MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gyomu | 2025-12-07 04:56:36+00:00
Aqua-era OS X is the best looking out of the box desktop environment in the entire history of computing, and given 1) the lack of interest everyone seems to have in the desktop these days and 2) the directions in which the few remaining contenders are headed, I wouldn’t be surprised if it remained that way for a long time.

It’d be fun, as a side project, to build a pixel perfect replica of it (along with the core apps that make it useful) that runs on a modern Linux kernel and preserve it in amber forever.
by keepamovin | 2025-12-07 04:57:17+00:00
35–44. Same thing, sometimes it makes planning errors, or misses context that should be obvious based on the files, but overall a huge booster. No need to review in depth, just set it against tests and let it iterate. So much potential, so exciting.

My feeling is the current suite of LLMs are "not smarter than US" they simply have far greater knowledge, unlimited focus, and unconstrained energy (modulo plan/credits/quotas of course!). I can't wait for the AIs that are actually smarter than us. Exciting to see what they'll do.
by ikr678 | 2025-12-07 05:01:21+00:00
I think we are about 10 years away from dumb fridges only being available from specialized catering or kitchen supply distributors. The screens are coming, they start as the 'luxury' option and then filter down to every single model.

Consider - I vehemently do not want a computer screen in my vehicle. I specifically bought a particular model in 2019 without one. If I want to upgrade, I am unable to exercise my preference though, as new cars without screens are no longer offered for sale.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-07 05:01:22+00:00
The problem with internalized locus of control is that it can come with blame if done wrong. If you're in complete control of your life, and your life happens to suck at the moment, are you a loser?

Moreover, what of those retail workers? Are they all lazy losers and we shouldn't bother with them? Or are they, partially, victims of circumstance?

Before I got cancer, I used to believe everything happened for a reason. I realize now that that belief can be very toxic. Why punish myself? Thats a choice.

That doesn't mean we need to be doomer. But we need to recognize some things are not in our control, and some things aren't even in anyone's control. And we shouldn't feel guilty about needing help, and we shouldn't punish ourselves out of some pursuit for bootstrap virtue.
by ineedasername | 2025-12-07 05:01:51+00:00
So far, I see the most concern about this sort of thing from people who came of age around or after Web 2.0 hit, at a time when even a good photoshop wasn’t too hard to place as fake.

Those I know who lived through this issue when digital editing really became cheap seem to be more sanguine about it, while the younger generation on the opposite side side is some combination “whatever” or frustrated but accept that yet another of countless weird things has invade a reality that was never quite right to begin with.

The folks in between, I’d say about the 20 years from age 20 to 40, are the most annoyed though. The eye of the storm on the way to proving that cyberpunk lacked the required imagination to properly calibrate our sense of when things were going to really get insane.
by iamnothere | 2025-12-07 05:02:23+00:00
Yes, exactly like that. Also random nobodies making crude jokes online, professors taking unpopular stances or refusing to adjust course materials for political reasons, individuals who argue with protesters, protesters who burn flags, Bibles, or Qurans, and citizens who simply express support for their preferred candidates.

You thought this was some kind of “gotcha” because you pegged me as a right winger opposing cancel culture. I support free speech, period.
by throw310822 | 2025-12-07 05:03:08+00:00
They are two MPs, they can say whatever they want. Sadly they don't reflect the position of Ireland, and I hope you are not trying to say that Ireland or Europe should abolish their internal democracy.

I say "sadly" because they're perfectly right. Daly: "the more arms you pump into Ukraine, the more the war will be prolonged, and the more Ukrainians will die [...] We will sit down with Russia, there will be a negotiated peace and this organisation should promote it earlier".

She said this three years ago: in the meanwhile hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have died, Ukraine has lost its territory anyway, we are sitting down with Russia and there is going to be a negotiated peace, and Europe is not part of it because it was never able to promote any diplomacy. Time proved her right on all points.
by Jaygles | 2025-12-07 05:03:43+00:00
I exclusively use the autocomplete in cursor. I hate reviewing huge chunks of llm code at one time. With the autocomplete, I’m in full control of the larger design and am able to quickly review each piece of llm code. Very often it generates what I was going to type myself.

