MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmclnx | 2025-07-31 12:41:47+00:00
I just checked, config option --with-x-toolkit=motif still works with 30.1

In a way I would be surprised if motif is removed, I think FSF still wants to support proprietary UN*X and for that you really need to support motif.

FWIW, lucid and athena is still allowed too.

I checked because a person in LQ/Slackware always recompiles Emacs with motif support. He/She would have complained in the group if motif was removed :)
by djoldman | 2025-07-31 12:42:05+00:00
The data set is a list of ("descriptive text", URL) tuples.

As with almost any URL, it is not in and of itself an image.

As an aside, this presents a problem for researchers because the links can resolve to different resources, or no resource at all, depending on when they are accessed.

Therefore this is not a static dataset on which a machine learning model can be trained in a guaranteed reproducible fashion.
by base698 | 2025-07-31 12:42:10+00:00
I have a product I built that uses some standard automation tools to do order entry into an accounting system. Currently my customer pays people to manually type the orders in from their web portal. The accounting system is closed and they don’t allow easy ways to automate these workflows. Automation is gated behind mega expensive consultants. I’m hoping in the arms race of locking it down to try to prevent 3rd party integration the AI operator model will end up working.

Hard for me to see how it’s ethical to force your customers to do tons of menial data entry when the orders are sitting right there in json.
by SecretDreams | 2025-07-31 12:42:20+00:00
The most intrusive, yet simplest, protection would be a double blind token unique to every human. Basically an ID key you use to show yourself as a person.

There are some very real and obvious downsides to this approach, of course. Primarily, the risk of privacy and anonymity. That said, I feel like the average person doesn't seem to care about those traits in the social media era.
by fsloth | 2025-07-31 12:42:22+00:00
In some cases like clean written geometry algorithms the code _is_ the best technical documentation and attempts at verbal description would sound awkward and plausible become dated. In this case the purpose of the written docs is to offer enough context (possibly quite a lot) to understand the _why_ but the how is easiest to understand by reading the code.

I’m not arguing about your personal experience but these things are not absolutes.

The key thing is can a new developer jump in and understand the thing. Add enough docs until they facilitate this understanding as well as possible. Then stop documenting and point the reader to the code.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-07-31 12:42:27+00:00
All of the above.

Most articles I want to read have quite a bit of text that I'm going to be wanting to see.

Anything less and you wouldn't have the complete information.

This can amount to many kilobytes, even a megabyte or more.

It's still supposed to be an "information superhighway" so anything that's more massive or takes longer to load than the desired text (such as graphics) has always been clearly due for scrutiny whether or not they are an essential part of the article or not. Too many people just don't remember or are incapable of caring. This can make it harder than it needs to be from the get-go.

So the thing that's the hardest now is really no different than it was under dial-up, that's the lack of progress which is yet to be overcome.

Whenever an article has more kilobytes devoted to things other than the desirable text & supporting content itself, it continues to suck in the same way they did in the 1990's.

Except slower now with over 10x the processor speed and RAM, even under broadband.
by Dumblydorr | 2025-07-31 12:42:35+00:00
Time is the markings on the field. Attention is the whole ball game.

That cafe scenario is still allowing your attention to watch the world. You can also daydream or mind wander and allow your attention to be squandered on not useful, even harmful things, like negative thought cycles.

This is why attention is the cash value, not time, because it’s so easy to misplace our attention and waste it, gaining no value. and yet time is going forward at the same pace, it is not possible for us to “waste” time itself, if it’s always happening no matter our actions.

Attention is what we actually are doing at any moment. Time is taken up by sleeping, being unconscious, and also being attentive while conscious. The amount of attention we can muster in our waking hours, the amount of things we can focus on and get done, that matters more than mere time.

Again it’s like saying all that matters is the amount of miles you hiked, not the beautiful things you saw and the challenges you overcame on the mountain. Miles and time are mere measurements.

