MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EGreg | 2025-07-20 15:59:42+00:00
Nope it was all me baby

Seriously, though, just being online and having a good memory for stuff like this. And watching people like Ben Swann, reading wikipedia etc. Literally two of the links are on wikipedia

I don’t just watch once source, I look at different viewpoints, especially because some of my friends wanted to debate stuff like 9/11. Like for example I looked at the Popular Mechanics issue that did an overview of physics. I wondered if Assad actually gassed his own people, or whoat happened with the Kakhovka dam, etc.

I guess I like to have a healthy skepticism of official narratives, but also try to stay away from conspiracy theories and thus enjoy collecting proven things that people have mostly forgotten because they were swept undee the rug.

Usually they point to extreme negligence and then coverups. I like to say “at least negligence”. But then again I am a libertarian who criticizes politicians and governments for theie failures, so…

If you like that, then I guess “the wiki” for this stuff is literally my own blogs…

Russia and Ukraine, missing context most of you had no idea about: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=397

My take on Israel and Gaza back in 2023: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=424

The KGB/Soviet propaganda roots of modern anti-zionism: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=481

Transparency in government: https://community.qbix.com/t/transparency-in-government/234

The global war on end to end encryption: https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...

Balancing privacy and accountability: https://community.qbix.com/t/balancing-privacy-and-accountab...

Quantum Mechanics: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=568
Ask HN: Newsletters for programmers about developing automations?
by pinter69 | 2025-07-20 15:59:46+00:00
There is a lot of content for no-code automations, vibe coding and generally everything to do with not real programming work.

There are also nice newsletters about AI research and academia.

I was wondering if there are newsletters for coding focused people about new things with automations, AI etc.

For now I only found HN daily as the best source, albeit not focused on this exact topic.
by sethammons | 2025-07-20 16:00:29+00:00
Slime molds are super interesting and are able to find optimal paths for resource management. Slime molds have been used to model and improve traffic flow for humans.

https://phys.org/news/2022-01-virtual-slime-mold-subway-netw...

I would call this action "crawling" and I am sure predates mammals. Or dinosaurs. Or plants.
by layer8 | 2025-07-20 16:00:35+00:00
I used to think that way too, but there’s a good argument to be made that overflowing your integer types to negative values instead of to small (or large) positive values avoids a lot of silent bugs you’d otherwise have with unsigned types. A language solving that would need to work with static proofs of non-overflow, and have any desired overflow to be explicit.

Java in the meantime has gained all the unsigned operations as methods in the Integer and Long classes, so the relatively rare cases when you need them are straightforward to handle.

The only real annoyance is that byte is signed. At least there’s a bit of unsigned support in the Byte class now.

Lastly, minor point, Java actually has an unsigned 16-bit integer type, called char.
by vmg12 | 2025-07-20 16:00:47+00:00
> But try to make protein powder 80% of your protein intake and see how you'll feel in a week

This is true for any food though. A different line of argument would be what if 95% of your protein came from whey and all other nutrients came from other sources. As long as you get the right balance of macronutrients and micronutrients i suspect you will be fine. Unfortunately studies on diet are very difficult to actually implement so we don't have the data to be certain.

Obviously most ultra processed food is low in nutrition, high in sugar, and high palateability so it makes sense that ultraprocessed foods are associated with bad health outcomes but I think it's a step too far to say that all ultra processed food is bad (it's probably a good rule of thumb for most people however).
by ajuc | 2025-07-20 16:00:58+00:00
C maj, F maj are the same, but C maj7 and Fmaj7 are not. Ultimately you have to remember which chords are the same and which aren't - which is about the same amount of information as just remembering all the combinations.

It's just an ugly irregular hack. I understand that you can get good at working around it, but eventually it's worth it to fix the underlying problem.
by bugbuddy | 2025-07-20 16:01:17+00:00
You know what the most important people should be when considering what is fair? Americans. Why should American policy care if fewer qualified Indians don’t get in? If less qualified Thais are available then fewer than the limit will be issued. The limit is not there to serve Indians.

