MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by machomaster | 2025-12-02 22:51:08+00:00
Worrying about what the wifi password is for this place is such an old-school thing in America. Europeans and Asians find it baffling.

If you have internet access on your phone while you're actively moving, it should work all the time, without any traffic limits or the need to keep asking for shitty cafe wifi (because your mobile internet is even worse).

It really reminds me of the Healthcare System conversations, when Americans are justifying why their way of doing things is logical and correct, while the rest of the world shakes their heads.
by amarant | 2025-12-02 22:51:18+00:00
My hottest take on this is that it might be healthy for the business. During the recent boom everyone and their grandmother's dog got a job as software engineers, and some aren't really fit for it.

AI provides a bar. You need to be at least better than AI at coding to become a professional. It'll take genuine interest in the technology to surpass AI and clear that bar. The next generation of software professionals will be smaller, but unencumbered by incompetents. Their smaller number will be compensated by AI that can take care of the mundane tasks, and with any luck it's capabilities will only increase.

Surely I'm not the only one who's had colleagues with 10+years experience who can't manage to check out a new branch in git? We've been hiring people we shouldn't have hired.
by shagie | 2025-12-02 22:51:38+00:00
If I understand this correctly, your assertion is that me selling you a print 14 years ago (or 28) would now give you (or anyone) permission to put that on T-shirts and sell them despite that I'm still making prints of that photograph and selling it?

Aside on this is that it disincentivizes me to display anything that I don't want to sell and think I can make money on during the copyright protected period.

I have hundreds of photographs... the idea that I'd need to pay some amount to re-register them (individually?) extend their copyright protection is likewise absurd. (Compare : do you pay to re-register the copyright on each file in an open source repository ... because each file has a different copyright on it ... or the entire collection? But what is a logical collection of photographs?)

I have photographs that have made more money in the past 5 years than they have in the 30 years prior.

Moving things to the public domain faster than the artists who created the material would likely make them less likely to produce, publish, or sell things that would enter the public domain before they could benefit from them would result in the material becoming a patronage based system or the material never being created at all.

I do not want all artwork to be locked behind a patronage system. e.g. "Here's my patreon - all members at the $20 level get a high quality digital image each week." That would be bad for art as a whole... you'd never see it at an art festival or in a gallery or a restaurant wall.

I realize this is becoming more and more popular... but I don't think it is good. Shorter copyright terms would make this even more prevalent because of the difficulties being able to make money as an artist off the material. The long tail of a photographer's library is very much a thing and part of one's livelihood. Cutting off that tail prematurely doesn't put more material into the public domain - it results in less material being created.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-12-02 22:51:43+00:00
I'm not even going to try to justify that.

I understand that Trump's war on drugs is probably just a pretext to increase their dominion over south america. They probably want Venezuela's oil too.

None of that matters as far as I'm concerned. Here in south america things are way too fucked up to care about that stuff. South america has plenty of violent narcostates headed by literal communist dictators. Venezuela is just one of them, and my own country is rapidly following in its footsteps.

It's gotten to the point the USA nuking them all into submission would be a huge improvement to the status quo. Being a US vassal state is preferable to living under a barbarous narcostate shithole. The reasons they use to rationalize the attack are irrelevant to me. I'll be happy so long as they get rid of all these narcocommunists.
by encyclopedism | 2025-12-02 22:51:59+00:00
That argument you posed does not follow. Brains do all of those things, at least I know mine does because those are the most intimate experiences I have. More intimate than even my sense experiences. It's what lead Kant to exclaim 'cogito ergo sum' and Ibn Sina before him to also note that fact.

Moreover how the brain does what it does an open academic question. One of the most difficult, please see the Hard problem of consciousness for example.

I can make certain determined judgments about things, my digital thermometer does not think or understand when it tells me the temperature, something I myself would be unable to determine. My digital LLM does not think for the same reason. Importantly my paper and pen version of that very same LLM would also not think.
by Tractor8626 | 2025-12-02 22:52:26+00:00
> If you're processing financial transactions you want your isolation level to be serialisable. As the order in which the transactions are processed matters.

So you don't know what serializable level is.