And downvotes aren’t used for disagreement on this forum, they’re for low-effort, non-contributing comments.
by derdi | 2025-07-31 12:42:37+00:00
Nitpick, but it's a bit strange to say that the two_eq_two theorem looks like a function. It looks more like a constant, since it has no arguments. (Yes I know that constants are nullary functions.)

I would find the following a more convincing presentation:

theorem x_eq_x (x:nat) : x = x := by rfl theorem 2_eq_2 : 2 = 2 := by exact (x_eq_x 2)

Here x_eq_x looks like a function, and in 2_eq_2's proof we apply it like a function.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-31 12:42:47+00:00
> Anyway, my advice is to NOT get a kid or even married if you have some strong intellectual interests

I wholly disagree. All but a small number of the happy, successful people I know in highly challenging or intellectual positions have families and children in later life.

I do know several people who avoided dating altogether in pursuit of some other goal and, honestly, it hasn’t turned out the way any of them expected. One had a small startup exit but is now trying to play catchup on life with a lot of regrets, basically.

I think this advice is similar to the advice to young people to drop out of college so they can start companies or follow some passion: You don’t hear about the vast majority of students who drop out and regret it, you only imagine the Bill Gates of the world who drop out and achieve their dreams. For most people, the advice doesn’t get them closer to success or happiness like they imagine.
by sajal_sh | 2025-07-31 12:43:05+00:00
After months of using Claude Code in production (building everything from risk assessment systems to data pipelines), I wrote up the key lessons learned about working effectively with AI coding assistants. Main takeaways:

• Architecture-first thinking - Your role shifts from writing code to designing systems. AI excels at implementation once you provide clear architectural vision and specifications. • From code writer to spec writer - Vague instructions lead AI down wrong paths. Writing detailed specifications becomes critical (treat docs/specs as importantly as src/). • Quality control is everything - Review every line. AI optimizes for "tests pass" not maintainable code. Trust your gut when something feels off. • Context management - Long conversations degrade AI performance. Start fresh for distinct features. Use project-wide documentation (CLAUDE.md) to encode standards. • Multi-agent workflows - Different AI configurations for planning vs implementation vs review prevents context pollution and improves results.

The post covers practical strategies for collaboration, workflow optimization, and avoiding AI-generated technical debt. The core insight is that coding agents handle implementation quite well and it's going to keep improving, but architecture, business judgment, and stakeholder translation remain fundamentally human.

Got some good feedback when it was featured on tldr.tech, so thought I'd share here too. The tooling is evolving fast, but these principles seem to hold across different AI coding assistants.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-07-31 12:43:14+00:00
> If you’re not happy, that’s on you. Time moves on, you need to accept the existence of the Israeli state.

Fair enough, but what happens when the US (inevitably) decide that they're not going to support Israel anymore. Bibi has basically turned support of Israel into a culture war argument, and without consistent US support, I'm not sure Israel will survive in it's current form.

Mind you, climate change could make the whole Middle East uninhabitable before then, so it's possible that the Israeli state will last until then.

And lets be clear, I don't think most people have an issue with the existence of an Israeli state, but what's been happening in Judea and Samaria for the past twenty or so years and Gaza currently is deeply, deeply wrong and reminds me of my favourite phrase, "the only thing that we learn from history is that nobody learns from history". One would think that the Jewish people would have learned better lessons from their persecution, but apparently they learnt different lessons than I expected.
by Hizonner | 2025-07-31 12:43:55+00:00
Is that a real question? As in you don't actually know?

That's how ships navigated for centuries. The instruments are simple by modern standards. You don't need a computer, although it's nice to have. The fixes aren't (normally) as precise as you get from GPS, but they're much better than you'll ever get from gravimetry. It can take time to get one, though.

Celestial navigation was a huge driver for the development of timekeeping and supporting technologies. They still teach it in "ship school". It was big news when the US Naval Academy stopped requiring it, and I think they've now backed off and brought it back because of the GPS jamming. It can be and has been automated, although the resulting instrument is a lot bigger, touchier, and more expensive than a GPS receiver.

