MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by j4_james | 2025-07-18 19:11:37+00:00
> "ANSI" is what people call it when they are working from paltry and incomplete samizdat doco of how this stuff works

People just use "ANSI" as a shorthand for ANSI X3.64-1979. And that was the standard that DEC used for their VT100+ range of terminals, which in turn became the de facto standard from which most modern terminal emulators are derived. If you read the DEC documentation, you'll find many references to "ANSI standard", "ANSI controls", "ANSI colors", etc. I don't think this is because they were ignorant of the subject matter, considering that they were members of the committee that produced that standard.

And ECMA-48 is essentially just the European equivalent of ANSI X3.64, and was developed in parallel. But obviously an American company like DEC or Microsoft would more likely be working from the American version of the standard rather than the European one.
by cool_dude85 | 2025-07-18 19:11:58+00:00
Again, I ask whether you think Harris or Biden produced objectively good results, or fixed any of the problems identified in the article. I agree that both are better choices than Trump, but my exact point is that I can't cast a vote that is actually in my best interests.

Concretely, I lost real pay under Biden; at the same time, buying a house where I live probably is half again as expensive as it had been. Even my most narrow economic interest is that both these problems get fixed. Do you think Harris would have done that?
by Andrew_nenakhov | 2025-07-18 19:12:01+00:00
I don't really think hardware keys (which I have a few, btw) really improve security:

I use a seriously backed up password manager that I have means to access from anywhere, and the only thing I have to worry is that I'd forget my really complex password to access it, because it is unfeasible that I'll lose all my devices where it is backed up and also an off-site backup of it.

With hardware keys, however, I constantly have to worry to keep them with me or in a safe place and not to lose them.

(my position is partially rooted in the fact that I happen to live in a country where you can easily have all your material possessions forcibly taken from you)
by Pooge | 2025-07-18 19:12:15+00:00
I know about the lack of tech-savvyness of most humans, but isn't Markdown and Pandoc—if you slam a GUI in front of it—covering the needs of 99% of users?

Granted, when you need formatting, like for a formal letter, you use a template someone made but this is not what most people use Word for.

And don't get me started on "people wouldn't understand how to put things in bold or italics"; they can barely use Word anyway. Might as well use something much simpler. Office "productivity" suites are over to me.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-07-18 19:12:33+00:00
> I disagree with the policies personally but politically I don't know if their calculation is wrong.

The current administration is really deluded about the prominence and draw it thinks America still has. They had the misconception, for example, that China was much more dependent on trade with the USA rather than the 2% impact that the numbers actually suggested. They are simply making all of their calculations with factually incorrect premises along with bad math.
by ffsm8 | 2025-07-18 19:12:35+00:00
Heh, same for me. (albeit only three factors, but more weren't configured)

It was firstname.lastname@gmail.com that I lost, as I was mostly using my original account with a pseudonym for anything private (was a teen when Gmail started, so didn't think twice about using a cringe username back then).

I had configured the first/last name Mail to forward everything to the pseudonym email and didn't access it again for something like a year... Then I had to respond to someone and... Well, Google never let me access it again.

I eventually gave up on it entirely and switched to a custom novelty domain on fastmail, much much later. (A portmanteau of my last/first name
by iamleppert | 2025-07-18 19:12:46+00:00
The working genes they insert are just into the cell envelope itself, not into the cell nucleus. There are actually a lot of DNA that is free floating around in the cell, and are used during protein synthesis, called episome or non-integrated DNA. This is distinct from the DNA inside the nucleus, which gets copied from generation to generation.

There are techniques that work on modifying nuclear DNA but from my understanding it's much harder (like using CRISPR) and has a lot more risks for things like causing cancer due to off-site editing.

