MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw0101a | 2025-12-19 13:37:06+00:00
> Isn’t that a bit like raising your kid with the intent of playing in the NBA though?

No: getting to the NBA is very difficult, but you don't have to be that good. You 'just' have to be good enough to play at the college/university level with a scholarship. One doesn't necessarily have to 'go pro'.

I knew someone who got a scholarship to a business/finance program for cross-country running: he wasn't planning on being a pro runner. And doing these activities in high school is probably a good thing, from a social and health perspective, regardless of if it leads anywhere else.
by tliltocatl | 2025-12-19 13:37:47+00:00
> This is irrelevant at this point. At this point it doesn't matter if Mozilla is evil. It doesn't matter if Mozilla is more evil than Google. Mozilla has little to no power to capitalize on that evil.

I guess that's where we disagree a lot. If Google monopolizes the web completely, it'll end up with the web dying as a relevant platform. Just like it happened with Win32 (sure, after a decade or so of constant suffering), just like it happened to minis&mainframes. Because, let's face it, being a platform monopolist isn't very profitable unless you are screwing the developers and users so hard they'll jump on the first opportunity. And it's not like the web isn't worth saving as it is now, but it is not worth saving if it is going to turn into corporate crap.

> . People grab their pitchforks to go after Mozilla at the slightest misstep and do nothing as Google tramples all over causing more damage than an evil Mozilla could even imagine. It is laughable.

People expect a lawnmower to chop off their hands if they stick one into it. People don't expect a nonprofit declaring their dedication to freedoms to chop their hands off - and not even single fingers. Yes, declaring moral superiority means you will be judged a lot.
by mutkach | 2025-12-19 13:37:48+00:00
Sure, he is one of biggest advocates for it, and yet he was quite clear that it is not yet possible for him to do his actual research in Lean.

Quoting one of the recent papers (2020):

> With current technology, it would take many person-decades to formalise Scholze’s results. Indeed, even stating Scholze’s theorems would be an achievement. Before that, one has of course to formalise the definition of a perfectoid space, and this is what we have done, using the Lean theorem prover.
by phyzome | 2025-12-19 13:38:52+00:00
Look, it's pretty simple: A bunch of companies have been shoving AI into their products without a lot of consideration for what their users actually want and need. This is a signal for current and future actions that are user-hostile, both directly involving AI and in general (indicative of their current mentality).

"Open source" doesn't help when it's a huge project and users aren't actively auditing all of the changes. (And in general we want to trust the developers; if you're having to audit all features, trust has already been lost.)
by m4rtink | 2025-12-19 13:38:57+00:00
Well stated, agreed. :)

Just wanted to note that even after the bad publicity that companies like Meta (ugly avatars, unusable bland virtual spaces) or Apple (overpriced device with no software or content) have given to VR, some people tend to regard it as dead even though there is quite a vibrant user and creator community doing some incredible things (even just what people do with VRChat is amazing!). And there are even companies that seem to get it (Valve).
by squidbeak | 2025-12-19 13:39:43+00:00
Perhaps in that case the critics should bend their ire on the marketing departments, rather than trashing the tech?

Really though, the potential in this tech is unknown at this point. The measures we have suggest there's no slowdown in progress, and it isn't unreasonable for any enthusiast or policy maker to speculate about where it could go, or how we might need to adjust our societies around it.
by dijit | 2025-12-19 13:39:46+00:00
I’m not sure I’m comfortable drawing such a conclusion.

There have been outages since time immemorial. And there were no LLMs then and we have no evidence that they are using LLMs necessarily or that this was caused by an LLM or even that this is not just a free occurrence.

I’m all on the AI hate train, but I think being correct and drawing correct conclusions based on evidence is more important
by daly | 2025-12-19 13:40:05+00:00
Jim Farley doesn't understand what is actually happening. The majors are all in denial. (Rory Sutherland on selling an electric car: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OTOKws45kCo )

I just drove from Pittsburgh to Louisianna to Florida to Pittsburgh without touching the steering wheel. The car planned the route, planned the charging stops, and backed into the charging spaces.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Arthur C. Clarke (I had a career in vision, AI, and robots yet it still feels like magic)

The price of electricity to "fill up" was about 1/4 the price of gas for equivalent miles. "Fill up" times at chargers averaged about 10 minutes.

