MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: JavaScript-free (X)HTML Includes
by Evidlo | 2025-08-22 18:47:30+00:00
(spoiler: its XSLT)

I've been working on a little demo for how to avoid copy-pasting header/footer boilerplate on a simple static webpage. My goal is to approximate the experience of Jekyll/Hugo but eliminate the need for a build step before publishing. This demo shows how to get basic templating features with XSL so you could write a blog post which looks like

<?xml version="1.0"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="/template.xsl"?> <page> <title>My Article</title> <content> some content <ul> <li>hello</li> <li>hello</li> </ul> </content> </page>

Some properties which set this approach apart from other methods:

- no build step (no need to setup Jekyll on the client or configure Github/Gitlab actions) - works on any webserver (e.g. as opposed to server-side includes, actions) - normal looking URLs (e.g. `example.com/foobar` as opposed to `example.com/#page=foobar`)

There's been some talk about removing XSLT support from the HTML spec [0], so I figured I would show this proof of concept while it still works.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952185

See also: grug-brain XSLT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44393817
by gramie | 2025-08-22 18:47:35+00:00
Brian Kernighan wrote:

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

— The Elements of Programming Style, 2nd edition, chapter 2

So if vibe coding produces code that is as clever as -- or more clever than -- you, then you have no chance of debugging it.
by geerlingguy | 2025-08-22 18:47:46+00:00
Infinite Mac (https://infinitemac.org) is honestly incredible and gets you 99% of the way there for running old software for the nostalgia.

But there's definitely something fun about running the old hardware with an old spinning hard drive, clacking away while it boots up for 2-3 minutes.

And then launching Microsoft Word 5.1 and wondering if it locked up, while each toolbar loads in one by one!

Honestly though, if you just wanted to do word processing, it's fine for that, and with modern tools like FloppyEmu, BlueSCSI, and some of the networking hacks with modern cheap hardware, you can get one of these things to transfer files to and from a network share very easily.

I'm using a netatalk server on my Raspberry Pi to serve up Samba shares over AppleTalk. Very simple to do nowadays! https://github.com/geerlingguy/apple-pi
by AlienRobot | 2025-08-22 18:47:49+00:00
Cheats are why I stopped playing FPS's and only occasionally play Rocket League. I can't tell if I'm bad at the game or if everyone else is cheating. Half of the games on this list are FPS's.

I think the more important question isn't how you implement an anti-cheat, it's why some types of games attract cheaters.

When victory in a game isn't about strategy but just about how quickly you can click o character's head, and just by doing it once you win the game, that makes the whole game a clear target for cheating. Everyone cheats as the sniper, nobody cheats as the medic.

I think you could make an FPS that cheaters hate by designing it so that it requires at least 2 players to defeat a player on the opposite team, e.g. by giving everyone weapons of different type and needing two types to defeat an enemy.

I wonder if anti-cheating game design is a thing?
by meagher | 2025-08-22 18:48:00+00:00
This is great long term for having cars that follow traffic laws since human drivers in NYC are awful (kill/injure pedestrians, bikers, and other street users all the time).

Not so great for getting cars out of NYC and pedestrianizing more of the city/moving towards more “low traffic neighborhoods” as I imagine Waymo and other similar companies are going to fight against these efforts.

Edit: Lots of people talking about human drivers taking advantage of self-driving cars being more cautious/timid. Good news is that once you have enough self-driving cars on the road, it probably slows down/calms other traffic (see related research on speed governors).
by zywoo | 2025-08-22 18:48:18+00:00
I can’t thank you more. This is my first time using HN, and since every title I clicked took me to an external link, I completely misunderstood the meaning and purpose of HN. After communicating with the moderator, I’ve gained a better understanding, and I’ll make sure to spend more time reading and joining discussions. I really appreciate your comment.
by duncancarroll | 2025-08-22 18:48:27+00:00
Y Combinator and other accelerators have job boards: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

A lot of VCs also have job boards, or they will list their portfolio companies and you can reach out directly:

https://jobs.a16z.com/jobs

https://jobs.sequoiacap.com/jobs

https://kindredventures.com/portfolio

etc
by antichronology | 2025-08-22 18:49:03+00:00
> ground truth

Hey yes, the ground truth for our evaluations is measured experimental data. Our models are benchmarked using mRNABench, which aggregates results from high-throughput wet lab experiments.

