MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jwarden | 2025-06-09 18:20:13+00:00
> Pillaging these funds seems like it's almost a trivial endeavor assuming

It is, and in fact the authors point this out in the original paper:

"…if the size of this group is greater than 1/α and the group can perfectly coordinate, there is no limit (other than the budget) to how much it can steal."

> I have to say that the biggest flaw I see isn't theoretical, it's practical.

Exactly. The theory is fine -- given all these assumptions hold. In practice, these assumption don't hold.

For example, one of the assumptions is absence of sybil attacks, fraud, or collusion. Obviously, these assumptions may not hold.

You can defend against sybil attacks in various ways. But how do you stop people from colluding (e.g. I $10 to 1000 friends, tell them they can keep $5 if they contribute $5 to my project)? There are collusion-resistant forms of quadratic funding, such as COCM, but these do not have the desirable theoretical properties (such as optimality) that vanilla QF has.
by jplusequalt | 2025-06-09 18:20:22+00:00
>For every person/child that just wants the answer there will be at least some that will want to know why

You're correct, but let's be honest here, the majority will use it as a means to get their homework over and done with so they can return to Tik Tok. Is that the society we want to cultivate?

>And these endlessly patient machines are very good at feeding that curiosity

They're also very good at feeding you factually incorrect information. In comparison, a textbook was crafted by experts in their field, and is often fact checked by many more experts before it becomes published.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-09 18:20:28+00:00
I'll be having a toast to him. The man's character development may have been a bit wooden and even absurd at times, but the procedural descriptions were curiously captivating, and the plots were just wonderful.

Day of The Jackal is a novel I can read again and again across the years without ever getting finally bored of it. Dogs of War is almost as good and The Avenger is wonderful from start to finish, to name just a few praiseworthy examples.
by naikrovek | 2025-06-09 18:20:35+00:00
> That gives you a profit, from a tax perspective, of $820k.

> But you only have $100k of actual dollars.

> Good luck paying your taxes!

a lot of people here are conflating "taxable income" and "the amount owed in taxes" for some reason.

if I earn $100/year, and I can deduct $50 of that, my tax bill is not $50. It is some percentage of $50, usually a low number for businesses. (Amazon regularly pays $0/year in taxes.)

depending on the tax rates and the locality of that business, the amount owed on tax is going to be anywhere from $0 to $50, and it is going to heavily favor the low end of that spectrum. I don't think any business pays 100% of its taxable income in taxes unless they have been heavily fined.

$100k is likely far more than enough to pay the tax on $820k of taxable income for a business. It could be enough to pay that tax bill 10 times over, it's hard to say.

my point is that taxable income != tax owed.
by kbolino | 2025-06-09 18:21:00+00:00
To bypass the filibuster.

To pass a bill the normal way, you need 60% of the Senate to agree. But certain kinds of bills can be passed through "reconciliation" which only needs a simple majority. Such bills must be "budget neutral" as assessed by the CBO. So legislators throw in hacks like Section 174 in order to game the system and offset other provisions they actually want.
by madaxe_again | 2025-06-09 18:21:19+00:00
If you like The Tim Traveler you’ll probably also like “What On Earth is This?”, very much the same vein, no overlap in what they’ve covered. His latest video is on a 1960’s underwater cable car in France.

https://youtube.com/@whatonearthisthisthing?si=OCSx2leuGaDSG...
by xp84 | 2025-06-09 18:22:11+00:00
I run the BBP at work and we have gotten great reports from it that I'm really glad we didn't find out the "bad" way.

But I kind of think that, instead of any person or group of people choosing between "submit to a BBP" or "sell a 0-day to evil state actors or dark web clients" a BBP is better seen as allowing you to employ stunningly smart and ethical researchers in India (where a $2k bounty goes pretty far) to find all your vulns ASAP so that you have way fewer vulns for the actual bad guys to find. A pretty good "High" vuln is so valuable to people like CIA, FSB, Mossad, etc, not to mention terrorists, money launderers, etc. that it would be hard to compete with those guys financially if we were dealing with strictly economically rational but amoral researchers.

We've paid thousands to a couple of the same researchers, and it's money well spent.
by EGreg | 2025-06-09 18:22:23+00:00
I mean, what else do you use to run things in the browser?

Pouchdb. Hypercore (pear). It’s nice to be able to spin up JS versions of things and have them “just work” in the most widely deployed platform in the world.

TensorflowJS was awesome for years, with things like blazeface, readyplayer me avatars and hallway tile and other models working in realtime at the edge. Before chatgpt was even conceived. What’s your solution, transpile Go into wasm?

Agents can work in people’s browsers as well as node.js around the world. Being inside a browser gives a great sandbox, and it’s private on the person’s own machine too.

