MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tialaramex | 2025-06-21 18:17:30+00:00
The thing that specifically makes me sigh every single day is that I start a power shell, the terminal opens and it displays most of the greeting, but only later, maybe in a few seconds, or when I click it, the rest displays. Arguably that might be a power shell bug but it's annoying and the same people made both. It's a bad smell, did anybody QA this?

Some time during my day I'll forget that because Microsoft's engineers have apparently seen a real Unix but have little or no experience living with one they've decided PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD are the same thing. This is another one of those things like doing MAC and encryption in the wrong order, or not realising you need a new variable (with the same name) for each iteration of your loops, where it makes sense if it's 1975 and this isn't yet common knowledge, but this is 2025, fucking ask someone.

There are more annoyances, but those are the biggest two.
by i8code | 2025-06-21 18:18:54+00:00
I agree, the initial set of releases were all over the place. I took the feedback from this thread and fed it to Claude along with the semver.org references that were linked here for more detailed (and pedantic) context. Makes way more sense now. Thanks for the feedback! Claude handled the cleanup. Here's the updated releases: https://github.com/derekg/ts-ssh/releases
by abeppu | 2025-06-21 18:19:48+00:00
I think a basic issue here is that they're claiming this is to build housing, but this is not gonna help our housing issues:

- the housing crisis isn't about a lack of land to build on really

- there's a decent amount of vacant housing, but it's not meeting people's needs if it's far from jobs, schools, food, healthcare, or if it financially doesn't make sense

- especially in the western states where most of the BLM land is, building more housing surrounded by/abutting wild land creates/exacerbates fire risks, which perhaps makes new housing expensive or impossible to insure, etc.

So even setting aside the environmental or even ethical objections to this (did a property developer lobby for this?), it just seems like a bad way to accomplish their stated goals.
by NewJazz | 2025-06-21 18:20:01+00:00
Ah. Yeah I'm setting things up with managed node groups and it doesn't seem so bad so far... Waiting for the other shoe to drop after so much doom saying though haha. Luckily we removed the need for anything stateful, so I can ignore the EBS-CSI shortcomings. Also trying to keep it simple/minimal when it comes to ingress and networking.
by maximus-decimus | 2025-06-21 18:20:15+00:00
I don't understand your point. EV batteries won't cost multiple thousands of times more for the exact same battery that would go in a phone. If you pay 1000 times more for 1000 times more battery, I don't see the problem. If anything, they probably want 1000 times more demand so they can gain economies of scale.
by kazinator | 2025-06-21 18:20:23+00:00
In TXR Lisp, I abstracted car/cdr to work with non-conses.

$ txr This is the TXR Lisp interactive listener of TXR 300. Quit with :quit or Ctrl-D on an empty line. Ctrl-X ? for cheatsheet. TXR is written, directed and produced by, not to mention starring, Kaz. 1> [mapcar chr-toupper "abc"] "ABC"

There is an important function and concept called nullify. This deals with the fact that empty nonlists are not nil. nullify returns its argument (like identity) if the argument is a non-empty thing. If the argument is an empty sequence, it translates it to nil:

2> (nullify "") nil

Thus:

3> (cdr "a") nil 4> (car "abc") #\a 5> (car "a") #\a 6> (cdr "a") nil

Here, nullify at work. (cdr "a") wants to be "", but gets nullified.

7> (car "ab") #\a 8> (cadr "ab") #\b 9> (cddr "ab") nil

You can define a structure with car and cdr methods. Heck, rplaca and rplacd too!

10> (defstruct kons () bling blong (:method car (me) me.bling) (:method cdr (me) me.blong) (:method rplaca (me splat) (set me.bling splat)) (:method rplacd (me plonk) (set me.blong plonk))) #<struct-type kons> 11> (new kons bling 1 blong 2) #S(kons bling 1 blong 2) 12> (car *11) 1 13> (cdr *11) 2 14> (rplaca *11 42) #S(kons bling 42 blong 2)

You can have a nullify method which informs the language how to nullify your object. Our above kons structure needs nullify if it is to be a complete emulation of conses that work as sequences. https://www.nongnu.org/txr/txr-manpage.html#N-F001A7B8

This is not the only way to make an object which serves as a sequence; you can instead (or in addition!) implement array-like indexing via the lambda and lambda-set methods to have it vector-like rather than list-like.

