skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Head over to Instagram and pick a random reel. Now scroll down and let the algorithm pick out suggestions for you. (Not your main timeline, mind you -- this gets you actual algorithmic suggestions.) The first few will be normal, but it gets incredibly disturbing very quickly. I did this last night and it was about 90% AI videos. They included:

1. Beautiful cakes and muffins that squirmed and then turned into puppies. (This sounds cute but is actually kind of disturbing.)

2. Rats. Big ass rats. And some cockroaches. A sandwich full of bugs.

3. Pretty women having their heads sliced up with sharp knives, which then demonstrated that they were actually made of "cake".

4. Monsters in what appear to be backyard surveillance cameras.

This was interspersed with random content that I actually look at, plus a few thirst traps. The closest description I have for it was "this is what a bad trip is like." The Internet in 2025 is nothing like MSN.
"What Saved The ‘Miracle House’ In Lahaina?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37192915

Iirc, one of items listed was rocks/gravel surrounding the house on the ground so any embers that landed beside the building had nothing to feed on ignite.
Give it enough time and a new version of Slack will eventually grind to a halt on your puny 2019 CPU.
oh this is a really good point! You're totally right, I had completely skipped over the fact that the rectangles were allowed to overlap. I think I'm probably done with this project / I'm pretty happy with the solution as it stands, but I think you're right that this simplifies the problem considerably. Thanks!
OK so now I feel it's rather immaterial who of us was right and who was wrong
> But here’s the thing: I don’t need it. I don’t have a single usecase for which I would need this much processing power. In fact, I could still use that i5 from 2011 and it would do everything I want it to do perfectly fine. I didn’t need to upgrade, I just wanted to.

If only we could have a bigger percentage of people that thought the same way. Then we might be able to get away from the insanity of marketing for new New NEW when what you have will do. Maybe these huge “tech” companies will be taken down a peg into more sane valuation territories. Maybe we’ll stop with the mounting piles of e-waste driven by the advertisers pushing FOMO of not having the shiniest.

A guy can dream though.

I figure I’ll slow my pace of upgrades even more than I have now and when the software becomes yet a larger pile of bloated nonsense shat out by clueless developers than it already is, I’ll switch back to writing letters.
Moderation systems, even with humans at the helm, are adversarial systems where people can, and will, push on what is allowed. An AI moderator that is as good as a human on a per message basis is still going to be played like a fiddle by an adversary that is interested enough.

Many a forum out there has collapsed because the moderators manage to decide something is fine when it keep losing them contributors. The why do we think the AI will do better?
> The statement is a motte and bailey.

Note that these are both social issues, not biological issues, and it's possible to have different opinions about the two. There's certainly no biological imperative to have separate sports for men and women; that's simply a social convention. If we look only at men, those who are taller typically have a huge athletic advantage over those who are shorter. Why don't we have separate pro basketball leagues for tall guys and short guys? Even the "shorter" NBA players, usually guards, are almost always taller than the average male. As a shorter than average male myself, I'm dwarfed not only by NBA players but also by WNBA players. Where do I get my fair shot? ;-)

> Your analogy fails because there aren't biological differences between people of different faiths.

As I already said in my previous comment, this is a social issue, not a biological issue. I also elaborated on this in another comment in this same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42674247

> It also enables bad behavior like trying to force lesbians to like dick, lest they be called transphobic.

I have no idea what you're talking about or where you're getting this stuff.
They have that, to some degree. The standard library is mostly optional. Also, a lot of things are 'implementation defined', so you could just not implement those. That leaves quite a small language core.
Kids Turn to a Mental-Health Chatbot to Share Their Anxieties
Preferential treatment based on immutable characteristics. It's called discrimination.
Great idea!

What you're engaging in is transparent and glaringly obvious. It's subversive and downright malicious.

Even in a cohesive and homogenous society, you are desperately looking for any and all means to split, fracture and divvy up the population in warring "diversity" groups that are constantly at odds with each other. There has to be something you can use right?

Young children, the elderly, women, atheists or religious folk aren't a diversity group. They are just people.

I know exactly what you're doing, and it doesn't work in cohesive functional societies. They reject it.
What we see is the outcome of a political process, but doesn’t mean policymakers are unaware.

All it really means is that when it comes to a battle between fire prevention people and people who like their gardens, in the absence of a fire, the people worried about fire are going to look like scolds and the people who want the individual freedom to have a garden are going to win the political fight. More of a collective outcome of our society than oversight by policymakers.

Good luck trying to ban gardens in the Oakland hills, people just won’t do it even if policymakers want it. Probably the best way to do it would be to deregulate insurance and give them discretion - “oh you want to have a garden in a fire prone area, sure - that will just be 3x your original bill”
He’s forgetting that software keeps getting slower. Forever and ever. With new hardware comes new expectations for hardware by software vendors.
> I think I have less than 100 users total.

