MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rcxdude | 2025-07-23 17:13:32+00:00
They hold shared on behalf of other people, i.e. if someone buys one of their index funds they buy the corresponding shares. They are the on-paper owner of a very large fraction of shares in public companies, but they are a) not the ultimate owners, just agents of the real investors, and b) as a consequence very hands-off in the operation of the businessness. They in general just go along with what the company executives and other, more direct investors want. They have a general stated goal of 'encouraging long-term value for their stockholders', but the most activist thing they've done was contribute to a shuffle in exxonmobile which pushed them to pay a little bit more attention to the environment and climate change, which is if anything the opposite of what people tend to assume they do.
by harmmonica | 2025-07-23 17:13:32+00:00
This seems like a good argument for some kind of AI guardrails. And then the question is who decides where the guardrails start and end? I guess the straw man is: if you knew the AI friend was not going to advocate destructive behavior, to oneself (maybe less important?) and to the world around you, then the AI friend might actually be a net benefit because the actual person may feel more emotionally supported than they otherwise would be.

The problem is there's almost no way to regulate the guardrails, at least in a country like the US, and so then you're left with corporate interests deciding on the guardrails with their only incentive being hockey stick growth in engagement/revenue, which we already know is destructive in almost every corporate vertical (social media, food, etc.).
by merksittich | 2025-07-23 17:13:55+00:00
Thank you, I'll bite. If within your code of conduct:

- Are you providing reasoning traces, responses or both?

- Are you evaluating reasoning traces, responses or both?

- Has your work shifted towards multi-turn or long horizon tasks?

- If you also work with chat logs of actual users, do you think that they are properly anonymized? Or do you believe that you could de-anonymize them without major efforts?

- Do you have contact to other evaluators?

- How do you (and your colleagues) feel about the work (e.g., moral qualms because "training your replacement" or proud because furthering civilization, or it's just about the money...)?
by chriswarbo | 2025-07-23 17:14:38+00:00
Tests can't catch everything; it's a question of cost/benefit, and stopping when the diminishing returns provided by further tests (or other QA work) isn't enough to justify the cost of further investment in them (including the opportunity cost of spending our time improving QA elsewhere).

For your example, the best place to invest would be in that API's own test suite (e.g. sending its devs examples of usage that we rely on); but of course we can't rely on others to make our lives easier. Contracts can help with that, to make the API developers responsible for following some particular change notification process.

Still, such situations are hypothetical; whereas the sorts of integration tests that the parent is describing are useful to avoid our deployments from immediately blowing up.
by hylaride | 2025-07-23 17:15:07+00:00
Also, Vanguard is run as a sort of cooperative where it is indirectly owned by the fundholders, which is why they were always incentivized to LOWER fees. The founder of Vanguard (Jack Bogle) probably left tens of billions of wealth on the table by creating that model (and he had no regrets, FWIW).

There are concerns because by default they usually cast votes by board recommendations and since they have such a huge stewardship of the stock market it means others can have more direct influence, but Vanguard itself is otherwise as neutral a stock ownership intermediary as can pretty much exist.
by cgriswald | 2025-07-23 17:17:06+00:00
The actual claims of the paper are not that this was 'for show', but that NASA considered the risks unlikely and prioritized the more likely risks to the astronauts lives. I see how the authors got to 'so it was all for show', but it simply isn't true.