The empty function and nullify are almost inverses; anyway they are implemented in the same spot of a 16000+ line file. The difference is that empty errors out on objects that are not iterable, whereas nullify takes objects of all types:

val nullify(val obj) { val self = lit("nullify"); seq_info_t si = seq_info(obj); if (seq_iterable(si)) { seq_iter_t iter; val elem; seq_iter_init_with_info(self, &iter, si); return if2(seq_peek(&iter, &elem), obj); } return si.obj; } val empty(val seq) { val self = lit("empty"); val elem; seq_iter_t iter; seq_iter_init(self, &iter, seq); return tnil(!seq_peek(&iter, &elem)); }

But, anyway, conses are good. TXR doubles down on conses.
by phillipcarter | 2025-06-21 18:20:31+00:00
Well yeah, there are practical limits imposed by the fact that these have to run on real systems. But in practice, you find that you're limited by your backend observability system because it was designed for a world of many events with narrow data, not fewer events with wider data (so-called "wide events").

OTel and the standard toolkit you get with it doesn't prevent you from doing wide events.
by socalgal2 | 2025-06-21 18:21:41+00:00
> We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money. If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck.

I like billboards when I'm driving down an interstate and I want to decide if I should get off at the next stop and I want to know what food options there are. (example: Driving down I5 from SF to LA). I like billboards when they tell me about an attraction coming up. (Winchester House has a billboard) I like billboards when they advertize concerts/entertainers. (Driving down the I15 from Ontario to Oceanside there are ads for who's playing at Yaamava (https://www.yaamava.com/yaamava-theater), Pala (https://www.palacasino.com/entertainment/upcoming-concerts/), etc...
by cvoss | 2025-06-21 18:21:47+00:00
All: Please consider reading the proposed text of the law [0] and pass judgment directly on that, rather than one organization's hot (and to the cursory reader, misleading) take on what they think is about to happen.

The proposed law is clear and readable. The relevant part starts on p. 30.

The law anticipates that the States themselves and local governments will be among the buyers, and priority consideration is given to them.

State and local governments, including the sovereign Indian Tribes must be consulted regarding which land goes up for sale.

Use of the sold lands must be residential or otherwise contributing to community needs associated with residential development.

The land cannot be sold for less than FMV.

For private buyers, sales are designed to be competitive to make it hard for a single buyer to end up with many tracts.

[0] https://www.energy.senate.gov/services/files/DF7B7FBE-9866-4...
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-06-21 18:22:16+00:00
> bias against [thing]

This isn’t strictly a problem if the thing is actually disagreeable. For example, most people have a bias against criminality. Whether there is a bias is unrelated to how agreeable the bias is. Any opinion is “a bias”.

What’s more relevant is how well their stated positions match their actions. Is there another country doing the things that Israel is doing (or that has done them) but was never prosecuted by the ICC? That seems like it would be indicative of a “bias against Israel”.
by Cheer2171 | 2025-06-21 18:22:22+00:00
Just think if any EU business didn't have to pay the Microsoft tax or the open source TCO tax/labor, because there is a non-profit full-stack solution running at cost. Make any business out of the EU pay retail rates to subsidize development. It would be a huge competitive advantage. Just like payments have become so much easier in the EU over the past decade.
by xnx | 2025-06-21 18:22:47+00:00
My Gemini Flash 2.0 prompt: "Below is the transcript of a podcast preceded by a line number. Reply with the line numbers that are likely to be from advertisements, promotions, commercials, sponsorships, or ending credits."

I think it's better than 60%, but I should definitely set up some evals.

I split the text by sentence, but was considering having the LLM try and put into paragraph (that might conceptually chunk commercial sentences together), but what I've got has been good enough for me.

I wanted to switch to Flash 2.5, but it looks like they increased the price a lot.

