MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wahern | 2025-07-16 19:51:17+00:00
That's a myth, albeit one commonly held everywhere, even by locals.

You don't find it odd that so many poor- and middle-income countries with wildly different legal histories and taxing structures have the same glaring property tax loophole? Despite often wildly different origin stories for how the loophole came about?

Yes, some jurisdictions tax incomplete structures differently, but that only begs the question of whether a habitable structure lived in would be considered incomplete merely because some rebar is sticking out.

The real answer mostly relates to patterns of savings and real estate finance. In places where people invest their savings into their home directly, without a mortgage or similar as is common in more developed countries with robust retail financing options and comparatively liquid real estate markets, they often plan to build incrementally over time. Today you have enough money to build a 1-story out-of-pocket; in a few years you hope to have enough saved to expand to a 1-1/2 story or 2-story. This is much more feasible with concrete construction as it's relatively cheap (if not free or even cheaper than finishing) to just leave rebar exposed. Of course, as you pointed out earlier this doesn't make for great engineering. So you're more likely to see this in areas with loose building codes or lax enforcement.

In really poor areas you'll often find partial structures that aren't even habitable. That makes no sense in the tax loophole theory, but perfectly fits the theory that these structures are methods of investing savings. What's sad is that it's not uncommon for these to sit unfinished (to the point of habitability) for many years, or never finished at all; hard-working people's savings effectively lost.
by tim333 | 2025-07-16 19:51:19+00:00
I tried the opening example

>Take an open source project such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all of the content farms that try to rank at the top for that term.

and the third result on google.co.uk for "youtube downloader" is "yt-dlp without a doubt the best way to download youtube videos"

I guess search is kind of tricky.
by mindcrime | 2025-07-16 19:51:54+00:00
Ya know, I've directed a lot of criticism at Maven over the years... and most of it well-founded, I believe, even in hindsight. And yet, today, I find that of all the Java build tools, Maven is my preferred one. Part of that is me, normalizing the pain of Maven in some regards, and part of that is places where they have improved the tool. But however you break it down, it is indeed the case that for the most part Maven "just works"™. That is, at least for Java. I don't do a lot of Scala or Kotlin or anything, so no comment there. And for Groovy, I'm usually doing Grails projects which default to Gradle, so I tend to use Gradle in that context. But for plain Java projects, I honestly find Maven to be the path of least resistance.
by stillpointlab | 2025-07-16 19:51:57+00:00
> Natural language is not sufficient to give precise instructions

On consideration, this is the core of our disagreement and it is probably one that we will not see past.

I have to assume that you see human/computer interactions as master-slave relations. You are the master providing instructions and the computer is a slave that MUST do precisely what you instruct it to do. I would wager that you feel frustrated when you deal with other people who choose to do things in a way that is different than how you want them to be done.

One thing I was taught when I became a manager was that I should focus on outcomes. I should explain to people what the result I wanted was, rather than to be really picky about the implementation. I found that sometimes people could realize my desired outcomes in a way that was better than I would have done it. It was enlightening.

There is an idiom in English, about winning the battle but losing the war. It is when a person becomes so obsessed with controlling tiny details that they lose sight of the overall goal.

I doubt we will see eye-to-eye on this, but I am arguing that we will have better outcomes if we obsess less about the details of how computers implement our goals and we spend more time focusing on the goals we want to achieve.
by drdaeman | 2025-07-16 19:52:02+00:00
Does “brute force” allow for heuristics and direction?

If it doesn’t (“brute” as opposite of “smart”, just dumb iteration to exhaustion) then you’re right, of course.

But if it does, then I’m not sure it’s patently absurd - novel ideas could be merely a matter of chance of having all the precursors together at the right time, a stochastic process. And it scales well, bearing at least some resemblance to brute force approaches - although the term is not entirely great (something around “stochastic”, “trial-and-error”, and “heuristic” is probably a better term).
by lxgr | 2025-07-16 19:52:36+00:00
Ah, this is for DoH, gotcha!

