MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kevstev | 2025-12-08 15:51:31+00:00
Nothing inherently wrong with the core product IMHO. The issue is more with Confluent, who have been constantly swinging from hot buzzword to hot buzzword for the last few years in search of growth. Confluent cloud is very expensive, and you still have to deal with a surprising amount of scaling headaches. I have people I consider friends that work there, so I don't want to go too deep into their various missteps, but the Kafka ecosystem has been largely stagnant outside of getting rid of Zookeeper and simplifying operations/deployment. There have been some decent quality of life fixes, but the platform is very expensive, yet if you are really all-in on Kafka, you would be insane to not get support from Confluent- it can break in surprising ways.

So you are stuck with some really terrible tradeoffs- Go with Confluent Cloud, pay a fortune, and still likely have some issues to deal with. Or you could go with Confluent Platform, still have to pay people to operate it, while Confluent the company focuses most of their attention on Cloud and still charges you a fortune. Or you could just go completely OS and forgo anything Confluent and risk being really up the river when something inevitably breaks, or you have to learn the hard way that librdkafka has poor support for a lot of the shiny features discussed in the release notes.

Redpanda has surpassed them from a technical quality perspective, but Kafka has them beat on the ecosystem and the sheer inertia of moving from one platform to another. Kafka for example was built in a time of spinning rust hard disks, and expects to be run on general purpose compute nodes, where Redpanda will actually look at your hardware and optimize the number of threads its spawns for the box it is on- assuming it is going to be the only real app running there, which is true for anything but a toy deployment.

This is my experience from running platform teams and being head of messaging at multiple companies.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-12-08 15:51:51+00:00
> The apple login bypass bug comes to mind.

I think you're talking about this "goto fail" bug?

https://teamscale.com/blog/en/news/blog/gotofail

> In practice, at my shop, we permit early returns for trivial things

Are you also writing C or similar? If so, then this rule is relevant.

In modern languages, there are language constructs to aid the cleanup on exit, such as using(resource) {} or try {} finally {} It really does depend on if these conveniences are available or not.

For the rest of us, the opposite of "no early return" is to choose early return only sometime - in cases where results in better code, e.g. shorter, less indented and unlikely to cause issues due to failure to cleanup on exit. And avoid it where it might be problematic. In other words, to taste.

> Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, and co-authors have argued in their refactoring books that nested conditionals may be harder to understand than a certain type of flatter structure using multiple exits predicated by guard clauses. Their 2009 book flatly states that "one exit point is really not a useful rule. Clarity is the key principle: If the method is clearer with one exit point, use one exit point; otherwise don’t".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured_programming#Early_e...

this thinking is quite different to say, 25 years earlier than that, and IMHO the programming language constructs available play a big role.
by FabHK | 2025-12-08 15:52:02+00:00
Crypto is not prevalent in the Philippines or Indonesia. Except maybe in the scam centres in the Philippines run by Chinese gangsters that are operating pig butchering and other scams, and threatening to undermine the Philippine government. See The Economist, which estimates that these crypto scammers rake in some $500bn a year.

https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc

https://www.economistgroup.com/press-centre/the-economist/fr...
by throw310822 | 2025-12-08 15:52:21+00:00
Cursor with Claude 4.5 Opus has been writing all my code since a few days. It's exhilarating, I can describe features and they get added to my code in a matter of seconds, minutes at most. It gets almost everything right, certainly more than I would at the first try. I only hand code parts that are small and tricky, and provide guidance on the general architecture, where to put things and how to organise them. It's an incredible way of working, the only nagging doubt is how long will it last before employers decide they don't need me in the loop at all.
by lagniappe | 2025-12-08 15:52:26+00:00
Somewhat offtopic curiosity: Is there anything that Japanese fishkeepers do to keep the water and livestock inside the tank during earthquakes? Here we have no such risk for earthquakes, so a 600lb tank of water 4ft off the ground isn't much of an issue, even when bumped. I'd imagine earthquakes of this frequency could complicate that.
by skylurk | 2025-12-08 15:52:56+00:00
I don't know because I don't drive with turn-by-turn audio.