I think I could do a fair bit of ad identification just with text heuristics: "This podcast is sponsored/supported by...", etc.
by jefftk | 2025-06-21 18:23:58+00:00
The site you reference quotes Beckstead out of context, and either reading the context or looking at what he spent the next decade of his life working on would make it clear that he thinks the marginal dollar is better spent on saving lives in poor countries than rich ones. He well understands that his "other things being equal" in his dissertation essentially never holds in practice, and was writing for a philosophy audience where this kind of hypothetical is expected.
by iknownothow | 2025-06-21 18:24:19+00:00
As far as I can tell, the paper covers text documents only. Therefore your example doesn't quite apply.

It is well known that LLMs have a ways to go when it comes to processing images like they process text or audio.

I don't think there's any good performing multimodal model that accepts image pixels directly. Most vision capabilities are hacks or engineered in. An image undergoes several processing steps and each processor's outputs are fed to the transformer as tokens. This may happen in one network but there's non-transformer networks involved. Examples of preprocessing:

* OCR * CNNs (2D pattern recognizers) with different zooms, angles, slices etc * Others maybe too?
by estebank | 2025-06-21 18:24:38+00:00
You are making the baseline assumption that the reason for reusable bags is to reduce greenhouse emissions, instead of reducing the number of plastic bags being discarded in public areas causing negative externalities like affecting wildlife. Heavier plastic bags have a greater chance of lasting beyond a single shop trip to make it long enough to be reused at the very least as a garbage bag. Paper bags desintegrate easily if thrown in the trash and are trivially recyclable.

I do think that we need to meet people where they are at, you can't expect people to over night start bringing a classic trolley and/or canvas bags to a local shop if they don't have a shop to walk to or dont have a way to keep a bag on themselves at all times, but we can slowly nudge people towards desirable behavior. And that's what charging for bags does.
by Mentlo | 2025-06-21 18:25:04+00:00
There’s software domains where there’s very little work past solving the business problem. And there’s software domains where once you’ve architected the solution, there isn’t much problem solving to continue, there’s just a long slog of stuff to write.

The later is not making any neuron embedding tradeoff when they hand of the slog to agents.

There’s a lot of software development in that latter category.
by CoastalCoder | 2025-06-21 18:25:18+00:00
I think what's missing from the 40% number is that it says nothing about how passionately the other 60% feels.

I'm not concerned about the fact that the election was close.

I'm concerned that, post election, the country is so deeply polarized. For the first time in my life, I fear there's a small but real chance that we're headed for civil war.
by phillipcarter | 2025-06-21 18:25:32+00:00
At the end of the day it's just vibes. If the company is one that sees:

- Reliability as a cost center

- Vendor costs are to be limited

- CIO-driven rather than CTO-driven

Then it's going to be a given that they prioritize costs that are easy to see, and will do things like force a dev team to work for a month to shave ~2k/month off of a cloud bill. In my experience, these orgs will also sometimes do a 180 when they learn that their SLAs involve paying out to customers at a premium during incidents, which is always very funny to observe. Then you talk to some devs and they say things like "we literally told them this would happen years ago and it fell on deaf ears" or something.
by woodruffw | 2025-06-21 18:25:48+00:00
> deltachat devs are working on forward secrecy

That’s great, but I’m not holding my breath. PGP isn’t architecturally well-equipped to provide forward secrecy. In the mean time, I think it’s borderline negligent to put this in the category of secure messaging; the world’s expectations for security baselines have moved on beyond the mid-2000s.

(My reference point here is Keybase, which built a very user-friendly and misuse-resistant encrypted chat on top of PGP in the mid-2010s. They couldn’t get to forward secrecy either with PGP as their substrate.)

> as for metadata, as long as the messages are sent from my personal email server to the destinations email server using a TLS connection, the metadata is accessible only on those two servers.

To the best of my knowledge, MTA-STS adoption rates are still abysmal[1]. It’s a move in the right direction, but this kind of shambolic jigsaw approach to communication security isn’t appropriate in 2025. Sensitive messages should go over protocols designed to carry them.

