MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by platevoltage | 2025-08-22 19:34:12+00:00
Social Media is basically what enabled me to actually be social during the Friendster/Early Myspace era. It helped me get to know people I'd met in real life, and meet other people within the city I lived in.

Now if you're not on linkedIn, people question whether you are a real person or not.

I hope AI ends up like blockchain. It's there if you have a use-case for it, but it's not absolutely embedded in everything you do. Both are insanely cool technologies.
by searls | 2025-08-22 19:34:20+00:00
Yeah this is a great comment and moves it forward. Will incorporate this into my personalization stanza.

I agree, I think one reason this strategy has not helped me with Claude Code is that it just leads to endless spinning. Not just tool churn, but ten, twenty, thirty revisions of a file listing that should've just been tested and declared done much sooner. By the time Claude gets around to _executing the code_ it's so far gone it can't even get back to successful compilation.

p.s. ChatGPT's hyperbole with this kind of personalization enabled is extremely embarrassing to read. It routinely opens paragraphs with things like "my skepticism is screaming" and I cringe pretty hard as I copy paste the working code underneath it.
by raverbashing | 2025-08-22 19:34:37+00:00
This is naive at best

Here's a better analogy, in the 70s "nobody planned" for names with 's in then. SQL injections, separators, "not in the alphabet", whatever. In the US. Where a lot of people with 's in their names live... Or double-barrelled names.

It's a much simpler problem and still tripped a lot of people

And then you have to support a user with a "funny name" or a business with "weird characters", or you expand your startup to Canada/Mexico and lo and behold...
by otterley | 2025-08-22 19:35:34+00:00
I'm sympathetic to the argument that the feature is an elegant one. But at the same time, maintaining it is not cost-free; every line of code written, imported, or linked poses an ongoing "tax" and/or risk. This is a garden-variety product management decision: is it worth the ongoing maintenance and risk? As a responsible PM, you have to weigh the costs against the benefits, and I think they've presented sufficient evidence users have voted "no" on the benefits.

As I said in another thread, not everything of value or benefit gains meaningful adoption. A rational actor doesn't preserve everything of value for its own sake. At best, we call people who do "museum curators," and at worst, "hoarders."
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-22 19:35:52+00:00
Not only are you being disingenous by generalizing to "anything that exists" (when for the immense majority is "anything you put up for sale", it's just Mossad that wants your family vaction photos), but here's the thing: I do have that right. By default. It might make you unhappy, but I have it. It crosses into a different territory if I deprive you from it (theft), or if the only I would have had to acquired it would be to buy a copy from you(piracy), but ultimately, as a society, we've decided that harming you for it is a line not to be crossed.

I have every right to see a thing. Just like you have every right to try to stop me from doing so. The general rule is that we shouldn't hurt eachother trying to do it/prevent it.
by structural | 2025-08-22 19:35:57+00:00
1. If you want to advance the state of the art as quickly as possible (or have many, many experiments to run), being able to iterate quickly is the primary concern.

2. If you are publishing research, any time spent beyond what's necessary for the paper is a net loss, because you could be working on the next advancement instead of doing all the work of making the code more portable and reusable.

3. If you're trying to use that research in an internal effort, you'll take the next step to "make it work on my cloud", and any effort beyond that is also a net loss for your team.

4. If the amount of work necessary to prototype something that you can write a paper with is 1x, the amount of work necessary to scale that on one specific machine configuration is something like >= 10x, and the amount of work to make that a reusable library that can build and run anywhere is more like 100x.

So it really comes down to - who is going to do the majority of this work? How is it funded? How is it organized?

This can be compared to other human endeavours, too. Take the nuclear industry and its development as a parallel. The actual physics of nuclear fission is understood at this point and can be taught to lots of people. But to get from there to building a functional prototype reactor is a larger project (10x scale), and then scaling that to an entire powerplant complex that can be built in a variety of physical locations and run safely for decades is again orders of magnitude larger.
by torginus | 2025-08-22 19:36:03+00:00
The biggest weakness of genetic algorithms is they can't make use of gradients - meaning they have no idea how to 'move' towards the solution - they end up guessing and refining their guesses, which means they're much slower to converge.

