They are so wildly used, and the companies usually tell you if they use your prompts for training. But again, at the current use case your code gets lost in the noise even if they do use it. Anthropic says they don’t. Microsoft allows you to disable, same with ChatGPT. Unclear on Goole.
But if you are worried, you can use an inference only solution like Groq.
Please provide a PDF as well. I cannot read books in HTML format because I need to keep track of where i left. That means I either have to leave the browser tab open (but this is prone to accidentally closing it) or I need to bookmark every progress, which creates noise in my bookmarks. With a PDF I simply leave it, the reader remembers my last page. I also have a sense of progress with pdf.
Depends. If it’s with ICs, sure. But as soon as some manager or someone with a leadership position joins, then it’s just plain work. So I dislike chitchatting with such people.
Same! If I see the first people joining are managers or above, I just wait until I see other engineers join. I hate managers talk, I couldn’t care less about them.
HN is so depressing, but at the same time so Im addicted to it. It’s like tiktok but for people who enjoy plain text and hacking related stuff. When I first visited HN more than 10 years ago (without account) like, 90% of the content was exciting and you got to learn something. Nowadays it’s about 40-50%, and the rest is crap (including comments). I have been trying to leave HN, let’s see if I can do it in 2026.
particularly ironic comment from an HN/lobsters celebrity account lol
this website isn't turning into Reddit, this website has been a pretentious orange subreddit for well over a decade if not right from the get go and a link to this site's Reddiquette page (just as ignored as on any subreddit!) is evidence TO that effect, and not against it!
the fact that the link petuously denies reality notwithstanding!
I mean, I'm not saying I think it's some sort of bastion of intellectual superiority, just that "have people been saying this place has been going downhill for a long time" is true.
It's still really early 2000's! We have over 900 years left :)
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On topic: discussions like these are as old as human discussion forums and communities. I think that the participants each grow and change on an individual level just as much as the community and platform does. I think humans have a hard time identifying how much of their feelings of nostalgia are based in reality.
Maybe the platform has not actually changed in the ways people fear, and instead, peoples' opinions on what is interesting, important, or valuable has changed?
Since this thread has been discussing politics-adjacent things, let's consider Senator John Fetterman from the United States. Mr. Fetterman is notably different today from when he first started his campaign, regarding what he believes is important and valuable. (Mr. Fetterman suffered a stroke, which is suspected to have brought about personality changes and shifts in political ideology.)
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I think we, as individuals, should always be focusing our first line of questioning on how _we're_ changing, rather than trying to figure out how the world, or the zeitgeist, or Hacker News, etc. is changing.
Sometimes we outgrow things that we hold dear, and instead of accepting that it's not really the place for us anymore and moving on to a different environment, we try to shape our current environment around our new personality by instituting new rules or adding new features.
I don't get people who use "you say [thing] is getting worse but someone X years ago said the same!" as an argument that somehow proves [thing] isn't getting worse. Things can become progressively worse over long periods of time, it's not an instant change that can only happen once.
Another context where I often see this "argument" is major Windows versions. People rightfully say they want to stay on Windows 10 because 11 is objectively worse in many ways, and someone jumps in to say "you said the same about 7 to 10" as if it's some sort of gotcha. Both complaints can be right, each new version can be worse than the last.
Right now, we have at least one aspect in which HN has become objectively worse in the past years: AI-generated content. It didn't exist a decade ago, so good luck using that "argument" there. Thankfully, its prevalence is still nowhere near as bad as on Reddit (it's impossible to browse that site for 10 minutes without noticing bots posting blatant ChatGPT responses everywhere and getting hundreds of upvotes), but still.
I do feel like 40-50% signal ratio is still good compared to 90%
HN did give me some leads in the start of just cool things to follow and I have been able to make an understanding of what things interest me and what don't due to it. And this has also been the reason I read a lot of comments etc. and content here, maybe more than I should.
I don't know to me, building my own website and forum etc. are possible but they feel complicated and I still can't seem to get eye balls. On Hackernews Comments its easier personally to write something, get feedback on it, (improve?/learn?)