Anything that involves math or complicated conditions I take extra time on.

I feel I’m getting code written 2 to 3 times faster this way while maintaining high quality and confidence
by hedgehog | 2025-12-07 05:04:47+00:00
You can have the tool start by writing an implementation plan describing the overall approach and key details including references, snippets of code, task list, etc. That is much faster than a raw diff to review and refine to make sure it matches your intent. Once that's acceptable the changes are quick, and having the machine do a few rounds of refinement to make sure the diff vs HEAD matches the plan helps iron out some of the easy issues before human eyes show up. The final review is then easier because you are only checking for smaller issues and consistency with the plan that you already signed off on.

It's not magic though, this still takes some time to do.
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-12-07 05:06:10+00:00
> how do you enable power users to learn more powerful tools already present in the software?

On-the-job-training, honestly; like we've been doing for decades, restated as:

Employer-mandated required training in ${Product} competence: consisting of a "proper" guided introduction to the advanced and undiscovered features of a product combined with a proficiency examination where the end-user must demonstrate both understanding a feature, and actually using it.

(With the obvious caveat the you'll probably want to cut-off Internet access during the exam part to avoid people delegating their thinking to an LLM again; or mindlessly following someone else's instructions in-general)

My pet example is when ("normal") people are using MS Word when they don't understand how defined-styles work, and instead treat everything in Word as a very literal 1:1 WYSIWYG, so to "make a heading" they'll select a line of text, then manually set the font, size, and alignment (bonus points if they think Underlining text for emphasis is ever appropriate typography (it isn't)), and they probably think there's nothing more to learn. I'll bet that someone like that is never going to explore and understand the Styles system on their own volition (they're here to do a job, not to spontaneously decide to want to learn Word inside out, even on company time).

Separately, there are things like "onboarding popups" you see in web-applications thesedays, where users are prompted to learn about new and underused features, but I feel they're ineffective or user-hostile because those popups only appear when users are trying to use the software for something else, so they'll ignore or dismiss them, never to be seen again.

> By corollary, how do you turn more casual users into power users?

Unfortunately for our purposes, autism isn't transmissible.
by solidsnack9000 | 2025-12-07 05:06:21+00:00
It does stand to reason that all law could be formalized. For example, consider the definition of murder in the first degree from 18 USC § 1111:

"Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought."

You might say, well, "unlawful" and "malice" are fuzzy concepts; but we can take them to be facts that we input into the model. I guess we could write something like this in Catala:

scope Murder : definition in_the_1st_degree under condition is_malice_aforethought and is_unlawful consequence equals true

In the calculation of social benefits and taxes, the facts input to the model are generally things like prices, depreciations, costs, areas of offices, percentages and so on, input numerically and sworn to be true. These numbers are then used to calculate an amount due (or in arrears). Performing the calculation in a way that is verified to conform to the law is a big part of the work.

However, in other areas of law, determining the facts is actually where the real work is -- was there malice aforethought? A formalized legal machine could process these facts but it's not a big help. The models would just be a huge list of assumptions that have to be input and a minimal calculation that produces `true` or one of the alternatives of an enum.
by quotemstr | 2025-12-07 05:06:41+00:00
> Rust has automatic memory management

Sure, if you define "automatic memory management" in a bespoke way.

> Could you be more specific?

The lifetime system, one of the most complex and challenging parts of the Rust programming model, exists only so that Rust can combine manual memory management with memory safety. Relax the requirement to manage memory manually and you can safely delete lifetimes and end up with a much simpler language.

Have you ever written a Java or Python program?
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-07 05:07:05+00:00
Joe Lonsdale has also been retweeting supremacist extremists like Connor Tomlinson - this guy:

https://www.thenational.scot/news/25673425.gb-news-spewing-r...