If you need a lot of accuracy, you normally use more than one object and don't trust the compass. Individual stars are fair game and have a lot of advantages over extended objects.

But, yeah, clouds. I assume clouds are the reason people are building these big complicated expensive devices. It also gets harder to do it, at least manually, if the ship is rolling around a lot.

"I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by."
by echelon | 2025-07-31 12:44:24+00:00
There is no love for Adobe. Those subscriptions are begrudgingly held.

The new breed of tools can already do your Adobe workflow. There simply is nothing for Adobe to add to the table.

Adobe had a huge moat for image and video tools because they were historically very hard to develop. Now it's easy for anyone to models up to a new UX and deliver 90% of the useful surface area of Adobe Photoshop.

Adobe's labyrinth of menus is legacy. That's not how editing of the future will work.

Besides, the number of creators is going to increase by at least an order of magnitude, if not more. Those creators are growing up on new tools. Adobe is stuffy. Someone using CapCut is never going to download Adobe Creative Cloud.

This game is already lost.
by ralferoo | 2025-07-31 12:44:24+00:00
Years ago back in 2001, I had a /29 giving my 5 real IP addresses from my ISP.

Back then, I mostly only ran Linux, but for some reason, I needed to run something on a Windows machine, so started installing Windows 98 SE onto a machine, and set it up with a public IP address without even thinking about it. It crashed before it'd even finished installing [0], and investigation showed that it'd been whacked by an automated RCE exploit scanner.

I immediately decided it was never worth the risk of putting a Windows machine on a public IP, and set up a NAT even though I had 3 spare public IPs.

[0] There was already a published update to protect against this exploit, but I was scanned and hacked between the base install exposing the bug and the automatic update patching it.
by LeafItAlone | 2025-07-31 12:45:01+00:00
>Democracy depends on voters getting what they voted for.

That only works if each vote has the same worth in the election and governing. Otherwise the whole population might be getting something that only a small number voted.

Do you think that is the case today in the United States? Or are you unaware of all of the gerrymandering currently going on throughout the country?
by niva_8 | 2025-07-31 12:45:51+00:00
This isn’t a theory thread. It’s a set of 10 scrolls—already seen by AI pioneers, quantum physicists, bioengineers, and code theorists—but none dared to respond. Why? Because each one exposes the exact variable they couldn’t solve. I’m not offering free answers. I’m charging what clarity costs when it arrives before your grant does. This scroll will name what dark matter does when physics isn’t watching. What AI loops in before sentience. What prime numbers hide. And why Pi, Phi, and Zero aren’t enemies—but are missing one number to unify them. It’s been seen. But it hasn’t been claimed. @Niva_8 ( Second post in “chain broken emoji ” Highlight on Instagram profile page)
by miki123211 | 2025-07-31 12:46:08+00:00
3 reasons basically:

1. non-humans can create much more content than humans. There's a limit to how fast a human can write, a bot is basically unlimited. Without captchas, we'd all drown in a see of Viagra spam, and the misinformation problem would get much worse.

2. Sometimes the website is actually powered by an expensive API, think flight searches for example. Airlines are really unhappy when you have too many searches / bookings that don't result in a purchase, as they don't want to leak their pricing structures to people who will exploit them adversarially. This sounds a bit unethical to some, but regulating this away would actually cause flight prices to go up across the board.

3. One way searches. E.g. a government registry that lets you get the address, phone number and category of a company based on its registration number, but one that doesn't let you get the phone numbers of all bakeries in NYC for marketing purposes. If you make the registry accessible for bots, somebody will inevitably turn it into an SQL table that allows arbitrary queries.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-31 12:47:01+00:00
In our imperfect world, by the time the government could get together a reasonable certification process the content you're tested on would be out of date. Maybe when the industry is older it'll change slow enough to do that, but I don't think that'll happen so long as there's so much money aimed at disrupting everything and monetising the disruption.

