MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-07-09 21:58:58+00:00
The behavior depicted in Silicon Valley is (a humorous exaggeration of) the real response to California's prohibition on noncompetes. You can't force your employees not to jump ship, so instead, you pay them not to. Continuously, and competitively. At any time, said workers are free to go work for your competitors, so you need to actually compete to keep them, even if your only interest in them is having them not working on anything important.

This is why Google has a dozen different applications that all do the same thing. Google didn't want high-level talent competing with them, so they just hired as many of the top developers as they could, and then paid them enough for them to be content working on miscellany.
by larkost | 2025-07-09 21:59:54+00:00
Can you provide more about this idea? I see the Boring company as being pretty feckless, and at the same time extremely boastful. They have gotten hopes up in a number of places about solving city traffic problems, only to go dark when the rubber (should have) met the road.

But I don't see any of those having impacted the California High Speed Rail. Rather that has been harmed by lots of different groups throwing roadblocks up, sometime for ideological reasons (lots of this from State and National Republicans, sometimes with reasons, but often more political), and a whole lot of NIMBY (see: Palo Alto). What do you see the Boring Company having to do with that?

As a side note: there are some really poorly thought through parts of the project, for example they don't have a plan for actually making it over the mountains into Los Angeles. I still want it to happen, but...
by const_cast | 2025-07-09 22:02:07+00:00
Frankly I think people are going to be mad at Mozilla no matter what, and at this point I treat the discourse like a psyop.

Does Mozilla make mistakes? Of course. But when their competitors, Chrome, make the same mistakes but orders of magnitude worse, and nobody says anything, I can't take it seriously.

Does Mozilla disrespect their users? A bit, sometimes, in specific circumstances. Google's entire business model is disrespecting their users. So, if that's your gauge, then you're actually arguing in favor of Firefox. Same thing goes for ads. Same things go for shady payments.

This is not to say that we shouldn't critique Mozilla or Firefox. We should. But, I can't help but feel that the critique is disproportionate. And, it makes me wonder how much of it is critique, and how much of it is suspicious praise towards Google.

It's this sort of expectation problem. Maybe there's a word for it. But, since Google has shown so much bad behavior, they've set that expectation for themselves. And now, they're off the hook. They're playing a different game all together. Mozilla has one set of standards, and Chrome has another.

In this universe, Mozilla is a PhD student and Chrome is a toddler. We don't knock the toddler for shitting their pants because it's what we expect. And, we certainly wouldn't expect the toddler to construct a bibliography!
by 74B5 | 2025-07-09 22:03:04+00:00
And then eventually, water seeps in. Like in the german Asse II mine, that is planned to be evacuated, which will be a major challenge.

https://www.bge.de/en/asse/short-information/history-of-the-...

It might be true that nuclear power produces less waste but we have to consider the scales of global energy demand, multiply it by the time scales of nuclear waste to reach what threshold exactly? When and how would nuclear waste become a problem. Would it take ~200 years like the industrial revolution with CO2? Would it be okay if it where 300 years? or 500? What do we do, when background radiation is rising from ground water and soil? Switch back to natural instead of green energy, hoping the next millenias will be fine?

I dont think nuclear power is a solution. It can be step in an energy transition strategy, but no solution.
by kulahan | 2025-07-09 22:03:15+00:00
The enthusiasm is very easy to understand.