This "URL template" thing seems odd – is Windows doing something like creating a URL out of the DNS IP and a pattern, e.g. 1.1.1.1 + "https://<ip>/foo" would yield https://1.1.1.1/foo?

If so, why not just allow providing an actual URL for each server?
by sierra1011 | 2025-07-16 19:52:38+00:00
I'm so tired of opening every program or app I have to use for work and being met by a popup or notification that I can, should I wish, do something with AI. I can't even change focus of a Meet window without it popping up suggesting Gemini, and I can see that notification countless times in a day. Can't turn it off, I'm not an Org Admin.

I just want to not have it shoved in my face. It's exhausting.
by conductr | 2025-07-16 19:52:53+00:00
I feel like use case and audience matters when making these decisions. In this case, the user is probably someone interacting with a python script they're running in a console (I assume by print), then I really don't think it matters - the user will check that both things are set. Should you also give them some documentation about setting env vars? Should you customize that documentation to the OS they're running? etc.

If the user is a typical consumer using a typical consumer interface, then yes you want to handhold them a bit more.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-07-16 19:52:59+00:00
Interestingly enough Claude has me reading much more. Especially with math books, one of the greatest challenges to self-study can be making sure you are in fact getting the concepts correct. Without this it's easy to get fairly deep into a book only to give up once you realize you haven't quite built the picture in your head right. Often you do get it, but it takes multiple re-reads/alternate views of the problem.

With Claude as I read I can constantly check my understanding. When my response elicits a "Well, not exactly..." I know I have to go back. This combined with the ability to have Claude clarify formula details from a phone picture has rapidly accelerated my learning and has me reading much more these days.

Claude is also pretty good at subject specific recommendations, especially when you're looking for a specific type of treatment of a subject.
by daneel_w | 2025-07-16 19:53:34+00:00
For what it may be worth, here's a most basic (but fully working) config for running Unbound as a DoT-only forwarder:

server: logfile: "" log-queries: no # adjust as necessary interface: 127.0.0.1@53 access-control: 127.0.0.0/8 allow infra-keep-probing: yes tls-system-cert: yes forward-zone: name: "." forward-tls-upstream: yes forward-addr: 9.9.9.9@853#dns.quad9.net forward-addr: 193.110.81.9@853#zero.dns0.eu forward-addr: 149.112.112.112@853#dns.quad9.net forward-addr: 185.253.5.9@853#zero.dns0.eu
by IshKebab | 2025-07-16 19:53:43+00:00
They're only 4 & 6 so they don't yet. A 6 year old cannot reliably cross the road safely.

The NSPCC says 12 is a minimum for leaving kids alone at home: https://www.gov.uk/law-on-leaving-your-child-home-alone

That's going to depend wildly on the actual child (my eldest is ridiculously responsible so we'll probably go out when she's younger, maybe 10).

I really don't think people are focusing on how busy lives will be in 10-12 years when they decide whether or not to have children. Obviously things like finances and childcare when they are young are way more important. Kind of insane that we're even debating that.
by mbastos | 2025-07-16 19:54:11+00:00
Honestly, the software job market has always been small. The big lie pushed by tech giants was that everyone should learn to code, not because there were unlimited jobs, but because they wanted a massive talent pool to cherry-pick from.

But the reality? We’ve always been competing. Against overseas devs. Against the founder’s nephew who built a WordPress site once. Against the tides of startup hype and budget freezes.

And the software engineering job? It was never just about writing code. It’s about selling yourself. Convincing PMs not to ship garbage. Debugging messes without crying for help. Surviving org chaos. You need a whole toolkit beyond just syntax.

The current contraction isn’t just about LLMs, it’s about companies pulling back on risk. When the economy picks up, AI won’t be a convenient excuse anymore. The market ebbs and flows, same as it ever was.
by kragen | 2025-07-16 19:54:13+00:00
The usual meaning of "data path" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapath is the path from the register file (and/or memory access unit) to the ALU and back to the register file (and/or memory access unit). So we could say that both the 8088 and the 68000 had a 16-bit data path, because they used 16-bit buses for those transfers and a 16-bit ALU, even though the 68000 had 32-bit registers and the 8088 had an 8-bit data bus to connect it to RAM. The 68020 implemented the same instructions and registers as the 68000 (and additional ones) but used a 32-bit data path, so they were twice as fast.