I think the entire ecosystem of people connected to Peter Thiel and Lonsdale are radicalizing towards the far right, and I don’t mean this as hyperbole. It’s not just the Palantir crew, but also the All In crew, and all their other VC buddies like Brad Gerstner. Every one of them is giving the current direction power. It’s hard to trust that companies in Lonsdale’s portfolio like Anduril - or these other VC’s portfolios - will be a force for good.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-07 05:08:15+00:00
Intelligence and empathy aren't necessarily corrolated. I'd imagine many people in the ad industry are very intelligent, and earn a lot of money though choosing to work in that industry, but care very little about what their work is actually doing to people beyond squeezing every cent out of them, or are able to use their smarts to rationalise their work actually being good.
by aatd86 | 2025-12-07 05:08:38+00:00
The issue is that it might look good but an LLM often inserts weird mistakes. Or ellipses. Or overindex on the training data. If someone is not careful it is easy to completely wreck the codebase by piling on seemingly innocuous commits. So far I have developed a good sense for when I need to push the llm to avoid sloppy code. It is all in the details.

But a junior engineer would never find/anticipate those issues.

I am a bit concerned. Because the kind of software I am making, a llm would never prompt on its own. A junior cannot make it, it requires research and programming experience that they do not have. But I know that if I were a junior today, I would probably try to use llms as much as possible and would probably know less programming over time.

So it seems to me that we are likely to have worse software over time. Perhaps a boon for senior engineers but how do we train junior devs in that environment? Force them to build slowly, without llms? Is it aligned with business incentives?

Do we create APIs expecting the code to be generated by LLMs or written by hand? Because the impact of verbosity is not necessarily the same. LLMs don't get tired as fast as humans.
by nis0s | 2025-12-07 05:11:34+00:00
I admit the scenario is contrived, but that’s to make a point. Feel free to construct your own scenario that’s not a non sequitur.

But the E scenario is also fallacious, doesn’t matter if E is schizophrenic if the conspiracy is real. Maybe E’s detractors would like others to think E is schizophrenic, or the symptoms they want to cast as schizophrenic are a stress response to the targeted harassment.
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-12-07 05:11:38+00:00
A well paid human expert can find lots of uses of LLMs. I'm still not convinced that humans will ever be totally replaced, and what work will look like is human experts using LLMs as another tool in the toolbox, just like how an engineer would have used a slide rule or mechanical calculator back in the day. The kind of work they're good at doesn't cover the full range of necessary engineering tasks, but they do open up new avenues. For instance, yesterday I was able to get the basic gist of three solutions for a pretty complex task in about an hour. The result of that was me seeing that two of them were unlikely to work for what I'm doing, so that now I can invest actual effort in the third solution.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-12-07 05:13:12+00:00
My grandfather rode to school on a horse, saw the last of the nomadic native peoples traveling Iowa, watched polio ruin lives and bring fear, then watched science conquer polio. Watched humans conquer the sky and land on the moon, fought mechanised island warfare as a sent in Marine in the pacific on the side of half the world fighting against the other half of the world. Personally saw the damage of nuclear war in occupied Japan, then watched the world build a 15 minute system for mutually assured nuclear destruction (MAD). Went from mail to shared rural 'party' phone lines, and ended his life with a world connected with a global knowledge network to every home and free video calls to anywhere in the world. He went from canned zucchini/beats in the winter to access to whatever fresh produce (and more importantly ice cream) he wanted all year long.

Unless we make some major breakthroughs, I don't think there will ever be another generation of change like that one.
by jodrellblank | 2025-12-07 05:14:49+00:00
> connecting to a remote server and exchanging the file contents over a base64 stream (?)

I think that's not the right code because it's in "PerformCopyFileFromRemoteSession" and that sounds like it's for Copy-Item -ToSession ... -FromSession ... which are for New-PSSessions (PowerShell remoting/WinRM). Those are already Powershell-serialized-in-XML-in-WinRM-XML (I think) and copying file data plausibly goes into Base64 to go inside that.