Our goal, however, is to move beyond predicting existing experimental outcomes. We intend to design novel sequences and validate their function in our own lab. At that stage, the functional success of the RNA we design will become the ground truth.

> peer reviewed?

Both mRNA bench and Orthrus are in submission (at a big ML conference and a big name journal) - unfortunately the academic systems move slow but we're working on getting them out there.

> synthetic mRNA sequences

I think you're asking on generalizing out of distribution to unnatural sequences. There are two ways that we do this: (1) There are these screens called Massively Parallel Reporter Assays (MPRAs) and we eval for example on https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31267113/

Here all the sequences are synthetic and randomly designed and we do observe generalization. Ultimately it depends on the problem that we're tackling: some tasks like gene therapy design require endogenous sequences.

(2) The other angle is variant effect prediction (VEP). It can be thought of as a counterfactual prediction problem where you ask the model whether a small change in the input predicts a large change in the output. This is a good example of the study (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.11.637758v2)

> experimental verification of their predicted properties

all our model evaluations are predictions of experimental results! The datasets we use are collections of wet lab measurements, so the model is constantly benchmarked against ground-truth biology.

The evaluation method involves fitting a linear probe on the model's learned embeddings to predict the experimental signal. This directly tests whether the model's learned representation of an RNA sequence contains a linear combination of features that can predict its measured biological properties.

Thanks for the feedback I understand the caution around pre-prints. We believe a self-supervised learning approach is well-suited for this problem because it allows the model to first learn patterns from millions of unlabeled sequences before being fine-tuned on specific, and often smaller, experimental datasets.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-22 18:49:29+00:00
Always has been. A lot of prominent Twitter accounts in my primary language, especially the old ones, has telltales of having been on 2chan. net. There must be something to that format that installs a basic social media amplification skill in your brain that do not develop otherwise.

There are places more toxic than 4chan but skill levels don't compare, and 4chan and 2chan also share nothing culture wise, so it must be in the architecture.
by zingababba | 2025-08-22 18:49:59+00:00
Yes, literally the first thing I thought of was "oh, another government LLM use case." Exactly the same crap doge was doing.

Whatever contractor is working on this is probably salivating at the opportunity to refine capabilities. I still think at some point this is going to be used to field questions like "ok, show me the top 10 citizens in this area who regularly engage in X online behavior."
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-08-22 18:50:27+00:00
Having a seasonal service is not a bad idea. The big problem with that is cutoff times. Too early and people will complain when they can't get a ride when no snow is on the ground. Too late and you're liable for everything that happens when the road is covered in thin ice or sleet, including leaving someone stranded. You will need very accurate weather predictions for operating over the winter months.
by fa3556 | 2025-08-22 18:50:49+00:00
I feel like the only other solution to kernel-level anticheat is some kind of measured and verified system image. The whole chain has to be signed and trusted from the TPM through the kernel to userspace. This way if anyone tampers with the system the game will refuse to launch. I think something like this is already possible with systemd or is at least the long term goal IIRC from Lennart's blog.
by stouset | 2025-08-22 18:51:48+00:00
> The problem with string length is there's probably at least four concepts that could conceivably be called length.

The answer here isn't to throw up your hands, pick one, and other cases be damned. It's to expose them all and let the engineer choose. To not beat the dead horse of Rust, I'll point that Ruby gets this right too.

* String#length # count Unicode code units * String#bytes#length # count bytes * String#grapheme_clusters#length # count grapheme clusters

Similarly, each of those "views" lets you slice, index, etc. across those concepts naturally. Golang's string is the worst of them all. They're nominally UTF-8, but nothing actually enforces it. But really they're just buckets of bytes, unless you send them to APIs that silently require them to be UTF-8 and drop them on the floor or misbehave if they're not.

