MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-07-13 08:52:28+00:00
Is that your article? I'm afraid I think that it badly misses the mark. Literary cyberpunk is simple; it is nothing more or less than near-future crime fiction where technology (usually speculative) is central to the plot. That's the common thread; writing style, setting characteristics, etc., are diverse.

Now I know that some people are going to say, "but what of social structures and evil corporations?!"

Look no further than William Gibson’s Burning Chrome story collection:

-The word "government" is barely used, and the features of the setting’s governments are wholly irrelevant to the stories. (In fact, the IRS and other Federal agencies are briefly mentioned, which does not imply total anarcho-capitalism.)

-The word "corporation" is also barely used, and the stories (with one exception, of a sort,) have nothing to do with corporations controlling everything and making a mess of things.

-The stories don’t suggest very much about the social structures of their settings, overall. If they’re "dystopian" at all, it is by necessity -- as most of the action takes place in the underworld, with hackers, rogue agents, washed up ex-military operatives, etc. Thus, whatever the setting is, the story takes place in its seedy underbelly.

Yet surely nobody doubts that Gibson's collection is a work of cyberpunk, and an incredibly influential one at that.

What's overused, and what have become dated, are some aesthetic tropes that have become associated with the genre. But you can certainly write good cyberpunk without them. Just write a near-future crime novel where technology is central to the plot.
by mrkeen | 2025-07-13 08:52:58+00:00
It's the parse-versus-validate hill in this case.

This pseudocode is "Validate" for at least 3 reasons:

Forgetting to check:

this check is fragile: it’s extremely easy to forget. Because its return value is unused, it can always be omitted, and the code that needs it would still typecheck.

Repeatable/redundant checks:

First, it’s just annoying. We already checked that the list is non-empty, why do we have to clutter our code with another redundant check? Second, it has a potential performance cost. Although the cost of the redundant check is trivial in this particular example, one could imagine a more complex scenario where the redundant checks could add up, such as if they were happening in a tight loop.

Not using the type system:

Use a data structure that makes illegal states unrepresentable. Model your data using the most precise data structure you reasonably can. If ruling out a particular possibility is too hard using the encoding you are currently using, consider alternate encodings that can express the property you care about more easily. Don’t be afraid to refactor.

> How do you know PARSE_ERROR is not email_t

It has to be for it to compile, right? Which means that email_t is the type which represents both valid and invalid emails. How do you know if it's valid? You remember to write a check for it. Why not just save yourself some keystrokes and use char* instead. This is validate, not parse.
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-13 08:53:24+00:00
Fear and resentments. I've seen this not just online but also in conversation with friends. They encouter blogs and Youtube vids about great success with AI agents. Mainstream press articles about how AI is set to eliminate all jobs in 3 years, and mass layoffs in tech because 'AI' (even though we have had the same cyclic boom/bust in tech every 7 years before 'AI', not saying this cycle isn't different though).

They even tried some ChatGTP or Copilot coding themselves, throwing in some vague 'do this' prompt and got bad results. So they decided either "it's all bs hype for losers' or "man, I'm clearly not cut out for this new AI world, hope I can hold out till I can retire"

So every time they see an AI post, they feel the need to wave a '100% pure non AI coder, who's with me?' flag.
by heavyset_go | 2025-07-13 08:53:53+00:00
The statistics I am talking about are the rates of gay/bi identification by generation.

There's a reason there's nearly 10x as many gay identifying people in recent generations compared to past, and you can't generalize it as being a "phase". The true rates are likely the same, but people who identify that way dip off as you go back generations.

You notice the same pattern with left-handedness and those who identify as left-handed over time.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-07-13 08:55:01+00:00
"Intent to destroy" is usually difficult to prove, but in this case, it's the easiest part to prove. Israeli leaders (including the President, Prime Minister, Defense Minister, and other ministers), politicians, generals, soldiers and TV commentators (not to mention opinion polling of the general population) have made so many genocidal statements that it's difficult to keep track.
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-13 08:56:43+00:00
Overall an interesting read.

