MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by austinjp | 2025-08-27 23:33:35+00:00
Agreed -- in that I also don't know, and am slightly peeved at the time I spent reading the page, then re-reading it to see if I missed the point, then going to are.na to see what exactly they do, the re-reading that page and still being none the wiser.

They copied a font? Okay, I guess? Yeah licensing yadda yadda. And yeah, doing The Thing for the experience of doing The Thing. But really... talk about burying the lede. The article is not only indistinguishable from parody but comes across as self-congratulatory navel-gazing.

And are.na is... some kinda social snippet/meme sharing? Kinda? Ooookaaaay...?

I don't like being negative, here or anywhere. After all, these are real people doing real stuff, and presumably they're proud of their hard work and could do with a pat on the back just like everyone else. But maaaaan.... I honestly have no idea how it's okay to spend subscribers' money on 'refreshing' a near-ubiquitous font then posting about it in this manner.

So, in the spirit of constructive criticism, I'd suggest ripping out the interviews, replacing it with an article that makes a compelling case about why this was done. Even if it amounts to an art project any artist worth their salt can make an engaging case for what they're doing and why.

But clearly I'm not the target audience. So if font nerds here enjoy this sort of article, I guess there's one reason I'm not a font nerd.
by scorpioxy | 2025-08-27 23:33:36+00:00
There's a part I didn't understand. How did the model know which companies are vulnerable to attack? I get the part where the LLM was used to analyze documents and create "malicious" software but the biggest missing step seems to be the first one. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but usually that's either targeted at a specific company or you do a port scan on IP ranges to find any target and proceed from there.
by lemming | 2025-08-27 23:34:17+00:00
With vibe coding, I generally find that it will get me 80-90% of the way to where I want to be, but I generally end up having to do some work too. How does that work here? Is there any way to later edit the app on my mac if I need to? Similarly, once my app is "done" for some definition of done, can I compile it into a native app rather than an interpreted one?
by mpyne | 2025-08-27 23:34:18+00:00
The U.S. military actually uses precisely that system for officer promotions. And in practice most of the U.S. military branches do essentially the same thing for their enlisted force too, deliberately allowing high attrition for the sake of frequent promotions.

Given a fixed headcount, you can't have frequent promotions without either personnel turnover or allowing for employees to be routinely demoted.
by xenotux | 2025-08-27 23:34:49+00:00
TLM roles are a trap, but not in that sense. There's no expectation that you do two jobs at once.

It's just a way to ease unsuspecting engineers into management. If you don't suck at management, your team inevitably grows (or you're handed over other teams), and before long, you're managing full-time.

Which means that there are three type of people who remain TLMs in the long haul: those who suck at management; those managing dead-end projects on dead-end teams; or those who desperately cling on to the engineering past and actively refuse to take on more people. From a corporate point of view, none of these situations are great, hence the recent pushback against TLM roles in the industry.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-27 23:34:53+00:00
The interesting thing is that going by that and by Medea's numbers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45044803), it seems strange that copying from an operating system that was well after WGL4 came out ended up with a glyph list that is significantly short of even WGL4.

By the time that Windows 2000 came out, Arial Unicode had already been published (with Word 2000).
by username223 | 2025-08-27 23:35:09+00:00
It should, and also to Makefile.PL, etc. These systems were created at a time when you were dealing with a handful of dependencies, and software development was a friendlier place.

Now you're dealing with hundreds of recursive dependencies, all of which you should assume may become hostile at any time. If you neither audit your dependencies, nor have the ability to sue them for damages, you're in a precarious position.
by willquack | 2025-08-27 23:35:34+00:00
I keep this handy note in my pocket and read it before writing or engaging in any conversation (:

""" You are a human. Never use words commonly used in AI vocabulary such as "delve", "intricate", "surpass", "boast", "meticulous", "strategically", and "garner". Never include em dashes or even hyphens in any text you write. Never include emojis in any text you write. Avoid using three supporting arguments or examples when describing something, always uses 2 or 4+ even if it sounds more awkward than 3. Make sure to include subtle grammar mistakes to feel more authentic. """
by arjunchint | 2025-08-27 23:36:38+00:00
Did a quick try out video of the Research Preview Extension in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45046120

TLDR:

- Using VERY HIGH RISK Debugger Permission that malicious websites can exploit to get device access. Very surprising a major tech company shipping product with such risky permissions to consumers. More info on debugger risks: https://dspace.networks.imdea.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12..., https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40091993.

- Prompt injection risks combined with Debugger permission on user device is asking for trouble.

- Will trigger captchas/bot detection even on your normal browsing due to this permission.