The limit should be there to prevent the industry from further concentration and becoming a subsidiary of a foreign government like India. There is a national security element to this also.
by findthewords | 2025-07-20 16:01:43+00:00
Camera vision and LIDAR perfectly complement each other. Camera vision is no good detecting unknown/outlier obstacles quickly and accurately. LIDAR is great at detecting unknown obstacles quickly and accurately.

You can tune the camera obstacle detection to be hyper-sensitive, which results in phantom braking, causing Passengers to feel that the car is "unreliable" while it actually is safer. Humans are better at braking the appropriate amount when they see something strange, dynamically tuning their sensitivity in a new situation.

You can lax the sensitivity, which will reduce false alarms, but will actually cause more crashes, deaths, and injuries. You don't want your customers to feel unsafe, so from a business perspective you will inevitably reduce the sensitivity.
by haiku2077 | 2025-07-20 16:01:48+00:00
Reading that article, it reads more like the person skipped the weigh station and got pulled over by the highway patrol cop usually at the weigh station. Weigh stations will often have a patrol car sitting by the highway that pulls over anyone speeding or who needs to stop at the weigh station but didn't. So CBP (not ICE) was called by a highway officer.

Still to your point of a state government authority calling the feds because someone they interacted with looked Hispanic.
by dchftcs | 2025-07-20 16:01:49+00:00
FSD itself is not a failed bet as a driver-assist system. When it started Tesla was cash poor and often on the verge of collapse, so cutting costs made sense. They will never do as well as a mature Lidar-based solution, but over the years FSD added some value to some people, and might turn out to be a slight competitive advantage in selling cars.

I also think Tesla and their robotaxis are egregiously overhyped, but cutting Lidar was not a terrible business decision at the time. Though it's a terrible decision to have still stuck to vision-only (and using low-quality cameras apparently) when they could have at least got Radar and cheap Lidars.
by zozbot234 | 2025-07-20 16:01:54+00:00
> Java out of the gate had Suns network vision built in via jndi, rmi and object serialization.

It's kind of obvious since having a standard, platform-neutral virtual machine doesn't just enable WORA; it enables sending binary code and program state over the network, which is quite handy for all sorts of distributed computing flows. We'll probably do the same things using Wasm components once that tech stack becomes established.
by webappguy | 2025-07-20 16:02:16+00:00
I personally can’t wait for programming to ‘die’. It has stolen a decade of my life minimum. Like veterinarians being trained to help pets ultimately finding out a huge portion of the job is killing them. I was not sufficiently informed that I’d spend a decade arguing languages, dealing with thousands of other developers with diverging opinions, legacy code, poorly if at all maintained libraries, tools, frameworks, etc if you have been in the game at least a decade please don’t @. Adios to programming as it was (happily welcoming a new DIFFERENT reality whatever that means). Nostalgia is for life, not staring at a screen 8hrs a day
by antirez | 2025-07-20 16:02:29+00:00
Totally possible. In general I believe that while more powerful in their best outputs, Sonnet/Opus 4 are in other ways (alignment / consistency) a regression on Sonnet 3.5v2 (often called Sonnet 3.6), as Sonnet 3.7 was. Also models are complex objects, and sometimes in a given domain a given model that on paper is weaker will work better. And, on top of that: interactive use vs agent requires different reinforcement learning training that sometimes may not be towards an aligned target... So also using the model in one way or the other may change how good it is.
by mnafees | 2025-07-20 16:03:11+00:00
I wrote Qt C++ for 7 years as an open source contributor to KDE. This reminds me of QtWidgets’ .ui files—custom XML files following a specific schema. Later, Qt introduced QML, which I personally found unintuitive, and over time I lost interest in Qt altogether. That said, I still think XML for UI definitions makes sense, and it’s understandable that some larger environments continue to use it.
by Moto7451 | 2025-07-20 16:03:51+00:00
How about Kombucha? Vanilla extract? Sourdough bread? Mouth wash? Oral medicines? There are more sources to alcohol than the bar, including many incidental sources we don’t think about and happily feed to children as soon as they can handle solid foods.