For the record, I actually like Maps for driving. I find the level of detail just right for how I use it.

My main complaint happens when you are not driving: if you let it have access to your location, Maps is constantly resetting your pan/zoom if the app becomes inactive. So on MacOS I block location, but a phone has to have your location for nav of course.
by Fnoord | 2025-12-08 15:53:04+00:00
There was a time where IRC was the most popular way to chat, and then MSN became IM default. Then people 'pinged' with BBOS. At one point, WhatsApp became the default, and just now Signal got popular, [1] thanks to Donald Trump.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/1j38sgw/signal_is_t...
by onraglanroad | 2025-12-08 15:53:15+00:00
Obviously it wouldn't work for everyone but for those who have an interest in computers it would be a nice option.

I was unemployed for a while in 2008 and I'd have loved it if I could have got paid minimum wage for working on open source rather than just getting jobseekers allowance and searching for jobs that didn't exist.

Plus I'd have learned some valuable skills that would help me find work anyway. And it would have increased the numbers of IT savvy workers. Seems like a win-win-win.
by 1313ed01 | 2025-12-08 15:53:18+00:00
I saw some gamebook for two players many years ago that had a small 5x5 table printed on each page. When players needed a random number 1-5 they simultaneously revealed a hand showing 1-5 fingers and used the table on the current page to cross-reference to get a number .

Of course it would work fine without the table, just using simple maths, but I think having unique tables on each page to scramble the result removes some of the ability of players to try to mind-game each other.

It would not work as well for ranges other than 1-5.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-12-08 15:53:26+00:00
But LLMs already do the paperclip thing.

Suppose you tell a coding LLM that your monitoring system has detected that the website is down and that it needs to find the problem and solve it. In that case, there's a non-zero chance that it will conclude that it needs to alter the monitoring system so that it can't detect the website's status anymore and always reports it as being up. That's today. LLMs do that.

Even if it correctly interprets the problem and initially attempts to solve it, if it can't, there is a high chance it will eventually conclude that it can't solve the real problem, and should change the monitoring system instead.

That's the paperclip problem. The LLM achieves the literal goal you set out for it, but in a harmful way.

Yes. A child can understand that this is the wrong solution. But LLMs are not children.
by alphazard | 2025-12-08 15:53:27+00:00
I've found that these incompetent folks (mostly in management as you say) really don't want to reveal their intellectual inferiority; they are desperate to hide it. If you started using this with your team, everyone adding value would benefit from the clarity, and the incompetent folks will just go along with it so as not to reveal their incompetence. They aren't adding value anyways, so it's fine if they fall behind.
by aidenn0 | 2025-12-08 15:53:32+00:00
The power of macros is somewhat overblown and not at all hard to explain.

Consider e.g. the "with" statement in Python[1]. Someone came up with the idea, found a way to integrate it into python and a year later, people could use it. In Lisp, you write a macro.

Now Python is a rather agile language as these things go. In other languages it would be a lot more than a year. When I was in college, my professor wanted us to use generics, but the school mandated language, Java, lacked generics at the time. So we were told to use a fork of javac that had generics added. Pretty much none of the development tools would play nicely with this, and javac was at least two orders of magnitude slower at compiling than my preferred java compiler at the time (jikes).

None of this is world-ending, but it really is annoying. The argument for macros is just "what is the next generics/with/whatever feature that your language is missing." Most of the features that lisp programmers use macros for have made it into modern languages that continue to evolve, so the leverage narrows. In the late '90s it was probably a much bigger multiplier than today.

1: https://peps.python.org/pep-0343/
by rixed | 2025-12-08 15:53:42+00:00
To add to what nicbou said, I would like to question the idea that the best way to defend a country is to enlist and fight a war. At the contrary, many are of the opinion that to defend Europe we have to oppose this recent trend of spending billions into the unproductive war machine.