To go straight to the nitpicks:

> The Matrix Trilogy, Ghost in the Shell, [...]. Except Gibson did it first.

Ghost in the Shell started publication around 1989, but it's author was writing cyberpunk in 1985 (Appleseed), with already many of the themes approached in it.

1985 is a tad later than Gibson's Neuromamcer, but given the timeline to start a series with the level of details Masamune Shirow uses, they're basically writing at the same time.

I wouldn't put Gibson as a direct influence, and in the Japanese scene Akira, started in 1982 would be way more influencial.

What really stroke me is how far the Japanese culture feels from a western perspective, when it had a very flourishing Cyberpunk scene that doesn't get much credit outside of manga/anime fans.
by metalman | 2025-07-13 08:58:22+00:00
It is 3"rd page news, 3 days late, and the orange one stole all there fire.

They did pull out all the stops, and the King proposed a toast, flattering France, in French. Though this is only a symptom of how unpopular the governments in both countrys have gotten. Trump has correctly determined that the US has become the arbiter of everything, and it's do as he says, or figure something else out.Theater is not working as a substitue, no matter how you pronounce it.
by macrolime | 2025-07-13 09:00:17+00:00
I ssh into my server, then use the devcontainer cli tool to open a shell in the dev container. Found that easier than installing ssh in every container, especially when there's lots of them. I made a simple command line tool for helping the process, so I don't have to type out any long commands. If I run it it will list the running dev containers and I give them each a number to I don't have to use the full ID.
by tcfhgj | 2025-07-13 09:00:37+00:00
> If you are using a library in rust, it has to be async await, tokio, send+sync and all the other crap

Send and sync is only required if you want to access something from multiple threads, which isn't required by async await (parallelism vs concurrency)

1) You can use async await without parallelism and 2) send and sync aren't a product of async/await in Rust, but generally memory safety, i.e. you need Send generally when something can/is allowed to move between threads.
by eugenegusarov | 2025-07-13 09:01:46+00:00
Is this a full screenshot of the page? You can not only collapse the panel, you can also resize it in a way you want. Just drag the top edge of the panel.

In terms of calls to LLMs. I do not use any frameworks or LLM proxies like OpenRouter etc. Instead, I make the calls directly to LLM providers with a tiny thin proxy endpoint I created in Supabase.

One of the problems I had with other tools was the difficulty in understand the actual responses that particular playgrounds provided. Especially when it came to error responses. I guess that they are either built with the some Proxy providers like OpenRouter who handles and interprets errors internally before giving a response to the user, or they are using frameworks like LangChain with their abstraction hell.

In our case on Yola, it was crucial to have a playground that provided this raw type of experience that I have builtin.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-07-13 09:02:09+00:00
Temporary loans in exchange for other items on temporary loan (which is what this is), is legally the only way the British Museum can let material leave their collections.

I realise that there is a lot of meme-age worthy material that the British Museum is full of stolen property, but it's worth remembering that most of the items were donated at a time when legal provenance was virtually impossible to establish (particularly if you have to assume a peer of the realm like Elgin is an honest man, lest you find yourself under attack from the entire establishment), and the Museum is prevented by an Act of Parliament from giving items away regardless of later legal claims.

To return the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles to Greece, for example, requires a new Act, which - given the current government's legislative programme - is unlikely to happen in the next 3-4 years, and there's little appetite for it.

A temporary loan deal would be more realistic if both the British and Greek governments trusted each other to make the returns. That means the Greeks would basically need to loan out half the museum of Athens to make it work...
by omnimus | 2025-07-13 09:02:15+00:00
This is a bit outdated i run mixed multi monitor setup and for last year or two it has been working no issues. Linux moves slowly but steadily and things eventualy get pretty great (another example sound and pipewire).