This was possible years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpSzT_c7_UI&t=10m30s
by cesarb | 2025-06-09 18:22:58+00:00
> It is very strange that no real open source project uses "AI" in any way.

Using genAI is particularly hard on open source projects due to worries about licensing: if your project is under license X, you don't want to risk including any code with a license incompatible with X, or even under a license compatible with X but without the correct attribution.

It's still not settled whether genAI can really "launder" the license of the code in its training set, or whether legal theories like "subconscious copying" would apply. In the later case, using genAI could be very risky.
by jcalx | 2025-06-09 18:23:37+00:00
I enjoy his writing style, and particularly his willingness to indulge in paragraphs of dryly humorous details, usually of the technical and operational varieties. For all their flaws, he and a few others (e.g. Alistair MacLean) have a particular flavor of "very competent protagonist relying on their wits and Very Particular Set of Skills" that other authors can't execute quite as well.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-09 18:23:41+00:00
If we had specifically defunded highway patrol that was net-revenue-positive, yes.

Republican defunding of the IRS is literally insane: reform by cutting enforcement.

- It rewards people who cheat on their taxes.

- It costs the government more money that it saves, because IRS investment is net revenue positive.

But then, the modern Republican party seems more concerned with being the party of 'law(s I agree with) and order (for people who aren't me).'
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-06-09 18:24:03+00:00
In my country, there is already a (little known and not really enforced) law, that says, that for similar work there has to be a similar pay (simplifying massively). There is possibly a bunch of workarounds for this (as usual), but a good HR will not like the idea of hiring another SWE, with the same title as other SWEs, but with 2x pay.
by vegetable | 2025-06-09 18:24:05+00:00
I think his video makes it clear how hard it is to make something made-in-america--even this product isn't. On the product front alone, people would be making a decision to spend ~5-10x something made-in-notamerica. gains from trade is a fundamental idea that has proven to be mostly beneficial to the masses. suddenly claiming self-reliance yields freedom seems very politically aligned.
by verall | 2025-06-09 18:24:10+00:00
I fully agree with this, besides that if an AI could auto-generate a commit message that I can edit to make actually correct and comprehensive, it will probably be a better, more descriptive message than whatever I come up with in usually ~3 minutes.

The value is a nice starting point but the message is still confirmed by the actual expert. If it's fully auto-generated or I start "accepting" everything, then I agree it becomes completely useless.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-06-09 18:24:16+00:00
You contact your representatives in Congress (mail, phone, in person at town halls and such) and say "hey, stop passing giant omnibus bills". You encourage others to do the same. That's all you can do, as a citizen.

Unfortunately it won't make a difference because the vast majority of Americans simply do not care. So very few people will be putting pressure on their representatives, and nothing will change.
by _QrE | 2025-06-09 18:24:36+00:00
I'm not sure how valid most of these points are. A lot of the latency in an agentic system is going to be the calls to the LLM(s).

From the article: """ Agents typically have a number of shared characteristics when they start to scale (read: have actual users):

They are long-running — anywhere from seconds to minutes to hours. Each execution is expensive — not just the LLM calls, but the nature of the agent is to replace something that would typically require a human operator. Development environments, browser infrastructure, large document processing — these all cost $$$. They often involve input from a user (or another agent!) at some point in their execution cycle. They spend a lot of time awaiting i/o or a human.

"""

No. 1 doesn't really point to one language over another, and all the rest show that execution speed and server-side efficiency is not very relevant. People ask agents a question and do something else while the agent works. If the agent takes a couple seconds longer because you've written it in Python, I doubt that anyone would care (in the majority of cases at least).

I'd argue Python is a better fit for agents, mostly because of the mountain of AI-related libraries and support that it has.

> Contrast this with Python: library developers need to think about asyncio, multithreading, multiprocessing, eventlet, gevent, and some other patterns...

Agents aren't that hard to make work, and you can get most of the use (and paying users) without optimizing every last thing. And besides, the mountain of support you have for whatever workflow you're building means that someone has probably already tried building at least part of what you're working on, so you don't have to go in blind.
by Bondi_Blue | 2025-06-09 18:24:51+00:00
It is weird that they acted as through the design system hasn't changed much since iOS 7. They've overhauled and tweaked it every year since 2011- increasing font weights, using slower floaty/bubble animations, increasing corner radiuses and adding more negative space, adding depth and shadows to icons, etc. Control Center, for example, looks nothing like it did in iOS 7. iOS 7 was much more minimal, the least skeuomorphic, and a bit more geometric than the "neumorphic" changes they've made since then.

This updated design language seems to have similarities to Microsoft's Material/Fluent design system that brought more of that same glass material to Windows 11, with the more 3d-looking edge outlines on ui elements. So the glass metaphor seems to be a trending metaphor in these UIs, for better or for worse.
by toast0 | 2025-06-09 18:24:55+00:00
What do you want to hear about? Doing things the same old way continues to work in the same old way. I may be a dinosaur, but I hear La Brea is nice this time of year.