When was the last time germans lined up to enlist in the army? How much good was it for their country?
by notepad0x90 | 2025-12-08 15:54:27+00:00
I thought I read somewhere paramount is in survival mode, avoiding risky projects and focusing on reliable projects. This is surprising indeed.

Amazon took MGM, maybe netflix can take over paramount after it takes over warner bros?

I know people have strong opinions on this, but both from studios like warner and netflix, their quality has been subpar, i don't think this will change much in terms of risk taking. There used to be lots of more flops but lots of really good blockbusters as well. Now there are a lot less of both, it is profitable but enshittified.
by palmotea | 2025-12-08 15:54:30+00:00
> Once humanity gets to the point where they are literally no longer needed to produce value due to automation, the means of production will be - logically - accessible to all who survive. Those who don't have access will die.

And that's the part that the AI optimists in these discussions skip over. They want to talk about this new and glorious AI-infested future, but not mention the holocaust that will happen to get there. For most people, the holocaust is the only relevant part, because they'll be destroyed in it [1]. The glorious future of abundance without work is one they'll never see [2].

[1] Most likely through grinding poverty and deprivation, which is how capitalism does it. Not gas chambers or anything.

[2] That future, like you said, a smaller group. I think eventually it will roughly consist of the nepo babies of some billionaires and a smallish group of Lumon-employees (the cultists, not the severed) who must worship them to survive.
by iLemming | 2025-12-08 15:54:34+00:00
Just effing stop. This shit sounds like Y2K jokes - you're only making a fool of yourself. Lazy setup, zero insight - these jokes void of humor, irony, or even a pinch of truth. Anyone who opens their mouth about Emacs not having decent editing simply has no idea what modern Emacs can offer there. Emacs has hands-down the best plain text editing features unmatched by anything else. Don't even think of challenging me on this sentence; as someone who used a bunch of different editors, I will chew you up and spit you out like a pistachio even before the actual debate.
by neom | 2025-12-08 15:54:56+00:00
Uber ride app has ads in it now on top of data collection, service fees, etc, uber eats also sells sponsored placement, and then the fees and prices now... like what the actual fuck is this? https://s.h4x.club/9Zun85Lj - these people have lost their minds, y'all really gonna drive the business down to 10 loyal customers who you milk to hell and high water? Weird strategy.
by like_any_other | 2025-12-08 15:55:22+00:00
Back in the day in my country, if your neighbor or taxi driver was informing the authorities of your habits and travels, this was considered a dangerously hostile action. If no willing informant could be found, there were torture basements to get it. It's what kept the government in power for so long. E.g. travel data makes it easy to identify nascent political groups.

Thankfully corporations have proven themselves so trustworthy and benevolent, we don't think twice about giving them the data they used to have to torture out of us. Likewise the governments, that we know are among the buyers [1], are just as beloved and uncontroversial, unlike in the old days.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/14/23759585/odni-spy-report-...
by Dilettante_ | 2025-12-08 15:55:23+00:00
>If we take from the government the ability to freeze bank accounts of protestors, we can't just also remove the ability to freeze the accounts of criminals

That's really the crux of the issue here: Having to choose one over the other, would you rather some criminals go free, or some innocents be imprisoned?

I suspect anyone's position to this depends heavily on which sides they've been on more on their lives: Victimized by criminals or unjustly punished.
by Aldipower | 2025-12-08 15:55:31+00:00
It is a task that could be _easily_ done manually in much shorter time without AI, probably by developers who even love to develop. The reaction on this shouldn't be misjudged as anti-AI. A lot of people, including me, just do not get it! For scientific purposes? Ok, fair enough. But what is the further meaning of this exercise?
by Taikonerd | 2025-12-08 15:55:37+00:00
IANA economist, but if there were a debt crisis, it would ultimately be about the psychology of the investors who would buy government debt. They want to be very, very confident that they will be paid back (which is why they're willing to accept a low interest rate).