I think people make mistake of trying Ubuntu LTS thats super conservative with updates so you are years behind. For desktop you really want Fedora or something even more up to date. I think people sould try Fedora silverblue or its derivatives (bazzite, bluefin) its “atomic” distros that cannot be easily broken (steamos does the same).
by keiferski | 2025-07-13 09:02:28+00:00
Cyberpunk was essentially a sub-type of counterculture, and counterculture itself has pretty much been dead for a couple decades now. When the hackers are primarily interested in VC funds, the cryptocurrency ethos overtaken by the finance industry, and the goal of every artist to “make it” as a creator, there’s basically no room for culture that explicitly wants to operate outside the system.

You could probably tie this to the general financial precariousness of the average young person today vs. in the 70s and 80s. It used to be much easier to get a solid income and housing from a random job, which left more time and mental space for things other than the profit motive.

Not sure if we will ever get back to that. Maybe basic income, but that is almost inherently tied to the system, so probably not. You’d need an economic situation in which everyone feels comfortable enough without actually being dependent on a specific institution like the government.
by potamic | 2025-07-13 09:03:35+00:00
I mean that can be said of any research, couldn't it? 400 years back, nobody would have dreamed that studying why these dots in the night sky move will help us understand tides on earth. 200 years back no one would have imagined that the key to health and diseases are some invisible organisms in the air no one can see. A mere 100 years back it would've been impossible to conceive that these imaginary "atoms" will lead to reserves of immense energy. And yet here we are today living in a world only made possible because of what people did before.

The cosmic microwave background is not even something imaginary far away in time or space. It is radiation that surrounds us in the present. It is passing by the earth constantly, all the time. There's some research trying to use it for space navigation, but no one knew you could do that when they pointed antennas randomly in the sky. The amount of cross over some research has to a lot of other research and eventually to practical applications cannot be easily comprehended. Science builds upon science in very complex and convoluted ways with each step being that people simply tried to find more about something around them that they did not know. If you knew how to find it, then there's nothing to research in the first place, is there?

There must be so much information in cosmic microwave radiation about things we may not even know. Who knows if it could lead to uncovering information about dark matter or dark energy and who knows where that information would take human civilization. At this time, research simply indicates that you find out as much about it as you can, because it is there!
by lukaslukas | 2025-07-13 09:04:31+00:00
Hi HN,

Last weekend, I wondered whether I could replace our clunky contact form with a WhatsApp chat. Forty-eight hours (and a lot of Claude Code prompts) later, OWA.link was live.

Stack (all edge-deployable): Cloudflare Workers KV for storage/DB React app link generator (most of the UI and functionality was generated by Claude Code). SimpleAnalytics was used for anonymous click stats.

Here's what you can test:

Try this link: https://owa.link/book-meeting

Click and answer to see WhatsApp open with a pre-filled message that includes your form data.

Alternatively, try this simplified version: https://openwa.link/plDumo

It's completely free if you're OK with sharing your analytics data (everyone can add "+" to the end of links to see the number of clicks, like bit.ly does).

Why share? I'm curious to know if this edge-only approach makes sense in the long term.

Is the AI actually useful? This is my first project that has been created entirely by AI (front end, back end, help guide and translations), and I think it's pretty awesome.

All feedback (technical, UX and business) is welcome! If people find it valuable, I’ll clean up the code and open-source the Worker next week so you can host it yourself.

Thanks for your attention, and happy hacking! :)
by roomey | 2025-07-13 09:04:43+00:00
Would someone be able to say if this is somehow related to encoding data as polar coordinates, because at my knowledge level it looks like it could be related?

For some context, to learn more about quantum computing, I was trying to build an evolutionary style ML algo to generate quantum circuits using the quantum machine primitives. The type where the fittest survive and mutate.

In terms of computing (this was a few years ago), I was limited to the number of qubits I could simulate (as there had to be many simulations).

The solution I found was to encode data into the spin of the qubit (which is an analog value). So I used polar coordinates to "encode data"

The matrix values looked a lot like this, so I was wondering if hill space is related? I was having to make up some stuff as I went along, and finding out the correct area to learn about more would be useful.
by anon-3988 | 2025-07-13 09:04:46+00:00
> Here, I’ll build on that by showing how this technique can be used outside of niche academic languages by demonstrating it in a language that is as practical as it is dangerous - C.