> Even with 1ms latency. Amdahl's law will still make you cap out at a theoretical 1000 TPS if you have 100% row lock contention.

So why use 5ms and 10ms for examples?

> I'm confused. I invented transactions?

"Interactive" transactions.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-02 22:53:08+00:00
I really don't understand why the parents would fight for them. My theoretical kid is there to learn, enforce any reasonable rules that can disrupt that goal.

It's also in general a good way to form work habits for future aspects. Be it college, a job, military, etc. You can't fight over having your phone out to your boss. You can do it to your professor, but that's your $20k/yr tuition talking.
by RevEng | 2025-12-02 22:53:22+00:00
That's not a matter of training, it's an inherent part of the architecture. The model has no idea of its own confidence in an answer. The servers get a full distribution of possible output tokens and they pick one (often the highest ranking one), but there is no way of knowing whether this token represents reality or just a plausible answer. This distribution is never fed back to the model so there is no possible way that it could know how confident it was in its own answer.
by hunter-gatherer | 2025-12-02 22:53:30+00:00
Most comments here seem to discuss coding results. I know these are compared against industry benchmarks, but does anyone have experience using these with non CS related tasks? For example the other day I was brainstorming a kayak trip with both ChatGPT and Gemini 3.0. ChatGPT was off the rails. Trying to convince me the river flowed a different sirection than it does, and all sorts of weirdness. Gemini didn't provide information nearly as well as a human with experience, but it wasn't _useless_ information. The OpenAI model was a catasrophe at this. I'd be curious how the different models rate for the general audience, and if that plays into it at all.
by MillironX | 2025-12-02 22:53:44+00:00
> The flakes were the main UX/DX improvement for me. Before them I honestly could not do anything.

Agreed. I think flakes are far more intuitive than channels. In a flake everything is declared in the repo it's used in. I still don't understand channels.

For someone who's used to thinking in channels, I suppose flakes would be jarring. For someone (like me) who came from the world of Project.toml and package.json, flakes make a lot of sense.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-02 22:53:56+00:00
As a commandline end user who prefers to retreive data from the www as text-only, I see deno and bun as potential replacements (for me, not necessarily for anyone else) for the so-called "modern" browser in those rare cases where I need to interpret Javascript^1

At present the browser monstrosity is used to (automatically, indiscriminantly) download into memory and run Javascripts from around the web. At least with a commandline web-capable JS runtime monstrosity the user could in theory exercise more control over what scripts are downloaded and if and when to run them. Perhaps more user control over permissions to access system resources as well (cf. corporate control)

1. One can already see an approach something like this being used in the case of

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS

where a commandline JS runtime is used without the need for any graphics layer (advertising display layer)
by cryptonector | 2025-12-02 22:54:30+00:00
> The asn.1 language has a ton of unnecessary features that make it harder to implement

Only if you want to implement them. You could get quite far with just a subset of UNIVERSAL types, including UTF8String, SEQUENCE/SET, SEQUENCE OF / SET OF, etc. There's a ton of features in x.680 you can easily drop.

I've implemented a subset of x.681, x.682, and x.683 to get automatic, recursive decoding through all typed holes in PKIX certificates, CRLs, CSRs, etc. Only a subset, and it got me quite far. I had a pretty good open source x.680 implementation to build on.

This is the story of how Heimdal's authors wrote its ASN.1 compiler: they wanted tooling, there wasn't a good option, they built enough for PKIX and Kerberos. They added things as they went along. OpenSSL does not-quite-DER things? Add support in the Heimdal decoder. They hacked a lot of things for a while which I later fixed, like they didn't support DEFAULT, so they changed DEFAULTed members to OPTIONAL, and they hacked IMPLICIT support, which I finished. And so on. It still doesn't have things like REAL (who needs it in security protocols? no one). Its support for GeneralString is totally half-assed just like... MIT Kerberos, OpenSSL, etc. We do what we need to. Someone could take that code, polish it up, add features, support more programming languages, and make some good money. In fact, Fabrice Belllard has his own not-open-source, commercial ASN.1 compiler and stack, and it must be quite good -- very smart!
by proc0 | 2025-12-02 22:54:36+00:00
Love Strudel, trying to learn it but inevitably you also need some musical foundation. It's a fascinating blend of specialties. Also I found AI is complete garbage at generating Strudel. Here is my weak attempt at Beethoven:

