MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kkfx | 2025-07-19 19:49:54+00:00
The real problem is average mentality: many here for instance still want paper mail, the office, some also on call from home dress with suit and tie, complete with tie clip and shoes, in their own home! Efficiency is an oxymoron for them, being disorganized and pretend the contrary sticking to mere apparent organization is normal thing. Learning organizations? Most are still at Taylor-Weber-Fayol models...

There is a deep social fracture between "the old dying cohort" and a new cohort still struggling to emerge and still without a clear shape. The result is full-quite-quitting mode and sub-par performances on anything with entrepreneurs playing the old https://i.ibb.co/gdTBXT0/Corp-Whining-Hist.jpg deepening the fracture.
by saghm | 2025-07-19 19:49:59+00:00
That's a good point. When something is within the usual for someone's experience, it's not going to be as obvious, so it becomes the baseline that's used to compare other things to. For stuff like religion, it's easy to assume that your amount is normal, and having more (if you don't feel like you have much) or less (if you do feel like you have a lot) is unusual.

I don't have any experience living outside of the northeast (although not New England specifically since high school), but I definitely agree that there's certainly more religion in New England than might be obvious from the outside (more Catholic than the rest of the country, which also might explain some of the differences).
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-07-19 19:50:16+00:00
The most useful frame here is looking at log odds. Going from 15% -> 16% means

-log_2(.15/(1-.15)) -> -log_2(.16/1-.16))

=

2.5 -> 2.39

So saying 16% instead of 15% implies an additional tenth of a bit of evidence in favor (alternatively, 16/15 ~= 1.07 ~= 2^.1).

I don't know if I can weigh in on whether humans should drop a tenth of a bit of evidence to make their conclusion seem less confident. In software (eg. spam detector), dropping that much information to make the conclusion more presentable would probably be a mistake.
by asdff | 2025-07-19 19:50:41+00:00
> drive thrashing I heard at the time was swapping rather than just normal code compilation.

Funny how that was such a signal back then. Did the program crash? Lets listen. No, I can still hear it, its just taking its time. I'm not sure how long it took for me to realize the noise was coming from the drives and that wasn't the sound a cpu under load makes. Maybe a cpu under load noise (or an increasing brightness light) would actually be useful in some contexts: no need to hop on and run htop just look from across the room.
by rolph | 2025-07-19 19:50:53+00:00
the dose makes the poison

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison

warfarin, in prescribed quantities, allows a patient to contiue life, with minimization of select morbidity. warfarin also has the potential to induce uncontrolled haemorage at doses higher than therepeutic.

many classic drugs are available for use as chemo/bioweapons, the difference is intent. there has to be a titration for intent, and there is when you order chemicals, or reagents, or an odd collection of houseware and cleaning substances due to KYC and SSSS.

how do we do KYC & SSSS with AI prompts and actions.
by lucianbr | 2025-07-19 19:51:22+00:00
Is there some database where you can see predictions of different people and the results? Or are we supposed to rely on them keeping track and keeping themselves honest? Because that is not something humans do generally, and I have no reason to trust any of these 'rationalists'.

This sounds like a circular argument. You started explaining why them giving percentage predictions should make them more trustworthy, but when looking into the details, I seem to come back to 'just trust them'.
by mcswell | 2025-07-19 19:52:07+00:00
I guess this is not directly related, but I worked on a modified DocBook XML schema for some years. We were writing grammars of natural languages, so we had no use for some of the DocBook constructs, and needed to add others. That wasn't hard. And there are WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) editors, like XMLmind, which read the schema and helped you create conforming documents.

There are at least two ways to get from such an XML document to a PDF; we used pdfLaTeX, modified to handle our extra constructs, and then XeLaTeX.

I won't say it was a simple toolpath, but it allowed us to do at least two things that would have been difficult with Word or OpenOffice:

(1) It gave us an archival XML format, which will probably be readable and understandable for centuries. For grammars of endangered languages, that's important, because the languages won't be around more than a couple decades.