The "practical" part really bugged me because the entire post is trying to explain exactly why it is not.

The only way to make C reasonably safe is to encode information via newtype pattern. Wrap `char *` inside a struct that have proper names and include the size in there as well.

Basically, there should be ZERO pointers except at creation and consumption by outside libraries (open, write, etc)
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-13 09:05:07+00:00
> how much of that does google/alphabet actually own?

A ton. They got shares in a bunch of submarine cables, their properties (YouTube, Maps, Google Search) make up a wide share of Internet traffic, they are via Google Search the chief traffic source for most if not all websites, they own a large CDN as well as one of the three dominant hyperscalers...
by whymememe | 2025-07-13 09:05:47+00:00
I have had an incredibly similar experience, including falling back into being convinced I was in a 'loop' when my mind was tired or on psychedelics. I've always found it interesting how common this type of bad trip is and wondered if there's a reason why it's so common. Cultural context can have a large impact on the type of trips you have, but I would not have guessed that western culture would create this type of bad trip, in particular.
Build ML Models by Just Asking – With MCP, LangChain, and a Bit of Magic
by premkiran_o7 | 2025-07-13 09:05:51+00:00
I wrote a practical post on how to connect an AI agent to a tool-based ML server using MCP and LangGraph. Link: https://medium.com/@premlaknaboina/how-to-wrap-machine-learning-models-as-mcp-tools-1e510b21f1f9

The agent accepts user input (like "run linear regression on dataset.csv") and auto-trains a model behind the scenes.
by ternaus | 2025-07-13 09:07:54+00:00
Do it in a very similar way in Cursor:

Steps: [1] Add pre-commit hook [2] Write design doc as mdc file to .cursor/rules [3] Iterate on design doc till it describes what I want [4] Ask to write the code [5] Where possible - extend the test suite. [6] On every commit check that pre-commit hook checks and tests pass [7] On every bug extend the test suite [8] Write as many as possible custom pre-commit hooks [9] Add extensive docstrings to the complex code -> adds extra context to the LLM [10] Iterate [11] From time to time ask to verify that design doc is up to date
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-13 09:09:04+00:00
> `_t` should not be used for custom types since it's reserved for future standard types (and/or types declared in a header you might include someday).

That old thing again...

The _t postfix is only reserved in the POSIX standard, but not in the C standard (and C and POSIX are entirely different things - outside the UNIX bubble at least).

It's unlikely that POSIX changes anymore, but if you get a name collision in a new POSIX version it's still just a simple name collision, and it's up to the user code to fix that.

And it's not like symbol collision problems are limited to POSIX, the world won't end because some piece of C code collides with a symbol used in a dependency, there's always ways to isolate its usage.

Also, it's good practice in the C world to use a namespace prefix for libraries, and such a prefix will also make sure that any _t postfix will not collide with POSIX symbols (the question is of course why POSIX couldn't play nice with the rest of the world and use a posix_ prefix - historical reasons I guess, but then just going a ahead and squatting on the _t postfix for all eternity is a bit rich).
by davydm | 2025-07-13 09:10:01+00:00
Could it possibly be related to the dogged persistence of those who would ai all the things?

I've seen quite a few "help, my vibe-coded app doesn't quite work, and it's 16k lines of code, I need a real programmer" posts around the interwebs. And there's the great push to replace workers with ai, irrespective of the clear evidence that this is a good way to tank your product. A lot of sunken cost fallacy roaming about these days.
AGI Is Mathematically Impossible (3): Kolmogorov Complexity
by ICBTheory | 2025-07-13 09:10:34+00:00
Hi folks. This is the third part in an ongoing theory I’ve been developing over the last few years called the Infinite Choice Barrier (ICB). The core idea is simple:

General intelligence—especially AGI—is structurally impossible under certain epistemic conditions.