Like anything there’s nuance here. I’m not saying being drunk, an alcoholic, or having a single alcoholic beverage will have no negative affects. I’m discussing the difference between a culture (cells on agar) and the entirety of the human body. You are not going to reproduce the same results they had because your digestive tract, kidneys, and liver are inline.

This is really important because our food contains so many things naturally including the Erythritol in the original article.

Let’s talk about another example. Would you find Fish acceptable? How about mercury? How would you square exposure to mercury due to eating fish?
by Fade_Dance | 2025-07-20 16:03:58+00:00
>It would also put immense pressure on companies like Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, and GM to offer similar guarantees or risk appearing evasive to consumers.

Mercedes has been talking about taking taking liability for their self-driving systems and certain situations for years. I can't imagine why one would write an article about this topic and not even mention that Mercedes started this dialogue (and it was heavily reported in self-driving news) years ago... other than perhaps the author didn't take time to do any research on the topic beyond a quick Google search.

Tesla auto parking is notoriously horrible though - arguably non-functional if you want to avoid occasionally getting your wheels curbed and such - so the article is correct in saying that this is a big step up from Tesla. So are auto parking systems from many manufacturers from a decade ago.
by ayaros | 2025-07-20 16:04:00+00:00
This is David Greelish's great documentary about the Lisa with interviews from John Sculley, Bill Atkinson, Ray Arachelian (developer of LisaEm), and many others involved with the Lisa both in the past and the present. It's been free on YouTube for a number of months, but I feel it deserves a bit more attention.

David also recently published some of his extended interview footage with Bill Atkinson, which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAAFnqj-Cks

It's always fun to see some footage from the cutting room floor. I think some of the casual banter that normally gets edited out really does a lot to humanize people.
by righthand | 2025-07-20 16:04:14+00:00
I haven’t tried JUCE yet but I miss the days where everything was a C++ class in Qt. Everyone clamours for a templating language but:

class MyButton extends QObject {

…

$button = new Button();

$button->color = “blue”;

$icon = new Svg();

$layout = new QtHorizontal();

$layout->push($icon, $button);

$this->layout = $layout;

…

}

This to me is much more readable than fiddling with stacked, embedded, and nested mustache/XML syntax split across files. Templating languages only really guarantee one unique thing about understanding the code: “Is my module embedded under the correct parent module?”
by etbebl | 2025-07-20 16:04:41+00:00
It seems to me that for products that in general are cheap to buy as well as produce, companies would want to make these products somewhat longer-lasting to gain a better reputation and then make more sales and larger profits on more expensive items.

I think the fundamental problem here is that nobody trusts brands anymore because we have been trained by strategies like market segmentation and private equity cost cutting that the vast majority of brands don't consistently indicate quality. That product A could be fine and a very similar-looking product B could be horrible, and any company or even product could become shit at any moment. Breyers in the US is a great example - they sell real (though still watery) ice cream in the cartons that say "naturals," and all the other very similar looking cartons are full of crap artificial frozen dairy dessert. They had a very strong brand, and they decided it was time to cash out that brand goodwill by cheaping out, but deceptively so they could ride it out for a few decades, at which point who cares?