Their advantage is they don't require gradients (so the fitness function to be differentiable), but I don't think they're going to be the next big thing.
by cauch | 2025-08-22 19:36:36+00:00
I'm surprised by what you say, it is not at all my experience. Are you sure you are not over-interpreting what your friend said, or that your friend's experience was not unusual?

1) People at CERN publish papers in "normal" physics journals, which do the usual peer review. Few articles that I've myself per-reviewed were not from my own experiment. There is, of course, also an internal reviewing for each collaboration, but it is to improve the quality and something totally natural and obvious if you want to have a collaboration (by definition, a collaboration is a place where people read each other work and feedback to each others). But it is totally different from "the work is only reviewed by the collaboration".

2) I've worked ~5 years in one experiment, and ~5 years in another, and I did not notice any different terminology. In both experiments, I've very rapidly met and learned the name of people of other experiments working on similar subject. I don't know any workshop or conference where the invited scientists are not from different experiment. During these events, there are a lot of exchanges.

3) What is true, and it is maybe the reason of your misunderstanding, is that you are strongly advised to not share non-cross-checked material outside of the collaboration. The goal is to avoid biasing the independent experiments: if you notice a strange phenomena that will later turn out to be a statistical fluctuation or if you use a new methodology that will later turn out to have unnoticed systematical biases, if you mention this to the other experiment, you will "contaminate" them: they may focus their research or adopt the flawed methodology. But this is only for non-cross-checked and it does not make any sense to pretend that it has a negative impact (a lot of scientists, in collaboration or not, towards all history, don't like to share their preliminary results before they acquired a good confidence that what they saw it reliable).

4) Do you have example of things that one could not understand while it was done down the hall from them? I don't recall "not being able to understand" (the point of a publication is to explain, so people care about making it understandable). I do recall "harder to understand", but it was often from people from the same collaboration, and the reason was because of they needed to use some mathematical tools I did not know and that there was not really any other way.

I'm sure there are cases where two groups end up diverging and it makes the collaboration more challenging. But I really doubt it is not something exceptional, and that everyone in the collaborations will try to mitigate.

Your comment makes me wonder to which extend the outsiders of CERN don't have plenty of crazy myths totally disconnected from the reality. I guess it is a good example why people like Hossenfelder are a problem: they feed on these myths and cultivate them.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-22 19:36:41+00:00
I would think the Linux kernel could offer a "don't let anything read/write to the process I'm about to open" with a launcher then have that process also create a random/temp executable to test that the configuration is working...

Having the kernel itself, actually deny any access... The game devs run a build without debug symbols (not that debugging could work with it on), and run with it... Also, this should severely limit what that process can do in terms of communication outside itself. And maybe a launch warning from the OS... "You are about to launch a sealed application that cannot be observed, do you want to continue? Y/N"
by Animats | 2025-08-22 19:36:49+00:00
Yes. [1] That incident got considerable publicity in the San Francisco media. But not because of the Waymo.[2][3]

Someone was driving a Tesla on I-280 into SF. They'd previously been involved in a hit-and-run accident on the freeway. They exited I-280 at the 6th St. off ramp, which is a long straightaway. They entered surface streets at 98 MPH in a 25 MPH zone, ran through a red light, and reached the next intersection, where traffic was stopped at a red light. The Tesla Model Y plowed into a lane of stopped cars, killing one person and one dog, injuring seven others, and demolishing at least six vehicles. One of the vehicles waiting was a Waymo, which had no one on board at the time.

The driver of the Tesla claims their brakes failed. "Police on Monday booked Zheng on one count of felony vehicular manslaughter, reckless driving causing injury, felony vandalism and speeding."[2]

[1] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/waymo-multi-car-wr...