Solar: needs unforeseen advances in energy storage tech, also hilariously inefficient

Geothermal: regionally locked

Wind: unpredictable

Hydro: all the good spots are already being used

Coal/oil/gas: too dirty

Nuclear faces none of these problems. It’s a big project at the moment, because SMRs aren’t developed (yet?), but the actual operation and output is unbelievably steady. Newer designs are mostly about mega-safety, and more people getting over Chernobyl can help drive funding to potentially reach fusion - the obvious holy grail. I literally cannot even imagine what you think is more viable?
by weird-eye-issue | 2025-07-09 22:03:54+00:00
Great so your experiment just consisted of having an LLM hallucinate

That's not really an experiment is it? You basically just used them to create a hypothesis but you never actually proved anything

They're great at writing text and code so the fact that the other LLM was able to use that syntax to presumably write code that worked (which you had no way of proving since you can't actually run that code) doesn't really mean anything

It would be similar to having it respond in a certain JSON format, they are great at that too. Doesn't really translate to a real world codebase
by oconnor663 | 2025-07-09 22:04:35+00:00
Here's another data point: https://lobste.rs/s/yubalv/pointers_are_complicated_ii_we_ne...

> I spoke to Apple folks when their compiler team switched the default to strict aliasing. They reported that it made key workloads 5-10% faster and the fixes were much easier to do and upstream than I would have expected. My view of -fstrict-aliasing at the time was that it was a flag that let you generate incorrect code that ran slightly faster. They had actual data that convinced me otherwise.
by beAbU | 2025-07-09 22:04:48+00:00
Ireland has citizens' assemblies, which is something along these lines.

100 citizens are chosen at random to advise government on certain things every now and then.

Theres some noise in news sources now calling for the next president to be elected via lottery as well. Note the Irish president is mostly ceremonial, and nothing like the democratic dictatorship in the US.
by lr4444lr | 2025-07-09 22:05:20+00:00
The parental part bears special mention.

My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa. I'd like to think it's not that my kids are poorly socialized or misbehave - they've always received glowing reports at school. I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents, and there is also a class list where our phone numbers are listed (and where we find these other parents' contact info).

Something happened with the culture of getting kids to play with each other outside of school hours, and I don't know what it was. COVID lockdowns definitely delayed it from starting for our kids, but I know these parents are mostly in my generation, and we certainly played more together.

We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were better. When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.

Kids having regular playdates would encourage more familiarity among the families and trust in letting kids play unsupervised with each other. Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.
by jiggawatts | 2025-07-09 22:05:30+00:00
It's a waste of time. These arguments always boil down to some "mysterious soul that only biological brains possess". It's theistic nonsense.

Even if current LLM architectures can't get to AGI, which I will believe, there's no coherent argument that can be made that there is no possible path to AGI with digital computers.

It could be as simple as simulating the top-to-bottom biology of a human brain! That's possible, just wildly impractical, so any arguments based on abstractions like logic, mathematics, physics, etc... go right out the window. They're obviously invalid. Only practical engineering arguments can possibly be valid.

"It's impossible for heavier-than-air objects to fly!"

"Look up. What's that?"

"A bird!"

"You're not every bright, are you?"
by shkkmo | 2025-07-09 22:05:47+00:00
The exclusion of patterns that involve more than 2 numbers is a pretty huge caveat that should be mentioned earlier and more clearly. When I was playing a lot of minesweeper, larger levels tended to require solving larger patterns most of the time. If you exclude those solutions, your estimate of how often you are required to guess is going to be pretty inaccurate.
by sophacles | 2025-07-09 22:05:55+00:00
American white supremacists can't figure out a definition of "white". I doubt anyone will ever get a handle on it.

(e.g. do you include Italians? Jewish people? What about Turks or Armenians? Eastern Europeans? There's all sorts of disagreements about what "white" is in the most racist groups out there... because the whole concept is fucking stupid).
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-09 22:06:11+00:00
My grandma was the head of the local Air Force wives' club. Their house was always stocked like a full bar and at least several people stopped by for a visit just about every day. They knew at least 10 of their neighbors well, and some former neighbors too.

Find me community like this anywhere in America these days. Immigrant communities perhaps? Most Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.
by sleepyguy | 2025-07-09 22:06:51+00:00
What good are emergency plans if the state fails to warn anyone? The article neglects to mention that the one camp that did evacuate did so only because the people in charge were alert and watching the weather reports on the news. They made it clear they received no warning from the state.