(2) It gave us the ability to cleanly typeset documents that had multiple scripts (including both Roman and various right-to-left scripts, like Arabic and Thaana).
by piva00 | 2025-07-19 19:52:30+00:00
> $5 for that comment lol.

I live in Sweden so kinda couldn't care much less about it, lol.

Over here drinking and driving is not tolerated, no amount is considered safe exactly because giving any leeway lets a lot of people to think "I'm not incapacitated enough to not drive", killing people. It's shameful to drunk drive here, glad our traffic is not murderous like yours.

> But hey, who cares about facts?

Looks like you, since the fact was she was drunk driving by legal definition.
by somat | 2025-07-19 19:52:57+00:00
Ehhh, My experience is the opposite(perhaps it is what you buy) manufacturers hate dealing with the end customer directly, customer-service is huge pain and not part of their core competence. So the manufacturer always goes through resellers, distributors, middle-men.

Personally I hate it, I would love to buy directly from the manufacturer instead of playing roulette with the distributor.
by pnw | 2025-07-19 19:52:58+00:00
https://www.restsensor.com/ is the new name for https://noiseaware.com. They got started making a 'noisy party' sensor that is monitoring the audio in your hotel room or AirBNB. You can see the Noiseaware branding on the sensor in that X thread.

So it's not just a $500 scam, it's also a privacy issue. I had no idea these audio sensors were even a thing.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-07-19 19:52:59+00:00
Red flag for what?

A regular purchaser of adult entertainment almost certainly has enough cash flow to pay their bills. And they'll have a hard time claiming it's not them when it matches their previous activity. Having an interest in sex doesn't in the slightest suggest a person is bad--if anything, the apparent lack of interest would be more worrisome. (Not that purchase history can be used to discern this.) Some of the ones who don't are asexuals, but some are those who are repressing their sexuality--and that's more likely to show up in unacceptable ways.

A first time purchaser of adult entertainment is another matter--that's going to have a lot of spouse-found-out chargebacks.
by mirashii | 2025-07-19 19:54:17+00:00
> For the disjoint field issues raised, it’s not that the borrow checker can’t “reason across functions,” it’s that the field borrows are done through getter functions which themselves borrow the whole struct mutably

Right, and even more to the point, there's another important property of Rust at play here: a function's signature should be the only thing necessary to typecheck the program; changes in the body of a function should not cause a caller to fail. This is why you can't infer types in function signatures and a variety of other restrictions.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-19 19:54:22+00:00
> This wasn't the first stop sign the driver encountered in the Tesla

If the Tesla just blew a stop sign there wouldn’t be a suit.

My Subaru has collision avoidance. It markets this, albeit somewhat carefully. If the collision detection-and-avoidance system straight up didn’t work, and I got injured in an accident because of it, I’d hold both the driver and Subaru responsible. Because they sold me a thing that they claimed would do something it didn’t.

Tesla’s collision-avoidance system was marketed as an autopilot that didn’t need human supervision except for legal reasons. It didn’t work. And it failed in a way cars with collision-avoidance radars probable wouldn’t have.
by drweevil | 2025-07-19 19:54:51+00:00
That is indeed the crux of it. If you write me an inane email, it’s still you, and it tells me something about you. If you send me the output of some AI, have I learned anything? Has anything been communicated? I simply can’t know. It reminds me a bit of the classic philosophical thought experiment "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Hence the waste of time the author alludes to. The only comparison to email that makes any sense in this case are the senseless chain mails people used to forward endlessly. They have that same quality.
by FakeFind_ai | 2025-07-19 19:54:51+00:00
Lately I’ve noticed a disturbing pattern: highly rated Amazon products turning out to be absolute junk. I did some digging and realized just how deep the fake review problem runs. Between review farms, AI-generated praise, and sellers hijacking old listings, it’s getting harder to know what’s real.

Fakespot was a solid tool to catch this, but it shut down. So I built FakeFind — a lightweight, AI-powered Amazon review checker that scans a product’s reviews and gives you a trust score (1–10). It detects patterns like mass 5-star floods, vague language, and suspicious reviewer behavior.

