MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-08-29 05:02:15+00:00
For Trump v. Casa, I'm going to set aside the argument that "nationwide injunctions are bad" because it's not really relevant here. The court has had plenty of opportunities to shut down nationwide injunctions, 14 during the Biden administration according to your linked Wikipedia article, and I think you need to consider what it means that the court only now decides to close that door during this administration and this case, specifically.

With regards to McMahon v. New York, what makes you think that the plaintiff is unlikely to succeed in the merits? The court can absolutely take into consideration the intent of the Trump administration and McMahon as his secretary to illegally shutter the Department of Education. On the one hand, you have the executive branch's ability to oversee a reduction in force; on the other, you have the executive reducing force as an end-run around the duty charged to them by law. If the "unitary executive theory" means that the executive can discharge duties they are bound by law to execute, then the Constitution is meaningless (as Sotomayor cites at the very beginning of her dissent, Article 2 section 3 charges the President to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed"). Your argument that irreparable harm extends only to the staff being fired is also naively narrow; the states brought the suit, not the staff of the DoEd. The states argue--correctly--that if the Department cannot carry out its duties, then a vast array of students and teachers that rely on services funded or administered by the DoEd would be harmed. It seems batshit to argue that the harms done to the executive by temporarily curtailing that power outweigh the harms that will be done to an uncertain but certainly vast number of people in the interim. It's worth noting that, in this case, providing relief simply means that the government must maintain the status quo for a few months or however long it takes for the case to work through the courts. Restoring someone's job with back pay is sufficient when one person is fired. It is not sufficient when the executive has eliminated 50% of a statutorily-mandated department of the federal government with an eye to cut more.
by avmich | 2025-08-29 05:02:26+00:00
> As I said in my other comments, just cause something is sold at a lower cost doesn't mean its optimal.

No, Starship isn't optimal, it's just better than existing alternative by this specific criteria. If you need some other quality, you may rationally choose something else.

The point was that the price of kilogram to orbit is an important criteria for many customers, so they logically choose Starship.
by sfpotter | 2025-08-29 05:03:13+00:00
In Seattle, 5% is meager considering what tech workers here make. If you work as a teacher in the city of Seattle, you're likely looking at ~$100K/year, after at least a few years of experience, and assuming you have a masters degree with the requisite endorsements. So, lots of debt on top of that. Note that there are many other support staff in the schools who make significantly less but who do jobs which are no less important. If your spouse makes a similar amount, the likelihood you can own your own home unless you're phenomenally frugal and careful with your money is low. I have multiple friends who are city of Seattle teachers and they've been priced out of the city, by and large.

My opinion is that the teachers should be paid more and people in the city should be taxed far higher than they are. I attended Seattle public schools K-12 myself, and the older I get (now in my late 30's with a kid of my own), virtually all problems they face can be addressed by better compensation. All the teachers I know are kind, well-meaning people who do their best despite facing an adverse situation. Teaching has gotten significantly more difficult since COVID. In Seattle in particular, high income families have tended to pull their kids out of public schools and put them in private schools, where paying upwards of $50-60K/year isn't uncommon. Because of the ways public schools are funded in the state, this essentially operates as a zero sum game.
by TheDong | 2025-08-29 05:03:28+00:00
What commonly gets installed in those cases is actual malware, a RAT (Remote Admin Tool) that lets the attacker later run commands on your laptop (kinda like an OpenSSH server, but also punching a hole through nat and with a server that they can broadcast commands broadly to the entire fleet).

If the attacker wants to use AI to assist in looking for valuables on your machine, they won't install AI on your machine, they'll use the remote shell software to pop a shell session, and ask AI they're running on one of their machines to look around in the shell for anything sensitive.

If an attacker has access to your unlocked computer, it is already game over, and LLM tools is quite far down the list of dangerous software they could install.

Maybe we should ban common RAT software first, like `ssh` and `TeamViewer`.
by koyote | 2025-08-29 05:03:49+00:00
Is it just me or does dividing an integer always turn on some alarm bells in my head?

I'd immediately look into what happens for odd numbers, rounding, implicit type conversions etc. Or at least that's what I was taught when I first started programming.

Also relying on "well we know that X is always Y" is almost always a mistake; maybe not always at first but definitely in the future because X will almost certainly be Y at some point. Defensive coding would catch such issues (with at the very least an Assert somewhere to ensure X is indeed Y before continuing, ensuring that we get a nice error when that assumption proves to be wrong).
by Animats | 2025-08-29 05:03:53+00:00
> I'm going to assume that Silicon Valley Bank has products built around the fact that a startup has a large sum of money that it spends very slowly, versus a restaurant that needs loans and spends money as quickly as it comes in.