That can't be what happens if you do Copy-Item -Destination \\server\share\
by TheJoeMan | 2025-12-07 05:16:42+00:00
I feel very fortunate to have been able to attend a local Hawaiian resident’s wedding in Waimea, Kauai this past summer. As we stayed on the south-side, we mostly enjoyed our simpler accommodations while only seeing the Sheraton et. al. from the beach. We made one day trip north of Lihue and were turned off when we saw tourists at a plaza watching the dads get called up to hula and put flowers in their hair as a gag. So I understand the big resorts may be becoming unachievable, but perhaps there is hope it will open some people’s eyes to more authentic experiences.
Show HN: Geetanjali – RAG-powered ethical guidance from the Bhagavad Gita
by vnykmshr | 2025-12-07 05:18:47+00:00
I built a RAG application that retrieves relevant Bhagavad Gita verses for ethical dilemmas and generates structured guidance.

The problem: The Gita has 701 verses. Finding applicable wisdom for a specific situation requires either deep familiarity or hours of reading.

How it works: 1. User describes their ethical dilemma 2. Query is embedded using sentence-transformers 3. ChromaDB retrieves top-k semantically similar verses 4. LLM generates structured output: 3 options with tradeoffs, implementation steps, verse citations

Tech stack: - Backend: FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Redis - Vector DB: ChromaDB with all-MiniLM-L6-v2 embeddings - LLM: Ollama (qwen2.5:3b) primary, Anthropic Claude fallback - Frontend: React + TypeScript + Tailwind

Key design decisions: - RAG to prevent hallucination — every recommendation cites actual verses - Confidence scoring flags low-quality outputs for review - Structured JSON output for consistent UX - Local LLM option for privacy and zero API costs

What I learned: - LLM JSON extraction is harder than expected. Built a three-layer fallback (direct parse → markdown block extraction → raw_decode scanning) - Semantic search on religious texts works surprisingly well for ethical queries - Smaller models (3B params) work fine when constrained by good prompts and retrieved context

GitHub: https://github.com/geetanjaliapp/geetanjali

Happy to discuss the RAG architecture or take feedback.
by buu700 | 2025-12-07 05:19:43+00:00
I'm not aware that we are there, but would be very interested if you have information to the contrary. Even if we were there, the product/service that does it would have to be at a reasonable cost in order to be useful for most people.

As I said, a lot of the gap may be tooling. But I'm skeptical that even the models themselves are capable of that given sufficiently advanced tooling. I'm not saying we're not close (certainly much closer than we were at the start of the decade), but if we were actually there, you would have zero reservations about removing the human from the loop of an initial prototype.
by guiambros | 2025-12-07 05:19:45+00:00
Annoying indeed. I created a script using ffmpeg to merge all the 2-min clips into a longer video per chapter[1], so I could watch the lectures on my commute.

You may need to tweak for different courses, but I've used for ML4T, GIOS, and ML, and it has been incredibly helpful.

[1] https://github.com/guiambros/vidcat
by syphia | 2025-12-07 05:22:45+00:00
I prefer a more direct formulation of what mathematics is, rather than what it is about.

In that case, mathematics is a demonstration of what is apparent, up to but not including what is directly observable.

This separates it from historical record, which concerns itself with what apparently must have been observed. And it from literal record, since an image of a bird is a direct reproduction of its colors and form.

This separates it from art, which (over-generalizing here) demonstrates what is not apparent. Mathematics is direct; art is indirect.

While science is direct, it operates by a different method. In science, one proposes a hypothesis, compares against observation, and only then determines its worth. Mathematics, on the contrary, is self-contained. The demonstration is the entire point.

3 + 3 = 6 is nothing more than a symbolic demonstration of an apparent principle. And so is the fundamental theorem of calculus, when taken in its relevant context.
by legerdemain | 2025-12-07 05:24:00+00:00
Specifically CS7210 is demanding because of its assignments. The assignments come from UW's CSE452, have very little direct connection with the course lectures, and require you to implement a Paxos-like system correctly, basically in one shot, in an environment that is very difficult to debug. So the projects turn into 60-80-hour slogs where students change parameters semi-randomly until something starts working. CS7210 shares that aspect with a number of other courses in the program.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-12-07 05:24:59+00:00
One could make a completely opposite point just by slightly editing your scenarios.