There is plenty of evidence that the risk was taken seriously (regulations and treaties surrounding the issue, ICBC activities in the years prior to launch, the expense on things the public would never have known about, medical and biological testing done for the first three missions, NASA's openness with the ICBC about the imperfection of the system and the existence of contingency plans...).
by blue_waters | 2025-07-23 17:18:04+00:00
I think there is going to be a painful Tailwind CSS hangover when it's used and copy/pasted via components like Shadcn UI. It really doesn't belong in design kits or UI component libraries (especially if these are packaged - why on earth would want the Tailwind/Postcss processor reaching into node_modules). But as a convenient utility class-based style system for prototype development or simple apps - it has its place.
by yuliyp | 2025-07-23 17:18:17+00:00
I don't think this is head-of-line blocking. That is, it's not like a single slow request causes starvation of other requests. The IO thread for the connection is grabbing and dispatching data to workers as fast as it can. All the requests are uniform, so it's not like one request would be bigger/harder to handle for that thread.
by craftkiller | 2025-07-23 17:18:24+00:00
FWIW I think its good to elaborate on how other projects are doing things incorrectly (though I agree the GOS people could use some diplomacy and decorum). For example, with the fairphones for the longest time the only answer you could get on why grapheneos doesn't support it is that the phone is not secure. That answer doesn't leave me informed, all it leaves me with is "someone on the internet told me it wasn't secure". For the newest fairphone 6 they actually elaborated and covered things like the lack of a secure element. That leaves me informed, so now I can look up what a secure element is, why I want it, and then make an informed decision for my next cellphone purchase.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-07-23 17:18:28+00:00
I miss Atom. I loved it. I loved all the crazy plugins people would make to do all sorts of things. It was a fun time.

These days I'm stuck on QTCreator most of the time. It's OK for core editing functionality but there's a lot that I miss, and some things like the generic Language Server support just aren't fleshed out much.

I'm tempted to use another editor whenever I'm not working on UI files but it adds some friction.
by fabrice_d | 2025-07-23 17:18:30+00:00
Indeed, you should. I haven't found a Rust UI project that compiles to Wasm and has good ergonomics; they all seem to make the mistake of being frameworks that control the whole app lifecycle and reinvent either markup or cumbersome ways to build your UI.

What would be nice is to use Wasm for component libraries instead, or for progressive enhancement (eg. add sophisticated autocomplete support to an input field).
by LooseMarmoset | 2025-07-23 17:18:51+00:00
systemd-resolved is an effing nightmare when combined with network-manager. these two packages consistently manage to stomp all over DNS resolution in their haste to be the one true source of name resolution. i tried enabling systemd-resolved as part of an effort to do dns over https and i end up with zero dns. i swear that /etc/resolv.conf plus helper scripts is more consistent and easy.
by Jtsummers | 2025-07-23 17:18:58+00:00
While reading this article I also saw the link to (and submitted) a GAO report:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44661215

which discusses this program on page 179 (in raw page count, numbered page 169).

The main reason I submitted it was as a kind-of answer to this recurring submission:

"Is the U.S. Ready for the Next War": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44649291 (links to previous submissions in the comments there)

I've made various comments here in the past on how DoD acquisitions are failing and get mixed responses (none, sometimes agreement, but, surprisingly, also pushback), and this article gets into it in a brutal but unfortunately factual way. OCX is years late, as described in this article, and billions over budget. Lots of other systems are in the same situation. Years late, millions and billions over budget, and when they deliver are often delivered with a subset of the target requirements.

In the classic trilemma "fast, good, cheap; pick two" you at least get two. In the case of DoD acquisitions you're more likely to get none. Slow, bad, expensive.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-07-23 17:19:04+00:00
Not entirely sure, but C#'s Blazor is amazing. I can stick to purely C# code, front-end and back-end, we rarely call out to JS unless its for like file uploading dialogs. I don't want to ever touch JavaScript again after this workflow.

Edit:

And if you don't want to do "WebAssembly" you can have it do it all server rendered, think of a SPA on steroids.
by gwking | 2025-07-23 17:19:59+00:00
I went from VS Code to Cursor, then got frustrated with Cursor breaking keybindings and other things, tried to go back to VS Code but missed the superior tab completion. Then I gave Zed a long hard try, but after over a month of daily usage I went back to Cursor again, just for the tab completion quality.