The scales that this technology works is mind-boggling. 10^12 to 10^14 per kg of body weight of individual viral particles that all must do the same thing, and work correctly at scale. Even a few errors could cause serious problems.
by ankit219 | 2025-07-18 19:13:05+00:00
Not just Meta, 40 EU companies urged EU to postpone roll out of the ai act by two years due to it's unclear nature. This code of practice is voluntary and goes beyond what is in the act itself. EU published it in a way to say that there would be less scrutiny if you voluntarily sign up for this code of practice. Meta would anyway face scrutiny on all ends, so does not seem to a plausible case to sign something voluntary.

One of the key aspects of the act is how a model provider is responsible if the downstream partners misuse it in any way. For open source, it's a very hard requirement[1].

> GPAI model providers need to establish reasonable copyright measures to mitigate the risk that a downstream system or application into which a model is integrated generates copyright-infringing outputs, including through avoiding overfitting of their GPAI model. Where a GPAI model is provided to another entity, providers are encouraged to make the conclusion or validity of the contractual provision of the model dependent upon a promise of that entity to take appropriate measures to avoid the repeated generation of output that is identical or recognisably similar to protected works.

[1] https://www.lw.com/en/insights/2024/11/european-commission-r...
by autoexec | 2025-07-18 19:13:05+00:00
> But I'm personally not too worried about ingesting pfas from pfas lined products!

The fact that we've poisoned the rain wouldn't make me feel any better about the PFAS I'm getting from packaging. There's research showing that the chemicals do leach into food from packaging and that it causes significant increases in the amount found in people's blood. Look up the findings on PFAS and microwave popcorn for example. It not looking good for coffee cups either https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
by satellite2 | 2025-07-18 19:13:12+00:00
Well Europe haven't enacted policies actually breaking American monopolies until now.

Europeans are still essentially on Google, Meta and Amazon for most of their browsing experiences. So I'm assuming Europe's goal is not to compete or break American moat but to force them to be polite and to preserve national sovereignty on important national security aspects.

A position which is essentially reasonable if not too polite.
by chaps | 2025-07-18 19:13:39+00:00
In the context of criminal prosecution/litigation, there's an enormous difference between "murdering one person" vs "murdering 100". For limitless reasons!

Like, is a victim of life threatening domestic violence who shoots their abuser during an attack a "murderer"? Or is an abuser who killed their spouse in a rage a "murderer"? Obviously these are different and the prosecution/defense hash that out over a very, very long time.

Details matter. Ask any public defender.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-18 19:14:55+00:00
So I just ran strace -c cat <file> and strace -c bat <file>

Bat did 445 syscall Cat did 48 syscall

Sure bat does beautify some things a lot but still I just wanted to tell this, I want something that can use io_uring for cat too I think,

like what's the least number of syscalls that you can use for something like cat?
by aussieInSF | 2025-07-18 19:15:15+00:00
Thank you for doing this Peter!

I am Australian, working in tech using an E-3 visa in the Bay Area.

My wife is considering moving forward with an EB-2 NIW application, she is currently in F1 OPT. She doesn't have a very strong profile currently, but is willing to work on it.

I am concerned that this might complicate me being able to renew the E-3 in the future. My understanding is that an approved or even denied I-140 from a spouse potentially signals immigrant intent for both, and it is at the discretion of the CBP agent to make this assessment.

More generally my understanding is that even if her I-140 was approved, and we stayed in the US until the I-485 was filed, that would permanently make me not eligible for any future E-3.

Is this accurate?

I previously was thinking of following the E-3 -> EB-3 -> GC route myself, but I don't see how I can do this if I'm sacrificing the E-3 if anything goes wrong.
by kwk1 | 2025-07-18 19:15:18+00:00
An evaluation of what's best really depends on how one weighs different tradeoffs. For example, Debian and Arch are basically polar opposites in terms of two questions:

1) do you want an intermediary between you and the upstream? for example, to patch out telemetry

2) is it important that what you're using continues to work the same way so you can focus on your actual work?