That's what SVB assumed, and they were very wrong.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_Silicon_Valley_Ban...
by motorest | 2025-08-29 05:03:59+00:00
> Because it represents wasted time and cognitive load.

No, not really. Either you use them because they are presented to you, or you don't and you are oblivious to their existence. There is zero cognitive load.

> It's a vestigial habit from an era when search was bad.

Nonsense. It's absurd to even suggest that it's reasonable to use a search engine to be able to open sites that matter to you personally.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-08-29 05:06:35+00:00
Here's a steelman for some brand of leftism (I don't ascribe to any label, though I'm an alleged market socialist)

You can buy votes, even if it's banned, by buying up and controlling the media.

Therefore money and political power can be exchanged.

The existence of billionaires - People who have as much money (and therefore, as much political power) as ten hundred millionaires - Therefore represents a dangerous accumulation of power.

When we look at the market and capitalism, we aren't seeing a fun little game where some speedrunner gets a high score and there are no consequences. We are seeing an incentive landscape trying to reform the aristocracy. We are seeing kings arise from first principles.

This should be stopped.

One nonviolent way to stop this is to fund just massive welfare programs, close all tax loopholes, all offshore tax havens, and give poor people money, which is the most American franchisement you can have.

Implementation is left as a simple exercise for the reader
by ActorNightly | 2025-08-29 05:06:46+00:00
> Letting functions take anything as an argument and then just assuming it's a duck with the methods you want is no way to write a robust system

Everyone keeps harping on type safety, but it just doesn't play out in reality. Linux Kernel is incredibly robust, has never been a broken mess, and has basically no type enforcement, as you can cast pointers into other stuff.

In general, all typing does is move error checking into the compiler/preprocessor instead of testing. And time spent on designing and writing type safe code is almost equivalent to time spent writing tests that serve as an end-to-end contract.

There is a reason why NodeJS was the most used language before all the AI stuff came with Python.

>Performance wise you're boxed into a corner. The slow runtime will have you writing native code in another language, complicating your project.

Most of these performance arguments are similar to arguging that your commuter car needs to be a track spec Ferrari in terms of performance, by people that have very little experience with cars.

Plenty of fast/performant stuff runs on Python. PyPy is a thing also. So is launching small compiled executables like a process, that takes literally one line of code in Python.

>The GIL will have you jumping through hoops to work around.

This is just laughable. Clearly you have extremely little experience with Python.
by sethammons | 2025-08-29 05:07:29+00:00
You ever see something out of the corner of your eye and you were mistaken? It feels like LLM hallucinations. "An orange cat on my counter?!" And an instant later, your brain has reclassified "a basketball on my counter" as that fits the environment model better as several instant-observations gather contexts: not moving, more round, not furry, I don't own a cat, yesterday my kid mentioned something about tryouts, boop insta-reclassification from cat to basketball.

I can recognize my own meta cognition there. My model of reality course corrects the information feed interpretation on the fly. Optical illusions feel very similar whereby the inner reality model clashes with the observed.

For general ai, it needs a world model that can be tested against and surprise is noted and models are updated. Looping llm output with test cases is a crude approximation of that world model.
Show HN: Promptproof – GitHub Action to test LLM prompts, catch bad JSON schemas
by geminimir | 2025-08-29 05:07:31+00:00
We kept breaking production with small prompt edits — suddenly outputs weren’t valid JSON, fields disappeared, or formats changed silently. So we built Promptproof, a GitHub Action that runs in CI and blocks PRs when prompts produce invalid outputs.

Features:

- Validates JSON output

- Enforces required keys & schemas

- Runs fast in CI (no external infra)

- Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, and local models

- Adds PR comments so reviewers see failures immediately

We’d love feedback: which rules or integrations would make this most useful for you?

Repo: https://github.com/geminimir/promptproof-action
by hilbert42 | 2025-08-29 05:07:46+00:00
Exactly, I too have been sans JS for as long—before it came on the scene.

As I implied in my earlier post most users these days don't realize the advantages of turning off JS. Trouble is, most browser manufacturers make it difficult to disable JS, either there's no switch in the settings or it's buried so deep it's essentially dysfunctional. Here I'd especially single out Mozilla with Firefox, one could once easily disable JS but the function was removed I suspect after pressure from Google—as you would know without JS ads are almost a non event.