I don't use any of the chat or agent features, but for me Cursor's tab completion is a step forward in work efficiency that Zeta and Copilot were not. Sometimes it's subtle, and sometimes it is very obvious. Cursor seems to have sources of context that the others don't, like file names from the directory tree, and maybe even the relevant .pyi type annotations and docs for python modules. It also jumps to the next relevant problem site very effectively. It feels like the Cursor devs have done a ton of practical work that will be hard to match with anything other than a full-on competitive effort.

I want to see Zed succeed. I think it's very important that VS Code and its ultra-funded derivatives not dominate the modern editor landscape too thoroughly. Tab completion used to seem like a straightforward thing, but if the state of the art requires a very elaborate, whole-workspace-as-context environment to operate in, then I wonder if it's going to become a go big or go home kind of feature.

I can't help wonder what the actual internal API for this kind of thing is going to look like in the future. It used to be something like, what's the current token behind the cursor, and look in a big prefix tree of indexed words. Then maybe it got more elaborate with things like tree-sitter, like what's the incomplete parse tree up to this point. Then when editors started using AI, I stopped having any idea of what the actual inputs are. I'd love to hear about real implementation experience at any stage of this evolution.
by Karawebnetwork | 2025-07-23 17:20:45+00:00
In my opinion, this reflects more on the groups you've interacted with than on you personally.

I don't want to put you in a box, but consider this example:

"There is no significant difference in the effectiveness of how autistic and non-autistic people communicate, according to a new study, challenging the stereotype that autistic people struggle to connect with others." https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/autistic-people-communicat...

This highlights how much of our perception is shaped by context and societal bias.

Our society is unwell and the idea of a "third space" (a place outside of home and work where people can connect and thrive) has largely disappeared.

Working a lot can be wonderful when it brings you joy. Think of the Japanese concept of Ikigai (生き甲斐), which refers to having a sense of purpose: something that brings fulfillment and makes life feel worthwhile. If your work gives you that, then that's amazing, and you're fortunate.

It could be that you were born to bring nothing but profits and taxes to the community. And that's perfectly fine if it genuinely makes you happy.

The issue, in my view, is that in our unbalanced society work often becomes that default third space. But it's not designed to support human flourishing in that way. By design, it is meant to extract the maximum amount of profit from human resources, with little to no concern for their well-being. This often leads to burnout or disillusionment, especially when decades of effort go unnoticed or fail to make a meaningful impact on society.

Imagine if we had more spaces where we could do meaningful work, not necessarily for profit, in safe and supportive environments that foster connection with like-minded people. Many of us who quietly struggle on our own while still performing at a high level would finally feel like we belong to a supportive group.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-07-23 17:20:45+00:00
One thing the author didn't mention is how incredibly polished the primary ecosystem of documentation, standard library, and tooling is. The Elixir standard library is incredibly consistent in order to support Elixir's piping operator, such that the first argument will basically always be the information you want passed from the function before it. In comparison, I frequently have to check the docs to confirm argument order on any lesser-used function in Python, Javascript, or C#. Then there's the fact that the second-layer of standard library, the OTP inherited from Erlang, which is expansive to the point of containing most things you'd want to do on a server. The documentation, in turn, is the gold standard that I (typically negatively) compare all other language docs to. It's organized, discoverable, and covers not just the "what" but the "How" and "Why" exceptionally well, not just at the function level, but the module layer as well. Frankly, only MDN comes close. All combined, it's just an incredibly productive language.
by AlanYx | 2025-07-23 17:20:50+00:00
The most important thing here IMHO is the strong stance taken towards open source and open weight AI models. This stance puts the US government at odds with some other regulatory initiatives like the EU AI Act (which doesn't outlaw open weight models and does have some exemptions below 10²⁵ FLOPS, but still places a fairly daunting regulatory burden on decentralized open projects).
by codyb | 2025-07-23 17:20:59+00:00
Type systems in this space seem to take a long time and never quite reach completeness. At least that's the experience I've taken away from occasionally glancing at Erlang's Dialyzer project every now and again which I don't think has ever reached any semblance of the maturity of something like TypeScript.