In what sense does a virtual machine instruction set architecture with no hardware implementation have a "data path" separate from its arithmetic size? You seem to be using the term in a nonstandard way, which is fine, but I cannot guess what it is.

By your other criteria, the (uncontroversially "16-bit") 8088 would be an 8-bit computer, except that it had a 20-bit address space.
by toyg | 2025-07-16 19:54:17+00:00
Vittorio Sgarbi is a... character. A young university professor in history of the arts, he earned his initial fame with expletive-laden TV monologues in which he'd talk about classic paintings, or rather used them as an excuse to say whatever he wanted to say about the world and politics. Then proceeded to use his fame to kickstart a long political career among Italian right-wing parties, serving as a minister at national level before running for mayor in a few different places. In-between, he dated pornstars, partied hard, verbally abused a lot of people, and generally lived a dissolute life.
by Someone | 2025-07-16 19:55:42+00:00
> This idea of trusting that companies record and save all interactions and calls indefinitely is no way something I'd trust for anything important.

In many jurisdictions, it is against the law to record and save all interactions and calls indefinitely.

Often, law says you can only make video recordings for a given, legal, purpose. If the goal is to deter crime and help solve crimes, keeping recordings around for a few weeks is allowed, but keeping them forever typically isn’t.
by CraigJPerry | 2025-07-16 19:55:49+00:00
I keep meaning to write something like this but exploring the “how simple can you make it” angle - a lot of my world is kube (which is great in the right scenario) but could you shave complexity out of a stack designed for solo dev rapid iteration:

e.g. rather than:

> It’s important not to do any heavy data processing steps in the project-ui … we keep the browser application light while delegating the heavy lifting and business logic to the server

Chomp the complexity, serve HTML from the backend directly

> ty

Im curious where ty goes but for a min-complexity stack i couldnt spend complexity tokens on pre release tools

> pydantic … dataclasses

One or the t’other, plus i’ll forever confuse myself: is it post_init (dataclasses) or is it post_model_init (pydantic) - i had to check!

> docker

if we already have uv, could we get away without docker? uv sync can give an experience almost akin to static compiled binaries with the right setup. Its not going to handle volumes etc so if you're using docker features, this concept isnt going to fly. If you're not wedded to docker though, can you get away with just uv in dev and prod? in an enterprise prob not, i wouldn't expect to be able to download deps in prod. For flying solo though…

> compose

You’ve a frontend, a backend and presumably a database. Could you get away with just uv to manage your backend and a local sqlite db?

So a broadly feature comparable stack for rapid iteration with less complexity but still all the bells and whistles so you dont need to cook everything yourself, might look like:

- uv - fastapi + jinja + htmx + surreal + picocss - sqlite

You could probably sketch a path to hyper scale if you ever needed it:

- v1 = the above stack - v2 = swap sqlite for postgres, now you unlocked multiple writers and horizontal scaling, maybe py-pglite for test envs so you can defer test-containers adoption for one more scaling iteration. WAL streaming would add some complexity to this step but worth it - v3 = introduce containers, a container registry and test-containers. I dont think you really unlock much in this step for all that additional complexity though… - v4 = rke2 single node cluster, no load balancer needed yet - v5 = scale to triple node, we need a load balancer too - v6 = add agent nodes to the rke cluster - v7 = can you optimise costs, maybe rewrite unchanging parts in a more resource efficient stack …
by KingCML | 2025-07-16 19:56:05+00:00
Karen and Edward Zuckerberg, who are either Mark's parents or different people with the same exact names and professions from the same New York suburb, have been suspended for a year from competitive bridge by the ACBL, the game's governing body in North America.

Though reportedly neither Zuck signed an admission of wrongdoing, the ACBL found both guilty of "Collusive Cheating Online"—that is, sharing information (through something other than a game action) with one another while playing together, which within bridge is the worst possible thing you can do.