Of course if one wants to optimize for eyeballs, they can probably go for reddit or twitter maxxing or similar because cmon this is exactly the stuff the article is talking about from what I see.
Hackernews does indeed sit on the perfect spot. I feel like if you want more informationally dense topics, perhaps lobsters can be good for ya.
Their UX is not steamlined. They seem to also opt you in by default to every conceivable category of notifications. It feels like a clown website. If they fixed some of this it could genuinely be enjoyable though of course I get the point that it's employment networking as opposed to a social media 'connect with friends' site
Its alright, were not all like that. I found the site cute, at least there are people standing up to the bullshit. I have been blogging about it on my site to https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/
But what about laptops? I don’t use desktop machines anymore (last time was in 2012). Apple laptops are top notch. I use ubuntu as vm (headless) for software development tho
Not working with Linux is a function of Apple, not Linux. There is a crew who have wasted the last half decade trying to make Asahi Linux, a distro to run on ARM macbooks. The result is after all that time, getting an almost reasonably working OS on old hardware, Apple released the M4 and crippled the whole effort. There's been a lot of drama around the core team who have tried to cast blame, but it's clear they are frustrated by the fact that the OEM would rather Asahi didn't exist.
I can't personally consider a laptop which can't run linux "top notch." But I gave up on macbooks around 10 years ago. You can call me biased.
I just put Asahi on an M2 Air and it works so incredibly well that I was thinking this might finally be the year linux takes the desktop .. I wasn't aware of the drama w/Apple but I imagine M2 hardware will become valuable and sought after over M3+ just for the ability to run Asahi
The really sad thing is Alyssa Rosenzweig was doing Libreboots on potato ARM laptops a few years ago. Asus C201 if I remember correctly. Alyssa went on to create Panfrost, which was fucking incredible. Then Alyssa left freedom and started working on Asahi instead. Now Lenovo is shipping a bad ass ARM chromebook with benchmarks in the M2 macbook territory, and where did Alyssa go? To work for proprietary Intel. There's a song playing in my head right now, Stabbing Westward: The thing I hate.
Had Alyssa stuck with freedom, we would have had a very nice HP Chromebook x360 13b-ca0047nr, fully repairable, fully free cpu, gpu, and wifi, like a few years ago. 2016 Macbook Pro tier laptop, not at all shabby.
And now today, an even better Lenovo chromebook 3nm, 16GBs RAM, even a 50 tops NPU... but no. Alyssa had to go chase proprietary Apple. We have the hardware today. FSF could be selling fully free RYF ARM machines right now. Like FULLY free, all the way down to the EC, below the boot loader, below the CPU firmware even. But they aren't. The talent jumped ship for a soulless corporate paycheck.
I'm not faulting anyone for making a living either, I understand. But I'm pretty sure Alyssa was making a decent living with Collabra. Now Intel has their claws in, and will bury that brilliant developer in a back office doing miserable work. Whatever money Intel is paying, it wasn't worth the pride and impact that could have been made in software freedom.
It's just sitting right there. Victory is just laying there for someone to pick it up. But nobody with the talent is even trying now.
Best you can do is build a high end desktop at home and access it remotely with any laptop you desire. The laptop performance then becomes mostly irrelevant (even the OS is less relevant) and by using modern game streaming protocols you can actually get great image quality, low latency and 60+ fps. Though, optimizing it for low bandwidth is still a chore.
Have that desktop be reachable with SSH for all your CLI and sys admin needs, use sunshine/moonlight for the remote streaming and tailscale for securing and making sunshine globally available.
Bandwidth is not really a problem if you live in decent city. The problem is latency and data usage. 1 Hour streaming consumes GBs of data, that's a big problem if you use cellular network.
Latency is another problem, recently LTT video show that even as low as 5-10ms added latency can negatively impact your gaming performance, even if you don't notice. You begin to notice at around 20ms.