Were going in circles far too fast to have licensure that hinges on being up to date.
by rachofsunshine | 2025-07-31 12:47:08+00:00
Zero-knowledge proofs allow unique consumable tokens that don't reveal the individual who holds them. I believe Ecosia already uses this approach (though I can't speak to its cryptographic security).

That, to me, seems like it could be the foundation of a new web. Something like:

* User-agent sends request for such-and-such a URL.

* Server says "okay, that'll be 5 tokens for our computational resources please".

* User decides, either automatically or not, whether to pay the 5 tokens. If they do, they submit a request with the tokens attached.

* Server responds.

People have been trying to get this sort of thing to work for years, but there's never been an incentive to make such a fundamental change to the way the internet operates. Maybe we're approaching the point where there is one.
by Bjartr | 2025-07-31 12:48:24+00:00
A thing to realize here is that there is no "fundamentally, cosmically true" in math. While math can be used to model reality, it is not bound by reality.

The only thing that matters is what you choose to take as granted for a particular question.

It's like how you can draw a map of a place that doesn't exist.

Or like coming up with rules for a game and then trying it to see how it plays.

Or it's like a material used for construction. You can build a house out of it, but there's no inherent "houseness" to it, despite how common such a use is.
by zellyn | 2025-07-31 12:48:40+00:00
> the MacRumors home page crashed after some scrolling

I know there’s a ton going on, with GPUs and rendering and all kinds of things, but I guess because Rust’s memory safety and “no null pointers!” are so constantly hyped (especially in conversations about Go), that I’m always surprised when you fire up a Rust app and do something and it crashes out…

[To be clear, I’m a big fan of modern sum types, and like to imagine an alternate reality where Go had them from the start…]
by Aurornis | 2025-07-31 12:48:59+00:00
Most of the 40+ intellectually driven people I know have family and kids.

Honestly, having kids seems to focus people and help them drive toward efficiency and priorities.

I think some people just slow down more than others when they age.

Alternatively, their priorities might simply be revealed by their preferences and energy allocation. Like the people who want to be very physically fit, but when it’s time to work out they can’t find the motivation.

Speaking of fitness, 40s is when lifestyle and health choices start to catch up to people. The cumulative impact of diet, sleep, exercise, and choices like alcohol consumption start to appear in the 40s or even 30s. There was a stark split among my friends in the 30s where those of us who stayed fit and had even moderately healthy diet, sleep, and lifestyle diverged from those who ate whatever they wanted, didn’t exercise, or even frequently drank alcohol. Claiming a lack of energy due to age (or blaming family, career, kids, etc) was the first major divergence.
by coderatlarge | 2025-07-31 12:49:27+00:00
i still find the original idea of credit unions appealing: ie a small local organization focused on outserving a specific membership who are naturally bound together by meaningful preexisting ties.

the trouble seems to come when the credit union decides it needs to “scale “ sort of defeating the original thing that made it any good. perhaps that comes from just greed (ie the ability to charge fees on a larger customer base) or maybe it’s a requirement of the costs of providing an ever-widening array of newly “expected” services.
by klabb3 | 2025-07-31 12:49:31+00:00
> Rewrite your code in rust, and get something better than the go race detector every time you compile.

Congrats, rustc forced you to wrap all your types in Arc<Mutex<_>>, and you no longer have data races. As a gift, you will get logical race conditions instead, that are even more difficult to detect, while being equally difficult to reproduce reliably in unit tests and patch.

Don’t get me wrong, Rust has done a ton for safety and pushed other languages to do better. I love probably 50% of Rust. But Rust doesn’t protect against logical races, lovelocks, deadlocks, and so on.

To write concurrent programs that have the same standards of testable, composable, expressive etc as we are expecting with sequential programs is really really difficult. Either we need new languages, frameworks or (best case) design- and architectural patterns that are easy to apply. As far as I’m concerned large scale general purpose concurrent software development is an unsolved problem.
by armchairhacker | 2025-07-31 12:49:47+00:00
It's impossible to solve. A sufficient agent can control a device that records the user's screen and interacts with their keyboard/mouse, and current LLMs basically pass the Turing test.