[1]: https://www.uriports.com/blog/mta-sts-survey-update-2025/
by Brian_K_White | 2025-06-21 18:26:51+00:00
They are obviously "command line interfaces" in that the interface is that you enter lines of commands.

They are equally obviously different from the non-interative interface where all input is provided in the command line arguments and other shell syntax (pipes, redirection).

ls is a cli app. bash is an interative app that provides the cli environment in which you use ls.

I fail to see what is gained by trying make the meaning of "cli app" unclear when it definitely has an understood meaning, just because you can technically assemble the same words to mean other things. Sure in certsin contexts where you are speaking more geneticslly and more abstractly like in some research paper you may refer to a wide range of things all as "command line interface". But so what? How does noting that help in this context? (It does not)
by eesmith | 2025-06-21 18:27:26+00:00
MRVs are cluster-like, but not cluster munitions.

Otherwise the US ICBM fleet with MIRVs would be a cluster munition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targeta... even mentions 'multiple re-entry vehicle (MRV) system for a ballistic missile deploys multiple warheads above a single aimpoint which then drift apart, producing a cluster bomb-like effect.'

Note the "like". That is not the same as saying MRVs are cluster bombs.

The Convention on Cluster Munitions says: “Cluster munition” means a conventional munition that is designed to disperse or release explosive submunitions each weighing less than 20 kilograms, and includes those explosive submunitions -- https://www.clusterconvention.org/files/convention_text/Conv...

From what I've heard, the MRV warheads carry more than 20kg of explosives, making them not a cluster bomb.

In any case, neither Israel, the US, nor Iran are signatories to the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

What I said was, point to the relevant treaty or conventions which are being violated.

No, what I said was it cannot be read as "just to hit somebody and do some damage".

Your best response should be to describe why there are no military objectives by bombing a city - no military targets, no command-and-control centers, no anti-missile bases, no espionage headquarters, etc. (There's a reason Article 58 is so hard to follow.)

Do you really want to argue that this is "terrorism"? Definitions of terrorism regularly exclude armed conflict between nations, as you can read at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_terrorism . What definition are you using?

So:

1) Which treaty or convention defines what 'enough precision' means?

2) What makes these cluster munitions? Are all MIRV systems (including conventionally-armed ones) cluster munitions?

3) Which treaty or convention prohibits the use of these weapons?

4) Which tribunal will determine if Iran or Israel violated these conventions?

As far as I can tell, none, no, none, and none.

The ICC and other post-war agreements were meant to prevent the atrocities regularly carried out during wars. Reject those agreements, fail to uphold them internally, well, don't be surprised about the outcome when a non-curb-stomp war breaks out.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-06-21 18:27:37+00:00
the problem the EU has is that such an ultimatum lacks teeth. China gets to make these demands because they've down willingness to fund and build homegrown alternatives and then blacklist the foreign competitor. If the EU wants the leverage to make these sorts of demands, they need to start by giving out a couple million here and there for the competitors they want to see.
by estebank | 2025-06-21 18:27:39+00:00
Some people on this thread are talking about things like canvas bags, which are more expensive and meant to be reused a lot, and others are talking about plastic bags that have a lot of material and are more durable than the old school "thinnest bag you can produce without it dissolving immediately when you look at it" which are not nearly as expensive to buy as the others.
People with Diabetes Are Cured in Small Trial of New Drug
by CommenterPerson | 2025-06-21 18:28:32+00:00
Unlocked link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/health/diabetes-cure-insulin-stem-cell.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Qk8.P2gk.-v62pzDodRGy&smid=url-share
by Viliam1234 | 2025-06-21 18:29:11+00:00
I guess some people were taught that the Not-Invented-Here Syndrome is a bad thing and needs to be avoided at all costs. And they took it literally.

I had a similar situation at a former job once, where as a subtask of some task we basically needed to implement a "partial deep copy" for a few specific classes (deep-copy some selected properties, shallow-copy the rest), which could either be implemented in ~50 lines of Java code, or by adding an extra library that provided this functionality using a domain-specific language, plus many other things, some of them potential vulnerabilities... and it took a lot of time to convince my team leader that "reinventing the wheel" is the right thing to do in this case.