Not morally, not practically. Mathematically.

The argument splits across three barriers: 1.Computability (Gödel, Turing, Rice): You can’t decide what your system can’t see. 2.Entropy (Shannon): Beyond a certain point, signal breaks down structurally. 3.Complexity (Kolmogorov, Chaitin): Most real-world problems are fundamentally incompressible.

This paper focuses on (3): Kolmogorov Complexity. It argues that most of what humans care about is not just hard to model, but formally unmodellable—because the shortest description of a problem is the problem.

In other words: you can’t generalize from what can’t be compressed.

⸻

Here’s the abstract:

There is a common misconception that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will emerge through scale, memory, or recursive optimization. This paper argues the opposite: that as systems scale, they approach the structural limit of generalization itself. Using Kolmogorov complexity, we show that many real-world problems—particularly those involving social meaning, context divergence, and semantic volatility—are formally incompressible and thus unlearnable by any finite algorithm.

This is not a performance issue. It’s a mathematical wall. And it doesn’t care how many tokens you’ve got

The paper isn’t light, but it’s precise. If you’re into limits, structures, and why most intelligence happens outside of optimization, it might be worth your time.

https://philpapers.org/archive/SCHAII-18.pdf

Happy to read your view.
by vendiddy | 2025-07-13 09:10:36+00:00
I think in many cases the ecosystem issues are overblown. For the common 90% of use cases there are battle tested libraries out there.

For the less common ones, we tend to just roll our own which in most cases isn't that bad if you have reference implementations.

I think the most under-appreciated aspect of Elixir is how it helps reduce complexity. And there isn't a silver bullet here, but the tooling, immutability, pattern matching, process-based concurrency model, etc are all design decisions that, IMHO lead to simpler, more robust code.

(Caveat: of course, like any language, you can make a mess of things.)

I'm curious what libraries they wish existed.
by yorwba | 2025-07-13 09:10:39+00:00
The author seems a bit too excited about the discovery that the dot product of the vectors [a, b] and [1, 1] is a + b. I don't think the problem with getting neural nets to do arithmetic is that they literally can't add two coefficients of a vector, but that the input and output modalities are something different (e.g. digit sequences) and you want to use a generic architecture that can also do other tasks (e.g. text prediction in general). If you knew in advance that you just need to calculate a + b, you could skip the neural network altogether.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-13 09:12:03+00:00
tl;dr We're talking about a $200 million piece of equipment. This isn't your typical job. Merely "getting by" is nowhere near sufficient.

That line of reasoning isn't an appeal to emotion but your earlier focus on dehumanization and discrimination most certainly was.

I think it's a reasonable point that such a policy exhibits a severe perverse incentive. So the question becomes, how many lives are lost due to the perverse incentive versus if the policy didn't exist? Someone with the right knowledge and resources can at least make an objective attempt at estimating that.

Regarding bus drivers I'll observe there is a stark difference in both scale and certainty of death. The degree to which safety risks are tolerated almost invariably scales with such metrics. Pilots operate in a domain where an unmitigated failure not resulting in the deaths of everyone on board is far closer to the exception than the norm.

There are also public perception and financial angles to consider. People are rather paranoid about hurtling through the air in metal tubes. The equipment is also rather capital intensive, with a 787 and a hyperscale data center falling vaguely in the same order of magnitude. As such many of the practices surrounding that activity go a bit overboard from an actuarial perspective at least in comparison to other common daily pastimes (but not in comparison to aforementioned data centers).

Which circles back around nicely to your leading statement. It is the act itself, the attempt to commit suicide, that I think is reasonable to view as a sudden and debilitating condition. Those with suicidal ideations are statistically more likely to suffer from that. I think it's extremely similar to the heart attack example, and policy certainly requires commercial pilots to have regular physicals. The primary difference (and potential point of contention) is that there's no straightforward way to hide a physical condition whereas you probably can hide a mental one and (unlike a physical one) doing so is likely to exacerbate it.