Never in the state's history has there been a more incompetent government than the one in place now. Dan Patrick is focused on cracking down on CBD to benefit his liquor industry friends, while Abbott seems interested only in doing favors for his friends in Oil and Gas and the power business. No one appears to be serving the public anymore. Even Ted "vacation" Cruz is gone as often as possible and barely shows up.

Texas is what happens to a great state when shitty and corrupt people are in charge.
by H8crilA | 2025-07-09 22:07:15+00:00
I am a nuclear fanboy not because it promises technological breakthroughs (like you wrote, there probably won't be many or even any), but because there just isn't any other option that can deliver continuous power without messing up the climate. I want it to happen even if it slightly increases my power bill or my taxes. And as far as I understand the increase would be slight, if any at all. I am an even bigger fan of solar power, but are we really going to have enough battery capacity to reliably run entire countries?
by mlyle | 2025-07-09 22:08:52+00:00
Eh, I don't think I agree. Let's talk about the long-lived isotopes: Pu-239 and Pu-242.

Significant inhaled Pu-239 has a fair risk of causing cancer even after a long time. However mercury is volatile and it's a lot easier to end up inhaling fumes.

And mercury is absorbed well through ingestion and Pu isn't, and most of the risk after ingestion would be chemical, not radiological. From that standpoint, it's looking a lot better than other heavy metals.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-09 22:08:55+00:00
>With COVID partying meant that someone could kill you with an illness.

Given the mortality rate for people typically in the partying age group (and especially those under 30), you were more likely to die in a traffic accident on your way to or back from the party, or from alcohol poisoning, than from a case of COVID acquired there. Let's not exaggerate.

From the NIH: The median IFR for COVID based on age groups: 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years.

The 1918 Flu it was certainly not.
by ryao | 2025-07-09 22:09:03+00:00
The chart labeled Percent Decline in Hours Spent Attending or Hosting Social Event by Age 2003 - 2024 seems to be a bad way of view thing the data since it assumes that there is an inherit difference on how people approach this based on arbitrary age groups. Having it be by birth year would be better, since it would reflect how the people in question’s habits are changing over time.

That said, party culture had been excessive in the past and it was impoverishing to many people. I and others my age more wisely do without, which leaves us with money for things that are more important than one offs.
by sneak | 2025-07-09 22:09:14+00:00
The US used to be run by people with the ability to think strategically, or by people who listened to educated people who could think strategically. The current US leadership either allows or endorses the capricious whims of an TV-educated idiot to consistently undermine national security and the most fundamental national interests. The complete and total mismanagement of the covid pandemic stands as a perfect example of the scale of the positively massive amount of preventable destruction being wrought presently. That’s just one out of many.

Hard to build high level stuff while the cities are flooding or burning, measles are spreading, the food is becoming toxic, the water is becoming undrinkable, out of control rogue agencies are kidnapping people indiscriminately off the streets, the literacy levels are falling precipitously, and a greater and greater percentage of the population struggles to buy food, much less healthcare or secondary education (or a useful primary education). You simply won’t have the talent pools required to do hard things at scale after a while. This is to say nothing of the complete unpredictability of the economics of supply chains, as incoherent economic policies are arbitrarily whipsawing tariffs around on a monthly basis. It becomes impossible to plan a year in advance.

You need some basic levels of functioning society and infrastructure and economy to build advanced institutions and structures and companies and technology. The US has been attacking its own society’s foundations for decades, and has recently accelerated the pace substantially.

I personally anticipate civil breakdown within a generation, certainly not continued technological innovation.
by martinald | 2025-07-09 22:09:43+00:00
AFIAK you can upload any bitrate to youtube as long as the file is <256GB.

So you could upload a crazy high bitrate file to them for a 20 min video which I suspect would be close to "raw" quality.

I don't know how many corners youtube cut on encoding though.