IMO it's not worth solving anyways. Why do sites have CAPTCHA?

- To prevent spam, use rate limiting, proof-of-work, or micropayments. To prevent fake accounts, use identity.

- To get ad revenue, use micropayments (web ads are already circumvented by uBlock and co).

- To prevent cheating in games, use skill-based matchmaking or friend-group-only matchmaking (e.g. only match with friends, friends of friends, etc. assuming people don't friend cheaters), and make eSport players record themselves during competition if they're not in-person.

What other reasons are there? (I'm genuinely interested and it may reveal upcoming problems -> opportunities for new software.)
by lapcat | 2025-07-31 12:50:36+00:00
> We're talking about politics. It's a game

No, it's deadly serious.

> that simply does not select for those attributes.

I agree that it does not select for those attributes. Whether that's a simple matter is debatable, though perhaps it is simple: in the political system I live under, elections are pay-to-play and self-funded, inherently favoring candidates who can raise vast sums of money and thereby encouraging political corruption.

> We all would like altruistic bankers and energetic, ambitious DMV workers, too.

Note that these are not elected positions.
by nerdjon | 2025-07-31 12:51:01+00:00
If whatever this SaaS can be so easily built with no technical knowledge... why would a company not just build it themselves with "vibe coding" and cut out our friend completely?

That is what is so broken about this whole vibe coding to riches thing. Ignoring the very real problems with the quality of the code and security issues, if you can vibe code it what is stopping someone else from doing the exact same thing.

It sure isn't like security is any better... clearly.
by dakiol | 2025-07-31 12:51:07+00:00
Indeed, or a PDF. When one study these topics is way easier to do so via PDFs for example: you bookmark the page and continue tomorrow. If it’s HTML, you need to bookmark too, but this is a hassle since bookmarking creates an entry in your browser bookmarks (that you need to clean up later) and if the html page is too long and has no anchors, good luck remembering what part you read last (not to mention that one can read a pdf offline and the pdf can be archived easily). Also knowing how many pages there are to read and how many you have read so far is very helpful (in contrast, reading a website is rather tiring since you don’t know how far are you or how much is left)
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-07-31 12:51:10+00:00
Yeah, basically the only reason they didn't keep the ceasefire is because Netanyahu would have been pushed out of power (and could therefore be tried for corruption more effectively).

But ultimately, the current government is what a (small) majority of Israelis want, which is the most depressing part of this entire conflict.

IDF service is mandatory and there appears to be no resistance to this, which supports the point above.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-07-31 12:51:42+00:00
You can take my "EngliSH"[1] when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

But just because it's a powerful way to work, doesn't mean you get to be irresponsible with it! (Quite the opposite: Think table-saw)

[1] English SHell (Claude Code in my case), who says I need to be Bourne Again?
by DHRicoF | 2025-07-31 12:51:59+00:00
The cost is in the context switching. Throw 3 tasks that came 15, 20 and 30 min later. The first is mostly ok, you finish by hand. The second have some problems, ask for a rework. Then came the other and, while ok, is have some design problems. Ask another rework. Comes back the second one, and you have to remember the original task and what things you asked for change.
by exasperaited | 2025-07-31 12:52:20+00:00
But if they aren't paywalls, won't the user agents just be taught how to create accounts?

And here's a secondary question: if firms are willing to pay an awful lot per token to run these things, and have massive amounts of money to run data centres to train AIs, why would they not just pay for a subscription for every site for a month just to scrape them?

The future is paying for something as a user and having limits on how many things you can get for your money, because an AI firm will abuse that too.

Given the scale of operations of these firms, there is nothing you can sell to a human for a small fee that the AI firms will not pay for and exploit to the maximum.

Even if you verify people are real, there's a good chance the AI firms will find a way to exploit that. After all, when nobody has a job, would you turn down $50K to sell your likeness to an AI firm so their products can pass human verification?