News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

RugnirViking

Re:Skill to Create Product Videos on Monday November 02, 2026 @07:04PM (#50346105)
they look almost exactly the same to me. Granted, they are mostly video of the same product, but still, whats the major difference?
It's much worse than they havent played games at all. They would probably object and say that they do play games, they've played some mario cart that one time, and they play mario party and some monopoly game with their children. They almost certainly have played at least a few brief moments of their flagship games at a show or something.

They assume their own experience is more or less what everyone else has, including their players. A sort of dabbling, disinterested experience, flowing from one piece of content to another.

It is worse than not having played games at all because when people around them take on the task of making games with intensity and zeal and solemnity and great care, they can roll their eyes and think "it's not that serious, nobody really cares about this stuff". When people have passionate arguments about creative direction they feel they can see the bigger picture and rise above the petty squabbles by saying that the artistic direction doesn't matter. They know it doesn't matter, because it doesn't matter to them, and to all the other people who, presumably, are like them.

I think that they are wrong, but I think the task of explaining to them why they are wrong is like trying to teach a devout atheist why religion matters. It will be a long and hard uphill battle and in many cases likely utterly impossible.

Re:HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN on Monday November 02, 2026 @07:56AM (#50336197)
human nature isn't as focused and intentional as your question makes it out to be. There is a button to show less shorts, temporarily. It's not even clear to me it actually does anything. Why make that convoluted system instead of one for just turning it off? It's one of the most requested youtube features; Why don't they make it?

They're betting that despite the masses not wanting it, they'll watch them anyway. And to a rounding error, they're right.

Youtube consumption doesn't represent the finest moments of humanity. For the most part, its the huddled, cowed moments of weakness. The hated but accepted necessary recovery after a hard day's work, working up the energy for facing the chores needed for continued survival. People would much rather be out and about, living life with exuberance, but one simply cannot do that all the time. Few look forward to watching youtube. Few see "youtube watcher" as part of their identity. It's just a thing they do. Of course, occasionally you do see something worthwhile, something that improves your life, something you spend more than a passing thought on after closing it. But that is the exception, not the rule.

For many, hacker news is also this thing.

Re:HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN on Monday November 02, 2026 @07:48AM (#50336115)
a big(ger?) problem with it was also that most people seemed to never like anything. This was, I think, because it was socially risky to do so - sure maybe your friends would say nothing, maybe they'd watch it, but the chance that they'd go "oh god, you liked THAT?" was felt to be too risky. Not just because of offensive content but also just mediocre content.

In exactly the same way that a good like ratio on a youtube video is 1 in 1000 views or worse, the people actually liking stuff quickly became almost exclusively weird socially oblivious people "liking" whatever random dreck they stumbled across, by far drowning out the much larger contingent of people occasionally liking actually good stuff.

I mean, I see something worth sharing like once every week or so. And when I want to share it, i'll do it myself, not via some weird engineered system that may or may not show it to the people I think would most enjoy it

Re:Mathematics has changed. Let's act like it on Monday November 02, 2026 @06:56AM (#50335662)
do you think, perhaps, that it might be possible to cool the discussion? that there might be some meaning located between the picture painted by the person you're replying to and your own?

or do you sincerely think that the only options available to us are "all cars banned" or the alternative posted by the person above?

Re:Mathematics has changed. Let's act like it on Monday November 02, 2026 @06:13AM (#50335380)
I think we like simple and elegant solutions because we understand the perils of leaky abstractions. LLMs benefit hugely from this also; short scripts that work well can save them hours of faffing about trying to discover how to do something. I imagine if they were able, they too would prefer elegant solutions
Very busy ui. Mmo levels of stuff vying for the players attention
Re:We ran AI agent swarms in Minecraft and Mindustry on Friday October 30, 2026 @06:42AM (#50302154)
it seems to me that would only be true if the amount of knowledge needed to complete a task far exceeds the context limit. Why would that be the case? I find most people are using horribly inefficient contexts, and a naive approach to dark factories/software eng swarms seems to only compound this
Re:The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI on Thursday October 29, 2026 @11:14AM (#50290403)
> It's not very good, it's not optimized for maintenance or extension

Well yeah. Prototypes are not products, the last 10% takes 90% of the time, and so on.

Practically half the wisdom written about software in the last 20 years has been about the fact that just because you can make something that kinda looks like the thing at a glance very much does not mean you can make the thing. All those "small tweaks" you think you need to be finished usually turn out to require large redesigns, else you'll tank performance, stability, security, usability, or all four at once.

Meditate on the fact that people used to (and still do!) go to game jams and code games with freshly made assets in a day. I just did one myself without llms at the weekend. Whats the difference between that and making a game that people buy? Why does it take so much longer?

Re:StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month on Thursday October 29, 2026 @08:08AM (#50287679)
I really enjoy lemmy with summit client on my phone. Never been on it from my desktop though. Probably a good thing all things considered.

It's got pretty good coverage of most things related to my country and interests, but if you go too far afield/niche theres not many users on many topics

Re:The Brutal Harvard Class That Suddenly Everyone Wants to Take on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @07:59AM (#50272199)
Ive been looking at educating myself on some version of the trivium recently. Never had any worthwhile humanities education on philosophy, rhetoric, history of ideas, or logic from my high school education in the UK. My degrees have been all STEM. It's hard to push through alone though, id love some kinda evening course I could do.