On Android I use Privacy Browser which makes it dead easy to turn JS off and on, and on Windows and Linux it's Pale Moon with a plugin that provides a one-click switch.

Seems to me too little is made of these advantages in tech sites such as HN—although that's not surprising given that many here make a living from JS programming and are paid by companies who financially benefit from sending mega-sized JS-loaded pages to web users.
by fallous | 2025-08-29 05:07:55+00:00
I'm not sure that you can reach the conclusion that "people don't have world models" based on beliefs that do not fully integrate with such a model. We too often try to misapply binary truth requirements to domains in which there exists at least a trinary logic, if not a greater number of logic truths.

If I meet a random stranger, do I trust them or distrust them? The answer is "both/neither," because a concept such as "trust" isn't a binary logic in such a circumstance. They are neither trustworthy nor untrustworthy, they are in a state of nontrustworthiness (the absence of trust, but not the opposite of truth).

World models tend to have foundational principles/truths that inform what can be compatible for inclusion. A belief that is non-compatible, rather than compatible/incompatible, can exist in such a model (often weakly) since it does not meet the requirements for rejection. Incomplete information can be integrated into a world model as long as the aspects being evaluated for compatibility conform to the model.

Requiring a world model to contain complete information and logical consistency at all possible levels from the granular to the metaphysical seems to be one Hell of a high bar that makes demands no other system is expected to achieve.
by EmadGinawi | 2025-08-29 05:08:02+00:00
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As part of this initiative, Zendy users will gain access to titles across a range of disciplines, including history, literature, politics, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, international development, and Hispanic and Francophone studies. The partnership also includes works from the prestigious British Academy publishing portfolio, following Liverpool’s recent appointment as the Academy’s publishing partner for its academic books programme.

This partnership strengthens Zendy’s offering in the humanities and social sciences, providing users with valuable perspectives on human experience and society. It reflects the shared mission of both organisations to break down access barriers and promote educational equity across underserved regions.

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Show HN: StripeMeter – Open-Source Usage Metering for Stripe Billing
by geminimir | 2025-08-29 05:08:18+00:00
We built StripeMeter, an open-source usage metering platform that plugs directly into Stripe. It solves the classic SaaS pain of “why is my bill higher than expected?” by giving both developers and customers real-time usage tracking with live cost projections. Why it matters

- Transparency: Customers see exactly what Stripe will bill them (within 0.5% parity).

- Exactly-once guarantee: No double billing, ever.

- Fast & scalable: Sub-minute freshness with Redis + Postgres counters.

We’d love feedback from SaaS builders, especially if you’ve struggled with Stripe’s metered billing. Does this solve a real pain for you? What would you need before trusting it in production?
by Razengan | 2025-08-29 05:10:16+00:00
Does anybody know why Anthropic doesn't let you remove your payment info from your account, or how to get support from them?

I bought a Pro subscription, the send button on their dumb chatbot box is disabled for me (on Safari), and I still get "capacity constraints' limits. Filed a chargeback with my bank just because of the audacity of their post-purchase experience. ChatGPT-5 works good enough for coding too.

From my experience with Claude Opus it seems like it tries to be "too smart" and doesn't seem to keep up with the latest APIs. It suggested some code for a iOS/macOS project that was only valid on tvOS, and other gaffs.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-29 05:10:35+00:00
That's the point. The device being compromised to the point that malicious code is actually meddling with the bank app is the only time that having it fail attestation would be useful. The other cases are useless/vexing false positives. But attestation doesn't happen in the one case it would be useful because then the attacker-controlled code won't even attempt to do it, it will just exfiltrate the user's credentials to the attacker.
by mont_tag | 2025-08-29 05:12:07+00:00
History of women in the Python world: In 2006, the first two women were voted in as PSF fellows, Laura Creighton and Anna Martelli Ravenscroft. In 2008, there were two women on the PSF board, Gloria Willadsen and Allison Randal. The woman mentored by Guido was Emily Morehouse-Valcarcel. She is now on the steering committee but was not featured in the film. Less prominent in the documentary was Carol Willing who was on the initial steering committee. Also featured were Mariatta Wijaya and Lisa Roach-Carrier who were mentored by another developer.
by DrewADesign | 2025-08-29 05:12:30+00:00
My intuition says there are some stylistic differences. It seems like some development cultures somewhat have better results with more rigid computer engineering sort of tasks with high granularity requirements and more straightforward goals, even if the tasks are really hard, deeply technical and the goals are difficult. I think some are better at the more nebulous sort of tasks with a lot of flexibility. Both are really useful mindsets that seem much less useful if improperly applied.