No answer to either is consequence-free, e.g. for 1), see the Debian SSH patch event, or for 2), if the answer is "it doesn't work", then that kinda forces one's hand.
by Ancapistani | 2025-07-18 19:15:36+00:00
Early crypto believer here. My first purchase of Bitcoin was at $0.23. I've been through the ups and downs, used the proceeds to buy physical assets over the years (land, and one vehicle), and lost interest in the "community" shortly after Ethereum gained initial popularity. I still hold some crypto, mostly Bitcoin but also Ethereum, Monero, and a handful of altcoins that don't amount to enough to bother withdrawing.

My hot take take: Crypto still fills a valuable role, and will still "take over" the global financial system both at the individual and institutional level. Whether that's Bitcoin, another coin, or something new created by the institutions themselves is yet to be seen.

You're right that it's "tainted", of course. That's why I think we're in a (hopefully) long slump in adoption. I think that will rapidly change if and when the US Dollar loses its place as the world's reserve currency.

At some point there will be a war or significant political disruption. A large part of the world will want to divest itself of dollars, and none of the state-backed alternatives will be stable enough for their needs. That's when we'll see a shift to crypto - first some international institutions that do business across ideological borders, then the rest of the internationals, then individuals.

Unless and until that happens, things will continue to slowly grow. The boom/bust cycle will keep going, getting longer and lower magnitude over time. There's still money to be made in speculation, but that's not what interests me :)
by patrickhogan1 | 2025-07-18 19:15:42+00:00
On your intelligence graph where it shows Grok 4 and OpenAI o4-mini as comparable (and among the highest intelligence rated models), it doesn’t have OpenAI o3 or o3-pro.

Yet all of my tests show o3 blows o4-mini out of the water.

What are you classifying as intelligence?
by LeoPanthera | 2025-07-18 19:16:13+00:00
In case anyone doesn't realise, (nearly) every episode is available on the Internet Archive. I was recently involved in restoring an additional "lost" episode from a tape found in a libarary.

https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles

Why not start with the "Gary Kildall Special":

https://archive.org/details/GaryKild
by j2kun | 2025-07-18 19:16:19+00:00
> the entirety of that data needs to be loaded into my program

What? No. I'm not saying the entire Google search index is feasible, but you can do a lot. Here are some concrete numbers from what is now considered an "old" paper (2022; it has been improved since then)

https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/949

To make queries to a 1 GB database [in a scheme called DoublePIR] the client must download a 16 MB "hint" about the database contents; thereafter, the client may make an unbounded number of queries, each requiring 345 KB of communication, and a throughput of 7.4 GB/s/core.
by ajd555 | 2025-07-18 19:16:54+00:00
Grok 4 has about 99% accuracy in picking the right tools and making tool calls with proper arguments almost every single time.

Where did this number come from? What is "the right tool"? I find this extremely subjective. As most engineers know, there is no right tool, but mostly a compromise where you pick the least worst tool and choose what risks you're willing to manage or not.
by baerrie | 2025-07-18 19:17:31+00:00
I meant to say historical personality. I thought I had heard about this type of ego-death when reading some of the early pioneer’s works but can’t find a mention. Basically it was the idea of who I was that had built up over time based on people’s assumptions, judgements, and the way they treated me. My built up idea of self was enforcing negative looping behavior patterns until tripping freed me from that past idea, my historical personality. This led to me feeling a more open and unburdened sense of identity, allowing my idea of self to be an unfolding story rather than someone else's half-telling
by mbrumlow | 2025-07-18 19:17:31+00:00
> But having it at 25 or 30 based on development smacks of disenfranchisement and eg jim crow literacy laws.

Nobody said they would have a test based system. Fairly sure we uniformly say brains are not fully developed until 24. So your Jim Crow comment is unfounded, at best as a misunderstanding or at worst an attempt to throw race into a conversation to try and strengthen your position with past atrocities void logic.
by NearAP | 2025-07-18 19:18:14+00:00
1) This also happens to non-workspace (regular) gmail accounts

2) I didn't change the policy on the workspace email when I signed up for it

The point is still - why ask me to authenticate via different methods and then reject them after I've correctly authenticated? If some policy is overriding these, then you shouldn't have asked me to authenticate via those methods in the first place.
by Vortigaunt | 2025-07-18 19:18:27+00:00
Looks like someone archived the page of firefox-patch-bin[1] and the only thing that stands out about the package itself is that it's supposedly the "Extended Support Release." Besides that it looks like it's depended on by 183 other packages/metapackages. While that seems more interesting, there isn't an archive of all of those packages.