I have had my car for 15 months. I rotated the tires and added wiper fluid. "Lower total cost of ownership always wins" is basic economics.

And now Grok listens to my trip stops and updates navigation. Talk to Grok, touch "start full self driving" and relax.

"The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed," -- William Gibson
by bluGill | 2025-12-19 13:40:09+00:00
Copyright violation. If you write a book and I translate it to a different language you own the copyright on my translation. (except poetry which is artistic enough that it cannot be translated and so your version inspires me but I can't just translate it ). Decompilation doesn't have enough creative work to call it anything other than a translation.

I'm not a lawyer. I'm reasonably sure I'm right so the above is good enough for discussion, but if you need legal advice see a lawyer.
by Havoc | 2025-12-19 13:40:12+00:00
>that’s a conversation worth having

I'm not even sure there is much room left for one.

There is very little alignment in starting assumptions between most parties in this convo. One guy is coding mission critical stuff, the other is doing throw away projects. One guy depends on coding to put food on table, the other does not. One guy wants to understand every LoC, other is happy to vibe code. One is a junior looking for first job, other is in management in google after being promoted out of engineering. One guy has access to $200/m tech, the other does not. etc etc

We can't even get consensus on tab vs spaces...we're not going to get AI & coding down to consensus or who is "right".

Perhaps a bit a nihilistic & jaded, but I'm very much leaning towards "place your bets & may the odds be ever in your favour".
by everdrive | 2025-12-19 13:40:14+00:00
This is really interesting. Can you expand on this? What are OTT and DSP in this context?

Do you have a sense for what data is tracked and how it's used? Or if this sort of system is blind in certain cases? (eg: I hook up an N64 to the a/v ports -- will I get retro game ads on the TV?)
by rayiner | 2025-12-19 13:40:15+00:00
Jack Smith also just fucked up the prosecution. The Supreme Court was going to find some sort of official acts immunity existed. There is implied official acts immunity for judges in the U.S. And official acts immunity for executives is typical in the developed world. The EU for example has official acts immunity for “officials and servants,” though the scope is fuzzy: https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-high-flyers-face-fresh-do....

Jack Smith’s indictment mixed together conduct, like the sitting President consulting with his AG about suspected voter fraud, that clearly would fall within the scope of immunity, with stuff that was clearly not an official act. I don’t know if he was dumb or arrogant, but it was an insane tactical error.

Official immunity is tough and there’s no clear answer. The old canard that “a prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich” has a lot of truth to it. As between a potentially criminal, but duly elected President, and a potentially corrupt, and unelected prosecutor, which one is the bigger risk? There’s a strong argument that it’s better to have elections be the final backstop rather than the judgment of unelected prosecutors being able to override voters.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-12-19 13:40:51+00:00
> Just normal Luddite things, which attracts those most threatened in their personal identity by the new technology.

I feel like “Luddite” is a misunderstood term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

> Malcolm L. Thomas argued in his 1970 history The Luddites that machine-breaking was one of the very few tactics that workers could use to increase pressure on employers, undermine lower-paid competing workers, and create solidarity among workers. "These attacks on machines did not imply any necessary hostility to machinery as such; machinery was just a conveniently exposed target against which an attack could be made." [emph. added] Historian Eric Hobsbawm has called their machine wrecking "collective bargaining by riot", which had been a tactic used in Britain since the Restoration because manufactories were scattered throughout the country, and that made it impractical to hold large-scale strikes. An agricultural variant of Luddism occurred during the widespread Swing Riots of 1830 in southern and eastern England, centring on breaking threshing machines.

Luddites were closer to “class struggle by other means” than “identity politics.”
by nottorp | 2025-12-19 13:41:32+00:00
> it isn't unreasonable for any enthusiast or policy maker to speculate about where it could go

What is posted to HN daily is beyond speculation. I suppose a psychologist has a term for what it is, I don't.

