MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-14 21:28:44+00:00
>that better reflects European values — democratic, sovereign, inclusive, transparent, respectful of personal privacy and innovation-driven."

This is very rich coming from the same Eurocrats who are pretty much persistently working to subvert private, secure communications, E2E encryption and other key privacy protections, all in the name of half-baked bullshit about stopping crime and protecting the kiddies.

Not that US bureaucrats don't do similar, but it's worth pointing to this kind of moral smugness about something non-existent.

Also, innovation-driven? So, how's that European start-up culture doing so far?
by prmph | 2025-07-14 21:29:19+00:00
People are lapping up vibe coding as a way a way to avoid deep work, and spec-driven development is in opposition to that.

Looking at the brief for this, it likely involves painstaking work to review and refine the specs produced. Not that there is anything wrong with that; as I said before in a comment on another story, coding assistants may reduce quite a bit of drudgery, but to get the best out of them you still need to do lots of work.

The more I use agentic coding tools, the more I come to the realization that speccing is where you add value as an experienced skilled engineer. And I think this bodes well for software engineering, as a bifurcation emerges between the vibe coders (who will probably merge with the mythical end-user programmers) and serious engineers whose are skilled at using LLMs via high quality specs to create software of higher quality and maintainability.

So the vibe coders would probably not take to this tool that much, but that's fine.
by treetalker | 2025-07-14 21:30:01+00:00
It occurs to me that selection of tasks to delegate to "AI" (read: LLMs) is a better test of whether the operator is an expert or not, as opposed to how good the model is.

As thought fodder, I offer the examples of many supposedly high-level attorneys, law firms, and (in a recent Georgia state case, to name but one) even judges either failing to review or foolishly accepting, and then filing, hallucinated crappola.

One might consider White & Case lawyers to be experts; same with most attorneys practicing in federal courts, and presiding judges. Their real-world delegation of fiduciary duties to AI doesn't prove the quality of the AI, but rather their own actual lack of expertise — both in the use of LLMs and also, apparently, in knowledge of the law, basic legal research, and essential business skills such as substantive proofreading.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-07-14 21:30:29+00:00
> I have a pretty compressed version of Arrival that's at 2GB and is a 4k movie ~2hrs long (the original file was ~2x the size). To stream that we need to do 2000Mb / (3600s * 2) = 277.8Mb/s.

Your math is WAY off.

2 gigabytes / 2 hours is only about 2.22 megabits/sec.
by itslennysfault | 2025-07-14 21:32:00+00:00
Gosh people love complicating things.

You don't need to fight with installing (the correct version of) java. I wouldn't in my life consider installing java on my OS directly.

For anyone with docker already installed (most people these days)...

git clone git@github.com:gardner/LocalLanguageTool.git cd LocalLanguageTool docker compose up
by topspin | 2025-07-14 21:32:48+00:00
"it was creating teams of commenters"

The implications of that are breathtaking.

Also, the synergy of X and Grok is pretty incredible. "@grok Is that true?" is a household meme now.

We're all on a runaway train in the dark and there are curves ahead. Just how much bubbling green hazardous waste is in those tank cars, anyhow?
by simoncion | 2025-07-14 21:33:09+00:00
When was the last time you had the opportunity to do this? 1998? I believe that what you're telling me is true, (and yeah, small ISPs are often really great to be customers of because of stuff like that) but -given the state of IPv4 allocations- I find it difficult to believe that it happened within the past ten, twenty years.
by yieldcrv | 2025-07-14 21:33:28+00:00
> It sucks that Blaine Wetzel is apparently a dirtbag because holy crap could that place put together a dinner

I totally support voting with your wallet

I don't really understand the outcome that people want to occur with cancelled people. Ostracized from society ... permanently? What we have now where its not thought out at all but some kind of professional harm is put on a pedestal as accountability?
by fivestones | 2025-07-14 21:33:32+00:00
Once I did 5k running with my son in mostly empty terminals of an airport while on a layover. We were training for a race and didn’t want to miss the day.