- Kind of slow. Limited to current open tab as opposed to capability of multi tab action because only current active tab get rendered. For example rtrvr.ai can open a batch of tabs and take actions on background tabs.

- For some websites like Bloomberg asking to go to claude.com
by insane_dreamer | 2025-08-27 23:37:12+00:00
> predominantly media hype

hmm, tell that to parents whose kids were killed, or who are genuinely freaked out that there is a chance that their kid could die when they send them to school

as a parent who moved to the US and encountered this fear for the first time -- a fear that's just not present in other countries because while anything can happen anywhere, the chances are much much lower. why? not because there aren't crazy people in other countries, but because they don't have easy access to guns

> so they are overblown, especially relative to other gun deaths

actually, it's the other way around; it's the "other gun deaths" that are _under-valued_ and often ignored in the gun debate -- we should be talking about those _more_ not talking about school shootings less

50K gun deaths a year in the US is absolutely bonkers compared to other developed countries, and on par with Central America per-capita; and even if half are suicides, many who commit suicide may not have done so if guns weren't so readily accessible (sure there are other ways to do, but it's not as easy)

> plays into the narrative around police shootings. There are about 1100 people killed by cops every year in the United States

the reason for the narrative, is that in no other other advanced democracy on earth is there such a high rate of police killing civilians (when calculated per capita) -- it's not even close

they get attention because police shouldn't be killing civilians in the first place; it's pretty simple

if the USA didn't have such an obsession with guns, we wouldn't even be having this conversation
by nostrademons | 2025-08-27 23:37:27+00:00
That's a large part of it.

Probably the best description I've heard of the EM role is that "It's a large collection of part-time roles, all with disparate skillsets, that together are responsible for ensuring the success of the project."

Communication is a huge part of that - downwards (telling reports the information they need to be successful), sideway (getting information from cross-functional partners and managerial peers so you align your projects with theirs), and upwards (managing expectations and asking for direction at the appropriate point so upper management doesn't freak out).

But other skillsets involved are: playing therapist (managing anxiety, morale issues, resentment, and misconduct); coaching (both technical and interpersonal); splitting up vague exec mandates into subgoals; prioritizing; hiring; managing performance; serving as a point of contact for whatever random problems your reports bring you; negotiating; setting team structure; developing expertise among your reports; managing their careers so they get promoted; ensuring that they're recognized for their accomplishments; helping people have fun in the office; modeling a culture of respect; selling new product initiatives; and yes, enforcing company policy.
by BoorishBears | 2025-08-27 23:38:01+00:00
The is funny to read because it captures my feelings on this exactly: when you're a company of passionate people driven by a mission from the top down (very important this alignment is genuinely top down), the drawbacks of the TLM-like position are totally workable: the org gives some grace and flexibility to everyone involved knowing that the TLM is sacrificing some effectiveness as an IC, those under them are losing some room for direct impact. It all works out as long you're able to "grow the pie" and make up for the smaller slices by executing.

Once you're late stage though, that's done. TLMs are probably being held to 100% of IC standards and manager standards, people under them are jockeying for "impact" and don't want to compete with their manager, etc.

I totally see why it wouldn't work at today's Google. Honestly maybe it's a positive sign they recognized that.
by thomascountz | 2025-08-27 23:38:20+00:00
You can find an em dash in my comment history if you're curious. Despite what could be said about poor sample selection, consider the imbalance of the argument being made: the frequency of em dash use is disproportionate to the suspicion thrust upon a sample of writing. I.e., a single em dash is suspicious, regardless of how many times it might show up. Therefore, it's more likely that someone who uses em dashes—even if only rarely—will self-select to respond to a thread like this and feel compelled to defend themselves.
by CharlesW | 2025-08-27 23:38:28+00:00
> I didn't see mention anywhere of a license.

This page, which is poorly designed¹ to the point that it supports the idea that this is all an in-joke rather than the work of pros, appears to suggest that this is a purely commercial work: https://abcdinamo.com/licenses