I suspect most of the problem is people exporting 4k at a 'web' bitrate preset (15mbit/s?), which is actually gonna get murdered on the 2nd encode more than encoding quality on youtubes side?
by iosifache | 2025-07-09 22:10:06+00:00
I just provide a hammer. Users decide whether they're hitting their own nail or the metal one.

The comparison might be loose, but the problem is similar to releasing a browser. Do you prevent users from accessing websites you think are malicious or illegal? Or do you delegate that responsibility?

I was hesitant about releasing the MCP server as open source software, but I hope (1) it proves useful for others and (2) people understand that the authors of the books they're reading need money to eat, live, and support their families.
Telnyx launches built-in testing for AI Agents
by maevesentner | 2025-07-09 22:10:12+00:00
Telnyx just added built-in testing for AI Agents. You can now create test scenarios with input variables, run pass/fail checks, and validate your agent’s behavior before pushing to production. It’s a simple but powerful way to catch issues early and iterate faster on prompts, logic, and workflows.

More here: https://telnyx.com/release-notes/testing-ai-agents
by elashri | 2025-07-09 22:10:29+00:00
I do force all plain DNS on port 53 to my local dns (Adguard home + unbound on a gl-inet router). And I block common DoH addresses. There are many lists on Github. I collect them using github action to have one big list of their IP and addresses and block them.

This is not a bullet proof solution in case there is a semi known custom DoH an application use. But it is the best that I can do without Enterprise network gear and more complex setup that I would like to maintain.
Show HN: Interactive CV – Real-time resume editor with ATS-optimized templates
by AIHiredMe | 2025-07-09 22:10:32+00:00
Hi HN,

7 months ago I shared Interactive CV here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42361479 as a React learning project during paternity leave. Thanks to your feedback, it's evolved significantly.

The biggest change: rebuilt the editor for real-time editing. Had to switch from standard PDF libraries to react-pdf-renderer, which gave me plenty of headaches until I got live preview working smoothly. Worth it though.

Major updates since v1: - Real-time CV editor (no more clunky forms) - Six new ATS‑friendly templates - Improved AI job matching algorithm - Completely redesigned UX

The app now has usage limits (though you can try everything for free), but there's still a full demo on the landing page so you can test it without signing up.

Still solving the same problem: I got tired of spending hours tweaking my resume for different job applications. The workflow is much smoother now.

What would make this actually useful for your job search process?
by notepad0x90 | 2025-07-09 22:11:05+00:00
why? and why does it have to be a compromise?

You're assuming things because things are already done insecurely. You can authenticate the self-extractor as well as the extracted content. The user gets a nice message "This is a 7zip self-extracting archive sent to you by Bob containing the files below".

As an incident responder, I've seen much more of regular archives being used to social engineer users than self-extracting archives, because self-extracting is not "content executing". it is better for social engineering for users to establish trust in the payload first by having them manually open the archive. if something "weird" like self-extraction happens first, it might feel less trustworthy.

Oh and by the way, things like PyInstaller or electron apps are already self-extracting and self-executing archives. So are JAR files and android APK's.
by gerdesj | 2025-07-09 22:11:25+00:00
Its a trick one. Traditional DNS runs over port 53/udp and fails over to 53/tcp for large queries/results. That's easy to deal with on a packet filter firewall.

Then in the name of ... something, something, security ... DNS over http(s) was invented. Now you can balkanize DNS by requiring certain SSL certificates be involved. To my knowledge this hasn't been abused large scale yet but it could.

Let's go easy on the tinfoil and simply redirect outbound traffic to 53/udp and tcp to a PiHole or other DNS server under your control.

If you insist on the tin foil, you will probably need to look into a MitM proxy such as Squid - look into "bump" and "spice".
by api | 2025-07-09 22:11:38+00:00
It was already happening before COVID. All these trends were. That just made it worse.

