skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Doesn’t that impugn a whole lot of classics?

I'm sure it impugns many of the classics (and later), not only Garfield! In my mind, it does impugn He-Man, G.I. Joe, etc. YMMV, of course.

> Dudes sitting in a smoky room: “Yeah, so the pig’s a big fat pig with mobility issues and get this, he stutters hahahaha gonna sell like moonshine, go tell the artists.”

There was a lot of artistry in the Looney Toons, the artists were both doing it for the money (of course) but also out of love for cartoons and they had ideas about them. It wasn't pure cold hearted market research. They didn't go "what would sell more stuffed toys, a pig or a rabbit?".

There must have been some of this too, of course, but have you read memories or articles about Tex Avery and other people involved? They truly cared about their craft. They had ideas about what they wanted to achieve, and it wasn't just "make money".
Don't forget all those interconnected microservices, so that every request has to be handled by dozens of machines with lots of json flying everywhere eating up CPU time that could have been spent actually carrying out the business logic instead.
All I can think of is: "Poor Boromir." :-(
Pension is also a fiction (as in, I do not have one).
Pharmaceutical Tariffs: The What and the How
For some reason I'm thinking of the classic "Speed cooking" videos:

https://youtu.be/8TVpQiCIqp4
Most of those subs linked are from direct negotations from the state, and they are in the form of tax incentives, not cash in account.

How are you going to use that against a company that nevada agreed to give them X amount of tax incentives over a year if they build a giga factory there?

Using that as a justification that "tesla only lives because of tax payer money" is ridiculous.

Also, poking around the SpaceX data just seems entirely false too. The biggest 'loan' of $98M to spaceX for "Missle technology development". And when you follow the authorizations it was just a firm fixed price contract.
Welcome to the world of restoration and restomods!

Remember Google Reader?

What if I want a better Google Reader?!

* beats dead horse * ... sorry, horsey.
In my experience, people aren't so static as to have dualities. They don't fit so neatly into little descriptors.

What is a strength? Something you are inherently talented at? A skill you have plenty of experience with? A subject you have a lot of knowledge of? What you are motivated by?

What is a weakness?

I see that most people are rather adaptable to context. When you're working at a startup building an app make AI complete your Uber orders for you, there's no reason to be focused on making sure the system is scalable to a million requests per second. Most people tend to understand that. They may have a lot of experience building highly scalable backend systems, they may want to build another system like that again because it pleases them to do so. But most people will see the forest for the trees and focus on getting the project out the door in the fastest way possible because they probably won't have a million customers for a long time... if at all.

I tend to look for what people value when building a team. You'll need to match the set-intersection of the teams' values with the goals of the business. People are motivated to work on thing they value. We can tolerate working on things we don't but try to avoid doing that for too long. So if the business needs a highly reliable system because failures can lose their customers millions of dollars a minute for downtime then you'll want to stock your team with developers that value those things the company cares about.

What you're good at today can change tomorrow. You can be better at it. It's a skill, it's knowledge, it's something you can acquire: it's not an attribute or trait of you as a person.
this is the first time I am seeing spam on HN
>> The pacts "represent non-essential spending on third party consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform

The irony is that they're cutting external solution providers to do more in-house.

... which means more work in-house.

... done by the same teams they just cut the size of.

Without looking at government pay bands for specialty talent, I think the Pentagon is going to have a hard time doing this work itself well.
Again, trojan horse. Israel is the justification being used. If it wasn't Israel it would be something else. The protest at many of these colleges were organized by Jewish students.
At my local supermarket self-checkout they moan at me for removing the security tags from bottles of wine when the staff are busy. It's my wine!
Sometimes you just have to do it yourself. I'm lucky enough to have had a CD collection before music streaming is a thing. Now my phone has enough capacity (since I still use phones that can take SD cards) to casually carry my entire collection around. I can play it in any order I want.

I've even still got a streaming service I can do exploring on, since YouTube bundles one with Premium. I find it's a good thing I have my own collection though since it tracks my interests poorly.

I've gotten back into buying my own video too. I don't consume a ton of video and I dropped Netflix streaming a while ago because the delta between me marking something for the queue and actually getting to it was becoming routinely larger than the amount of time Netflix would still have the thing I wanted to see.

The problem is, I don't even see the second derivative on this trend turning, let alone the first. Metric-driven development, by its very nature, will take away every knob from you that you could conceivably use to drive their metrics lower. I think that's a reasonable approximation of the root cause of the reality observed in the OP. If you happen to agree with their metrics then hey, good times for you, but the odds of that are low since you're probably not looking to maximize the monetization they can extract from you as priority one.

Therefore, the only option is, get off metric-driven-development platforms. There is no alternative and will be even less of one as time goes on.