Height/width to display is font-dependent, so can't just be on a "string" but needs an object with additional context.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-22 18:52:13+00:00
I'm not sure why you think waymo would fight against that. People getting rid of their own cars for daily use will increase how often a service like waymo is used for occasional usage. In the long run it would be a win for waymo. Not many people are taking taxis on a daily basis in New York for normal driving, they buy a car if they need to do that because even with the parking bill they will still come out ahead. And once they have their own car they feel like they need to get some use out of it.
by rnxrx | 2025-08-22 18:52:30+00:00
There's a point in the article that mentions allowing the model to ask questions. I've found this to be especially helpful in avoiding the bad or incomplete assumptions that so often lead to lousy code and debugging.

The (occasionally) surprising part is that there are times where the generated clarifying questions actually spawn questions of my own. Making the process more interactive is sort of like a pseudo rubber duckie process: forcing yourself to specifically articulate ideas serves to solidify and improve them.
by astrange | 2025-08-22 18:53:20+00:00
> Yes this is why all competent libraries don't actually use string for path. They have their own path data type because it's actually a different data type.

What is different about it? I don't see any constraints here relevant to having a different type. Note that this thread has already confused the issue, because they said filename and you said path. A path can contain /, it just happens to mean something.

If you want a better abstraction to locations of files on disk, then you shouldn't use paths at all, since they break if the file gets moved.
by chclau | 2025-08-22 18:53:21+00:00
Why refactor the code?: less repetition, clearer intent, easier to change timing/logic by editing a table instead of code paths.

Feedback welcome—especially ideas to extend it.

(This post is part of Resorte, a Spanish magazine (comics, hobbies, technical notes) inspired by Argentina’s legendary Lúpin. If you read Spanish, check it out.)
by roomey | 2025-08-22 18:53:25+00:00
A good bit less powerful yes. But the simplicity is a huge strength when it comes to long term tech. I started using it in 2012 I believe.

The most important thing in any note taking app is to use it consistently and use it for years. And bring it with you as you change jobs.

Sometimes simple things that work in plain text files that can be exported and imported easily is what you need for long term note taking.
by AlexandrB | 2025-08-22 18:53:27+00:00
Can you blame folks? Their Teslas were supposed to be appreciating assets[1] that were able to drive them coast-to-coast[2] by now. I'd be mad too.

[1] https://electrek.co/2025/03/18/elon-musk-biggest-lie-tesla-v...

[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2025/01/29/honest-thinking-why-did...
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-22 18:54:33+00:00
When it comes to cheating, perfect is the enemy of good. This is one of those rare cases where the phrase doesn’t hold.

The problem is that server-side occlusion is only a small piece of the puzzle. A naïve implementation means hundreds of thousands of raycasts per second, which doesn’t scale. Real engines rely on precomputed visibility sets, spatial partitioning, and still have to leak some data client-side for responsiveness.

Basically - the kernel level check is not laziness, but for unsolvable problems without huge compute costs or latency.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-22 18:54:43+00:00
> Sticking with the Gaza situation example, most protests are along the lines of "Israel shouldn't do that" and not "Hamas needs more support".

Yes, here is the nuance, which I concur with and I would hope most reasonable people could agree on.

In practice, protests are a mix of people but onlookers take a binary stance. It is not going to be difficult to see at protest a poster or cameras capture someone shouting something like "globalize the infitada! or or death to America".

Complicating matters further, protest organizers and the protesters themselves have more of a fluid behavior and motivations - it is not a club where membership is controlled and patrolled, a protest's mission is usually a little vague and fluid, etc.

And that is, I think, where the real risk lies - you are at a protest and you can find yourself surrounded by others who ARE supporting Hamas even if you're not and you get lumped together.

This happens on "the right" as well. You'll have some Neo-Nazi's in a conservative protest against XYZ, and now all of a sudden they're all Nazi's.