A major issue is the death of independent child play. In a lot of places if a kid — and we are talking up to early teens — is unsupervised police will be called. It’s entirely the result of daytime TV and true crime making people think there are pedophile nuts hiding in every bush when in reality abductions by strangers are incredibly rare. If a kid is abused or worse it’s almost always someone they know.

One of the things I love about where we live is that kids do still play outside. It’s a safe Midwestern suburb. We moved from SoCal and there you would definitely have some busybody call the cops. Of course it was perhaps more dangerous — not because of crime but cars. All the suburban streets have like 60mph speed limits in SoCal.
by const_cast | 2025-07-09 22:12:07+00:00
> If your company information is so sensitive that losing a worker would leave you vulnerable, then the solution is to compensate that employee well enough that they don’t see the need to leave and take on that additional risk.

Yes, this is what I think people are missing: non-competes harm the free labor market.

Labor is a resource like any other, and as such there's a market. If the labor is highly valuable that means we should value it as such, in dollars. If we're not doing that then that means something is distorting or otherwise breaking the free market.

I would never expect to buy a car for 5,000 dollars. But, for some reason, with labor, everyone's expectations of how a market works suddenly need not apply. Why is that?

The problem is if we forcibly lower wages via non-competes then that harms the labor market as a whole. Yes, companies get to save a few bucks, but in exchange the expectations are broken. This is actually self-destructive. Why? Because companies, as much as labor, relies on those expectations. Now, you can't hire better workers for more money because we've detached monetary value from the actual value of labor. Oops! You want the best of the best? You can't do that do anymore.

On the surface, non-competes appear to benefit companies, but they don't. It's an illusion, and a seductive one.
by thethimble | 2025-07-09 22:12:23+00:00
What’s your take on Hickey’s talk titled “Maybe Not” which fundamentally criticizes static types? Is there a middle ground where some form of static typing makes sense in a Clojure-esque world?

https://youtu.be/YR5WdGrpoug?si=4mI8doBX6jj6PJkk
by goda90 | 2025-07-09 22:12:42+00:00
I generally understand dealing with an upset kid in public is hard and I sympathize. But I once had a red-eye flight where the kid was screaming for its daddy, who we later determined was on the flight just in a different row. We saw no indication the mother was actually trying to soothe the child, nor did she go get the father. We were not happy to start a vacation with such little sleep...
by mlyle | 2025-07-09 22:12:46+00:00
Yah-- nuclear isn't going to win on its own, but no one technology is going to get us out of this greenhouse gas mess.

We're going to need to electrify a lot of things to lower emissions. And electrifying things requires a big source of base load. Overbuilding renewables, adding storage, enlarging transmission/grids, and load shedding all help; but likely still fall short of the mark at a reasonable cost.

Nuclear is expensive, but it fills key gaps in other solutions and helps reduce overall system risk.
by _kst_ | 2025-07-09 22:13:18+00:00
Algol 60 also uses the word "call" for parameters as well as functions. It introduced (?) the terms "call by value" and "call by name". For example, in 4.7.5.3: "In addition if the formal parameter is called by value the local array created during the call will have the same. subscript bounds as the actual array."

In modern terminology, we call procedures/functions/subroutines and pass arguments/parameters, so "pass by (value|name|reference)" is clearer than "call by (value|name|reference)". But the old terms "call by value" et al have survived in some contexts, though the idea of "calling" an argument or parameter has not.
by 01100011 | 2025-07-09 22:15:11+00:00
My Southern California neighborhood used to be like this. It was a diverse neighborhood of white, Filipino, Viet and Mexicans and it felt alive. Then covid hit and the demographics changed. Prices went up. Now the neighborhood is as quiet at night as where I lived in the bay area a few years ago. No open garages. No music.

People are generally unfriendly now and keep to themselves more. Sad what we've lost. We're still an immigrant community but the immigrants are from different places. I'm sure they paid too much for their houses and feel the stress. There are also some obvious cultural differences with respect to socializing and partying.