The 16-17 hour flights from the US to Asia are really hard to manage when you are trying to run every day. Depending on when you take off, you may be in the air an entire calendar day, based on starting the flight in the time zone were you leave in the US and ending it in the time zone where you land in Asia. (Like Singapore airlines flight 23. Takes off 10:15 pm from New York on a Wednesday and lands 19 h 15m later on Friday morning 5:30 am in Singapore.) Either you decide that your first run in Singapore is going to be on New York time, or you say running in place on the plane is going to count, or you don’t take that kind of flight.

Flying the other way is easy to keep your streak with though. Take off from Singapore at 11:35 pm and land in New York at 6 the next morning (18 1/2 hours later)
by Retr0id | 2025-07-14 21:33:42+00:00
> If you wanted to be cheeky, you could probably find the codebase for CURSED on GitHub. I ask that you don't share it on socials, because it's not ready for launch.

I'll respect the authors wishes not to link it. But I have to say, while my expectations for code quality were low, what I found was far below them.

From the github UI:

> Sorry, we had to truncate this directory to 1,000 files. 631 entries were omitted from the list.
by Veserv | 2025-07-14 21:34:05+00:00
Why? It is only a measly 500,000 gallons a day.

That is only ~2,000 m^3/day (~2 acre*foot/day). Even if they exclusively used the most expensive source of water, seawater desalination, that would only be ~800 $/day.

Your average almond tree uses 3-4 acre*foot per year [1]. So the yearly water consumption of the data center is ~200 almond trees. Your average almond tree produces ~50-60 pounds per year [2] and ~4500 pounds per hectare (2.5 acres), so that is the water consumption of a tiny 5 acre almond farm producing ~10,000 pounds of almonds per year.

The internet indicates the wholesale price of almonds is ~2 $/pound, so you can either have a data center or 20,000 $ worth of almonds.

[1] https://www.c-win.org/cwin-water-blog/2022/7/11/california-a...

[2] https://wikifarmer.com/library/en/article/almond-tree-harves...
by dwattttt | 2025-07-14 21:34:11+00:00
Yes, it's quite curious. Having used both block_on and spawn_blocking, and not being worried about what "colour" my function is, I am also quite confused about the fuss.

On a practical note, since Rust doesn't standardise on an async runtime, it would be more accurate to say tokio solved the coloured function problem, for whatever that means. Or any and everyone else that made it easy to call one coloured function from another.
by itslennysfault | 2025-07-14 21:34:22+00:00
I don't think the risks are high with this. It's not writing for you. It's just correcting your grammar. If you're 99% writing it yourself and just having it highlight grammar mistakes I wouldn't expect it to trigger an alarm....... but I haven't been in school since waaay before LLMs were viable/common. So, maybe it's worse than I think.
by CalChris | 2025-07-14 21:34:55+00:00
No, the immigration laws are not draconian. They have guidelines around reunification of families, etc. The Reagan era Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 even legalized most illegals from before 1982. That wasn't draconian either. You should read these laws.

Trumpian enforcement? Now that's draconian. It's also economically stupid. And I'm sure you understand the concept of clean hands. So further discussion of Melania and Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship will be unnecessary.

But then this all is just red meat tossed to consumers of red meat. So there's that.
by gus_massa | 2025-07-14 21:35:01+00:00
It's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hair_theorem , but it only applies after a while, not instantly.

Your disk will emit a lot of gravitational on electromagnetic radiation, and after a while it will be a nice sphere. (Unless it's rotating and it will be a nice somewhat-elipsoidal ball.)

---

> and then an electron popped into existence due to quantum randomness

I feel there is a huge can of worms of technical problems in this sentence that nobody know how to solve for now. Just in case replace the quantum randomness with a moron with a broken CRT used as an electron cannon.
by dmbche | 2025-07-14 21:35:29+00:00
As a more substantial take, being cynical about the language a group uses to speak of their realities and wants is necessarily against dialogue, understanding or seeing the members of that group as equals.

If "their" political views have the same value as ones affiliation to a sports team, but your political views are well researched and valid, could you be overlooking something? Edit0: and more importantly, what are they to you? Do they not have the same mental faculties as you? How they able to live and thrive while in total abhorrence to natural law? Or are they all naive children who don't know better?