If those investors are satisfied with a return to a late-80s fiscal posture, then great. But if they're worried that spending would just creep up again once the pressure is off, they might "demand" further cuts.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-08 15:55:56+00:00
Animal/human brains and LLMs have fundamentally different goals (or loss functions, if you prefer), even though both are based around prediction.

LLMs are trained to auto-regressively predict text continuations. They are not concerned with the external world and any objective experimentally verifiable facts - they are just self-predicting "this is what I'm going to say next", having learnt that from the training data (i.e. "what would the training data say next").

Humans/animals are embodied, living in the real world, whose design has been honed by a "loss function" favoring survival. Animals are "designed" to learn facts about the real world, and react to those facts in a way that helps them survive.

What humans/animals are predicting is not some auto-regressive "what will I do next", but rather what will HAPPEN next, based largely on outward-looking sensory inputs, but also internal inputs.

Animals are predicting something EXTERNAL (facts) vs LLMs predicting something INTERNAL (what will I say next).
by georgemcbay | 2025-12-08 15:56:05+00:00
> Even before LLMs people were asking Google search questions rather than looking for keyword matches

Google gets some of the blame for this by way of how useless Google search became for doing keyword searches over the years. Keyword searches have been terrible for many years, even if you use all the old tricks like quotations and specific operators.

Even if the reason for this is because non-tech people were already trying to use Google in the way that it thinks it optimized for, I'd argue they could have done a better job keeping things working well with keyword searches by training the user with better UI/UX.

(Though at the end of the day, I subscribe to the theory that Google let search get bad for everyone on purpose because once you have monopoly status you show more ads by having a not-great but better-than-nothing search engine than a great one).
by saint-evan | 2025-12-08 15:56:32+00:00
>About 20 years ago, I tried to found a startup. The ideas were good, and the team was good, but the execution was awful, and while we almost raised some money, we didn’t quite get there. Our failure was my fault. And I was pretty upset. And yet? In retrospect I’m happy that it didn’t happen, because I’ve seen what it means to get an investment. The world needs investors and people with big enough dreams to need venture capital – and I’m glad that I didn’t end up being one of them.

I wish the Author would explain what he meant by this. I'm hugely interested in this story and the 'why' of it.
by Hamuko | 2025-12-08 15:57:08+00:00
It's not really that expensive. GitHub Enterprise is like $21/month/user while GitLab Ultimate was $100/month/user the last time GitLab published prices. These days GitLab Ultimate is "contact us for pricing" while the cheaper GitLab Premium is $29/month/user.

I guess Bitbucket is cheaper but you'll lose the savings in your employees bitching about Bitbucket to each other on Slack.
by jtr1 | 2025-12-08 15:57:26+00:00
Interesting. Like many people here, I've thought a great deal about what it means for LLMs to be trained on the whole available corpus of written text, but real world conversation is a kind of dark matter of language as far as LLMs are concerned, isn't it? I imagine there is plenty of transcription in training data, but the total amount of language use in real conversational surely far exceeds any available written output and is qualitatively different in character.

This also makes me curious to what degree this phenomenon manifests when interacting with LLMs in languages other than English? Which languages have less tendency toward sycophantic confidence? More? Or does it exist at a layer abstracted from the particular language?
by throw310822 | 2025-12-08 15:57:26+00:00
At some point "general AI" stopped being the opposite of "narrow AI", that is AI specialised for a single task (e.g. speech or handwriting recognition, sentiment analysis, protein folding, etc.) and became practically synonymous with superintelligence. ChatGPT 3.5 is already a general AI based on the old definition, as it is already able to perform a variety of tasks without any specific pre-training.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-08 15:57:57+00:00
What seems to matter greatly how affect someone is by an earthquake, seems to also be related to how used people are to being unbalanced. I was once with a group of friends who most of them were skaters and snowboarders, so used to thinking about balance and being in situations where they can't do much about it, standing on relatively unbalanced things. During the earthquake, similarly to parent, most of them were fascinated, while the non-skaters quickly panicked and threw themselves on the ground.