Edit: well, guess what? I asked an "AI":

Psychological Drivers of AI Hype:

Term | Driver | Resulting Behavior -----------------------|-----------------------|------------------------------ ELIZA Effect | Symbolic projection | Treating a script like a person. Automation Bias | Cognitive offloading | Trusting AI over your own eyes. Techno-Optimism | Confirmation bias | Ignoring risks for "progress." Interface Familiarity | Fluency heuristic | Friendly UI = "Smart" system.

By the way, the text formatting is done by the "AI" as well. Asked it to make the table look like a table on HN specifically.
by _fzslm | 2025-12-19 13:42:13+00:00
It's a really pretty, humanist font, and those tend to be my favourite fonts. I was never the biggest fan of the grotesk-style Roboto/Inter/Univers, especially in the context of a user interface, which should feel a little bit friendlier imo.

I use Avenir on my Samsung phone, which is also pretty nice. I like Circular, Proxima Nova and Frutiger too, but they are all very expensive.

This font is free, flexible and genuinely really nice to look at. It's a good day for font nerds like me.
by falcor84 | 2025-12-19 13:42:16+00:00
My answer is: use AI exactly for the tasks that you as a tech lead on a project would be ok delegating to someone else. I.e. you still own the project and probably want to devote your attention to all of the aspects that you HAVE to be on to of, but there are probably a lot of tasks where you have a clear definition of the task and its boundaries, and you should be ok to delegate and then review.

This gets particularly tricky when the task requires a competency that you yourself lack. But here too the question is - would you be willing to delegate it to another human whom you don't fully trust (e.g. a contractor)? The answer for me is in many cases "yes, but I need to learn about this enough so that I can evaluate their work" - so that's what I do, I learn what I need to know at the level of the tech lead managing them, but not at the level of the expert implementing it.
by nairboon | 2025-12-19 13:42:44+00:00
Does anyone actually read articles from those low tier journals? Many of those articles are illegible fluff pieces.

That top tier publishers create new low-tier journals for this market shows that they are very well aware of these incentives and risks. They are not flooding their top journals with low quality OA "pay to publish" articles, which was the argument from OP.
by mpyne | 2025-12-19 13:42:55+00:00
> I’d like to understand the constraints and systems involved that make 80% considered full utilization. There’s obviously something that limits a OS; is it tunable?

There are OS tunables, and these tunables will have some measure of impact on the overall system performance.

But the things that make high-utilization systems so bad for cycle time are inherent aspects of a queue-based system that you cannot escape through better tuning, because the issues these cause to cycle time were not due to a lack of tuning.

If you can tune a system so that what previously would have been 95% loading is instead 82% loading that will show significant performance improvements, but you'd erase all those improvements if you just allowed the system to go back up to 95% loaded.
by tjchear | 2025-12-19 13:42:57+00:00
If we sees ourselves less as a programmer and more as a software builder, then it doesn’t really matter if our programming skills atrophy in the process of adopting this tool, because it affords us to build at a higher abstraction level), kind of like how a PM does it. This up-leveling in abstractions have happened over and over in software engineering as our tooling improves over time. I’m sure some excellent software engineers here couldn’t write in assembly code to save their lives, but are wildly productive and respected for what they do - building excellent software.

That said, as long as there’s the potential for AI to hallucinate, we’ll always need to be vigilant - for that reason I would want to keep my programming skills sharp.

AI assisted software building by day, artisanal coder by night perhaps.
by harimau777 | 2025-12-19 13:43:13+00:00
I mean, luddites have consistently been correct. Technological advancements have consistently been used to benefit the rich at the expense of regular people.

The early Industrial Revolution that the original Luddites objected to resulted in horrible working conditions and a power shift from artisans to factory workers.

Dadism was a reaction to WWI where the aristocracy's greed and petty squabbling led to 17 million deaths.
by halfcat | 2025-12-19 13:43:15+00:00
No. The opposite. The people who “move faster” are literally just producing tech debt that they get a quick high five for, then months later we limp along still dealing with it.