How is bandwidth not a problem if data usage on a cellular network is? You can dramatically lower your data usage by constraining bandwidth to say, ~2mbps, but doing so while keeping a decent image requires many sacrifices, like lowering resolution or using a software encoder that can squeeze out as much quality as possible out of 2mbps at a penalty for your latencies (won't matter much since you are already incurring latencies from your internet connection). You may also switch to a wi-fi hotspot once that's an option, and then even lift the bandwidth restrictions.
Regarding latency, this solution is meant as a way to use your notebook for any task, not just gaming. You can still play and enjoy most fps games with a mouse even at 20ms of extra latency, and you can tolerate much more when playing games with a gamepad. If you need to perform your best on a competitive match of cs2 you obviously should be on a wired connection, in front of a nice desktop pc (the very same you were using to stream to your notebook perhaps) and with a nice high refresh rate monitor. Notebooks are usually garbage for that anyways.
I did some investigation into this the other day. The short answer seems to be that if you like MacBooks, you aren't willing to accept a downgrade along any axis, and you really want to use Linux, your best bet today is an M2 machine. But you'll still be sacrificing a few hours of battery life, Touch ID support (likely unfixable), and a handful of hardware support edge cases. Apple made M3s and M4s harder to support, so Linux is still playing catch-up on getting those usable.
Beyond that, Lunar Lake chips are evidently really really good. The Dell XPS line in particular shows a lot of promise for becoming a strict upgrade or sidegrade to the M2 line within a few years, assuming the haptic touchpad works as well as claimed. In the meantime, I'm sure the XPS is still great if you can live with some compromises, and it even has official Linux support.
> Linux is still playing catch-up on getting those usable
This is an understatement. It is completely impossible to even attempt to install Linux at all on an M3 or M4, and AFAIK there have been no public reports of any progress or anyone working on it. (Maybe there are people working on it, I don’t know).
In his talk a few days ago, one of the main Asahi developers (Sven) shared that there is someone working on M3 support. There are screenshots of an M3 machine running Linux and playing DOOM at around 31:34 here: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...
Sounds like the GPU architecture changed significantly with M3. With M4 and M5, the technique for efficiently reverse-engineering drivers using a hypervisor no longer works.
What I mean is: on a normal laptop, when you scroll with two fingers on the scroll wheel, the distance you scroll is nearly a continuous function of how much you move your fingers; that is, if you only move your fingers a tiny bit, you will only scroll a few pixels or just one.
Most VM software (at least all of it that I've tried) doesn't properly emulate this. Instead, after you've moved your fingers some distance, it's translated to one discrete "tick" of a mouse scroll wheel, which causes the document to scroll a few lines.
The VM software I use is UTM, which is a frontend to QEMU or Apple Virtualization framework depending on which setting you pick when setting up the VM.
I have the HP Zbook Ultra G1a. AMD 395+, 129GB RAM, 4TB 2280 SSD. Works great with Ubuntu 24.04 and the OEM kernel. Plays Steam games, runs OpenCL AI models. Only nit is it is very picky on what USB PD chargers it will actually charge on at all. UGreen has a 140W that works.
I've had Linux running on a variety of laptops since the noughties. I've had no more issues than with Windows. ndiswrapper was a bit shit but did work back in the day.
I haven't, because I buy hardware that's designed to work with Linux. But if you buy hardware that doesn't have Linux drivers, it just won't work. That might mean Wifi not working, it might mean a fingerprint reader not working, etc.
I don't have an x86 laptop at the moment so sticking with Macbook for now. My assumption is Mac laptops still are far superior given M-series chips and OS that are tuned for battery efficiency. Would love to find out this is no longer the case.
My HP ZBooks have been a dream. My current Studio G10 with an i9-13900 and 4070M has largely Just Worked™ with recent versions of both Fedora and Ubuntu.
HP releases firmware updates on LVFS for both the ZBook and its companion Thunderbolt 4 dock(!). They also got it Ubuntu certified, like most of their business laptops.
> 1. For every social media account you have: post “I’m leaving. You should too”
Did you miss the trend in the 2010s of announcing you were quitting social media? This was already a thing. All it did was annoy people. Also 90% of the people I know who did it are back on social media.