Personally, I'm shocked—SHOCKED!—to see their son turned out this way.
by MichaelRo | 2025-07-16 19:56:20+00:00
Times have changed. My kid and the kids of every friend I know around me, have never opened a book on their own volition. Ever. Although they open the phone, tablet and laptop many times a day.

And it's not like they're stupid or anything, just have no desire to read, never learned to associate reading with something pleasurable.

But ... it shows. Like a friend has a kid who took the national exam that marks the end of secondary school (gymnasium) this year. He told me one question that was asked. Basically a conversation between John and George, John asking "George, will you start working or continue wasting your time doing nothing?", and George replies: "Right now I'm going to get the scissors to cut some leaves for the dogs". Question was, "What will George do? a) Start working or b) Continue wasting his time".

Kid chose "a) Start working" because as he argued, he goes after scissors and uses them to cut leaves, which is work. Asked my kid the same question, got the same answer: he'll start working. Well, but if they would have read a few books, they would have encountered the Romanian expression "cutting leaves to the dogs" as an idiom for laziness, lack of work, doing nothing. So they don't read anymore and it shows.
by photonthug | 2025-07-16 19:56:45+00:00
I don't know. Talking with strangers is always kind of insane, or at least a pretty illogical leap of faith, because there's not much chance that the interaction is interesting or amusing. Now a stranger that walks up to me and demands some dramatic reading of Paradise Lost, stat? Ok, I'm intrigued, hold my beer and buckle up while I let you hear about regions of sorrow and darkness visible because the produce section has never seen some shit like this
by nativeit | 2025-07-16 19:57:50+00:00
This is somewhat tangential, but related: if you are savvy enough to setup some self-hosted apps, I have used FreshRSS (along with some related extensions/plugins) to great effect in an effort to remove the direct influence of algorithms and endless scrolling.

With some tweaks, I can even use it to maintain subscriptions to YouTube channels and social media feeds. It’s maybe a subtle distinction, but I feel like having a very prosaic, chronological list of posts/articles/videos promotes healthier habits for consuming them.
by wslh | 2025-07-16 19:58:39+00:00
YMMV, but in my experience, Python's top use cases tend to require fewer dependencies, not more. Many trivial tasks are already built into the language. Not saying Python is perfect, but it's definitely well-oriented in that regard. I'm curious in what kinds of use cases have you found the opposite to be true?

I think the classic Python vs. Perl question ultimately comes down to using what you feel most comfortable with. People are different, and that's totally fine.
by AstralStorm | 2025-07-16 19:58:49+00:00
In personal experience, the much stronger and composite type model in Rust makes it easier to refactor.

Adding features in particular is a breeze and automatically the compiler/language will track for you the places that use only old set of traits.

Tooling is still newer though and needs polish. Generic handling is interesting at times and there are related missing features for that in the language, vis a vis specializations in particular.

Basic concurrency handling is also quite different in Rust than other languages, but thus usually safer.
by colordrops | 2025-07-16 19:59:14+00:00
Thats absurd. There is no inherently positive or negative connotation to religious symbolism. It happens everywhere, in paintings, books, movies, logos. It's fine, and there's nothing wrong with it. If your mind goes to dark places then that's your problem. I prefer to cut off dialog when problems actually arise, rather than in anticipation of hallucinated problems, Mr. Green Name.
Promptbio.ai – GenAI-Powered Biological Data Analysis
by PromptBio | 2025-07-16 19:59:15+00:00
We're launching PromptBio.ai — a conversational platform that makes biological data analysis easy, scalable, and reproducible for both bioinformaticians and wet-lab scientists.

What it offers: -Natural language–driven data processing -Accessible to experts and non-experts -Industrial-grade, cost-effective workflows

We’re inviting beta testers from academia and industry to help shape the platform.