Even if you don’t try the tool, I’m genuinely curious: How do you decide what reviews to trust now? Have you ever been scammed by a product with “great” reviews? https://fakefind.ai
by anthk | 2025-07-19 19:54:51+00:00
Once you got a svgalib image viewer, it didn't really matter a lot.

For newcomers, a similar experience would be using the framebuffer and running slrn against the NNTP servers from https://www.eternal-september.org, using IRC (still alive too) and using trickle to throttle down your connection to 56k or ISDN speeds if you were lucky.

Oh, an MUDs, of course.

Today you can get a similar feeling with http://wiby.me with tons of personal sites.
by johnklos | 2025-07-19 19:54:53+00:00
This seems wrong for several reasons:

* Collecting all sorts of telemetry has never been done for altruistic reasons by large tech companies.

* The value of an HP over an Apple is that the HP are supposed to be upgradable, so will HP start monitoring all the replaced parts of machines, too?

* HP has a multi-decade history of not being able to maintain a single URL for long term. I bet the only URL that hasn't changed from the '90s is "http://www.hp.com/". We're suppoed to believe that HP will maintain a customer facing system for more than a couple of machine lifecycles?

This is just an attempt to exfiltrate all sorts of data.
by int_19h | 2025-07-19 19:55:08+00:00
This is like the inverse of the normal C++ vtable. Normally the whole point of having a separate vtable (as opposed to just a bunch of function pointers directly in the struct) is so that you can share a single one between all instances, at the cost of one extra indirection. But here a copy of the vtable is instead attached to one individual instance, and yet it still does this one extra indirection to get to the implementation object.
by blub | 2025-07-19 19:55:28+00:00
Here’s a nice history of the decades old relationship: https://www.dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-5...

It was a major success, contributing to the thawing of relationships with the Soviet Union and probably contributed to the peaceful end of the Soviet Union. It supported several EU countries through their economic development and kept the EU afloat through the financial crisis.

It was a very important source of energy and there is no replacement. This can be seen by the flight of capital, deindustrialisation and poor economic prospects in Germany and the EU.

But as far as I know, many countries still import energy from Russia, either directly or laundered through third parties.
by raekk | 2025-07-19 19:55:38+00:00
Let's take it further: That atmosphere of wastefulness not only concerns bandwidth and energy use but also architectural decisions. There's technology that punches far above its weight class in terms of efficiency and there's the opposite. It seems like a collective form of learned helplessness, on both sides, the vendors and users. IMHO, the only real reason for slow, JavaScript-heavy sites is surveillance and detailed, distributed profiling of users. The other would be animated UI giving dopamine hits, but that could totally be confined to entertainment and shouldn't be a cue for "quality" software.
by lowbloodsugar | 2025-07-19 19:55:40+00:00
>Asynchrony: the possibility for tasks to run out of order and still be correct.

This is simply wrong. Asynchrony makes no claims about two unrelated tasks, so “order” here is irrelevant and in terms of each task, again, we expect the executions of a given task to be in order. So this statement cannot be true under either interpretation.

There’s lots more wrong with the article as you would expect when the starting premise is wrong.
by majormajor | 2025-07-19 19:55:43+00:00
> But, no one really wants to follow that to the logical conclusion of spending all possible dollars on marketing.

Sure, just like nobody wants to spend all possible dollars on rent.

But outside of "we just can't afford it anymore" external economic factors shocking the system, the natural incentives point to a slow and constant ratcheting up.

IMO this would be a good reason to have further regulations on advertising - locations, frequency, accuracy - since we're gonna be saturated with it otherwise.
by chamomeal | 2025-07-19 19:55:50+00:00
I also am enjoying LLMs, but I get no joy out of just prompting them again and again. I get so incredibly bored, with a little side of anxiety that I don’t really know how my program works.

I’ll probably get over it, but I’ve been realizing how much fun I get out building something as opposed to just having be built. I used to think all I cared about was results, and now I know that’s not true, so that’s fun!