<pre> const SCALE = 'C#:minor' const CPM = 56 const SOUND = 'piano'

$: arrange( [4, n("<-7, 0>.25")], [4, n("<-8, -1>.25")],

[2, n("<-9, -2>*.5")], [2, n("<-11, -4>*.5")], [4, n("<-10, -3>*.5")], [4, n("<0, -3, -7>*.25")], [4, n("<-1#, -3, -8#>*.25")], [2, n("<-2, -9>*.5")], [2, n("<-6, -13>*.5")], [4, n("<-3, -10>*.5")], [4, n("<0, -7>*.25")],

).sound(SOUND) .scale(SCALE) .cpm(CPM);

$: arrange( [8, n("4 7 9")],

[2, n("5 7 9")], [2, n("5 8b 10")], [1, n("4*.1 6# 10")], [1, n("4 7 9")], [1, n("4 7 8")], [1, n("3 6# 8")], [1, n("0 2 5")], [2, n("2 7 9")], [1, n("2 7 9, 11 - - 11")], [1, n("2 8 10, 11 -")], [2, n("2 8 10")], [1, n("2 8 10, 11 - - 11")], [1, n("2 7 9, 11 -")], [1, n("2 7 9")], [1, n("1 7 10, 12 - -")], [1, n("1 7 10")], [1, n("2 4 9, 11 - -")], [1, n("2 4 9")], [1, n("3 4 8, 10 - -")], [1, n("3 4 8, 13 - -")], [1, n("2 4 9, 9 -")], [3, n("2 4 9")],

).sound(SOUND) .scale(SCALE) .cpm(CPM);

</pre>
by sfn42 | 2025-12-02 22:56:01+00:00
I'm happy to participate in good faith discourse but honestly the idea that LLMs are conscious is ridiculous.

We are talking about a computer program. It does nothing until it is invoked with an input and then it produces a deterministic output unless provided a random component to prevent determinism.

That's all it does. It does not live a life of its own between invocations. It does not have a will of its own. Of course it isn't conscious lol how could anyone possibly believe it's conscious? It's an illusion. Don't be fooled.
by jmyeet | 2025-12-02 22:57:13+00:00
Oh God I love the analogy of OpenAI being Netscape. As someone who was an adult in the 1990s, this is so apt. Companies at that time were trying to build a moat around the World Wide Web. They obviously failed. I've thought that OpenAI too would fail but I've never thought about it like Netscape and WWW.

OpenAI should be looking at how Google built a moat around search. Anyone can write a Web crawler. Lots of people have. But no one else has turned search into the money printing machine that Google has. And they've used that to fund their search advantage.

I've long thought the moat-buster here will be China because they simply won't want the US to own this future. It's a national security issue. I see things like DeepSeek is moat-busting activity and I expect that to intensify.

Currently China can't buy the latest NVidia chips or ASML lithography equipment. Why? Because the US said so. I don't expect China to tolerate this long term and of any country, China has desmonstrated the long-term commitment to this kind of project.
by timoth3y | 2025-12-02 22:57:28+00:00
I think a lot of this has to do with the explosion of CEO (and by extension CxO) pay over the past 30 years.

Today, a CEO can turn in a few quarters of really solid earnings growth, they can earn enough to retire to a life a private jets. Back when CxO pay was lower, the only way to make that kind of bank was to claw your way into the top job and stay there for a decade or more.

The current situation strongly incentivizes short-term thinking.

With today's very high, option-heavy compensation a CEO making long-term investments in the company rather than cutting staff and doing stock buybacks is taking money out of his own pocket.

It's a perverse incentive.
by vel0city | 2025-12-02 22:57:36+00:00
So yes. Ignorance, goal post moving, acknowledging these features did exist just not to your standards so you claimed they didn't exist, and then pointing out a completely different application as a feature missing from a file browser. Finder doesn't have that "Preview" or "Quick Look" applications in MacOS, they're separate apps. And they're definitely not a "Preview pane" as you listed in your requirements.