"Why do you want to program something that already exists? Don't you realize that every line of code you write is a line of code someone else will have to maintain in the future?" Yeah, good points, but it's not like using a library is without costs either: you need to scan for vulnerabilities, increase versions, sometimes the API changes; in long term that is a lot of work to do just to avoid writing 50 lines of code.
by akomtu | 2025-06-21 18:30:11+00:00
Recognizing triangles isn't that impressive. What's the ceiling of complexity of patterns in data it can identify with is the real question. Give it a list of randomly generated xyz coords that fall on a geometric shape, or a list of points that sample a trajectory of Earth around Sun. Will it tell you that it's an ellipse? Will it derive the 2nd Newton's law? Will it notice the deviation from the ellipse and find the rule explaining it?
by paxcoder | 2025-06-21 18:30:13+00:00
While I appreciate criticizing bloat (why are we packing Chromium in every app again?), I would like to warn against watching every "pound". Images, for example, "weigh" a lot more than code but that doesn't mean they don't serve a purpose and add value.

That being said, the fact that quick maths can give you a 6 orders of magnitude difference between functional code and the package is probably reason for concern.
by chrisfosterelli | 2025-06-21 18:30:15+00:00
This is hacker news. Hacker ethos is rooted in the intellectual challenge of overcoming software systems and electronic hardware. It's the same ethos that stole long distance phone minutes, traded warez, and got free satellite channels. You don't have to do those things but you probably won't convince those who do that their 20 extra minutes of wifi will be the downfall of society.
by bawolff | 2025-06-21 18:32:00+00:00
Some of the footage coming out of Iran of the aftermath of these assinations have shown specific rooms in buildings targeted, leaving the rest of the building in-tact. For a high value military target like chief of the armed forces, it seems unlikely that would be a warcrime as the civilian casualities would be low compared to the military advantage of the target.

[The nuclear scientists on the other hand are much more questionable because its pretty unclear if they are legal targets at all]
by saurik | 2025-06-21 18:32:06+00:00
This seems like the wrong trade-off; and, if it really mattered, we--including you--should be working to push DNSSEC/DANE to improve, not for people to double down on WebPKI. Maybe we need to be advocating for DNS transparency, for example; but like, the road to there is through DANE, not through WebPKI: staunchly shilling for WebPKI isn't helping either the situation, the ecosystem, or the landscape.

OK, even so, let's examine it? The premise of CT is already a bit dubious: it involves being able to figure out, after the fact, that there was a certificate issued which should not have been issued, and the attack has already been performed. The only reason this makes any sense at all is because it (supposedly) provides an incentive to people not to participate in the attack in the first place...

...but, the assumption of this is pretty much always that the party that is at fault in such a scenario is always the CA. Only, the premise of ACME undermines that: if the government decides to take over the DNS record, Let's Encrypt absolutely will issue the certificate, and it absolutely wouldn't be their fault. If we did punish them for it, then what we are really saying is that ACME is a bad idea within WebPKI.

(BTW: a big part of your argument against DNSSEC always relies on "people aren't able to do it correctly", and if we apply that to CT the situation also sucks: as the expiration time for certificates goes lower and lower, the number of certificates I'm being issued goes up and up, and unless I have a durable central log of my requests--and no normal installation does--I can't verify any of the information from CT anyway.)

(Yes: we could build that software, so that Apache won't re-issue my certificates without first making sure that the request has been logged durably into a database, and there is software that also goes around scavenging CT to check if my certificate is mis-issued, but I hesitate to be that charitable, given that you have spent years ignoring people who assert that clients, not resolvers, must verify DNSSEC.)

(And, to take this as a moment to push back here on another of your refrains: yes, people can get DNSSEC wrong and accidentally publish their keys... but, the likelihood they will do something that dumb--despite not doing so for TLS--is way lower than the almost-certainty that they aren't going to even know what CT is, much less track it--and, critically, report after-the-fact "oops too late" attacks--for mis-issuance.)