52:24+00:00
I love Doctorow, but I think his bit about hallucinating library names needs a rethink.

In a world where you're on the hook for the code your AI writes, the job is code review, but it's just as much about wiring up tests and linters and type checkers so that errors of that kind are noticed and fixed by the AI before you even see the draft that got abandoned.

If I had to share an example about the subtle and then suddenly not so subtle ways that AI is gonna disappoint a coder it would be about the time I asked it to update my flake.nix such that kustomize 4.5 was installed instead of 4.6, and instead of sourcing the older code it patched the current version such that the output of --version was "4.5".
by flykespice | 2025-12-07 14:52:50+00:00
It doesn't makes him less a hero rescuer if many others were still involved, in fact, every diver who volunteered on the rescue effort is a hero on my book.

> There were teams from 11 countries, Musk included.

What did Musk help exactly, other than coming up with an impractical solution, then calling the hero rescuer a "pedo guy" after getting his big ego bruised?
by protontypes | 2025-12-07 14:53:25+00:00
The best tool for significantly reducing noise across social media while remaining connected is the News Feed Eradicator. LinkedIn is a particularly important tool for me, as I use this social media network a lot for work, but I can't allow myself to be distracted by it. With this little tool, I can set exactly how many minutes a day I want to spend on the feed without losing the ability to contact others directly via LinkedIn. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/news-feed-eradicato...
by al_borland | 2025-12-07 14:53:35+00:00
I wonder if the hunter gather societies could have grown larger if they put in the same level of work as the agricultural societies?

One could debate what leads to a better quality of life. Is it more downtime and community, like we see with hunter gatherers. Is it the modern conveniences we end up with through larger societies and more work effort?

I watched a video of a polyglot who learned the language of a hunter gatherer tribe to spend some time with them. It was amazing to see how well adapted they were to the environment, both in terms of their bodies and skills. The outsider was getting eaten up by bugs and cut by every little branch or thorn, while the locals had thicker skin and seemed completely unaffected by all of this. They were running through the forest at night and it seemed effortless. While hunting they needed a bag at one point, so someone grabbed some stuff off a tree and quickly wove one together like it was nothing. What ends up being a survival realty show for us ends up looking quite convenient for them. If I need a bag I need to work to earn money, then depend on a whole supply chain to grow/manufacture the raw materials, weave the fabric, cut and assemble the fabric into a bag, and a retailer to sell it to me, as well as all of the shipping on trucks, boats, and planes along the way. It’s actually pretty crazy how much work goes into everything we buy.
by stack_framer | 2025-12-07 14:54:03+00:00
> outreach for minorities in tech

Why is there no outreach to other minorities in tech, like the Amish, for example? They are certainly more underrepresented than women in the python community.

Or how about male ballet dancers? Why isn't the python community allocating some of its resources to helping them feel seen and included?

I'm giving ridiculous examples because the whole premise is ridiculous. And my general question remains: Why devote the resources of a tech community toward one social issue/group or another? There are plenty of other outlets more suitable for doing our civic duty.
by amiga386 | 2025-12-07 14:54:11+00:00
> Can you show me a real-world package that was held back because the code needed a feature or semantics from the interpreter

That is not what I was getting at. What I was saying is that, if you write code for perl 5.20 and mark it "use 5.20.0;", then that's it, you're done, code never needs to change again. You can bring in newer perl interpreters, you can upgrade, it's almost certainly not going to break.

You can even write new code down the line in Perl 5.32 which wouldn't be possible in 5.20, and the 5.20 code wouldn't be valid in 5.32, but as they're both declaring which version of the language they're written in, they just seamlessly work together in the same interpreter.

Compared to Python's deliberate policy, which is they won't guarantee your code will still run after two minor releases, and they have a habit of actively removing things, and there's only one version the interpreter implements and all code in the same interpreter has to be be compatible with that version... it means a continual stream of having to update code just so it still runs. And you don't know what they're going to deprecate or remove until they do it, so it's not possible to write anything futureproof.

> in 2.7, surrounding parentheses are not redundant,

That is interesting, I wasn't aware of that. And indeed that would be a thorny problem, moreso than keeping a print statement in the grammar.

Fun fact: the parentheses for all function calls are redundant in perl. It also flattens plain arrays and does not have some mad tuple-list distinction. These are all the same call to the foo subroutine:

foo "bar", "baz" foo ("bar", "baz") foo (("bar", "baz")) foo (("bar"), "baz") foo (((("bar")), "baz"))
by quickthrowman | 2025-12-07 14:54:33+00:00
I would assume it will mostly be youths from the former GDR, which is extremely visible on economic maps, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_GRDP_...

Former East Germany is lit up in red, similar to how you could see the old borders on night satellite photos from the color temperature of the outdoor lights in West and East Germany, which was most easily noticed in Berlin (article has a picture from 2012): https://kottke.org/19/11/the-berlin-wall-of-light

The outdoor lights will eventually all be LED, which will erase the old border from the night skies.
by sevensor | 2025-12-07 14:54:33+00:00
I have worked with a lot of junior engineers, and I’ll take comprehension any day. Developing their comprehension is a huge part of my responsibility to them and to the company. It’s pretty wasteful to take a human being with a functioning brain and ask them to churn out half understood code that works accidentally. I’m going to have to fix that eventually anyway, so why not get ahead of it and have them understand it so they can fix it instead of me?
by manfromchina1 | 2025-12-07 14:56:22+00:00
> From 2010 to 2020, tech optimism was at its peak. Despite the flaws, companies like Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, and countless SaaS startups felt like they were genuinely improving things

These are some legendary American companies whose service made life more convenient, however I never felt they were earth shattering in the way other American inventions like the plane, the Internet, the mircochip, nuclear power, the light-bulb and the laser have been. Not to mention the personal computer and the smartphone that were also invented in America. I always thought the aforementioned inventions carried more heft. AI seems to me to be the only advancement on the same level of importance today.