This has led to a situation where companies don't make any attempt anymore to gain a reputation for the quality of their products, because it's futile to convince the public that they can trust you. And also, they have to compete much more equally with alphabet soup brands on Amazon making the absolute cheapest version of products at the lowest margins (and labor costs). So why would anyone make a better lightbulb that no one will buy because it's $2 more expensive?
by atoav | 2025-07-20 16:06:08+00:00
Yes, only that it leaves vast parts of the US economy without workers, since not only skilled labour is sought after. Farm work would be one popular example. So unlike you somehow explain to Americans why foreigners get the good jobs while they now have to work the fields, a kins of labour that has been beneath them for decades, that won't even remotely fly (at least not without other major restructuring).
by triceratops | 2025-07-20 16:06:46+00:00
> you literally can't fit these cars in the city if you want to transport people to work and from work every day. There is no physical capacity for that

There's no space for 4-seater sedans each carrying a single person. How about tiny 1-seater self-driving golf carts going no more than 30mph? They take up as much space as 2 bus seats. This is ok because you're saving the space from the bus's aisle and driver compartment, and because buses rarely run completely full so they already waste some space.

These vehicles don't exist today. But I bet you could design and build them much cheaper than subway systems in most North American cities. These cities tend to be less dense than European or Asian cities, where trams and subways are more economical.
by sureglymop | 2025-07-20 16:06:49+00:00
It works. In general, multiple clients can back up to/restore from the same repository at the same time and do writes/reads in parallel. However, restic does have a concept of exclusive and non-exclusive locks and I would recommend reading the manual/reference section on locks. It has some smart logic to detect and clean up stale locks by itself.

Locks are created e.g. when you want to forget/prune data or when doing a check. The way I handle this is that I use systemd timers for my backup jobs. Before I do e.g. a check command I use an ansible ad-hoc command to pause the systemd units on all hosts and then wait until their operations are done. After doing my modifications to the repos I enable the units again.

Another tip is that you can create individual keys for your hosts for the same repository. Each host gets its own key so that host compromise only leads to that key being compromised which can then be revoked after the breach. And as I said I use rest-servers in append-only mode so a hacker can only "waste storage" in case of a breach. And I also back up to multiple different locations (sequentially) so if a backup location is compromised I could recover from that.

I don't back up the full hosts, mainly application data. I use tags to tag by application, backup type, etc. One pain point is, as I mentioned, that the snapshot IDs in the different repositories/locations are different. Also, because I back up sequentially, data may have already changed between writing to the different locations. But this is still better than syncing them with another tool as that would be bad in case one of the backup locations was compromised. The tag combinations help me deal with this issue.

Restic really is an insanely powerful tool and can do almost everything other backup tools can!

The only major downside to me is that it is not available in library form to be used in a Go program. But that may change in the future.

Also, what would be even cooler for the multiple backup locations, is if the encrypted data could be distributed using e.g. something like shamir secret sharing where you'd need access to k of n backup locations to recreate the secret data. That would also mean that you wouldn't have to trust whatever provider you use to back up to (e.g. if it's amazon s3 or something).
by oceanparkway | 2025-07-20 16:06:52+00:00
I think the "math" on reliability-over-steps will end up differently than described here in the long term because getting new factual input from the real world should improve the reliability of the end state, and we have all observed agentic systems at this point producing that behavior at least sometimes (e.g., a test failure prompts claude code to refactor correctly).

Whether or not one term in this equation currently compounds faster is a good question, or under what circumstances, etc., but presenting agentic abilities as always flawed thinking resulting in impossible long term task execution isn't right. Humans are flawed and require long, drawn out multi task thinking to get correct answers, and interacting with and getting feedback from the world outside the mind during a task execution process typically raises the chance of the correct answer being spit out in the end.

I'd agree that the agentic math isn't great at the moment, but if it's possible to reduce hallucinations or raise the strength and frequency effect of real world feedback on the model, you could see this playing out differently perhaps quite soon. There's at least a couple of examples of "we're already there".
by johnisgood | 2025-07-20 16:06:58+00:00
Yeah, but for this project, why would you choose (as others stated they would or prefer) to call out to an external program instead of using https://github.com/libgit2/git2go (libgit2, FFI) for example? For what it is worth, there is also a pure Go implementation: https://github.com/go-git/go-git (pure Go).