[2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/crash-tesla-waymo-inj...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULalTHBQ3rI&
by kragen | 2025-08-22 19:37:17+00:00
There are a lot of operations that are valid and well-defined on binary strings, such as sorting them, hashing them, writing them to files, measuring their lengths, indexing a trie with them, splitting them on delimiter bytes or substrings, concatenating them, substring-searching them, posting them to ZMQ as messages, subscribing to them as ZMQ prefixes, using them as keys or values in LevelDB, and so on. For binary strings that don't contain null bytes, we can add passing them as command-line arguments and using them as filenames.

The entire point of UTF-8 (designed, by the way, by the group that designed Go) is to encode Unicode in such a way that these byte string operations perform the corresponding Unicode operations, precisely so that you don't have to care whether your string is Unicode or just plain ASCII, so you don't need any error handling, except for the rare case where you want to do something related to the text that the string semantically represents. The only operation that doesn't really map is measuring the length.
by guptadeepak | 2025-08-22 19:37:26+00:00
I recently explored how AI agents are reshaping the dynamics of marketing vs. growth teams. The core shift isn’t automation for efficiency’s sake, but the structural replacement of human-heavy marketing workflows with agent-managed, always-on experimentation loops. Three key technical points stood out:

1. Agents can autonomously run multivariate campaign tests with real-time feedback loops.

2. API-driven integration across ad networks, CRMs, and analytics makes them execution-first systems.

3. Growth models shift from static funnels toward adaptive, agent-orchestrated experimentation.

I'm curious if others here see technical ceilings in agent coordination—especially around attribution accuracy and bias in optimization loops?
by hardwaregeek | 2025-08-22 19:37:27+00:00
Because there’s still someone in the car, they just have no way to defend themselves. You can tailgate and honk at them to your heart’s content. Well at least until they call the police but that’s pretty far. And there are other forms of aggression that do accomplish something. If you cut a Waymo off or beat it to merge, you get ahead of it. In some locales I could see a whole series of cars merging ahead of a Waymo if people are aggressive enough.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-08-22 19:37:33+00:00
Wow :) I got a 18 inch office-display by Fujitsu-Siemens with S-PVA panel, long ago.

Broke down after a long time. Repaired it by resoldering some simple capacitors.

During the repair I had a look at the chips. One (or two?)had that Faroudja label on it.

At the time I didn't know about that, and just wondered WTF is that? Searched the net and "got it". They meanwhile got bought up by someone, Wiki as of now says STMicroelectronics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faroudja

That display is still working but mostly gathering dust, some 8800 km away from me, atop a 4x kvm, managing some old stuff, also gathering dust :)
by kenhwang | 2025-08-22 19:37:45+00:00
Waymo in LA also drives pretty much like a human here would, which includes: not yielding for pedestrian-only crosswalks, running red lights, driving in the oncoming traffic/suicide/bike lane, occupying two lanes, blocking entrances/driveways/intersections, and stopping/parking in no-stop/parking curbs.

They're only really phenomenal at not hitting things; they really aren't good/courteous/predictable drivers under most conventional definitions.

Still, I think rollout in NYC will be fine. NYC generally drives slower and much less aggressively than LA, and slower gives the Waymo plenty of reaction time to not hit things.
by englishm | 2025-08-22 19:38:26+00:00
It could! We've mainly been focused on using it for audio and video for live streaming and RTC use cases, but the MoQT layer is very intentionally decoupled from the media details so the fan out infrastructure could actually be used for a lot of different things. You'd need to decide how you want to map your data to MoQT objects, groups, tracks, etc.
by mritchie712 | 2025-08-22 19:39:26+00:00
We[0] support Google Sheets as a source out of the box[1]. We have connectors for 500 sources and can grab data from anything with an API.

Definite spins up a datalake for you and pipelines to get data into the lake. We also have BI (semantic layer + dashboards) and an AI agent that will build reports for you. Let me know if you need a hand getting set up! I'm mike@definite.app.