And yes, in any group you'll find loud idiots. Those are in your group too - you just ignore them and focus on the other group's idiots, while disregarding the valid views that are behind.

Especially in the age of algorithmic social media, it's hard to parse what's actually being said.
by qwytw | 2025-07-14 21:36:15+00:00
Also there are no early IPOs. Very few people can buy stocks in these companies which changes the dynamics significantly. Note sure what's the point of talking about the stock market this much when for almost everyone the only way to get any exposureis through Nvidia or other hardware companies and maybe MS/Google/AWS.

> Investors and VCs have learnt if we stick with winners and growth companies, the payoffs are massive.

Well... yes and no. 2021 wasn't that long ago.

> So, it's foolish to apply 2000 parallels to now

The stock market and other financial stuff is of course different. The fundamental trend not necessarily though. It took awhile for anyone to figure out how to directly build a highly profitable internet based business back then for AI it seems more or less the same so far.
by jMyles | 2025-07-14 21:36:48+00:00
Is that true though?

Can't we generalize to say that we observe that black holes have a similar density (which is to say, proportion of mass to volume) any sample of the observable universe sufficiently large as to be roughly uniform?

In other words, doesn't this observation scale both down (to parts of the universe) and up (beyond the cosmological horizon, presuming that the rough uniformity in density persists), at least for any universe measured in euclidian terms?

It's very possible that I'm wrong here, and I'd love to be corrected.

...I also think we have to acknowledge that "similarly" is doing a fair bit of work here, as we're not accounting for rate of expansion - is that correct?
by baikondev | 2025-07-14 21:37:17+00:00
I built Baikon because I was frustrated with how complex AI agent development has become. Instead of scattered Python files and complex frameworks, you can write:

flow assistant: when user says "hello" -> call greet_user

function greet_user: say "Hi there! I'm your assistant."

That's a complete working AI agent. The syntax is human-readable but executable.

It includes an async engine, middleware system, variable management, and API integration - all the enterprise features you need, but with logic that anyone can understand.

I'd love feedback from the HN community. What would you build if AI agent logic was this simple?
by simonw | 2025-07-14 21:37:46+00:00
If you're talking to a 100KB SQLite database file this kind of thing is likely unnecessary, just opening and closing a connection for each query is probably fine.

If you're querying a multi-GB SQLite database there are things like per-connection caches that may benefit from a connection pool.

> What is an asyncio SQLite connection anyways? Isn’t it just a regular one that gets hucked into a separate thread?

Basically yes - aiosqlite works by opening each connection in a dedicated thread and then sending async queries to it and waiting for a response that gets sent to a Future.

https://github.com/omnilib/aiosqlite/blob/895fd9183b43cecce8...
by jacobgkau | 2025-07-14 21:38:24+00:00
Do you realize the linked article isn't talking about an actual bus stop? The movie My Neighbor Totoro has a scene at a bus stop. These people recreated the bus stop near their home/business.

So no, any bus stop that's been decorated is not "the same thing outside of Japan." This is specifically about being the bus stop from the movie.
by norseboar | 2025-07-14 21:38:52+00:00
I feel like random selection devolves pretty quickly back into the problems it's trying to solve? The examples in the article, with some commentary:

> Place critical appointment/hiring processes into the hands of randomly selected oversight boards. These boards manage appointments, evaluations, and dismissals, mitigating biases and discouraging the formation of insular power groups.

This has the same issue elections have, just at a smaller scale. A better analog is juries, and charisma/storytelling definitely matters when you're talking to a jury.

> Directly select candidates at random for positions from an eligibility pool. Set and maintain the eligibility standard (such as an exam) by randomly selected oversight board to keep it updated and prevent the standard from being manipulated or gamed.

This is somewhat analogous to college admissions, and the gaming is alive and well there too. You get rid of politics, but you're back to optimizing for KPIs and things. I'm not sure why randomly picking from the top 5% of KPI optimizers is going to be better than picking the top one.