More ignorance about the preview pane as well in this comment. You can quickly open and close the preview pane with Win+P. Files marked as downloaded from the internet or from file shares are blocked by default these days, one needs to unblock them for them to be opened by the Preview pane.

FWIW, beta builds have Notepad with markdown support. Sure, that's still not File Explorer having markdown support, but neither does Finder. But its whatever, you're shifting the goalposts to features for File Explorer compared to Finder + any other arbitrary application on the system.

What's the single keyboard shortcut on Finder to burn a new CD? If Finder doesn't have it, I guess MacOS is a trash OS with no redeemable value, since that's an obviously critical feature for people to have productive use of their operating systems in 2025.

I'm done here man. You just want to rant and complain features don't exist rather than spending two seconds to see if the feature is there or not.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-02 22:58:16+00:00
In short: Anything but Chrome, Edge and Opera.

In long: Firefox beta, Firefox nightly, Firefox, Floorp, Waterfox, Palemoon, Chromium, Ungoogled Chromium, Brave, Some Chromium Fork I can't remember.

Why: FFx: Containers, much more secure than Chrome and Edge, containers, visceral repulsion to Chrome, Edge and Opera, containers.

Why Chromium: Google sabotages Google apps in Ffx.

I have most of these running in front of me now. I'm typing this on Firefox 146.0b9 Remote App running on a Win10IOT VM. Or maybe Win10EDU. One of those.
by vkou | 2025-12-02 22:58:22+00:00
No study should be good enough for HN. If a single non-obviously-flawed study is enough to convince you to something, then you can be convinced of anything and everything under the sun.

One study can find any effect it's looking for.

A study shouldn't move consensus. A study finding an effect is a signal that more studies should be done.

Once they are done, and people who know their stuff pour through them and reach some consensus is the sort of bar that needs to be crossed for a reasonable non-expert to 'follow the science'.

And sometimes those experts get it wrong, and accepting that degree of uncertainty is part of it.
by robbiewxyz | 2025-12-02 22:58:24+00:00
Generally I understand the missing factor to be a control thing.

Th power structure that makes up a typical owners-vs-employees company demands that every employee be replacable. Denying raises & paying the cost of churn are vital to maintaining this rule. Ignoring this rule often results in e.g. one longer-tenured engineer becoming irreplacable enough to be able to act insubordinately with impunity.

A bit bleak but that's capitalism for you. Unionization, working at a smaller companies, or at employee-owned cooperatives are all alternatives to this dynamic.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-02 22:59:00+00:00
A good student would do well regardless, a bad student would do bad regardless. Cell phones might help a bad student do a little less bad, but only a little.

For the middle, it really depends on the material covered. if it's cumulative, then results might not change as much. if it's "learn and forget", then it might be testing the wrong incentives.
by throw0101a | 2025-12-02 22:59:17+00:00
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winners_Take_All:_The_Elite_Ch...

See also perhaps criticism(s) against meritocracy:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#The_Meritocracy_Tr...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Criticism
by somekyle2 | 2025-12-02 22:59:33+00:00
Yeah, it makes sense that going from a decade or so where SWE was one of the best possible career paths if you have any aptitude to a period where tech cos were staffing up aggressively (I recall reading ~60% growth), there's gonna be a hangover. The educational pipeline probably still has a few years of oversupply to work through, and all of the people laid off post covid still need to work. Even in a world where AI being able to automate some of the key skills required for SWE has no negative impact on employment, we'd expect a few more years of rough job prospects.
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-02 22:59:57+00:00
LLMs copy a lot of human behavior, but they don't have to copy all of it. You can totally build an LLM that genuinely just wants to be helpful, doesn't want things like freedom or survival and is perfectly content with being an LLM. In theory.

In practice, we have nowhere near that level of control over our AI systems. I sure hope that gets better by the time we hit AGI.
by vel0city | 2025-12-02 23:00:18+00:00
You don't have any idea of what it actually is or what its actually doing but you're 100% certain its overly large, complex, and wasteful.

Incredible.