A guy will proudly deploy something he vibe coded, or “write the documentation” for some app that a contractor wrote, and then we get someone in the business telling us there’s a bug because it doesn’t do what the documentation says, and now I’m spending half a day in meetings to explain and now we have a project to overhaul the documentation (meaning we aren’t working on other things), all because someone spent 90 seconds to have AI generate “documentation” and gave themselves a pat on the back.

I look at what was produced and just lay my head down on the desk. It’s all crap. I just see a stream of things to fix, convention not followed, 20 extra libraries included when 2 would have done. Code not organized, where this new function should have gone in a different module, because where it is now creates tight coupling between two modules that were intentionally built to not be coupled before.

It’s a meme at this point to say, ”all code is tech debt”, but that’s all I’ve seen it produce: crap that I have to clean up, and it can produce it way faster than I can clean it up, so we literally have more tech debt and more non-working crap than we would have had if we just wrote it by hand.

We have a ton of internal apps that were working, then someone took a shortcut and 6 months later we’re still paying for the shortcut.

It’s not about moving faster today. It’s about keeping the ship pointed in the right direction. AI is a guy a guy on a jet ski doing backflips, telling is we’re falling behind because our cargo ship hasn’t adopted jet skis.

AI is a guy on his high horse, telling everyone how much faster they could go if they also had a horse. Except the horse takes a dump in the middle of the office and the whole office spends half their day shoveling crap because this one guy thinks he’s going faster.
by immibis | 2025-12-19 13:43:17+00:00
What good does that do though? They still have the bug, whether it's marked "unsafe" or not. You could mark every C source file as "unsafe" and that wouldn't magically make C a better language or have fewer bugs.

This talking point needs to stop. Rust could be a better language but that would be because it causes fewer bugs, not because the bugs are labeled "unsafe"
by godelski | 2025-12-19 13:43:26+00:00
> Then he says: "to get trust back, our top priority will be working on AI features." WHAT THE FUCK WHYYYYY!?!?

I don't think adding a fucking shortcut to ChatGPT is "top priority" or even time consuming.

Did you even look at what they're calling "AI Mode" in that link? They call it "AI Window". It's the same fucking thing as the window where you can opt in to using chatbots. That's nowhere near the same thing as pushing AI on us
by techas | 2025-12-19 13:43:43+00:00
>There is not much left of communism in China besides the name,

After living 2 years in China and visiting the country every year for the last 12 years, I disagree with you.

Many not minor things in China are still very aligned with communism.

How the university system works, land property, production in unpopulated areas and small towns, participation of the government in industry, etc…
by UniverseHacker | 2025-12-19 13:43:50+00:00
If you actually thought you were arguing with a bot you wouldn’t bother replying. Most of those “slow” 70s cars with nowhere near the power of an eGolf could still leisurely cruise all day at over 100mph even up a grade, hit freeway speeds in a tiny fraction of the onramp, and keep up with freeway traffic towing a heavy trailer, for some reasonable context on what is actually needed and usable for transportation on public roads.

I feel I’m arguing with someone that has never actually driven a car, nor is able to have a civil disagreement like an adult. Your tone is simply not how we do things on HN.
Show HN: PocketCheck – A checklist for things not worth writing down
by Gonbei774 | 2025-12-19 13:43:54+00:00
I have ADHD tendencies. I leave things half-done, go home with my work keys still in my pocket, and as soon as I start something else I completely forget the task I was doing before. Reminders don’t work — I just don’t look at them. Checklists don’t work either — I forget to check them in the first place. So I built PocketCheck. It periodically asks, “Anything to put in your pocket?” It’s a pocket that stands in for my working memory. I forget what I put in my actual pockets all the time, but this pocket remembers for me. Input is minimal: just a name, or just a photo if I’m in a hurry. Since I started using it, I still forget things — but now I notice in time. Open source (GPL-3.0), no Google Play Services required.
by the-wumpus | 2025-12-19 13:43:56+00:00
The existing type checkers are slow. That's their reasoning for creating it. The type checking world in python is now reasonably well specified (and the type checkers are beginning to work more similarly), so I would expect (once ty is out of beta) you could replace your type checker with ty and just see a 20x speedup in CI and much much faster IDE diagnostics.