0 - https://www.definite.app/

1 - https://docs.definite.app/extractors/gsheetquerying
by pimlottc | 2025-08-22 19:39:33+00:00
I know it's a cliche to say a Youtuber is unique, but Posy really is quite incredible. He's certainly not the only one making videos about vintage 80s technology but his great videography, calm tone, odd manner of speech, occasional goofy humor, and beautiful custom-made audio soundtracks make for a mesmerizing presentation.
by dtf | 2025-08-22 19:39:51+00:00
I don't have a link to hand right now, but I'll try to put one up for you this weekend. I'm very interested in your implementation - thanks, will take a good look!

Initially this was just a vehicle for me to get stuck in and learn some WebGPU, so no doubt I'm missing lots of opportunities for optimisation - but it's been fun as much as frustrating. I leaned heavily on the SMPTE specification document and the FFMPEG proresdec.c implementation to understand and debug.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-22 19:40:20+00:00
I think that Team Fortress is pretty good in this regard... at least for some CTF maps and configurations... (I'm mostly recalling the original quake mod)... there were some maps that you had to have a scout/spy to be able to get past a strategically positioned automatic gun, and even then an HW guy by the flag was a pretty good secondary that was hard to get through.

Of course, I still remember seeing cheaters back then, in that game... usually quickly kicked off the server you were playing on.
by yencabulator | 2025-08-22 19:40:50+00:00
> It will have to cut some features that zed is really proud of

What, they're proud of the telemetery?

The fork claims to make everything opt-in and to not default to any specific vendor, and only to remove things that cannot be self-hosted. What proprietary features have to be cut that Zed people are really proud of?

https://github.com/zedless-editor/zedless?tab=readme-ov-file...

As far as I know, the Zed people have open sourced their collab server components (as AGPLv3), at least well enough to self-host. For example, https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/docs/src/dev... -- AFAIK it's just https://github.com/livekit/livekit

The AI stuff will happily talk to self-hosted models, or OpenAI API lookalikes.
by paulvnickerson | 2025-08-22 19:40:58+00:00
They should switch, then. This notion that we can't peal away browser spec complexity because it will break some websites is the same reason ActiveX continued to wreck havoc long after it should have. I found multiple security vulnerabilities in XSLT back in my pen-testing days, and even if it didn't increase the threat surface, browser spec needs to be simplified anyway.
by bob1029 | 2025-08-22 19:41:04+00:00
I think this is the best path if your problem can support it.

I use a 5950X for running genetic programming and neuroevolution experiments and about once every 100 hours the machine will just not like the state/load it is experiencing and will restart. My approach is to checkpoint as often as possible. I restart the program the next morning and it deserializes the last snapshot from disk. Worst case, I lose 5 minutes of work.

This also helps with Windows updates, power outages, and EM/cosmic radiation.
by cheema33 | 2025-08-22 19:42:13+00:00
If someone enjoys building houses with a hammer and nail, they still can. Other like using tools.

You will always be able to write code by hand. But you will not be able to keep up with other engineers who master using AI tools. I am a software engineer, I like building things. And I don't use binary or assembly, or C or any other lower level languages for good reasons. AI is just another higher level abstraction. A tool that allows me to build things a little faster. I use it every day.
by rashidae | 2025-08-22 19:42:18+00:00
There's a ton of people that are so resistant to change... Like, finding people who embrace the future and is okay with uncertainty for a while is tough, mostly on scenarios where their age is 35+, though not so dependent on age, but on mindset... I do understand his position, as it's the law of selection... If people are not at least trying to "adapt" to the new reality, then firing them, can also serve as a signal to others... Adapt or die!
by p2detar | 2025-08-22 19:42:37+00:00
They might very well be, because time-handling in Java almost always sucked. In the beginning there was java.util.Date and it was very poorly designed. Sun tried to fix that with java.util.Calendar. That worked for a while but it was still cumbersome, Calendar.getInstance() anyone? After that someone sat down and wrote Joda-Time, which was really really cool and IMO the basis of JSR-310 and the new java.time API. So you're kind of right, but it only took them 15 years to make it right.
by torginus | 2025-08-22 19:43:47+00:00
I think you hit the nail on the head - I think it's the stupid decision on Go lang designers part to make panic-s recover-able. This necessitates stack unwinding, meaning defer-s still need to run if a panic happens down the stack.