[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20250718140411/https://aur.archl...
by seeyebe | 2025-07-18 19:18:28+00:00
Thanks! Great question. Everything is an excellent tool, but it works differently—it uses a pre-built index, while rq scans the file system in real time.

To benchmark, you can use hyperfine like this:

hyperfine 'rq C:\ ".png" --glob' 'es.exe .png' 'fd --type f png'

This compares rq, Everything CLI (es.exe), and fd.
by otabdeveloper4 | 2025-07-18 19:18:33+00:00
> Nix-the-language is the worst programming language I've ever had the misfortune to interact with

Nix-the-language is just a subset of Javascript with built-in laziness and a slightly different syntax. An absolute bog-standard and mainstream way of thinking about programs in 2025.

That said, Nix-the-language also suffers from all the same birth defects that manifest themselves in frontend development.
by kolektiv | 2025-07-18 19:19:18+00:00
I can't take anything seriously with phrases like "it has not yet achieved AGI, but it is one leap forward in the race to AGI" - based on what? Nobody knows whether LLMs are a viable approach to AGI, nobody really agrees on what AGI is, hell, people don't really agree on what "I" is.

This is just not even science at all at this point, we're just into solid cargo cult.
by bell-cot | 2025-07-18 19:19:29+00:00
> Starbase ... is an outlier in the company and across the industry as a whole. Its TRIR topped out at 4.27 injuries per 100 workers in 2024, when it employed an average of 2,690 workers, according to the data submitted to OSHA. Injured Starbase employees were unable to perform their normal job duties for a total of 3,558 restricted-duty days, plus 656 lost-time days where injuries made them unable to work at all.

Compare with https://www.bls.gov/web/osh/table-1-industry-rates-national....

Looks to me like Starbase is far safer than automobile manufacturing. Let alone hospital nursing care.

So - other than "We <3 Elon Bashing", what's the point of the article? Nobody who's been inside a real factory would be surprised that busy Starbase has higher injuries rates than its "Slowly Going Nowhere, Ferociously" competition.
by yunyu | 2025-07-18 19:19:53+00:00
LLMs are on the verge of replacing data scientists and investment bankers. But can they perform simple accounting tasks for a real business?

We built AccountingBench, a test where LLMs must "close the books" for a real SaaS business using 1 year of Stripe/Ramp/Rippling/Mercury data.

Claude 4 and Grok 4 start strong - within 1% of human CPA baselines in month 1.

But as time progresses, all models inevitably accumulate compounding errors and exhibit erratic behavior, causing significant deviations.

That said, the early accuracy here is promising. With targeted post-training, models may be able to replace humans for this kind of work.
by sgt101 | 2025-07-18 19:20:46+00:00
Maybe it's different for other people, but I just couldn't move the way I used to, I had less gas, less snap, my reactions were poorer. There's a thing of power coming from your gut/core... that's what lets you really move and use leverage, and that really faded. Competing with guys in their mid twenties was the shocker. I guess that there's a think where experience and training builds advantage but then you go over a cliff where the physical difference just overwhelms that.

Look, we don't see professional athletes in their 40's much if at all. Mike Tyson was the best fighter (ever?) and looked in shocking good shape - but he still lost to that goon.
by hatthew | 2025-07-18 19:20:58+00:00
For long term memory, LLMs can learn new information by training on it. It would need a lot of training data, but it will get there eventually.

For short term memory, they can store information in their context window. Yes the context window is finite, but they can still be very large, and there exist techniques to fit more information within that window.