Given, outsourcing is probably going to be hit-or-miss regardless of who’s doing it.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-29 05:12:54+00:00
Pushing instead of polling was done more than fifteen years ago, and various major feed producers and consumers do support it. It was initially known as PubSubHubbub (PuSH), but was renamed to WebSub when adopted by W3C, where it has been a Recommendation for over seven years now <https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/>.

(As for SSE, it’s entirely unsuitable as it would require a persistent connection.)
by TrackerFF | 2025-08-29 05:13:15+00:00
Video and graphical designers? I’m not saying this with optimism, but rather as as observation.

I know a handful of digital marketers, that work for different marketing firms - and the use of GenAI for those tasks have exploded. Usually tasks which they either had in-house people, or freelancers do the work.

Now they just do it themselves.
by protocolture | 2025-08-29 05:13:40+00:00
>All you're doing is running away from the work

I feel like you have some weird moral hangup with needing/using non local resources that wont be resolved with any application of logic or reference to facts. Its nice that you have formed some weird worldview but its not really reality and it doesnt fit into it, so no need to make it anyone elses problem really.

Edit: Also last time I checked iMessage and Teams are also hosted outside of indonesia.
by palmotea | 2025-08-29 05:14:29+00:00
>> Feudalism.

> That's optimistic.

> Ancient egypt (elite in pyramids, slaves otherwise) is more likely.

No you're both being optimistic. The feudal lords had a vital need for serfs, and the pharaohs slaves.

It'll be more like elite in pyramids, everyone else (who survives) lives like a rat in the sewers, living off garbage and trying to stay out of sight. Once the elite no longer need workers like us, they'll withdraw the resources they need to live comfortably, or to even live at all. They're not making more land, and the capitalist elite have "better" uses for energy than heating your home and powering your shit.
by computerex | 2025-08-29 05:14:46+00:00
Technology has always helped people. Are you one of the people that say optimizing compilers are bad? Do you not use the intellisense? Or IDEs? Do you not use higher level languages? Why not write in assembly all the time? No free lunch right.

Yes there are trade offs, but at this point if you haven’t found a way to significantly amplify and scale yourself using llms, and your plan is to instead pretend that they are somehow not useful, that uphill battle can only last so long. The genie is out of the bag. Adapt to the times or you will be left behind. That’s just what I think.
by xp84 | 2025-08-29 05:16:16+00:00
I agree completely. My deck would have been:

Slide 1: 48-point font

Don't go forward with reentry

Slide 2: 24-point font

* Our foam collision dataset from experimentation only included pieces below X cu in. * Evidence points to this piece being at least Y cu in - 200 times more massive * Catastrophic damage to the wing cannot be ruled out

This would have been a great PowerPoint, and I'm not convinced handing them only an academic paper with dozens of pages of facts and figures would have had the effect that my above deck would have had.
by anyfoo | 2025-08-29 05:16:19+00:00
Good analysis. I guess I lost my cycle-counting foo, because on modern CPUs cycle-counting is a) infeasible on a superscalar, speculative, out-of-order CPU, and b) even if you did manage to do it, it hardly matters when a CPU cycle is less than a nanosecond, but any memory access that slips through the caches means many orders of magnitude higher latency.

Of course none of that applies here, but it colors the way you think about things…
by webcoon | 2025-08-29 05:16:57+00:00
Awesome! This speaks to something, which I've been thinking (and wishing) for a long time. I've already done probabilistic programming in a scientific context (Python) and classical software engineering for web development (TypeScript, Python, Rust), and I've always wondered why I couldn't have the real-world modelling capacity of the former with the static type assurances of the latter. Love that you (and Microsoft) are thinking along the same lines! Do you perhaps know of any Python implementations for this? There are plenty of dynamic stats programming libraries, but none offer typing solutions AFAIK.
by viccis | 2025-08-29 05:17:05+00:00
>b) "effect of", not "affect of"

Oh no, oh lord lmao

I meant "affect" and not "effect." You need to learn what affect means. I'm not asking you to learn about affect theory, but ffs no part of my sentence implied it meant "effect" and not "affect." Ugh. It doesn't even make sense. What would the "effect" of "poorly composed sentences" be? Only affect makes sense there.