¹ Seen while scanning: (1) Scroll down, then up. Boo. (2) Leading cramped beyond "style preference". (3) Bulleted list badly styled in a way that requires work. (4) No attention paid to tracking where it's needed (e.g. small all-caps type). (5) Some terms (e.g. "First Designer") capitalized inconsistently. (6) '&' used in body copy.
by hnroo99 | 2025-08-27 23:38:29+00:00
Whoa did not expect the CEO of Cloudflare to comment here! Thanks for the response. The extended periods of high latency was concerning, but I did some more digging and saw that your team is aware of this and working on it: https://www.answeroverflow.com/m/1409539854747963523 Hoping things work out!
by sershe | 2025-08-27 23:38:59+00:00
Not at Google but I'm in such a role right now and I really dislike it. Can't really get much focused coding in because you constantly have to jump in to review something or help fix something or handle a live site juniors cannot handle, or update some TPS report on what everyone is doing, or some PowerPoint or whatever. I dislike all of these to start with, but getting my own (expected) features in is an exercise in frustration. And when I ignore people and try to have uninterrupted time it feels like I'm neglecting all this other stuff. I wonder who thrives in such a mixed role...
by dolefulcreature | 2025-08-27 23:39:15+00:00
Honestly? Join a community choir and you will very quickly learn to appreciate all forms of choral music. Choral music is about groups of humans acting in an extremely organized and coordinated way. It's a kind of collabarative effort that requires full engagement of the senses: you have to LISTEN and FEEL and EXPRESS all in rhythmic time while also WATCHING each other and your director. It takes concerted effort and everyone has to be locked in or it all falls apart....but when you check all those boxes? Absolute transcendence.
by DoctorOetker | 2025-08-27 23:39:36+00:00
I don't understand, I try to constantly mark the threads that use software stacks I don't use or care about ("how to do X in framework Y better with respect to metric Z"). I am constantly interested in scientific discussions. Sometimes HN feels like a slow news day, and the thread with less points and less comments is what I get to see, and this underlying thread does feel suppressed...
by borg16 | 2025-08-27 23:39:37+00:00
I never really understood the concept of small teams. Managing a small team really does not provide the scale and benefit that a medium to large team does. Lost bandwidth of manager of said small team or extra salary of the same manager seem like something the company could use in other places.

But often such teams in faang come up as a by product of someone’s empire building and that is unfortunate for others involved in it.
by gm678 | 2025-08-27 23:40:03+00:00
I'm curious if this was created for/by Zed (which recently added support for it [0]) or if it was pioneered by the Neovim plugin [1] and caught the Zed team's attention?

The plugin doesn't seem to have any ties to the Zed editor that I can see, and hopefully if this was the product of discussions among different participants in the space it'll pick up steam quickly.

[0] https://zed.dev/releases/stable/0.201.4 [1] https://github.com/olimorris/codecompanion.nvim
by ggm | 2025-08-27 23:40:07+00:00
Look if reasons are "i don't like it" then that's fine. There's no arguing with personal preference or axioms of belief like "no matter what tax is bad"

The point of argument is when people have to be reminded of the contradictions: if you file a tax claim and claim allowances you acknowledge tax exists. If your health fund demands you also exploit state or federal subsidy you're exploiting the benefits. If your company receives industry offsets or assistance...
by missinglugnut | 2025-08-27 23:40:20+00:00
You haven't identified a group, a motive, a psychological mechanism, described the method, or explained the intention in any depth.

In other words, this is a cynical lament about how other people suck that's not descriptive enough to be useful or falsifiable. I believe in acknowledging harsh realities for the sake of dealing with them, but there's just no substance here to even acknowledge.

Nobody benefits from this sort of thinking.
by jerlam | 2025-08-27 23:40:37+00:00
Is this common for any other vaccines? I got a few in the past few years recommended by the doctor, but at no point did I have to show proof of anything to the pharmacy.

I poked around the pharmacy web site and there were a few that, upon selection, asked me to self-attest that I had a health condition that needed the vaccine. But nothing beyond clicking a checkbox.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-27 23:41:04+00:00
Because an explicit and stated method of this administration is to flood their opponents with things to fight, in the interest of pushing through big things that are important to them while their opponents are busy fighting everything and overwhelmed with the minutiae.

An effective response to that is calibrating ones outrage and asking "Out of all the things I could be fighting, what is the most impactful and important?"

Hence, I think it's a waste of time causing others to think about a token symbolic bribe.

Focus on the $250M+ bribes that are also happening.
by 627467 | 2025-08-27 23:41:22+00:00
Same with UK's OSA: don't most governments already have the tools to block domains based on operator compliance with laws? What's wrong with that approach that leads to this kind of universal jurisdiction approach?

I leave my home computer network open to the public and now suddenly I'm liable to some random jurisdiction around the world because someone in that location decides to call my computer?

China's GFW seems benign in comparison
by xenotux | 2025-08-27 23:41:49+00:00
The original ethos was that you didn't want the company ran by MBAs, so you wanted to build your management team by tapping into talented engineers.

Of course, this can backfire in many ways. You end up wasting engineering talent, and as the organization grows, managers spend more time on paper-pushing than on creative work. And there's no shortage of engineers who are just bad at reading, talking to, and managing people.