For medium term memory, there's not one single solution, but anecdotally it seems like solutions exist. My workplace has a chatbot that can ingest documents and save slack conversations, and then use the knowledge from those to answer questions indefinitely into the future. I haven't looked into how it works, but empirically it functions well across thousands of people for more than a year.

Between a human and an LLM transported 200 years into the future, a human will certainly have better critical thinking skills, but I'd bet an LLM system designed for the task will probably be able to more quickly learn to have coherent and symmetric conversations about the world with modern humans.

Overall, there's a lot that's unclear, and I think I'm pretty pessimistic about progress towards AGI, but I don't think we can deny that LLMs have something that is, at minimum, the best substitute for human intelligence that exists.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-18 19:21:07+00:00
And these packages are from AUR, they are not officially supported. AUR means Arch User Repository. You cannot even use Arch Linux's official package manager to install AUR packages either, you need an AUR helper ("makepkg" is sufficient though but it has limitations). These AUR helpers are not even official packages either. Not even yay: https://archlinux.org/packages/?sort=&q=yay.
by diggan | 2025-07-18 19:21:08+00:00
They are/were AUR packages it seems, anyone can spend 2 minutes and upload essentially anything there, like npm and similar. It's not necessarily a "maintainer" per se, as like the people who manage the packages in the proper Arch repositories, but entirely separate.

With that comes the same warning as downloading random stuff from the internet and executing it, you need to carefully review everything before running/installing it, as you're basically doing a fancy version of "curl | bash" when using the AUR.
by OG_BME | 2025-07-18 19:22:15+00:00
> Third, despite having been provided with a clear definition of AI companions, some respondents may have conflated general AI use (such as ChatGPT for homework help) with AI companion interactions, potentially inflating usage statistics.

I think the viability of this entire study hinges on how clear they were that they are not talking about ChatGPT, even if they use ChatGPT for things like getting advice.
by desolate_muffin | 2025-07-18 19:22:36+00:00
This phenomenon really frustrates me on behalf of my peers. I'm not sure what the right answer is, but anecdotally I've observed many others struggle to get their first jobs in tech, while, meanwhile, I am mostly being assigned to interview people who require visa sponsorship. Most of my referrals for my low YOE peers are rejected before the recruiter call. I have observed this at both very-big tech and my current medium-sized tech company.

I have also observed that on my team, more than half of the people are either currently on immigrant visas or were previously on immigrant visas. Just to be absolutely clear—these people are great, and I don't fault them or hold any ill will for them having coming here to work.

At the same time, it seems that most hiring is done at the mid and senior level. If we only hire senior talent and rely on immigrant visa labor to fill these ranks, where exactly is each subsequent generation of seniors supposed to come from? I feel there should be some requirements in place to ensure that companies aren't perpetuating this shortage by hiring very few domestic workers at the entry level.
by diggan | 2025-07-18 19:22:48+00:00
> AUR clients already show you the diff if you update a package, but note that this were completely new packages anyway, uploaded 2 days ago, so that doesn't really apply here.

The program I use for AUR (Rua) still displays exactly what you're about to build (as a git diff), before you build it, even if it's the first time/release. I'd assume all the other "AUR managers" would work the same way?
by LeoPanthera | 2025-07-18 19:23:10+00:00
This is a slight aside, but CachyOS is a great example of the failure of Wikipedia politics.

The "CachyOS" page was deleted[1], and replaced with a redirect to the Arch Linux page. But CachyOS is not mentioned anywhere on that page, nor on the "List of Linux distributions § Arch Linux-based" page.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
by flumpcakes | 2025-07-18 19:23:13+00:00
I have never seen that before. If I am reading that correctly: it is interesting that Israel was doing the work on US soil, giving the FBI/CIA a heads up about a potential large scale terrorist attack against the US and then the FBI/CIA seemingly do little to stop what eventually becomes 9/11 later that year. The FBI/CIA then obfuscate where their intel came from.