But pattern matching in Erlang does do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of keeping the variable space limited per unit of code which tends to reduce nesting and amount of code to ingest to understand the behavior you care about at any moment.
by kazinator | 2025-07-23 17:21:00+00:00
What I meant was that the correct prediction is "dogs" under the assumption that that is what has occurred in the arbitrarily selected training data. While we are training the thing, we want to get it to predict whatever is in the data.

> Why would you insert redundant letters into a lovely well-known succinct pangram

The 's' is not redundant, because my version of the pangram has "fox jumped" not "fox jumps".

I picked up this version as a kid and have always used that one when testing new keyboards.

> the whole point is to make the SHORTEST sentence with all letters of the alphabet

If that is the whole point, the fox-dog sentence must be abandoned for a shorter pangram.

The requirement those shorter pangrams tend not to satisfy is being easy to remember.

People don't care about the sentence being short, which is why variants starting with "The ..." instead of "A ..." soon appeared after the invention of the original, which itself could have dropped the "A".
by ericmay | 2025-07-23 17:21:19+00:00
> Its possibly (and my opinion is that this is likely the case) the unavoidable result of attempting to implement nearly pure state socialism.

> There is no real reason to think that other approaches to socialism have this problem, and, again, “Communist” denotes a distinction within socialism that is orthogonal to the form of socialism sought but related to utopian end-goal past socialism, and there's even less reason to think that has any bearing on the outcome being discussed.

But we also have to deal with the world as-is for any ideology being implemented or tried. I'm not sure how you move away from state socialism as you have defined it without destroying the state and existing government first.

As you noted already, attempts to implement Communist ideology or Socialist offshoots regardless of flavor have resulted in the state continuing to exist but a narrow and self-perpetuating elite continues to control both the state and, through the state, the means of production and society more generally.

We've already seen this play out. Equally there's no reason to think that other approaches to socialism, regardless of flavor, will play out any differently unless you're also going to advocate for overthrowing the government and destroying the nation state first. Nobody is going to give up their airlines and watches and whatever other things, so you're going to have to seize those.

> mistaking modern mixed economies... mature capitalist starting point, largely through the efforts of socialists including Communists,

You're just doing the same thing so it's only fair.

> The solution to that problem is to read more than a little bit of history.

Back at you.
by ep103 | 2025-07-23 17:21:21+00:00
SWIM worked as a PM at a company that decided to redo their UI. They ran into an issue on internal roll out, where they discovered their support team for years had been doing sql injection on a specific form in the UI, in order to run reports on the company's database. They had to stop the roll out, and productionize the support team's (very valid) use cases in order to remove the sql injection form.
by hbn | 2025-07-23 17:21:26+00:00
Yes

> We were partly inspired by Signal’s blocking of Recall. Given that Windows doesn’t let non-browser apps granularly disable Recall, Signal cleverly uses the DRM flag on their app to disable all screenshots. This breaks Recall, but unfortunately also breaks the ability to take any screenshots, including by legitimate accessibility software like screen-readers. Brave’s approach does not have this limitation since we’re able to granularly disable just Recall; regular screenshotting will still work. While it’s heartening that Microsoft recognizes that Web browsers are especially privacy-sensitive applications, we hope they offer the same granular ability to turn off Recall to all privacy-minded application developers.
by trod1234 | 2025-07-23 17:21:30+00:00
Powerful electromagnets don't work like that. They may switch on and off, and if you are in range, the motion is almost instantaneous.

Its not like in the movies where you have to be right up on it, and certain materials may attract at higher rates depending on the amount of ferromagnetic materials affected by the flux.

Field flux lines may also be warped depending on the geometry so its possible the drop-off wasn't calculated properly during initial facility design, or it changed.