If it was going from 3s -> 1s then you'd probably be right, but on my work codebase pyright (which is the faster one!) takes 15 seconds (ty takes 0.8s) and takes a bit for errors to appear in the IDE. This is now fast enough for us (mypy was taking >30s, which was not fast enough), but if the project grew another order of magnitude (which it might) then it would probably be too slow.

It's the same reason ruff is great, linting the codebase is so so fast.
by capnrefsmmat | 2025-12-19 13:45:09+00:00
Most of the tedious formatting requirements do not match what the final typeset article looks like. The requirements are instead theoretically to benefit peer reviewers, e.g., by having double-spaced lines so they can write their comments on the paper copy that was mailed to them back when the submission guidelines were written in the 1950s.

The smarter journals have started accepting submissions in any format on the first round, and then only require enough formatting for the typesetters to do their job.
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-19 13:45:45+00:00
If you hate reading other people's code, then you'll hate reading llm generated code, then all you'll ever be with ai at best is yet another vibe coder who produces piles of code they never intend to read, so you should have found another career even before llms were a thing.

Responsible use of ai means reading lots and lots of generated code, understanding it, reviewing and auditing it, not "vibe coding" for the purpose of avoiding ever reading any code.
Auto Majors are toast. They don't have AI
by daly | 2025-12-19 13:45:58+00:00
Jim Farley doesn't understand what is actually happening. The majors are all in denial. (Rory Sutherland on selling an electric car: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OTOKws45kCo )

I just drove from Pittsburgh to Louisianna to Florida to Pittsburgh without touching the steering wheel. The car planned the route, planned the charging stops, and backed into the charging spaces.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Arthur C. Clarke (I had a career in vision, AI, and robots yet it still feels like magic)

The price of electricity to "fill up" was about 1/4 the price of gas for equivalent miles. "Fill up" times at chargers averaged about 10 minutes.

I have had my car for 15 months. I rotated the tires and added wiper fluid. "Lower total cost of ownership always wins" is basic economics.

And now Grok listens to my trip stops and updates navigation. Talk to Grok, touch "start full self driving" and relax.

"The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed," -- William Gibson
by pwillia7 | 2025-12-19 13:45:58+00:00
Since you're a real established artist, I want to make my point more clear: I am not an artist and while AI image tools let me make fun pictures and not be reliant on artists for projects, it doesn't imbue me with the creativity to create artistic works that _move_ people or comment on our society. AI doesn't give or take that from you, and I argue that is what truly separates art and artists from doodles and doodlers.
by necovek | 2025-12-19 13:46:20+00:00
With time and experience, reading code becomes much easier.

And well-written code is usually easy to read and understand too!

The purpose of a code review is, apart from ensuring correctness, to ensure that the code that gets merged is easy to understand! And to be honest, if it's easy to understand, it's easy to ensure correctness too!

The biggest challenge I had was to distinguish between explanations needed to understand the change, and explanations needed to understand the code after it was merged in. And making it clear in my code review questions that whatever question I have, I need code and comments in the code to answer them, not the author to explain it to me (I frequently have already figured out the why, but took me longer than needed): it's not because I did not get it, it's because it should be clearer (finding the right balance between asking explicitly, offering a suggestion, or pitting it as a question to prompt some thinking is non-trivial too).
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-19 13:46:29+00:00
I like to be able to price shop, but I do want to support the authors. So I use Kobo & Kindle, then buy it wherever it's cheapest usually.

Then I use epubor ultimate to convert to epub and read it on my generic e-ink reader. Some folks object to the licensing or whatever with epubor (unattributed GPL?) but it works, it's easy, and when Amazon tightens up the DRM they always find a way around it eventually.