> At least once a week I get emails from people

My extension (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/privornot/fnpgifcbm...) currently says it has ~915 users. Usually the offers I get are in the $100-$200 range, but it's maybe once every 1-2 months I get an offer.

I'm guessing they go by keywords + user count (or something, maybe "last updated" too?) , as my extension is very country and context-specific, and I'm not getting that many offers (thankfully). More people reaching out saying thanks, which are better emails to receive anyways and some asking for the source code, which I'm happy to provide :)
Your comparison between humans and machines is revealing. If you want a soulless computer to tell you what’s going on in the world, talk to Grok or something. Humans have personalities.
You can also buy second hand to save another 50-80% when you do upgrades due to something catastrophically breaking. I got a used but very good quality mid tier Ryzen laptop for $200 from a few generations ago and added 32GB memory and a nvme drive and it’s an absurdly good computer for dev work.
That is actually cool! Good luck man!! Hope to see more templates!
I have had drinks with Peter Thiel. If you force him to answer more than one question about his theories it totally falls apart. Mostly the logic actually goes like this: oh if it doesn’t work I have the money to survive it and you don’t so I still win and claim I was right.

I wish more people understood this.
This has happened before. In 1950, the first link between tobacco smoke and cancer was publicized. Tobacco companies took 40 years before they started to admit (and then only due to public pressure) that the link was real and they already knew about it.

Also back then real scientists defended the companies, with so-called real data.

If you don't know who to trust in a case like this, it's always a good idea to pick the side that is against the bottom lines of large companies.
If you want infinite, there are better ways for that, so why would you want to simulate it?

Lot's of use of infinite spinning like for loading spinners and what not. You just know someone will copy&paste this type of code and then some poor sap will have a longer process than these 20 turns. Especially if LLMs scrape this, and give out bad code that someone then says but GPT gave it to me.

We should be much more aware of consequences of lazy writing
Or

ctrl-z

kill %%

That is in tcsh, I would think bash has %% too.
> But really, why is it so?

I don't think the bitter lesson is (or should be?) that you don't need to engineer biases in because with enough compute you could learn them instead ... The real lesson is that finding the right (minimal) set of biases is hard, and you should therefore always learn them instead if possible. Systems that learn are liable to outperform those that don't because by letting the data speak for itself, they are learning the right biases.

I think this is why historically the bitter lesson has been correct - because people have built too much into AI systems, got it wrong, and made them limited and brittle as a result.

The same thing is continuing to happen today with pre-trained LLMs (a fixed set of patterns!) and bespoke test-time reasoning approaches (of which at most one, likely none, are optimal). Of course it's understandable how we got here, even if a bit like the drunk looking for his lost car keys under the street lamp rather than in the dark spot he lost them. Continuous incremental learning (no training vs inference time distinction) is an unsolved problem, and the basis of intelligence/reasoning is not widely understood.
Yeah it's not as strong as constrained beam search like OpenAI uses (at least afaik) but it works on any models that support tool calling. Just keep it simple, don't have a lot of deep nested structures or complicated rules.

Lots of other models will work nearly as well though if you just give them a clear schema to follow and ask them to output json only, then parse it yourself. Like I've been using gemma2:9b to analyze text and output a json structure and it's nearly 100% reliable despite it being a tiny model and not supporting tools or structured output officially.
Consumer Capitalism is neither driven nor perturbed by environmentally and clock-conscientious nerds.
I just got a new M4Pro Mini (Apple). It replaces my M1Max 14-inch MBPro.

Bit zippier (not screaming), but it does have native support for Apple "Intelligence."

I was waiting for the M4Max/Ultra Studio, but, y'know, I realized that I have no need for that.

This has been working fine, for a couple of months. I suspect that I won't be replacing it, for a few years.

I probably will need to get a new iPhone, and maybe iPad, sometime in the next year or so (also for Apple Intelligence stuff), but I'm in no hurry.
What foods are taxed in the UK
The Signals of Workplace Submissiveness
https://archive.ph/gN7QV
True. For example, the Apple ][+ came with a demo disk full of programs for the then-new Applesoft BASIC language, and this was one of them. The questions were saved by POKEing them into arrays hard-coded into the program, allowing you to SAVE the modified program after running it.

It seemed like a neat trick at the time. There was also a crude CRUD database that worked the same way, retaining up to 50 names and phone numbers.

Actually that disk had a lot of really cool programs, now that I think about it. A biorhythm plotter, Woz's "Little Brick Out" Breakout clone, and a few other demos by luminaries like Bruce Tognazzini and Bob Bishop. And of course, ELIZA, the mother of all LLMs... only it was called FREUD for some reason.
Do you mean garden in the American sense or the British sense? Tomato plants are not a problem.

Trees and dense shrubs near the house are.
It's inconvenient to the policy 'makers' who are more interested in their aspirations than their duty.