Walking through the wrong door can have consequences as the news has reported.
by Mawr | 2025-07-23 17:22:17+00:00
His is the best response in this thread. The point is that whether you've personally heard of something or not is not a great indicator of anything.

To answer the original question, wherever there is any power imbalance, there will be abuse. Priests, teachers, parents vs children; boss vs employee; "vulnerable" females vs "aggressive" males. A man complains about assault by a woman, everyone laughs. A woman complains about assault by a man, he gets thrown in jail.
by Sesse__ | 2025-07-23 17:22:24+00:00
> It's really not, things can be powerful and easy to use. I'd even say some parts of ffmpeg are well designed in this way like `ffmpeg -i ./video.mp4 ./video.wav` working is well designed.

I'd argue that even this command line isn't well-designed at all; it should be `ffmpeg video.mp4 -o video.wav`. How is it sane that anything without an -i in front is an _output_ filename?
by juujian | 2025-07-23 17:22:33+00:00
Have been using Trixie on my laptop for a year (?) now, it has been a very positive experience. I had brought a brand new, very recent ThinkPad, not considering that the relevant drivers would not be in Debian Stable yet. Now on Trixie, having a relatively recent version of everything KDE plasma is a blessing. Things have changed so much, for the better, particularly regarding Wayland. The experience with Trixie is already better than it ever was for me with Ubuntu (good riddance!), and I cannot believe that this is supposed to be an unstable release. I broke stuff once, and that was my own fault (forcing update when not all necessary packages were staged yet, learned my lesson on that!).
by wccrawford | 2025-07-23 17:22:41+00:00
They may not "take people out of society", but they relieve a stress that would otherwise cause them to continue trying to enter society.

Or, you know, go crazy and do something bad.

As a pretty severe introvert, it's not hard for me to imagine "friends apps" getting good enough to provide a lot of comfort when I was younger, and if you grow up with them being a thing, you don't question them as much.

In fact, if "friend apps" were good enough to play video games on a decent level, I'm absolutely sure I'd use them instead of trying to deal with random jerks when playing multiplayer games.
by sugarpimpdorsey | 2025-07-23 17:23:03+00:00
I had some containerized application software break and start misbehaving in odd ways which was indicative of a deeper incompatibility issue. Possibly GPU related. No time to debug, had to roll it back.

This was complicated by the fact that the machine also hosted a MySQL database which could not be easily rolled back because the database was versioned up during the upgrade.
by lazide | 2025-07-23 17:23:05+00:00
And then verifiably received that help. (The one sided targeted email leaks right afterwards)

Who is dumber - the one who does the dumb thing, or the one who refuses to believe that the person did the dumb thing literally right in front of them, and then refuses to act.

No one has to be sophisticated when the world is willfully this stupid. The US is like the wife that insists their husband is faithful (and punishes the kids who try to say something) while the husband is literally cheating right in front of them.
by tlamponi | 2025-07-23 17:23:13+00:00
Yeah, I know, I spent more than a week into looking for options to reduce impact for all of our users.

And note that cgroupv1 also still works in the kernel just fine, only the part that systemd controlled was removed from systemd. You can still boot with cgroupv1 support on, e.g., Alpine Linux and OpenRC as init 1. So not sure if that will lessen my concerns about no guarantees for older naming-scheme versions, maintaining triple digits of them sure has its cost too.

And don't understand me wrong, sunsetting cgroupv1 was reasonable, but it was a lot of churn, it at least was a one time thing. The network interface naming situation is periodic churn, guaranteed to bite you every now and then just by using the defaults.
by agentultra | 2025-07-23 17:23:16+00:00
Who is sending in untrained people to manage fires? Maybe that organization deserves what's coming to them.

An extreme example: nuclear reactors. You don't want untrained people walking into a fire with the expectation that they can manage the situation.

Less extreme example: financial systems. You don't want untrained people walking into a fire losing your customers' funds and expect them to manage the situation.