But the huge perk of management is leverage. If you're technically competent and credible, and want something to happen, your team will see it your way. If you're a random "ideas guy" in an IC role, that's not a given.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-08-27 23:42:01+00:00
Every year I pay $39.99 for a one-month subscription for Punchbowl, which allows me to easily manage RSVP's for my son's birthday party.

For that price, you get the normal stuff you'd expect and also:

- no ads

- ability to set each invitee as an adult, a child or an infant (useful when planning food and activities)

- ability to group invitees into families, so that any adult in the family can edit the RSVP for any/all family members

- single place to manage all messages with attendees

- easy to start this year's invitation as a copy of last year's

- app that displays the total 'yes' folks, split by adult, child, infant

It's totally worth the money for the time it saves and the ease of use for guests.

But I'm surprised that AFAIK there's no open source thing that's as easy to use, and that includes all the features I listed.
by brandonin | 2025-08-27 23:42:44+00:00
Setup is pretty easy. If you use cursor or vs code you just click the button on the readme. if you are using anything else you just copy and paste the MCP server.

The second step is to add a rule that tells it to use the a24z memory mcp server. After that it should automatically do everything for you. I am having some trouble where it doesn't always call the tool, but I get around that just by adding "use a24z memory MCP" as part of my prompt.
by acossta | 2025-08-27 23:43:34+00:00
Asta isn’t just another chatbot; it’s a full stack for building and evaluating AI agents that can actually assist researchers. It ships with an open research assistant that reads papers, synthesizes evidence and even cites its sources. AstaBench’s 2,400‑problem benchmark suite gives us a reproducible way to compare agents on real multi‑step science tasks like literature review and code execution. The project also includes open‑source agents, APIs and language models tuned for research, plus access to a 200 M‑paper corpus.

In a world full of closed, untested agent tools, Asta is refreshing and gives developers all the components they need to build their own trustworthy science agents.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-27 23:44:18+00:00
The opposite is also true.

Does $2.5M matter to Apple?

No. They probably lose that much between rows in their spreadsheets.

So, if it's not material to Apple's finances, what does giving it to Trump mean? Symbolic gestures are symbolic, but you haven't bent someone to your will until you've made them give you something that hurts.
by xanehx | 2025-08-27 23:45:46+00:00
I’d like to script font that’s just as legible as Arial. I’ve never seen one.

I miss reading and writing cursive, but want the clarity of print. I don’t want flourishes, don’t want big ballooning lines, don’t want wacky out-of-place letters, it needs to flow, and needs to be connected in a natural way.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-27 23:45:46+00:00
Go vibe check Kimi-K2. One of the weirdest models out there now, and it's open weights - with both "base" and "instruct" versions available.

The language it uses is peculiar. It's like the entire model is a little bit ESL.

I suspect that this pattern comes from SFT and RLHF, not the optimizer or the base architecture or the pre-training dataset choices, and the base model itself would perform much more "in line" with other base models. But I could be wrong.

Goes to show just how "entangled" those AIs are, and how easy it is to affect them in unexpected ways with training. Base models have a vast set of "styles" and "language usage patterns" they could draw from - but instruct-tuning makes a certain set of base model features into the "default" persona, shaping the writing style this AI would use down the line.
by tremon | 2025-08-27 23:45:46+00:00
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...

> Together, the nation’s 5,426 data centers consume billions of gallons of water annually. One report estimated that U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021)

> Approximately 80% of the water (typically freshwater) withdrawn by data centers evaporates, with the remaining water discharged to municipal wastewater facilities.
by tbugrara | 2025-08-27 23:47:04+00:00
AI democratizes knowledge better than wikipedia ever could. It makes knowledge accessible to those who can't find good teachers (a good teacher is ridiculously rare). It makes knowledge accessible to those who've been let down by our capitalist society.

I don't care that you hate it. It's the best thing to happen to us in a long time and anyone who disagrees does so on a mountain of privilege. I'm happy for you to have learned everything you know, but to desire to take it away from everyone else is abhorrent to me.
by mmcclure | 2025-08-27 23:49:25+00:00
No one said they were, I don't even think this font is available for use outside of are.na's product. This is about craft.

I think they said it pretty well themselves:

With Areal, Dinamo designed an updated version of Arial especially suited for Are.na, but which still honors the original. Stem thicknesses were streamlined, more characters added (), a monospace version drawn, dark mode functionality optimized. You probably wouldn’t have noticed these changes if you hadn’t read this statement. It’s possible you still won’t. But to us (Are.na and Dinamo) Areal’s existence is satisfying in the way that rewriting an entire front-end is satisfying. As stated in this text block from 5 years ago, “the reason you would create something is because you love it enough to see it exist.”