It's common sense to everyone else.
Much/most of the damage at Hiroshima was the resulting fires, not the explosion, so it's very similar!
Regarding the Vim macro that ends by going to the next line to be "replayable": You can also use the following command to run the macro once per line:

:%norm @q
I think part of it may be they're not saying no until someone else is actually hired just in case they need a fallback, so everyone else gets to wait however long it takes for the role to be filled, most likely...
My "remote" web development setup
There are only ~16.7 million /24s in IPv4 whereas there are more than 2000 /44 for every person living on planet earth, it’s really a different scale.
What did the sustainability team do? I don’t mean an offense to the team members but sustainability for a software company is very niche. Unless you’re a hyper scaler like public cloud services your impact is limited.

The whole sustainability area needs a rethink. It needs to be linked to cost of doing business (and no - not idiotic carbon taxes) and I think if you’re using public cloud services it already is. If your code is inefficient you will be hit with higher bills (I know I’m abstracting wildly but this is mostly true). If you need to lower cost/utilization write the code to do optimize.

If you own your own data centers, now that’s a very different proposition. Not sure whether Wordpress owns these - and I don’t mean renting space and racks. I mean owning the entire space.
Eight Tigers
I think if you ask enough people, you will find people will have differing answers on which one(s) are different than the others. I intentionally included both things I agree with and disagree with.
think that might be stretching the definition of “world” a bit far
> The fixation on genitals in this discourse is weird.

It doesn't come from me. It comes from the people who demand purely biological definitions of "man" and "woman".

> It's an argument that tries to say "if you don't agree with me, you're a pervert that just thinks about genitals".

I didn't say anything about perversion.

> Men vs women can be clearly distinguished in many different ways while keeping their clothes on.

Highly inaccurately. For some damn reason, I've been called "ma'am" way too often, for example by grocery and retail store employees. I guess it's because of my height, which is shorter than average. (I don't have long hair, in case you're wondering.) Anyway, it really pisses me off, massive disrespect.
Massive wasting of time?

I feel like you only read half of that sentence.

entr to run commands on modifying files/directories

Alt-Tab to the command console that I always have running.

plain Makefiles to run your code

I have no idea what the advantage is here. F5 to run my code, including scripted deployment.

LSP and alike tools for your language

I don't know what this means.
So few options for good Gantt charts. At the end we all have to implement one for our specific use case.
Doesn’t have to be “the whole system.” You can pin blame directly on the people doing it.
They may need to buy a new server though. (Site is down at the time of writing this)
Actually this is a place that is open to anyone's opinion - and that makes sense. People from border areas with the one of the discussion can give alternative insights. Of course digging relevant ones out of 1k comments are a challenge.
I didn’t say they did it wrong. The commenter tossed out two pieces of my advice as not relevant and I wanted to reinforce that all the advice was linked. Not a pick-3 three, toss two situation. What is not cool is having some sort of animosity or negative reaction because I chose to reinforce the ideas.

Someone who is not willing to listen or reconsider will easily be susceptible to burn out again. Especially to advice only intended to help not criticize.
I think I used my 2010 laptop for eight years. Upgrades: 120GiB (GB?) SSD.
Hah, trust nolen to 1,000x something :))) I have used similar tactics in the past, but separately and definitely not in one day! For the interested:

- Bad Matrix (tput blocks to the terminal): https://www.evalapply.org/posts/bad-matrix/

- Animating Text Art in Javascript (print text into fixed grid, flipbook-style): https://www.evalapply.org/posts/animate-text-art-javascript/...

- oxo (format and print tic-tac-toe board to terminal, so I can regex-match for win/loss/draw results): https://github.com/adityaathalye/oxo/blob/7681e75edaeec5aa1f...

But, I mean, that Bad Apple takes the cake!

(edit: add missing link)
Proof? :) where has proof ever been found in truth?

It's not proof, but there is some good evidence out there. Here are two interesting papers I found informative.

https://arxiv.org/html/2403.04121v2

https://arxiv.org/html/2411.12580v1
Seems better than using a literal Playboy centerfold.
Thank you for that! This was particularly interesting:

Certain versions of Unix, and early network file systems, used paths of the form //hostname/path to access 'path' on server 'hostname'.

It directly ties in with the URL format:

scheme://hostname/path/to/file

How cool it would be if we could go:

cd //google.com/search?q=quack+like+duck

and we would get a directory with 1 file per result (or to be really unix like: 1 directory per result, with a set of files and directories for different aspects of the result hehehe :))
I found a much better article (5 page PDF) from the fire prevention expert quoted in this article, which details his method of prioritizing building fire-safe homes and dispels misconceptions of how wildfire spreads to homes:

https://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/woods/117_121.pdf
I believe that the intention was to say "No ability to save progress _between sessions_" in the original program, whereas the C++ implementation saves to text files.