Of course for the monotonous stuff that I’ve done before or don’t care a lick about, hell yeah I let em run wild. Boilerplate, crud, shell scripts, CSS. Had claude make me a terminal based version of snake. So sick
by Arathorn | 2025-07-19 19:56:13+00:00
It’s depressing to hear that you’ve given up on Element X, given that’s where all the work has been going, including ensuring the encryption is rock solid. Element Call is still webrtc; the fact it’s direct calling to a SFU rather than needing TURN for firewall traversal should be a good thing. How did you try to set it up? I did a basic walk through at https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo in case that helps.
by famouswaffles | 2025-07-19 19:56:18+00:00
From Noam Brown

https://x.com/polynoamial/status/1946478258968531288

"When you work at a frontier lab, you usually know where frontier capabilities are months before anyone else. But this result is brand new, using recently developed techniques. It was a surprise even to many researchers at OpenAI. Today, everyone gets to see where the frontier is."

and

"This was a small team effort led by @alexwei_ . He took a research idea few believed in and used it to achieve a result fewer thought possible. This also wouldn’t be possible without years of research+engineering from many at @OpenAI and the wider AI community."
by PaulRobinson | 2025-07-19 19:56:43+00:00
I worked for an ISP (Telinco/Northwest Net), that was a whitelabeller - two weeks before Freeserve launched in 1998 with no monthly fee and was paid for through 0845 chargeback, we launched Connect Free on the same premise, and then whitelabelled it - Totalise, Currant Bun (which was from the Sun newspaper - a newspaper had its own ISP!), and others. Eventually that firm became World Online and then Tiscali and today it's all TalkTalk.

The Summer before we did that, we had like, 2000 customers. Couple of small modem banks. A few racks of servers, which provided SMTP, POP3 (we weren't at IMAP yet), DNS, some webspace. We had a Usenet feed which was basically a cache from upstream, but those days were starting to look numbered. We also offered some gaming servers - Quake and the like.

I built the signup scripts which would also provision email addresses and webspace, and also get you hooked up on the RADIUS servers so you could dial in.

When the decision was made to go 0845, most of the team quit. There was basically like 3 of us left. And we needed to buy £500k of server parts and build them, get BSD installed and provisioned to do everything it needed, rebuild the RADIUS stack, provision a load of new bandwidth (we once diagnosed a rising packet error rate on a microwave link by noting the tree over the road had come into leaf, which we then fixed with a stepladder and a saw to deal with the specific problematic branch), all while just living Summer vibes.

We ended up buying a repossessed DMS100 switch to handle the phone lines, a ton of Nortel CVX1800s, figure out how to become a proper AS and get a BGP router sorted, and all while working from a portacabin in a car park next to the Cheshire farmhouse which acted as our data centre, which had such poor air con, at the start the ambient temperature regularly hit 45C.

Exhilarating. Genuinely, one of the best times of my professional life.

We worked so hard. We wouldn't get in until about 10am, but would then work to about 6-7pm, then head into the nearest major city where most of us lived (Manchester), go to the pub for a few hours and figure out what we were going to do the next day, and then go back and do it all again.

Being part of that movement where we went from ~2000 people paying £10/month to around 750,000 people dialling in whenever they felt like accessing the internet and providing exemplary service (our callout/support structure was based on us being benchmarked against Demon, Pipex, Freeserve, and so on, and we had to beat them on everything from modem negotiation time, DNS response, bandwidth, everything), and kind of seeing the start of the Internet becoming a popular thing in the UK was wonderful.

I met up with one of my ex-colleagues from that Summer this Spring, and we were talking about how much we would love to have that feeling once more.

It'll never happen, but wow, what a time.
by kkfx | 2025-07-19 19:56:50+00:00
I think most fails to understand a thing: stablecoins are not "quick and simple eCash-alike", they are a way to re-dollarize the world migrating the power from traditional bankers to new ones. That's the end of the wild west. The end of the classic banking system to be substituted with another one, equally shaped and harmful.