If you want to use social media less, just use social media less. Hang out with other people who socialize instead of burying their face in their phone. Getting on a high horse and lecturing other people on social media isn’t going to do anything.
<< Getting on a high horse and lecturing other people on social media isn’t going to do anything.
I disagree. Ostracism and generic shaming may be necessary. My kid is barely 4 and his cousin's already were fielding cellphones during our family gathering. There are times high horse riding is absolutely necessary.
Interesting point, because Hacker News doesn't serve ads, and doesn't have any personalized algorithms, yet it's quite compelling and I waste a lot of time here.
Is the problem really social media though? Without some kind of long-distance-capable social medium that we participate in directly, how are we going to know when the news is lying to us? Social media's alternatives also can't resist corruption, if we give up this fight, we'll lose that one too.
I think we can handle communicating with each other at scale, we just have to be more proactive about not letting control over the medium be up for sale, and more inventive about the ways we can protect each other from those who would make us into addicts.
Capital P proof is great if you want to know whether a topological space is separable, but if you want to know if you should stop paying your taxes because maybe they're causing more harm than good then you're going to have to rely on something besides capital P proof. You're going to have to rely on induction and probability. More vs less data matters quite a bit in such places.
Sources can include people you've never met, have no reason to lie, and happened to be in an opportune position to contribute to the sort of lowercase p proofs that you need.
If we can fix social media there can be many such people. If not, there will be necessarily fewer, and they'll have to be replaced by people for whom addressing the public with new information is their job. The latter sort are high value targets for corruption. As long as they're worried about keeping that job, they have to also worry about who they upset with their information. You're necessarily going to get weaker lowercase-p proofs from such people.
That's not to say that we'll have no tools for keeping power in check, but we will have fewer, which means their abuses will be more frequent and more severe.
I have given an example of something that I can prove, and you have failed to "easily" disprove it. Disappointing given the cockiness of your challenge.
And shortness in an argumentation is a mark of elegance, not of AI writing(which, just as an aside, is usually verbose? Where are you getting two-word replies from AIs?)
The challenge was not that you prove it to yourself, Mr. Descartes. It was that you prove it to bdangpublic. It doesn't look like you've done so to me.
You need to be more careful with scope regarding words like "exist".
That's moving the goalpost. The challenge was not to prove it to them, but to give an example of a provable thing, them claiming they would be easily able to prove the negative(or to prove that I cannot prove it? The wording is ambigous).
Asking me to prove something to someone in particular is a fool's errant. If you close your eyes, I cannot prove to you that you are able to see the sun.
But sure, if the perspective of bdangpublic is the measure of truth in this argument, then I claim that they exist instead. I should like to see them disprove their own existence to themselves. And simply arguing that I cannot be certain of their existence will not hold, since my perception is evidently irrelevant.
I think it’s all about balance. In my free time I do “slow” programming: I read the timeless books of our craft (e.g., TAOCP), I spend lots of time writing code by hand, debugging, using pen and paper to think, etc. I love it. All the crap we have now (AI everywhere , technofeudalism, etc.) doesn’t get to bother me. Now, at work, I use AI , I get things done and call it a day. I can do that because I have fun outside work.
yeah, it’s so true. just slowing down a little and doing things for the pure joy of it makes everything so meaningful, at least on a personal level. there’s a different kind of satisfaction when you pick up a pen and paper, solve the problem, and write code with your bare hands, without any AI.
Talking about hardcoded api keys, what’s the usual approach when dealing with a mobile app that talks to an api? Users don’t need auth to use the app (they do login via an alphanumeric code they get via marketing).
I only know how to do this properly via auth flows (user inputs username + passwd, then app calls the api for a user jwt, the app then uses the jwt in subsequent calls). I don’t think using this flow makes sense when the user “logins” via a simple alphanumeric code (which is of length 5 and anyone could guess)
I use them only for early prototypes that we discard early , but can’t use them with legacy codebases because reasons.
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