Another portion of the article says more explicitly:

Limitations:
Maximum number of nodes: 200.
The structure is stored only in memory (no disk saving).
How VPS work behind the scene
Thanks, but these only seem to work with graphical versions of Vim. Also, if you suspend your Vim session, these seem to stop working.
I wish I knew what "AI" is.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but to my understanding, every single one of these "AI" products is based on a model, i.e. it's just a normal program with a very big configuration file. The only thing "AI" about it is the machine learning performed when training the model. At the generation stage, there is nothing "AI" about it anymore. The AI is done already. What runs is a normal program.

I know it's used in computer vision, recommendation algorithms, and generative software like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, etc. I don't know if there is anything besides these.

From what I know, the biggest problems with AI is: 1) the program pretends to be intelligent, when it isn't, e.g. by using natural language. And 2) the program doesn't give the user enough control, they only get one text box prompt and that's it, no forms, no dialogs, so the product has to somehow generate the right answer from the most uncontrolled piece of data imaginable.

These two things combined not only limit the products potential by giving it unreasonable expectations but also makes it feel a bit of a scam: the product is a program, but what sells is its presentation: it has to present itself as being MORE than just a program by hiding as much of its internal workings from the consumers and covering its warts with additional layers of logic.

I don't know if the author would consider natural language to be a "hardcoding" create to temporarily solve a problem that should be solved by using more compute (AGI), but to me it feels like it is.

The best application of AI is probably going to be using AI internally to solve existing problems in a given domain your business is familiar with rather than try to come up with some AI solution that you have to sell other people.
>Then we might be able to get away from the insanity of marketing for new New NEW when what you have will do.

That is literally how modern capitalist consumer economies work. The whole system is based on the assumption of more people buying more things they don't need, computers and otherwise.

Our society is that way intentionally.
I prefer per process over the alternatives.

When you write code you have the choice to do per process, per thread, or sequential.

The problem is that doing multiple tests in a shared space doesn't necessarily match the world in which this code is run.

Per process testing allows you to design a test that matches the usage of your codebase. Per thread already constrains you.

For example: we might elect to write a job as a process that runs on demand, and the library we use has a memory leak, but it can't be fixed in reasonable time. Since we write it as a process that gets restarted we manage to constrain the behavior.

Doing multiple tests in multiple threads might not work here as there is a shared space that is retained and isn't representative of real world usage.

Concurrency is a feature of your software that you need to code for. So if you have multiple things happening, then that should be part of your test harness.

The test harness forcing you to think of it isn't always a desirable trait.

That said, I have worked on a codebase where we discovered bugs because the tests were run in parallel, in a shared space.
The origin of the cargo cult metaphor
My sweet summer child. Matt has unilateral control over every aspect of Wordpress, including the open-source project and community. He exerts that control, whether that's closing Slack channels or banning members.

https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/
While I have been using Linux since 1996 or so, and do have quite an opinionated workflow, I never could agree with this kind of ultraconservative approach to things. History never stops. Things change. Linux changes. Not every day, not every month, but every couple of years something has to go. And that's ok.
Antipode Finder
This is pretty cool! I like the creativity. The games this is based on are pretty good too. Danmaku are hypnotic
The include file mechanism is a hack that was acceptable at the time when machines were extremely underpowered, so only the simplest solutions had a chance to be implemented within a reasonable time frame.

By now, of course, precompiled headers exist, but their interplay with #define allows for fun inconsistencies.

And, of course, they leak implementation as much as the author wants, all the way to .h-only single-file libraries.

If you want an example of a sane approach to separate interface and implementation files from last century, take a look e.g. at Modula-2 with its .int and .mod files.
The top end of OutRut type tech was Power Drift and Rail Chase

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ngUCwEVtlI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQd3FFT7pnc
The inconvenience was ignoring the experts advice.

They might have said something along the lines of make sure you have water, the ability to use it (hello Maui), and people who know how to use it.

Or maybe they thought that was needless to say and had more advanced advice like clearing dead brush, making fire breaks, etc.

Or ... Well yeah. It would be nice to know what advice was ignored. I'm sure there was plenty in that category.
Cursor's problem isn't bigger context, it's better context.

I've been using it recently with @nanostores/react and @nanostores/router.

It constantly wants to use router methods from react-router and not nanostores so I am constantly correcting it.

This is despite using the rules for AI config (https://docs.cursor.com/context/rules-for-ai). It continually makes the same mistakes and requires the same correction likely because of the dominance of react-router in the model's training. That tells me that the prompt it's using isn't smart enough to know "use @nanostores/router because I didn't find react-router".

I think for Cursor to really nail it, the base prompt needs to have more context that it derived from the codebase. It should know that because I'm referencing @nanostores/router, to include an instruction to always use @nanostores/router.