It is deeply unfortunate.
by cowthulhu | 2025-08-22 18:54:48+00:00
In CO we have automatic traffic cameras, and to my knowledge they just mail you the ticket, which is usually only a fine (and no license points). Its one of those “automatic plea” tickets where if you fight it, you fight (and risk conviction on) the actual offense, while if you just pay the ticket it will automatically get downgraded to a less serious offense (IE parking outside the lines).
by Luker88 | 2025-08-22 18:55:22+00:00
> Rust crates re-introduces [...] potential for supply-chain attacks.

I have absolutely no idea how go would solve this problem, and in fact I don't think it does at all.

> The Go std-lib is fantastic.

I have seen worse, but I would still not call it decent considering this is a fairly new language that could have done a lot more.

I am going to ignore the incredible amount of asinine and downright wrong stuff in many of the most popular libraries (even the basic ones maintained by google) since you are talking only about the stdlib.

On the top of my head I found inconsistent tagging management for structs (json defaults, omitzero vs omitempty), not even errors on tag typos, the reader/writer pattern that forces you to to write custom connectors between the two, bzip2 has a reader and no writer, the context linked list for K/V. Just look at the consistency of the interfaces in the "encoding" pkg and cry, the package `hash` should actually be `checksum`. Why does `strconv.Atoi`/ItoA still exist? Time.Add() vs Time.Sub()...

It chock full of inconsistencies. It forces me to look at the documentation every single time I don't use something for more than a couple of days. No, the autocomplete with the 2-line documentation does not include the potential pitfalls that are explained at the top of the package only.

And please don't get me started on the wrappers I had to write around stuff in the net library to make it a bit more consistent or just less plain wrong. net/url.Parse!!! I said don't make my start on this package! nil vs NoBody! ARGH!

None of this is stuff at the language level (of which there is plenty to say).

None of it is a dealbreaker per se, but it adds attrition and becomes death by a billion cuts.

I don't even trust any parser written in go anymore, I always try to come up with corner cases to check how it reacts, and I am often surprised by most of them.

Sure, there are worse languages and libraries. Still not something I would pick up in 2025 for a new project.
by UncleMeat | 2025-08-22 18:55:23+00:00
Unfortunately we cannot. She is actively stealing my grandparents' remaining money and taking legal steps to gain legal and economic control over my other aunt's life once my grandparents die.

My family would absolutely love to go no-contact with her. But if she ends up with guardianship of my other aunt once my grandparents pass then she'll be sentenced to suffer and die.
by ufmace | 2025-08-22 18:55:52+00:00
I think the main difference for NYC is that quite a few streets and intersections routinely have 10x to 100x the pedestrian traffic of the busiest such intersections in pretty much any other American city.

That's not to say that I don't think it'll be able to handle it, just that it'll be a new challenge. I wonder if their current program of apparently trying to positively track every single moving object in range will survive that, or whether they'll need to figure out some algorithm to prioritize objects that are more likely to be of concern to it. And there probably are more than a few places where pedestrians are numerous and densely crowded enough that you can't positively track all of them, even with a bunch of LIDAR sensors.
by chasd00 | 2025-08-22 18:56:04+00:00
What you're describing is basically perfect unit testing. There was even a trend called TDD ( test driven development ) that tried to make the tests the driving force behind building the software in the first place. It works but it has to be perfect and, inevitably, your tests need testing and so you're back to square one. Regardless, it's tedious and time consuming and shortcuts get taken then value of the whole thing falls apart and running the unit tests just becomes like a ritual with no real meaning/impact.
by idoubtit | 2025-08-22 18:56:16+00:00
Even when I don't use directly ffmpeg, I often use tools that embed ffmpeg. For instance, I've recently upscaled an old anime, ripped from a low quality DVD. I used k4yt3x/video2x, which was good enough for what I wanted, and was easy to install. It embedded libffmpeg, so I could use the same arguments for encoding:

Video2X-x86_64.AppImage -i "$f" \ -c libvpx-vp9 -e crf=34 -o "${f/480p/480p_upscale2x}" \ -p realcugan -s 2 --noise-level 1

To find the best arguments for upscaling (last line from above), I first used ffmpeg to extract a short scene that I encoded with various parameter sets. Then I used ffmpeg to capture still images so that I could find the best set.
by infecto | 2025-08-22 18:56:28+00:00
My point was that it will be interesting to see how well it works in NYC where the only way to drive is aggressively in city streets breaking the rules. LA has its share of aggressive driving but as someone who has driven in both, NYC felt like I had to break the rules to go anywhere, LA not so much.