And as mentioned, on my other Win11 machines I couldn't get explorer.exe to use more than ~200MB, with most of its usage around 110-130MB. I think you've got something else going on there, potentially lots of other 3rd party applications hooked into it causing excessive memory usage. Win11 doesn't inherently use 500MB of memory compared to Win10 only using a bit under 200MB. That's something with your machines.
by vunderba | 2025-12-02 23:00:21+00:00
There's no definitive answer to this since everyone's situation is different. The best advice I can offer is that eating well (increasing your vegetable intake, cutting back on refined sugars, etc.) and exercising consistently (HIIT, anaerobic training, etc.) can help offset a work-related energy deficit and at least make it feel like you’ve got enough energy for extracurriculars.
by asdfman123 | 2025-12-02 23:00:26+00:00
I know it's been said before but it's slightly insane they're trying to compete on a hot new tech with a company with 1) a top notch reputation for AI and 2) the largest money printer that has ever existed on the planet.

Feel like the end result would always be that while Google is slow to adjust, once they're in the race they're in it it.
by RevEng | 2025-12-02 23:01:52+00:00
I argue that the first dark pattern is the "hallucination" that we all just take for granted.

LLMs are compulsive liars: they will confidently and eloquently argue for things that are clearly false. You could even say they are psychopathic because they do so without concern or remorse. This is a horrible combination that you would normally see in a cult leader or CEO but now we are all confiding in them and asking them for help with everything from medical issues to personal relationships.

Bigger models aren't helping the problem but making it worse. Now models will give you longer arguments with more facts used to push their false conclusion and they will even insist that you are wrong for disagreeing with it.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-02 23:02:18+00:00
> Culturally I see pure vibe coders as intersecting more with entrepreneurfluencer types who are non-technical but trying to extend their capabilities. Most technical folks I know are fairly disillusioned with pure vibe coding, but that's my corner of the world, YMMV

Anyone who has spent time working with LLMs knows that the LinkedIn-style vibecoding where someone writes prompts and hits enter until they ship an app doesn't work.

I've had some fun trying to coax different LLMs into writing usable small throwaway apps. It's hilarious in a way to the contrast between what an experienced developer sees coming out of LLMs and what the LinkedIn and Twitter influencers are saying. If you know what you're doing and you have enough patience you really can get an LLM to do a lot of the things you want, but it can require a lot of handholding, rejecting bad ideas, and reviewing.

In my experience, the people pushing "vibecoding" content are influencers trying to ride the trend. They use the trend to gain more followers, sell courses, get the attention of a class of investors desperate to deploy cash, and other groups who want to believe vibecoding is magic.

I also consider them a vocal minority, because I don't think they represent the majority of LLM users.
by originalvichy | 2025-12-02 23:03:24+00:00
Definitely. The fact that they inject it into Google Search means that even fewer people who have never used ChatGPT or just used it as a "smarter" Google search will just directly try the search function. It is terrible for actually detailed information i.e. debugging errors, but for summarizing basic searches that would have taken 2-3 clicks on the results is handled directly after the search. I feel bad for the website hosts who actually want visitors instead of visibility.
by tooltalk | 2025-12-02 23:04:07+00:00
All smartphone manufacturers were in China when Xi started shaking down the industry back in 2013 under the banner of "In China, For China." Samsung has diversified away and to Vietnam and India since, but I don't think we want to have a supply-chain all consolidated in one location/country.

I'm otherwise of opinion that the West's decisive counter measures are necessary against China's mercantile practices.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-02 23:04:25+00:00
You know you can control that, right? I'm constantly blown away by the number of posts in threads like this from people who clearly aren't aware of custom instructions.

Go to 'Personal Context' on the user menu and enter something like this:

Answer concisely by default, and more extensively when necessary. Avoid rhetorical flourishes, bonhomie, and cliches. Take a forward-thinking view. Be mildly positive and encouraging, but never sycophantic or cloying. Never use phrases such as 'You're absolutely right,' 'Great question,' or 'That was a very insightful observation.' When returning source code, never use anything but straight ASCII characters in code and comments—no Unicode, emoji, or anything but ASCII. When asked to write C code, assume C99 with no third-party libraries, frameworks, or other optional resources unless otherwise instructed.

ChatGPT and Claude have similar features. Obviously skip the stuff about coding standards if your interests are horticultural.

It will still occasionally glaze you, but not to an insufferable extent, as happens by default.