All this to say, I get it. Its in the air at the moment, I think.

Re:Hex Raises $100M on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @07:40AM (#50271991)
the best part is how they don't help at all for the hard part (collecting and curating high quality data) and instead help with the part any intern with python and a stem undergraduate could have done already (make a pretty graph)

armed with the free version of chatgpt, pretty much anyone capable of understanding or composing the question can summon such a graph nowadays, given the data.

Re:Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @06:13AM (#50271290)
I want to offer a counterpoint to the above. I think that for some people in some circumstance it is true, but you can absolutely have fulfilling relationships with people you spend a lot of time and attention on, both friends and romantic partners. I think a lot of people get stuck in the classic avoidant + anxious attachment styles, where people chase what they can't have, but thats not everyone.

I'm not sure how much I actually agree with attachment style theory, but I do observe the pattern parent points out in some people, that they chase people who are distant or unavailable. But its often unhealthy for both people

Re:Early progress on accelerating drug development with Claude on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @05:20AM (#50270952)
gibberish no, made up facts probably in about half of all responses it gives me dozens of times a day, things that dont make sense (internal contradictions in a single response) multiple times a day.
I find there is quite a difference between something like "what do I do next" for a specific problem, and actually trying to learn something hard from an AI. The first it is quite good at, the second it is not. Surface level is easy, going into the weeds is difficult
I understand its hyperbole but are there people seriously trying to benchmark how good ai is at seducing people? lol
no. That's not a given at all? I think most reasonably people now agree that AI intelligence is spiky, that is to say, there are some areas it is amazingly good, and some areas where it spectacularly fails.

One of these areas it's not good at is sadly it's social ability. It's terrible at explaining things - just try asking ask it to explain code !

Re:Writing Is Closer to Thought Than Code on Monday October 26, 2026 @11:34AM (#50245515)
the author, I imagine, would object that the bridge should have specified that it is not supposed to collapse.

And if it did, that the specific load that made it collapse should have been specifically mentioned in the spec.

And if it was, well just wait until agents become the magical machine gods he assumes they are, then bridge collapses will be a thing of the past.

but let's be real, he and everyone else are machine generating their specs anyway, and the relevant spec didnt mention anything about bridges collapsing but instead 250 pages of llm waffling about the tensile strength of different structural materials, load patterns from different tyre treads, the effect of climate change on el nino and weather patterns for wind, and the bridge still fell down, because nobody had any idea what they were doing

Re:Writing Is Closer to Thought Than Code on Monday October 26, 2026 @11:32AM (#50245484)
you can't write emotions on paper either. You can write things that evoke emotion in the reader, but code can do that too. It happens quite often to me, at work. Often negative but occasionally positive
Re:Brown student maps the hidden global labor powering AI on Monday October 26, 2026 @11:24AM (#50245350)
is that true? from looking at the map it seems there are workers and customers in europe, but usually these are separate? most europe workers working for US based entities, and most customers buying from different US entities
it has always been so that being able to read and write code is the first step on the rung. Once you get experience, you start to focus more on higher level concepts of what won't work, what will be annoying to maintain, what will be slow, what will be annoying to extend, and what will be acceptable to the other groups of humans you work with.

I think learning to code will still help with the other things here - its a good first step, even if its now obsolete on a direct level. Like how its useful for mathematicians to be able to calculate by hand even though calculators exist - it gives intuition for how to operate the tools and check results

Re:Code Is Clay Now on Thursday October 22, 2026 @03:07PM (#50199669)
how do you turn a prototype into a spec? do you find it ossifies incidental assumptions the ai made when making the prototype?
Re:Code Is Clay Now on Thursday October 22, 2026 @11:08AM (#50196459)
where are you working that bans llm usage in house? can I work there too?
buildings may be quite hard to destroy, but the relevant question is whether it is proportionally harder to build one.

required codes and standards may raise one (difficulty of removal) or both (difficulty of removal + difficulty of construction) in varying proportion.

Re:Starcraft: Ashfall on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:57AM (#50166561)
this is clearly vibecoded though?
Re:Why Is Speculative Decoding Fast? on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:13AM (#50165893)
this morning I tried a different approach to speculative decoding by not writing any code at all and in fact going out for a walk around the lake near my house? What do you mean specifically?
several reasons. For some, because we think it might lead to useful results. For some, because we think the human pursuit of knowledge is worthwhile. For some, because we want to discover truths about logic and the universe. For some, because we are playing a status game (not just the mathematicians themselves but countries, universities, companies etc). For some, because we get personal fulfillment in understanding, and there being experts at something who can help others to understand.

For most, all of the above in various measure. To act as though one is the only thing thats important is wrong. The crisis is because the balance between these that existed is being shifted.

there was already far more to learn than any genuis could understand in a hundred lifetimes. There is no nobility in simply increasing the amount of things that can be learned
you get "assaulted" "all the time"!? surely this is hyperbole. If not, perhaps consider moving somewhere far away from where you live now, immediately!
Re:Jev Meets the Trolley Problem on Sunday October 18, 2026 @05:38PM (#50145730)
Thats not how jev works? We're talking about a decision model that gives a number next to a series of options that, taken together, add up to 1. There is some sensible debate here about whether they should be taken as probabilities, but I can't follow what you're getting at if you did actually understand how jev works

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