Try it out: https://platform.promptbio.ai/register

White paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.05.663295v1.article-metrics

Join our Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/promptbio-beta/shared_invite/zt-39mzb8ixc-ejA_lwNBN8K1bQdzwx5a0Q

Team PromptBio
by code_biologist | 2025-07-16 19:59:43+00:00
Right, so latent deceptiveness has to be favored in pretraining / RL. To that end, it needs to be: a) useful to be deceptive to achieve CoT reasoning progress as benchmarked in training b) obvious deceptiveness should be "selected against" (in a gradient descent / RL sense) c) the model needs to be able to encode latent deception.

All of those seem like very reasonable criteria that will naturally be satisfied absent careful design by model creators. We should expect latent deceptiveness in the same way we see reasoning laziness pop up quickly.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-07-16 19:59:43+00:00
> The way that Cloudflare manages service topologies has been refined over time and currently consist of a combination of a legacy and a strategic system that are synced.

This writing is just brilliant. Clear to technical and non-technical readers. Makes the in-progress migration sound way more exciting than it probably is!

> We are sorry for the disruption this incident caused for our customers. We are actively making these improvements to ensure improved stability moving forward and to prevent this problem from happening again.

This is about as good as you can get it from a company as serious and important as Cloudflare. Bravo to the writers and vetters for not watering this down.
by ackfoobar | 2025-07-16 19:59:54+00:00
> imperative based build systems (Gradle, Ant, now Mill)

Build code in Mill is pretty declarative. You're using the word to mean "not 'pure, serialized data'".

> IDEs cannot read imperative statemetns

They can, however, run the code to dump the structure.

It's easy for code to embed pure data; on the flip side it's hard to encode behaviour in serialized data. More often than custom Maven plugins I see people just drop down to using shell.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-16 19:59:58+00:00
I guess that’s true.

Random funny story (presented with a devious agenda of course)—I tutored folks in an “math for non-stem majors” sort of math class in college. I was pretty good at it generally (I think as an engineering student I was closer to their material than the math students, who’d all long ago moved on to the big-brain stuff). But at some point they started asking about foils, which was pretty confusing (they weren’t looking for anachronistically named projector slides, challenging me to a duel, or preserving their lunch). It turns out FOIL is a mnemonic for applying the distributive property twice, which I’d never seen, having just remembered the underlying thing directly.

I wonder if these college English students have similarly forgotten some names? I guess that’s sort of a long shot. I do think memorization of facts should be avoided, though, whenever it is possible to instead integrate the underlying principle into your mental model instead.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-07-16 20:00:11+00:00
What other MCP-compatible tools are people using to ship/deploy software? Is there anything AWS-compatible that people like/use? Something for self-hosters? Anyone letting their agents ssh into machines..?

I suppose that most deployment/devops is done using existing git push workflows and IaaC. Has anyone had good experience with LLM/agent-compatible tools?
by saltcured | 2025-07-16 20:00:36+00:00
I skimmed the article and the comments. Nobody seems to speak about the main reality here. The limited dynamic range of audio reproduction means that Hollywood has to stylize everything. The lighting and color mapping are by no means realistic in the imagery either, for similar reasons.

So, it's a bit like complaining that tinted windows work better to reduce sunlight on TV than in real life. Or conversely that people whispering in the movies are way too loud, since you shouldn't be able to hear it all the way at the back of the crowded theater.

Also, sound effects are very stereotyped in the media. They are nearly a symbolic code, not realism. Hollywood shoes don't sound like shoes. Hollywood beverages don't sound like beverages. Hollywood clothes don't sound like clothes. Hollywood sex doesn't sound like sex.

Also, these conventions were being established for worse sound systems in old theaters, TV, etc. You cannot reproduce actual gunshot sound experiences in a movie. They are already "silenced" just to fit into the playback environment. So what else can you do to portray a suppressed weapon after that? Of course, you'll need to reduce it even further to make it unambiguously different.

Edit to add: I recall how Dirty Harry's magnum got what seemed like a new sound effect at the time. Not only is the sound smeared out in time, it has a ragged edge like a clipped signal. It is reminiscent of the recorded sounds of space launches that were culturally widespread by then from the Apollo program.