I suspect in the very long run this metric-driven development will eventually die off as all consumers come around to this realization one way or another and start turning to other alternatives, but it can easily be 5-10 years before there's enough of us for those "alternatives" to be able to survive in the market. Fortunately, MP3 players haven't gone anywhere. (Although it takes some searching to find ones that aren't also trying to match the streaming services and stick to old-school "play what you ask for and not anything else, unless you ask for shuffling or randomness explicitly".)
For a configuration language, comments are absolutely crucial. You want to be able to say "# This option is set because <so-and-so>" to explain why you are configuring it this way to the next person that reads the code (or you, in the future).

If the price to pay is that there is some risk some dummy might start parsing the comments as code, so be it. This is not a really a problem in "regular" programming languages, I don't see why it would be in a configuration language.
Oh, that’s the old Line Length Monitor. Back in the teletype days, it’d beep if your comment ran past 80 columns. Mine used to beep so much the janitor thought we had a bird infestation.
Unmentioned: there are serious security issues with memory cloning code not designed for it.

For example, an SSL library might have pre-calculated the random nonce for the next incoming SSL connection.

If you clone the VM containing a process using that library, now both child VM's will use the same nonce. Some crypto is 100% broken open if a nonce is reused.
Is this the logical conclusion of the marginal user effect? If your business model depends on growth, you need to keep changing the product to attract new users even at the cost of quality to old ones that are unlikely to leave.
It's almost certainly going to be bad, and almost certainly going to be unavoidable.

I can't spell for shit anymore. Ever since auto correct became omnipresent in pretty much all writing fields, my brain just kinda ditched remembering how to spell words.

buuuttt

Manual labor has been obsolete for at least 100 years now for certain classes of people, and fitness is still an enormous recreational activity people partake in. So even in an AI heavy society, I still strongly suspect there will be "brain games" that people still enjoy and regularly play.
I feel that it basically comes down to promotion driven development. Things are changed because they are justifications for someone promotion. Cut the bloat!
Thanks! I was looking at blackwell 6000PROs, 8x 96GB for running full fp8 (as it's supported and presumably fast).

I know AWQ should run, and be pretty snappy & efficient w/ the new MLA added, but wanted to check if fp8 fits as well, because from a simple napkin math it seems pretty tight (might only work for bs1, ctx_len <8k which would probably not be suited for coding tasks).
Open source AI won't change what I'm referring to. Open source or closed source AI leads to the same thing.
I block ads and trackers in my browser. But I had that turned off for Blue Shield's website because it is very broken in lots of ways. One way it's broken is it fails if you run an ad blocker. Not sure if blocking Google's surveillance is the problem or some other ad blocker rule.
Avery Library Launches Frank Lloyd Wright Digital Archive (2024)
Yes, the world is more complicated than any description of it. No, that doesn't make heuristics useless.

The trick is to understand that heuristics are approximations and not to replace the territory with the map.
“Trump is back in town; we’re doing things the way we should have always been doing them.”

Nothing odd here. It seems to be the new normal:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/11/australian-w...
Using privacy engineering to enable modern usability testing
Some heuristics are better than others.
They are one of those language features that, having learned them, it's a little hard to flip my brain around into the world I knew before I learned them.

If I think hard, I can sort of remember how I used to do things before I worked almost exclusively in languages that natively support closures ("Let's see... I create a state object, and it copies or retains reference to all the relevant variables... and for convenience I put my function pointer in there too usually... But I still need rules for disposing the state when I'm done with it..." It's so much nicer when the language handles all of that bookkeeping for you and auto-generates those state constructs).
That Netflix screenshot looks fucking great: clear, usable, no distractions, more than 5 items on a page. What a mess "modern" UX/UI has turned into.
I think you might even lose a bunch of these jobs, at least in the short term, as businesses now need to free up money (they likely hadn't planned to initially) to pay for tariffs before their goods / parts are auctioned off at the port. That's even before consumer spending tightens up due to rising prices, and declining stocks.
Dang. Now I’ve got to go listen to Tom T Hall.
I didn't know the objective, so I created my own simple one: get to the lake because I'm thirsty. Then I created another one: get back to where I started so I can bring water to my injured companion.
Technically many of these server/hosting companies were in the market first. Hetzner is older than AWS. Mailbox is like 10 years older than gmail/google.
So the US companies are the ones who didnt have first mover advantage.
tiktokification of content sites ... tinderisation of dating apps ... similar interaction model
This sounds like the "gang database" the chicago PD uses. Where they can basically put anyone in it for any reason with no oversight, appeal, or even way to find out if you're in it and why. Whenever parts of it end up in court it's bullshit like this.
Am I the only one who had no idea that these sectioning elements existed?