Since they didn't want to have a 'proper' RAII unwinding mechanism, this is the crappy compromise they came up with.
by alphazard | 2025-08-22 19:44:24+00:00
Inflation is felt immediately as change in price of things that one frequently buys. Everyone can empirically determine if they are experiencing inflation without consulting the news or any authority. And the basket that an authority uses to determine the "official" inflation numbers is less representative of its impact on an individual than their personal basket.

Then there is the outlook on inflation, which most lay people were not thinking about until recently. Most people think of longer term inflation as "economy good" or "economy bad", and often falsify their true outlook, instead signaling a political allegiance. In 2025, Trump is in office, so Democrats might signal "inflation go up, economy bad", and they would have signaled "inflation go down, economy good" when Biden was in Office a year ago. The reverse is true of Republicans.

Now, everyone expects inflation to continue and even accelerate in the long term. And people are worried enough to take action in the form of more loans, more investments on margin, holding less dollars, etc. And now everyone knows that everyone else is doing this, which is the "emperors clothes moment".

People are much less likely to be taken seriously if they express that inflation will mostly be a function of who is in office, rather than an inevitability of the American political system. If someone you cared about expected there to be no inflation, you might become concerned for their ability to financially plan.

So now we all know, and we know that everyone else knows, and we aren't trying to hide our outlook on inflation in conversation because it's now worse to look stupid on this topic than miss a signalling opportunity.

TLDR: what was once a low consequence signalling opportunity, is now part of serious financial planning.
by asadotzler | 2025-08-22 19:44:49+00:00
It's not the tools fault when people RTFM (guidance from the tool maker) and use it as it's intended (again, by the tool maker, who presumably knows how it works and is in the best position to guide users).

"If you keep pressing the back button like the IE engineers told you to, of course you will fail to go back. To go back you want to press the forward button. Are you an idiot? Press the forward button to go back, at least until the next version release when you will need to press the reload button to go back. Trust me, eventually the back button will go back, but for now only fools press the back button to go back."
by atoav | 2025-08-22 19:44:56+00:00
I instructed ChatGPT to tell me things as they are without fluff.

Since version 5 it constantly starts with a line like "Let's address this without fluff!" or even "I am giving it to you straight!".

It keeps constantly talking about how it behaves like I instructed it to behave instead of actually cutting the crap and giving me the raw facts.
by englishm | 2025-08-22 19:45:02+00:00
You might be interested in looking at this RTC example for ideas about how to make bi-directional data flows for arbitrary groups of participants (or players) work through a relay.

https://hang.live/

It uses a feature we haven't yet implemented, but we're thinking about how we might implement it at our scale, SUBSCRIBE_ANNOUNCES[1].

[1]: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-moq-transport-12....
by nine_k | 2025-08-22 19:45:54+00:00
Ian Lance Taylor, a big proponent of generics, wrote a lot about the difficulties of adding generics to Golang. I bet the initial team just had to cut the scope and produce a working language, as simple as possible while still practically useful. Easy concurrency was the goal, so they basically took mostl of Modula-2 plus ideas form Oberon (and elsewhere), removed all the "fluff" (like arrays indexable by enumeration types, etc), added GC, and that was plenty enough.
by guywithahat | 2025-08-22 19:46:16+00:00
There's a great YC saying which approximately says "you should get the easiest customers first". They even made a video about it, saying tech startups sometimes try to go for the hardest customers to "prove themselves" and it just hurts their business.

I sort of wonder if that's happening here. SF, Austin, LA, etc, are all great cities to build autonomous vehicle startups in. There are many more major cities which don't get snow, have minimal rain, and are well thought out in terms of driving layout. NYC seems like the most difficult city to operate in, and while I believe it's a lucrative market it seems like a mistake.