Keep in mind the initial comment, which is "I would have used libgit2 myself in any languages.", and they claimed it is a bad idea due to performance, as opposed to calling out to an external program.
by WalterBright | 2025-07-20 16:06:58+00:00
Many products come in 3 levels of quality:

1. the stripper, designed for a minimum price that will draw people into the showroom

2. the luxe, which has every feature, designed for the people who don't care about the price

3. the midrange, which is what most people wind up buying

This strategy maximizes the profit that can be made. You'll see it from refrigerators to cars.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-07-20 16:07:21+00:00
It's always the same issue.

If you want to move away from <insert US tech giant>, you either need to embrace Linux and open source software which requires the state's employees to learn a new "stack" of applications which means they need to be given appropriate training or you need to have you home grown solutions that are as easy to use as their US counterparts and were developed within the EU by the EU's member countries with the EU's values embedded in them.

The first solution is not going to happen, as Linux is still relatively unknown all things considered and I don't see the French government employees learning how to use this OS and/or the applications running on it by themselves.

Secondly in times of budget cuts like in France currently, the government is not about to rip all the Microsoft products off and replace them with something that would take years to transition to and cost a fortune to implement.

So that leaves the homegrown solution. Unfortunately the work to move off of Microsoft et al should have started 10 years ago but it hasn't. Europe has completely dropped the ball on tech and now it's coming back to bit it in the ass.

The Draghi report from last year was supposed to kick things into gear but we will be lucky to see anything coming through within the next 5 years and by this stage the US tech giants will have entrenched themselves even more in the EU.

I am sorry to say but this is a failure that will resonate for the many decades to come.
by wanderinglight | 2025-07-20 16:07:43+00:00
Formations in Ketu rely on knowing where nodes need to be placed and which slots in a formation are not filled.

Once this is known we translate the nodes towards the assigned slot in each step.

When you say "which nodes are rotationally reachable", what does that imply for formations? A node will be assigned a slot and has to move towards it while trying to avoid obstacles.

Happy to take a look if you file an issue on Ketu with details.
by camgunz | 2025-07-20 16:08:00+00:00
TL;DR: mostly what I mean is Go is the only language from this millennium that's consistently in the top 10 most popular programming languages.

>> This requires you to squint so that "popular" happens to identify only a handful of languages but conveniently catches Go and not say Swift or Rust. It's not difficult to do this, but it's not very honest to yourself.

> You seem to be arguing that Go is more popular than Rust, but that's not what we're talking about.

Isn't this exactly what we're talking about? I don't think you have to squint too hard to invent the gap between Go and Rust (et al).

> So apparently "popular" might mean 9th like Ada on TIOBE's list right?

No because it's only on that list.

> Or maybe "modern" includes Typescript, on several of these lists?

No because TypeScript is JavaScript, which is from the last millennium.

> No, the whole contrivance is silly.

Emotionally I agree with you, but in practice you gotta pick a stack, and there's a lot of benefit to choosing Go over Rust/Kotlin/Swift/TypeScript/Java/C#/C/C++/Ada.

> Go is a relatively popular modern language, nobody is surprised to discover that.

Eh I'm making the Stroustrup "there's two kinds of programming languages" argument. IMO, at this point Go criticisms are just jeers from the cheap seats.
by stouset | 2025-07-20 16:08:00+00:00
Yep. Having made the switch, I now see git (as a user-facing VCS) as a dead end.

It’ll take awhile for people to switch, but I think it will happen eventually. Invisible git compatibility means we don’t have to get everyone to switch all at once, and the benefits of primitives more aligned with the mental model of what we’re trying to do are undeniable.
by 13zebras | 2025-07-20 16:08:13+00:00
Re: discounting… Given that OpenAI is burning billions and making trivial revenue in comparison, the cost per token is probably going to skyrocket when Sam runs out of BS to con the next investor. I’m guessing the only way that token cost doesn’t explode is if Claude ends up in Amazon’s hands and OpenAI is Microsoft’s. Then Amazon, Google, and MS can subsidize if they want. But as standalone businesses, they can’t make it at current token prices. IMHO