> Firms could randomly select employees or shareholders to serve on their boards. These members can significantly dilute insider collusion and introduce perspectives often overlooked by traditionally selected executives.

Same issue as juries, plus the random picks probably won't know the material well. Although I don't know much about traditional board selections, maybe that's true regardless. If you weight based on % ownership for shareholders, you're de facto giving the seats to big funds, if not, it can quickly become a lottery of like, any random person in the states.

> Use stratified sampling to select committees, ensuring diverse representation of viewpoints, backgrounds, and expertise, contributing to balanced decision-making.

This is the jury thing again? It seems like the solution "randomly pick oversight/approval boards" was listed three times.

> Create randomly composed auditing and oversight committees, deterring corrupt practices through constant unpredictability in oversight.

Constant unpredictability in oversight sounds terrible. The reason we have judges and case law and things in the legal system is that there are tons of edge cases, where reasonable minds will differ. You want to build up a consistent set of guidelines people can follow. A lot of people who are on the edge of rules aren't trying to be corrupt, they're just not sure what they are/aren't allowed to do.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-14 21:40:07+00:00
> If you're querying a multi-GB SQLite database

In which case SQLite is probably the wrong tool for the job, and you should be using Postgres or MySQL that is actually designed from the ground up for lots of concurrent connections.

SQLite is amazing. I love SQLite. But I love it for single-user single-machine scenarios. Not multi-user. Not over a network.
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-14 21:40:18+00:00
In sane code, there are more function calls than there are functions. Imagine, now, that there's a function at 0x1337, and it's called from 69 different places in the code.

If we're using relative addresses, this would, of course, result in 69 different addresses to compress - each relative address being the difference between 0x1337 and the position of the code that calls it.

If we're using absolute addresses, we get the same exact address 0x1337 repeated 69 times - which is way more compressor friendly.
by underlipton | 2025-07-14 21:40:22+00:00
You're conflating the creation and execution, and overstating the role of salesmanship in the latter. Which is actually a huge part of the issue with contemporary politics. Instead of coming up with policy that a majority agree on, there's quite an emphasis on finding the right Stepford Smiler to sell whatever those who have influential connections want. In what will likely become an evergreen case study, see the recent NYC mayoral primary (though, in this case, they could barely get Cuomo to smile).

Suffice it to say, I don't want my phone jockeys taking on engineering duties.
by sandeepkd | 2025-07-14 21:40:31+00:00
Tried with one of my older projects to test it out. The problem statement was to upgrade the Java spring boot version from 2.7 to latest. I have done it in the past so exactly knew what had to be done there. All the requirement docs, design specs, and tasks look verbose and ok on high level. Interestingly I had some idea where the language in those docs was coming from. 1. It created about 40+ tasks (I have my own curated list of 5 tasks based on past experience)

2. At every task it tried to compile the code but failed for dependency errors

3. It still marked the task being complete and passed the onus of failures on the downstream tasks

4. Kept moving with the tasks where the original error were still not fixed but the tasks were being marked as done

5. After some point of time I got tired to a degree that I stopped reading the exact commands being executed, the fatigue of doing something that you are not involved in is for real 6. I made a naive assumption that I can sandbox it by giving permissions to the project folder only. It executed some CLI commands for java that looked simple enough in the beginning.

7. Turns out my environment variables got messed up and other simple things related to git, gradle stopped working

Ended my experiment, reverted the code changes, fixed my environment

Key takeaways:

1. Its giving a sense of work being executed, the quality and concreteness of work is hard to measure unless you have already done that in past. Its creating classes, tests which are not needed instead of focussing on the actual use case.

2. Sandboxes are MUST, there is a real risk of corruption, environment commands are not just simple file changes which could be easily reverted.
by addaon | 2025-07-14 21:40:37+00:00
> then it would become a sphere instantly

Event horizons are non-physical. Better to think of it as "then a spherical event horizon would become apparent." When the mass within a given black-hole-shaped volume (spherical for non-rotating mass) is "one electron short" of being a black hole, then one can define a surface in the shape of the (future) black hole where the escape velocity is /just/ below the speed of light. In practice, all light emitted within that volume will already be captured by the mass, unless it's perfectly perpendicular to the (future) event horizon. When that extra electron is added, it becomes true that the escape velocity at that same surface is now the speed of light -- the definition of event horizon. But nothing needs to "form" to make this true.
by exclipy | 2025-07-14 21:40:43+00:00
That's a compelling three file format.