Lighthouse will flag a warning if <h1> is used without a specified font-size.

This seems like a silly warning to give if there are no sectioning elements affecting <h1>.
Would a prompt history even be useful? This is all non-deterministic. the same prompt could result in wildy different code?
The more AI stuff I see makes me want to purchase a cabin somewhere in remote Montana and start writing a journal.
I wrote a recursive descent parser in Lisp for a YAML replacement language[1]. It wasn't difficult. Lisp makes it easy to write I/O, but also easy to separate logic from I/O. This made it easy for me to write unit tests without mocking.

I also wrote a toy resource scheduler at an HTTP endpoint in Haskell[2]. Writing I/O in Haskell was a learning curve but was ultimately fine. Keeping logic separate from I/O was the easy thing to do.

1: https://github.com/djha-skin/nrdl

2: https://github.com/djha-skin/lighthouse
Another poster linked to this study that states [1]

Existing rates of lead absorption are about 30 times higher than inferred natural rates

[1] https://sci-hub.se/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14334042/
She Worked in a Harvard Lab to Reverse Aging, Until ICE Jailed Her
Is anyone else here interested in actually trying this? I live near a fairly active small airport in Lansing, Illinois, and in the flight paths of everything going to/from Midway and Ohare, so combining this with ADSB might make for some interesting sources of calibration data, and a way to debug this algorithm.

I think a neighborhood of Raspberry Pi based cameras networked together could prove quite effective. I wonder if all the installed Ring door cameras could do this in a national security emergency.

I further wonder if it's being done to the US (with the current installed camera base) by China or others.
Inside Outside
They just want to see the numbers go up because people kept saying Biden and Obama deported more people and the easiest people to deport are the ones where you have all the paperwork already, you know where they are, where they work and can easily send them out.

Actually finding criminals to deport takes time and work and these people don't have time to actually do a real job.
Crowd Collapses and Crushes
"Production-grade" is a stretch. These AI coding tools can generate impressive prototypes, but there's still a massive gap between what they produce and code that's actually ready for production.

I don't understand the disconnect between engineers who work with these tools daily and the investor/exec/founder/influencer-types who constantly hype them. My LinkedIn feed has become a comedy.

I feel like any senior SWE who's tried to maintain an AI-generated codebase, coach a junior who's found themselves reliant on Cursor; or found themselves in an undo, yell, repeat cycle in Cline, knows they still require significant expertise to build production-safe code.

Where's the disconnect, or what am I missing?
It's possible Davis overstated his claim for effect. There are definitely elements of Jon as an author stand-in.

As an aside, over here (Argentina) we have an extremely marketing-oriented and bad comics author, Nik, who "invented" a cartoon cat vaguely similar to Garfield called "Gaturro", which started as a copy of Garfield with a slightly more political bent. It's as bad and bland as Garfield, without any trace of originality.

As Fight Club would have it, "a copy of a copy of a copy...".

I'm sure some of my vitriol against Garfield is influenced by my dislike of Nik and his Gaturro.
TL;DR: This is EEG readings + "AI" interpretation, today's version of the 70's biofeedback machines.
The is exactly the advice that one of my favorite podcasts, Manager Tools, would prescribe. Don't give feedback about emotions or internal feelings, give feedback about behaviors. Telling someone they are acting like an asshole can be met with, "but, no, I'm not acting like an asshole." Telling someone, "When you cut off people mid sentence and speak loudly, you will have people complain about you." gives them actionable ways to change their external behavior in the future. It doesn't matter if they are still an asshole on the inside.
A2A and MCP: Start of the AI Agent Protocol Wars?
The KoboldCpp UI I was using had a pretty straightforward way of setting up a chatbot-style dialogue interface that would send the dialogue context so far with each message input, along with some supporting prompt infrastructure reminding the model of how it's supposed to reply based on that context. It also allowed editing the context directly; but I didn't often do that except to correct simple one-off inaccuracies, instead usually opting to restart from the beginning when things would go off-track.

When the model would reply as multiple characters at once, or interleave narration with the dialogue, I'd usually just play along - most commonly it would decide for 2 or 3 steps to carry on the dialogue just hallucinating the things I would say.

I did a lot of experimenting with different ways to frame the dialogue, from a Zork-like adventure game, to an instant messenger chat, to just paragraphs of prose with dialogue mixed in as if from a novel. I found all of these methods to have different strengths or weaknesses, but the model also tended to blur between them after a few messages so I'd just play along as far as I could each time.
Charges are dismissed all the time when there is guilt. It is not the same thing as innocent. There is a close to 100% chance he admitted guilt.
I came across this idea after a dark period of meditation: creativity is the productive use of rumination, anxiety or mania. The best creators I know (offhand example, Heston Blumenthal) had rampant mental illness during their most creative periods. I myself suffer from clinical anxiety periodically, which I have to manage proactively.