Hard to really compare a tiny piece of LA and say it’s more dense and compare it to borough that is in the same range but also magnitudes larger total pop.
by UncleMeat | 2025-08-22 18:56:36+00:00
I don't even believe that this matters. I don't think the motivation is based on "hey we can use this as a strategy to get re-elected." I truly believe that the motivation is "fuck you, libs" and nothing deeper. Even if it makes them less likely to retain power they'll still do it. Because they got to spit on the left.

That's not cynicism. That's brute honesty.
by deathanatos | 2025-08-22 18:56:36+00:00
> which are a stable representation that can be converted to a bunch of encodings including "proper" utf-8, as long as all codepoints are representable in that encoding.

Which, to humor the parent, is also true of raw bytes strings. One of the (valid) points raised by the gist is that `str` is not infallibly encodable to UTF-8, since it can contain values that are not valid Unicode.

> This also allows you to work with strings that contain arbitrary data falling outside of the unicode spectrum.

If I write,

def foo(s: str) -> …:

… I want the input string to be Unicode. If I need "Unicode, or maybe with bullshit mixed in", that can be a different type, and then I can take

def foo(s: UnicodeWithBullshit) -> …:
by goodluckchuck | 2025-08-22 18:56:51+00:00
That’s how I feel about the title. How could that sentence ever make sense? People can support whatever they want. Which renewable resources? Pulpwood? Is it illegal to recycle?

Turns out the department that deals with farming, is going to focus on farming… and not on pushing electricity production.

Well yeah, the Department of Energy should probably be the ones spearheading our solar, wind, etc.
by justonceokay | 2025-08-22 18:57:06+00:00
I always love to compare Peter Norvig’s sudoku solver implementation [1] versus Ron Jeffries TDD approach [2].

Norvig starts with the theory building and creates a constraint solver in about 50 lines of code. Jeffries starts with TDD, assumes an implementation, has to change that implementation, therefore has to change the tests, and after a series of five blog posts kind of fizzles out on it.

To me it just highlights that defining the problem is with so much more than defining the tests, as you can’t write a test for a problem you haven’t defined yet. In this way the tests are an imposition. In short to me it shows that TDD only really works if you already knew how to buold the project to begin with.

[1] https://norvig.com/sudoku.html [2] https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/oksudoku/
by numpad0 | 2025-08-22 18:57:27+00:00
Domain Name System was an app on the Internet. It wasn't something that always existed. The purpose of it is to provide intuitive means to look up IP address from more intuitive domain name strings.

If you could come up with an alternative system to derive the IP address of desired remote host, or content, e.g. Magnet Link standard, you can just skip DNS and switch to that instead.

TLS can be a problem as a lot of moving parts of WWW now depends on DNS. But all of those can be solved.
by JohnMakin | 2025-08-22 18:57:35+00:00
> Not surprising, really.

Why is it not surprising? Can you give any other examples, or perhaps are you weirdly biased in favor of a narcissistic centibillionaire who doesn't know you exist and wouldn't care to? Luckily the world doesn't revolve around what you find newsworthy, because I suspect it would be quite dull.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-22 18:58:09+00:00
Apparently there are three other dry states: Bihar, Mizoram, and Nagaland, although apparently the first two have only banned alcohol for the past 30 and 10 years, unlike Gujarat which has had it banned since 1960.

I wonder what border towns there look like; I know that growing up in a dry county in Texas, people ended up going to the next town over and spent their hard-earned money there instead.