The banking world have state that in 2019 https://web.archive.org/web/20240213185758/https://www.cimb.... and now it's just another small win of the new banksters...
by umanwizard | 2025-07-19 19:56:58+00:00
IMO, it is reasonable that in the example given:

struct Point { x: f64, y: f64, } impl Point { fn x_mut(&mut self) -> &mut f64 { &mut self.x } fn y_mut(&mut self) -> &mut f64 { &mut self.y } }

the returned references are, for the purposes of aliasing rules, references to the entire struct rather than to pieces of it. `x` and `y` are implementation details of the struct and not part of its public API. Yes, this is occasionally annoying but I think the inverse (the borrow checker looking into the implementations of functions, rather than their signature, and reasoning about private API details) would be more confusing.

I also disagree with the author that his rejected code:

fn main() { let mut point = Point { x: 1.0, y: 2.0 }; let x_ref = point.x_mut(); let y_ref = point.y_mut(); *x_ref *= 2.0; *y_ref *= 2.0; }

"doesn't even violate the spirit of Rust's ownership rules."

I think the spirit of Rust's ownership rules is quite clear that when calling a function whose signature is

fn f<'a>(param: &'a mut T1) -> &'a mut T2;

`param` is "locked" (i.e., no other references to it may exist) for the lifetime of the return value. This is clear once you start to think of Rust borrow-checking as compile-time reader-writer locks.

This is often necessary for correctness (because there are many scenarios where you need to be guaranteed exclusive access to an object beyond just wanting to satisfy the LLVM "noalias" rules) and is not just an implementation detail: the language would be fundamentally different if instead the borrow checker tried to loosen this requirement as much as it could while still respecting the aliasing rules at a per-field level.
Show HN: MatchmakingEx – A matchmaking system, built on Elixir OTP principles
by matheusosan | 2025-07-19 19:57:10+00:00
A real-time matchmaking system, built with Elixir and focused on high-performance, scalability, and massive concurrency. Its main goal is to group users with compatible profiles or criteria, forming pairs or groups automatically based on configurable rules.
by majormajor | 2025-07-19 19:57:16+00:00
Similar-looking effects are not the "same" effect.

"Change always triggers backlash" does not imply "all backlash is unwarranted."

> What will matter is the message or idea you're communicating. Just like today, it doesn't matter if the code is yours, only the product you're shipping and problem it's solving.

But like the article explains about why it's rude: the less thought you put into it, the less chance the message is well communicated. The less thought you put into the code you ship, the less chance it will solve the problem reliably and consistently.

You aren't replying to "don't use LLM tools" you're replying to "don't just trust and forward their slop blindly."
by mystraline | 2025-07-19 19:57:20+00:00
We had a variation on this discussion a few days ago here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44591820

I discussed that their primary server had a child porn/child sex assault imagery problem. Others who had similar concerns were completely dismissed and attacked by the Element/Matrix admins.

I have to agree with this article. Matrix is basically dead, and not worth keeping around. And it starves the open source ecosystem from better things taking hold.
by consumer451 | 2025-07-19 19:57:22+00:00
The good thing about science is that it doesn’t depend on trusting any one person or institution, it depends on a process designed to catch bias and error.

Scientists don’t just publish opinions. Well, they can, but we generally call these people crackpots. However, in modern times they do financially well on YouTube and podcasts. Scientists test ideas through predictions and experiments, share their data and methods, and other scientists try to reproduce the results. If findings can’t be repeated, they’re usually rejected. Over time, only the most reliable results hold up.

Yes, funding and politics can influence science, on all sides. But the scientific system has: peer review, conflict-of-interest disclosures, reproducibility, and open data. These are not perfect, but they make science far more reliable than all other known systems.

What I believe is a continuation of how we built our modern civilization, since the time of Newton, and earlier. I cannot personally audit all of science, so instead I rely on the scientific method, which is the best system (warts and all) that we have yet found to discover the base truth.
by IshKebab | 2025-07-19 19:59:20+00:00
This post pretty much completely ignores the advantages of the borrow checker. I'm not talking about memory safety, which is it's original purpose. I'm talking about the fact that code that follows Rust's tree-style ownership pattern and doesn't excessively circumvent the borrow checker is more likely to be correct.

I don't think that was ever the intent behind the borrow checker but it is definitely an outcome.

So yes, the borrow checker makes some code more awkward than it would be in GC languages, but the benefits are easily worth it and they stretch far beyond memory safety.