It’s very sobering to realize you have to take the bad with the good, and sometimes it’s not worth it. Being average isn’t so bad.
TCP/IP applications for your PC compatible retro-computers
I can hot air rework a component on a phone too.

I won't assemble an entire smartphone this way unless I need to kill a lot of time and don't have anything better to do.
Setting aside the uncanny valley, my understanding is that people like seeing people not because they look like people but because it conveys effort and investment on the part of another human being. We want to feel like we're worth someone else's time, in every context.

We don't like to interact with people just because that's the only way we can interact but because humans are human. AI avatars are the exact opposite: a statement of disinterest. If you don't care enough about my business to be on a sales call with me, why would I bother speaking to an AI avatar you send in your place? What's a thank you message without a human being actually taking the time to record it?

AI avatars seem a lot like crypto: they're a neat technology solving the wrong problem. The "inefficiency" of humans interacting with humans is the fundamental component of communication. I guess it's a lot like LLMs: instead of producing less content that is more valuable / thoughtful per unit, we're producing a lot more content that is much less valuable / thoughtful per unit. AI avatars will create more vacuous communication, not enable our communication to be more thoughtful.

Maybe human behavior will change because of this, maybe the next generation that grows up interacting with AI avatars won't have this same feeling that speaking to an actual human means something.
All the shitty CEOs start doing the same shit at the same time, because most CEOs are not exceptional workers or thinkers or innovators. They are simply the (in)human conduits doing as much as possible to siphon money from their users to the shareholders and Board Member class. They follow the trends that their consulting firms tell them to follow (the same consultants that work at multiple companies within the industry), which is why we get massive hiring at the same time, massive layoffs at the same time, RTO at the same time. The US has allowed collusion and market coordination via 3rd parties (so we have, e.g., landlords sharing rental prices with a 3rd party consultant, who then combines this data and illegally collude to set prices but with a Computer instead of Bob). Modern-day capitalism has said "monopolies and huge conglomerates are good because they're EfFiCiEnT!!!" (though what kind of efficiency and to whom the efficiency gain are given is entirely ignored -- the efficiency to max profit is the only one that matters).

> It's actually quite shocking to have been part of (and hearing about) meetings between CEOs where "new information from CMK (consumer market knowledge) indicates that smaller dev teams all onsite are the best way to do things" - and everyone gets the same "information" at the same time, and thus the entire market moves in that direction, as if it was a fixed horse race and they were acting on a secret tip they heard from their uncle...

The same thing too when companies hire consultants to look at the "market wage" and then set salaries based on what the consultant said. Every worker at the same "market wage" with no incentives to be above that.
This post was true five years ago.

It isn't now. Tariffs (long-standing ones that have survived both parties in power) in fact are keeping byd from the US market to protect primarily Tesla.

In Tesla because of the brilliant behavior of its precious CEO, will likely be specifically targeted for exclusion from subsidies in the EU, and inevitably at home when this administration passes by
Yeah can't wait until our Nation's Finest are having to use Grok Spectacles to identify enemy combatants.
Why would it not like json? These models are supposed to be reasoning, that would imply it could reason that there's an error and fix it or interpret around it like a reasoning human could.
"Shoving content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase" maximizes eyeball time which maximizes ad dollars. Netflix's financials are a bit more opaque but I think that's the key driver of the carcinisation story here, the thing for which "what the median user wants" is ultimately a proxy.

Likewise, all social media converges on one model. Strava, which started out a weirder platform for serious athletes, is now is just an infinity scroll with DMs [0]

I do however think that this is an important insight:

> This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.

A lot of these companies probably were founded by people who wanted to cater to connoisseurs, but something about the financials of SaaS companies makes scaling to the ad-maximizing format a kind of destiny.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/style/strava-messaging.ht...
Everyone writes real programs that have side effects. Functional programming is no different. But the side effects happen in specific ways or places, rather than all over the place.
Yes I think those things are true too. I also think there's a national stigma around salaries at the level we'd need to pay people in STEM to be competitive with industry which may be an additional political roadblock.
Sounds like it would simply be inappropriate to clone & use a VM that's assuming it's data is unique. This would also be true of other conditions, e.g. if you needed to spoof a MAC or IPv6 address & picked one randomly.
Yeah for the positive example, I described the syntax of a domain-specific-language, and the AI basically one-shotted the parsing rules, that only needed minor fixes.

For a counterexample, working on any part of a codebase that's 100% application specific business logic, with our custom abstractions, the AI is usually so lost that it's basically not even worth using it, as the chances of writing correct and usable code is next to zero.
Doesn't even have to involve VC funding coming in. Just need a clueless product manager.