Of course, just an anecdote, and those people could also have a general lack of fear of death, but the difference between the two of you made me think of the event again.
by nobodyandproud | 2025-12-08 15:57:58+00:00
I understand the perspective and I don't disagree with it, but the problem that spawned social security doesn't go away. It takes a crushing amount of time and money to take care of your aging parents, unless we go down a very dark route, and many elderly are abandoned and it becomes a societal mess.

Some approaches I was mulling over:

1. The easiest way is to dilute SS without pushing the years down even further is to remove the required COLA adjustments.

It's probably the easiest; also the least imaginative; and may be too slow.

2. The other is what the other poster mentioned: Real social security really comes down to your kids; and this is what I think should be the basis for a "new deal".

This has to be done very carefully--I can see so many ways this can be abused--but longer-term I think giving some sort of tax break or even tax credit--based on the social security numbers of the parents--allocated by the parent(s).

For the family that can't do it full-time, they can then use that credit or offset to hire some help.

Thoughts?

Edit: I went through this but with hired help. It was both necessary and awful; and I wish I had an option to help my parents directly full-time, but I didn't have the means at the time (I suppose I still don't).

Edit 2: Fixing social security alone doesn't address the wider fiscal problem. It's almost a drop in the bucket. Healthcare is the problem.
by dh2022 | 2025-12-08 15:58:20+00:00
My MBA program mentioned in passing intrinsic / extrinsic motivation in the Ethics class - which in my program did not even have a final exam :).

Most of the time was spent on cost cutting, customer vs producer surplus, profit margins, efficient markets theory, lots marketing, lots of "the purpose of a commercial enterprise is to make money for its owner" said in different ways, and maybe some operations analysis.
by rmrfchik | 2025-12-08 15:58:26+00:00
nvidia on linux [for desktop] is utterly broken. I ran nvidia cards for almost 15 years (shame on me): laggy X11 compositing, fragile and broken wayland. Broken suspend/resume. Too many moving parts (selected drivers, modprobe quirks, suspend/resume scripts). Moved to amd: slick x11, reliable wayland, NO MORE DRIVERS AT ALL, works like charm. And yes, I do playing in Linux.
by rtkwe | 2025-12-08 15:58:57+00:00
Yes, there's a lot of pressure to stay on his good side, even if the charges are bogus and eventually beaten or just ends in a pay-off like many cases the process is still damaging/costly and there's large incentives to pre-comply. Look at Apple's little gift plaque for an example of that, not really a bribe unless more laws are broken but a nice little ego stroke none the less.
by OptionOfT | 2025-12-08 15:58:59+00:00
My initial thought about juries is that they are inherently more fair, as they represent the people.

Change always happens in the public, which then causes people to vote a certain way, which then changes the laws.

So you end up in situations where what you did is wrong by law, but you get a better outcome because of the jury, as the jury is the public, as opposed to a judge, and usually well-paid, meaning quite disconnected from the 'common man'. In the US for example judges are elected, which means they should represent the public better.

So it's not as black and white.
by johnfn | 2025-12-08 15:59:39+00:00
The point is that if we agree that this task is truly a one shot, as long as you agree it’s faster to prompt than code, then while you “easily” do this task in around an hour (or however long you say it will take you), I’ll prompt Claude in around 5 minutes, and get a few more things done while I let it run in the background. What am I missing from your argument?
by Pxtl | 2025-12-08 15:59:46+00:00
From a UX perspective, the AI overview summary being a multi-paragraph summary makes sense since that was a single query that isn't expected to have conversational context. Where it does not make sense is in conversation-based interfaces. Like, the most popular product is literally called "chat".

"I ask a short and vague question and you response with a scrollbar-full of information based on some invalid assumptions" is not, by any reasonable definition, a "chat".