I've tried new things occasionally, and I keep going back to a text editor and a shell window to run something like Make. It's probably not the most efficient process, but it works for everything and there's value in that. I have no interest in a tool that will generate lots of code for me that may or may not be correct and I'll have to go through with a fine tooth comb to see; I can personally generate lots of code that may or may not be correct, and if that fails, I have run some projects as copy-paste snippets from stack overflow until it works; it's not my idea of a good time, but I think it was better than spending the time to understand the many layers of OSX when all I wanted to do was get a pixel value from a point on the screen into applescript and I didn't want to do any other OSX ever (and I haven't).
by narag | 2025-06-09 18:25:02+00:00
That's trying to put a material value on software, and doing it based on the salaries of developers is as crazy as valuing it in lines of code.

I'm not sure if depreciation is the same concept as we call amortización in my country: capital that counts as investment instead of expenses because you're expected to keep extracting value from it over the years, so you can't get a deduction for the whole expense when you first pay for it.

If that's what this is about, it's absurd not for the reason you say (salaries are not a bad proxy for value, since you expect the profit will be greater) but because you'll probably keep paying for maintenance and evolving the software.
by gnopgnip | 2025-06-09 18:25:20+00:00
Generally the US requires valuable assets to be depreciated and amortized over their useful life. This is arguably a fair way to tax businesses with fewer downsides than many alternatives.

Consider a different situation, a business pays employees to build a residential home for $275k total, the land is worth zero in this simple example. Currently they can deduct $10k a year for 27.5 years to depreciate the home, even though they paid $275k up front. Allowing the business to deduct the entire $275k at once, only recovering the difference when the depreciated asset is sold is basically a tax free loan at the expense of all other taxpayers.

To be fair there are many situations where the government wants to incentivize spending in certain areas. Certain types of businesses can avoid depreciation and deduct full expenses, like for farm equipment and heavy duty vehicles, previously most R&D. Or where accelerated or bonus depreciation is used because most of the income is in the first few years. Like a taxi follows a 5 year double depreciation schedule, in the first year a $25k taxi would depreciate $10k, then $6k the next year, there are many examples that are on a shorter schedule.

Keeping a 5 year straight line depreciation on R&D benefits large established businesses and burdens startups, this is primarily a political decision and not economic. Another issue is that not all R&D spending results in a valuable asset with a usable life
by taeric | 2025-06-09 18:25:37+00:00
Awesome, thanks for the video!

And I'd expect anything like this to be more than a 1 man job! Apologies if I implied otherwise. I'd expect even using wheels for the turning that you would need more than a single person.

It is obnoxious how hard it is to search on why they would have never invented a wheel for the spinning of thread. AI seems to insist that spinning wheels are directly the result of carting wheels. I'd expect even wheels for a pulley system would have helped with the hanging process.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-06-09 18:25:45+00:00
> Citizen's United isn't even really about free expression IMO

unfortunately, it is about free expression in the opinion of the supreme court:

'the Court found that laws restricting the political spending of corporations and unions are inconsistent with the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.' [0]

BDS is a topical instance of a bottom-up movement recommending boycotting, divestment and sanctions against organizations that are considered to materially support the israelli government. naturally, you can imagine this attracts strong opinions from many sides. in some cases, states/municipalities have deemed this to be unprotected speech. [1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sancti...
by sorentwo | 2025-06-09 18:25:46+00:00
That's the issue with goroutines, threads, or any long running chain of processes. The tasks must be broken up into atomic chunks, and the state has to be serialized in some way. That allows failures to be retried, errors to be examined, results to be referenced later, and the whole thing to be distributed between multiple nodes.

It must in my view at least, as that's how Oban (https://github.com/oban-bg/oban) in Elixir models this kind of problem. Full disclosure, I'm an author and maintainer of the project.

It's Elixir specific, but this article emphasizes the importance of async task persistence: https://oban.pro/articles/oban-starts-where-tasks-end
by catoc | 2025-06-09 18:25:47+00:00
“How about starting with reliably, deterministically, and instantly (say <50ms) finding obvious things like <…> searching by a prefix of their name? As a second criterion, I would like to find files by substrings of their name”

Even I can, and have, build search functionality like this. Deterministically. No LLMs or “AI” needed. In fact for satisfying the above criteria this kind of implementation is still far more reliable.
by danenania | 2025-06-09 18:25:55+00:00
I built Plandex[1] (open source CLI coding agent focused on large projects and tasks) in Go and I’ve been very happy with that decision.