Have you considered a fourth file for Implemented such that Spec = Implemented + Design?

It would serve both as a check that nothing is missing from Design, and can also be an index for where to find things in the code, what architecture / patterns exist that should be reused where possible.

And what about coding standards / style guide? Where does that go?
by spankalee | 2025-07-14 21:41:31+00:00
My comment shouldn't be read in any way as supporting ICE or giving ICE this information. Doing so is clearly illegal under California law, and what ICE is doing right now is terrible.

But the prevailing sentiment in these comments is the the cameras shouldn't exist at all, not just that the data shouldn't be shared with ICE. My comment is about how useful the cameras are today. If you want them to not exist you need to understand why they do and probably offer up an alternate solution to the very real problems they address.
by treetalker | 2025-07-14 21:41:42+00:00
I agree that there is no (one) simple system that would work. Many simple systems are required, but should be as few in number as possible to limit complexity.

And it may be (almost certainly is) that a certain level of (high) complexity is required for such a system to work. I believe that some complex system, evolved from simple systems that work, could itself work. That belief coexists with my belief that the current complex system, having evolved, no longer works; and that it can't be made to work without re-evolving something from simpler systems that work.
by matt_d | 2025-07-14 21:41:49+00:00
Background:

https://discourse.llvm.org/t/announcing-the-lifetime-safety-...

Lifetime Analysis: Current Status

> For those not already familiar, we’re working on a new lifetime analysis in Clang to catch issues like use-after-scope or returning pointers to stack memory. The analysis is alias-based and draws inspiration from Rust’s borrow checker (specifically, [Polonius](https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2018/04/27/an-...)). More details in the RFC: https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-intra-procedural-lifetime-a...

> The initial implementation targets intra-procedural analysis for C++ raw pointers. This keeps the surface area small while we iterate. Over time, we aim to enable this analysis by default in Clang, with both “permissive” and “strict” modes to balance noise and coverage.

Key Components

- Conceptual Model: Introduces the fundamental concepts of Loan, Origin, and Path to model memory borrows and the lifetime of pointers.

- Fact Generation: A frontend pass traverses the Clang CFG to generate a representation of lifetime-relevant events, such as pointer assignments, taking an address, and variables going out of scope.

- Testing: llvm-lit tests validate the analysis by checking the generated facts.

Example:

[LifetimeSafety] Introduce intra-procedural analysis in Clang

Commit: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/3076794e924f

PR: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/142313

Test source code: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/3076794e924f30ae21...
by simonw | 2025-07-14 21:42:31+00:00
Multi-GB is tiny these days.

I didn't say anything about concurrent access. SQLite with WAL mode is fine for that these days for dozens of concurrent readers/writers (OK only one writer gets to write at a time, but if your writes queue for 1-2ms who cares?) - if you're dealing with hundreds or thousands over a network then yeah, use a server-based database engine.
by jMyles | 2025-07-14 21:42:42+00:00
Yes of course on some level, people who pay taxes to violent imperial actors are doing a disservice to humanity, and are in some sort of moral quandary.

We all wish that everyone who has ever lived in such a situation has had the bravery to resist. Right?

But I don't think that makes forbearance of such resistance equivalent to taking money from that same actor in exchange for expanding its capability. Those are related but distinct types of transaction.
by acjohnson55 | 2025-07-14 21:43:37+00:00
This is what the private equity industry exists to do (particularly firms with strategies like distressed, roll-ups, take-privates, etc).

They raise funds from large pools of capital, like endowments and pension funds, and they invest it into assets they identify as undervalued or underproducing.

When there is a crash in an asset class, private equity has often stepped in to buy assets at firesale prices from forced sellers.