Make B be charming and charismatic enough that C and D's attempts get laughed off and backfire. Make A be so affected by having to live in secrecy that it puts a real strain on the relationship with the person they care about the most. Now surely it would be A who ends up under "more stress", right?

Except you can't even say that, because "level of stress" is not an objectively measurable quantity that exists somewhere in the environment. You can be stressed out by things I get excited about. Someone else will shrug out a risk that makes me terrified. You could be under distress because some lights have blinked too fast, yet it doesn't mean that these lights have targeted you with their harassment.
by linguae | 2025-12-07 05:25:10+00:00
On the flipside, there were the days of the Power Macintosh 6100, 7500, 8500, 9600, and other models. It’s very easy to look up different models using these names, and there was also logic to the naming scheme, but it was confusing for people new to Macs to figure out, and this was back in the 1990s when there were still large amounts of people in the developed world who never owned a personal computer.

Once Steve Jobs returned, he replaced the product numbering scheme with a quadrant: consumer desktop (iMac), consumer laptop (iBook), high-end desktop (Power Mac), and high-end laptop (PowerBook). The high-end models had a suffix (G3, G4, G5), but it got confusing with all the variants (e.g., Wallsteeet vs Lombard vs Pismo PowerBook G3, various revisions of Titanium and Aluminum PowerBook G4, etc.)
by gblargg | 2025-12-07 05:26:20+00:00
Same here, on a big screen, I don't see anything notable. I really hope this isn't a mass delusion because YouTube started applying a sharpness ("edge enhancement") filter to videos to make them look sharper. It sure looks like that to me, because I hate this filter and how so many movie transfers have it added, with the ringing at the edges this filter leaves.
by jodrellblank | 2025-12-07 05:29:11+00:00
Raymond Chen from 2004, slightly unsatisfying[1]. Try Mark Russinovich post with technical details about rewriting Explorer's copy routines from XP to Vista[2].

Windows 8 team blog on updating the copy dialog UX[3].

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040106-00/?p=41...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120608005952/http://blogs.tech...

[3] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/b8/improving...
by Atlas667 | 2025-12-07 05:30:27+00:00
Many people romanticize their past so much that they side with historical oppressors. Oppressors who most likely subjugated most of their ancestors.

This is not a coincidence, but is the result of consuming media from people who engage in this same act of romanticizing their history, or this media comes from people who were themselves actually related to these oppressors.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-07 05:30:45+00:00
> They had to walk their own dogs and play with their own children.

Oof, that one hits hard. My dad was an executive, mom was a housewife/socialite, we lived in Mexico. Had our own live-in maid, gardeners/handymen for outside chores. I saw them more than my parents. I can totally see them hiring robots instead of humans. Once technology gets cheap enough, the masses adopt it (in the 60's TV was an electronic babysitter)
by defrost | 2025-12-07 05:34:13+00:00
Seems to have some promise:

* Whatever legitimate places AI has, in zebrafish isn't one - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46120733

* ‘CEO is my blood type’: a chilling new novel nails narcissistic tech culture in zebrafish - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45950784
by Barrin92 | 2025-12-07 05:35:08+00:00
>"in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious

it isn't hilarious, it's true. My father (now in his 60s) who came from a blue collar background with very little education taught himself programming by manually copying and editing software out of magazines, like a lot of people his age.

I teach students now who have access to all the information in the world but a lot of them are quite literally so scatterbrained and heedless anything that isn't catered to them they can't process. Not having working focus and memory is like having muscle atrophy of the mind, you just turn into a vegetable. Professors across disciplines have seen decline in student abilities, and for several decades now, not just due to LLMs.
by keyle | 2025-12-07 05:35:28+00:00
> Watching my juniors constantly fight the nonsense auto completion suggestions their LLM editor of choice put in front of them, or worse watching them accept it and proceed to get entirely lost in the sauce, I’m not entirely convinced that the autocompletion part of it is the best one.

That's not an LLM problem, they'd do the same thing 10 years ago with stack overflow: argue about which answer is best, or trust the answer blindly.