Beneath all the jargon, it’s good to remember that an “agent” is ultimately just a bunch of http requests and streams that need to be coordinated—some serially and some concurrently. And while that sounds pretty simple at a high level, there are many subtle details to pay attention to if you want to make this kind of system robust and scalable. Timeouts, retries, cancellation, error handling, thread pools, thread safety, and so on.

This stuff is Go’s bread and butter. It’s exactly what it was designed for. It’s not going to get you an MVP quite as fast as node or python, but as the codebase grows and edge cases accumulate, the advantages of Go become more and more noticeable.

1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex
by ashishb | 2025-06-09 18:26:00+00:00
> For long-running, expensive processes that do a lot of waiting, a downside is that if you kill the goroutine, you lose all your work.

This is true regardless of the language. I always do a reasonable amount of work (milliseconds to up to a few seconds) worth of work in a Go routine every time. Anything more and your web service is not as stateless as it should be.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-09 18:26:07+00:00
I've not doubt that many Chinese do applaud their leadership. Partly out of a closing of ranks against foreign criticism, partly out of genuine support and partly out of appeal created by sheer propagandization. Similar things happened in Nazi Germany and the USSR, or a number of other sophisticated dictatorships that had the time and effort to develop and entrench their social engineering and propaganda construction well.

It doesn't change that China is emphatically a dictatorial regime and not a democracy, and even if many of its people decide to disagree with the administration at some point, they'll simply be repressed from expressing this at all, as had happened many times.

And yes, you're either a propagandist or completely deluded.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-06-09 18:27:01+00:00
That's not really the issue (and I say this as a socialist). The issue is that it's a weak and very leaky definition that attempts to redefine anyone that touches "software development" away from being taxed like employees into being taxed like machines that produce assets at the same value as their cost of operating.

This punishes small businesses and new businesses more than any large org because it massively increases the cost of operating for the first few years.

And importantly it just doesn't do so consistently.

Orgs should have a higher tax burden. This just doesn't do that, instead this is punishing orgs for trying to do new things and rewarding existing momentum (i.e. the large corporations that already have a profitable revenue stream and a long trail of employment history).
by simonw | 2025-06-09 18:27:07+00:00
This article starts with this section about how easily we can trick ourselves and ignore clear evidence of something:

> But Cialdini’s book was a turning point because it highlighted the very real limitations to human reasoning. No matter how smart you were, the mechanisms of your thinkings could easily be tricked in ways that completely bypassed your logical thinking and could insert ideas and trigger decisions that were not in your best interest.

The author is an outspoken AI skeptic, who then spends the rest of the article arguing that, despite clear evidence, LLMs are not a useful tool for software engineering.

I would encourage them to re-read the first half of their article and question if maybe they are falling victim to what it describes!

Baldur calls for scientific research to demonstrate if LLMs are useful programming productivity enhancements or not. I would hope that, if such research goes against their beliefs, they would chose to reassess.

(I'm not holding my breath with respect to good research: I've read a bunch of academic papers on software development productivity in the past and found most of them to be pretty disappointing: this field is notoriously difficult to measure.)
by daedrdev | 2025-06-09 18:27:08+00:00
In the long run, all government debt is going to be future taxes. There are many programs that the government spends on that are efficient and produce more growth than the taxes collected would have, and there are many that don't and produce less growth than leaving the money in the hands of the taxed. Sometimes this is due to government inefficiency, and sometimes because we decided it's what we want, like medicare for elderly who will never return the investment into their health.
Show HN: Safe Domain Search – Avoid frontrunning, check availability locally
by powerpurple | 2025-06-09 18:27:09+00:00
Hey everyone, this is a small desktop app I put together to check domain availability without hitting any third-party APIs.

It runs everything locally to avoid the risk of tracking or frontrunning. Built with Go and Wails.

It’s a simple tool, but Go made it fun to build — a nice break from all the JavaScript I deal with at work.

Would appreciate any feedback or ideas to improve it.
by tptacek | 2025-06-09 18:27:13+00:00
That's true from a performance perspective but, in building an agent in Go, I was thankful that I had extremely well-worn patterns to manage concurrency, backlogs, and backpressure given that most interactions will involve one or more transactions with a remote service that takes several seconds to respond.

(I think you can effectively write an agent in any language and I think Javascript is probably the most popular choice. Now, generating code, regardless of whether it's an agent or a CLI tool or a server --- there, I think Go and LLM have a particularly nice chemistry.)
by abelanger | 2025-06-09 18:27:18+00:00
OP here - this type of "checkpoint-based state machine" is exactly what platforms which offer durable execution primitives like Hatchet (https://hatchet.run/) and Temporal (https://temporal.io/) are offering. Disclaimer: am a founder of Hatchet.

These platforms store an event history of the functions which have run as part of the same workflow, and automatically replay those when your function gets interrupted.

I imagine synchronizing memory contents at the language level would be much more overhead than synchronizing at the output level.