MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pear01 | 2025-08-27 15:12:19+00:00
Sounds like an interesting book, though far too many pages for a subject I have only a passing interest in. I would note given the authors affiliations I'm not sure I would ever consider it something that could "set the record straight". If there's a controversy about the program the authors backgrounds don't exactly suggest one will be getting a balanced view. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I appreciate the suggestion anyway.
by tombert | 2025-08-27 15:12:31+00:00
> a well designed test suite does run fast

Not what I meant. Even if the test suite itself executed instantly, which it doesn't and it's ridiculous to assume that test suites are "well designed" in the average case, it's still the bureaucratic slow nightmare of "enterprise development".

> they very easily could have determined how readily the bot talks about suicide under guise of "character development" or whatever they call that very well known jailbreak.

Even if it could be detected it is absolutely in no way implied, or even suggested, that having a bureaucratic enterprise test suite would have detected that. That's just an assertion that you're making.

> move fast and break shit with social media and AI is sociopathic.

As I said, I don't completely agree with the mantra. I just said that it comes out of a legitimate frustration with how awful enterprise development can be.

> At this point MFABS is just another way to say unprofessional software engineering in favor of more profit.

I don't disagree with this, hence why I said it's ok for stuff that's low-stakes. If you're working on something like, for example, a music recommendation system, and the system accidentally plays a Taylor Swift song instead of Metallica, and this happens because some software wasn't properly tested, it really isn't a big deal, somehow the metal-head will survive.

"Professional" and "unprofessional" aren't well defined terms. There are times when it's ok to half-ass something because it's better to just get something that works instead of getting something that's perfect. There are lots of applications, maybe even most applications, where that doesn't apply and it's better to try an strive for perfection, but it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that everything silicon valley is working on is high-stakes and that striving for perfection immediately is actually beneficial.

I would love a universe where everyone designed everything in TLA+ (or something similar) before building software, this would make me irrationally happy, but I understand that it's not realistic or even reasonable to do this for every application.
by devilbunny | 2025-08-27 15:12:42+00:00
Does it matter what I think?

Any situation that floods that area is going to be well beyond 100-year floods, likely beyond 1000-year, and (like the 1927 flood) predicated on catastrophic levee failures that result in the Mississippi being over 100 miles wide.

Is it possible? Of course. Is it likely? No. Would there be much bigger issues than a server farm being offline? Yes.

The worst-case scenario from a storm that hits locally (which, e.g., the 1927 flood was absolutely not a consequence of - it was water from upstream, which climate change will weaken because of decreased snowmelt) is like Harvey over Houston (similar terrain). But this is much farther inland and could not replenish itself from the Gulf.

That said, it is in the middle of nowhere.
by 542354234235 | 2025-08-27 15:13:13+00:00
It is actually more complicated than that and being forced to provide a passcode is also legal precedent, but both biometrics and passcodes are still open legal questions.

It has been argued successfully that giving biometrics is analogous to giving blood, hair, fingerprints, standing in a lineup, providing a writing sample, or wearing certain clothes, all of which you can be compelled to do.

From my understanding, the current split about being compelled to provide passcodes, and to a much lesser extent biometrics, is the foregone conclusion exception stemming from the Fisher v. United States [1] case, where, as Justice White said “the existence and locations of the papers[were] a foregone conclusion and the [defendant’s physical act] adds little or nothing to the sum total of the Government’s information by conceding that he in fact has the papers… [And so] no constitutional rights [were] touched. The question [was] not of testimony but of surrender.”

This has been used in relation to court cases on biometrics and passcodes [2]. It appears that courts that rule that you can be compelled seem to look narrowly at the passcode itself i.e. the government knows you own the phone and knows you know how to unlock it, so it is a foregone conclusion to provide it. Courts that rule you cannot be compelled seem to look at the phones contents i.e. the government does not know what is on the phone so decrypting the data would be providing protected testimony, or a stricter interpretation that you cannot be compelled to disclose the contents of the mind. The Supreme Court has declined multiple times to hear cases that would help settle the legal ambiguity, so it remains an evolving issue.

In short, a passcode is not a panacea and you may be compelled to provide it.

[1] https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2024/04/17/2...

[2] https://www.barclaydamon.com/webfiles/Publications/Unlock-De...
by potatolicious | 2025-08-27 15:13:31+00:00
I mean, there are so many factors. The piece covers many but I think there really are a few more that I've personally noticed:

- Companies have generally tightened belts on discretionary spending, which means fewer people are being paid to go to conferences and events. Many workplaces offered a relatively free hand when it came to company-sponsored conference trips, but now you're not only looking at paying your own way but taking PTO to do it!

- As someone who still makes an effort with in-person meetups: space is so hard to get unless you're well-funded. There used to be a plethora of startups around here that were happy to let you use their office after hours, but the end of ZIRP and the ensuing belt-tightening has taken a lot of these places off the list.

- AI has sucked so much air out of the room. AI-related meetups around here are still pretty common, lots of VC-funded AI startups lending their space to AI-related meetups. Heck, many even have a food and drinks budget. But if you're in any space that isn't AI this kind of support is basically completely non-existent.

Also, I think a major factor that can't be discounted are incentives for speakers. For the same reason most companies have switched to recorded announcements vs. live stage announcements, speakers are incentivized towards remote/recorded events vs. in-person since the content has much wider reach. It may be less useful for the in-person participants but you're optimizing for the long tail of people viewing remotely/viewing later.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-27 15:13:33+00:00
> on my 2011 Mac Mini which Apple stopped allowing upgrades on past macOS 10.13

I know some people feel like Apple is aggressive in this respect, but that's an 8 year old version of a browser. That's like taking off all of the locks on your house, leaving the doors and windows open all while expecting your house to never have uninvited guests.
by mapt | 2025-08-27 15:14:15+00:00
In the US, public defenders may try 1000 cases a year, may not meet you until five minutes before the initial plea, may have essentially zero investigative capability. Court cases may take years to arise, bail may be effectively denied by virtue of economics, and the plea bargain offered is often <5% of the sentence sought, while being the ultimate way of settling nearly every case.

Arguing for the merits of an adversarial system is one thing. But many parts of due process are effectively completely dead for the vast majority of defendants, and prosecutorial discretion rules the justice system almost completely for those of us who aren't millionaires. "Adversarial" might work for OJ Simpson, but it hasn't worked for most of us for a long time, and the US prison system holds the most prisoners per capita in the world - it isn't close†.

Defenders of the shortcuts we have created proudly justify it as saving the taxpayer money; of making workable a situation where they feel they are underfunded by an order of magnitude, but the reality is that it is justice amputated of essential components. If you want to save money, maybe consider making fewer things illegal, and imprisoning people for a shorter amount of time, but go back to actually holding real, speedy trials that are effectively adversarial in nature. In the meantime, we have a judge/jury/executioner in the DA's office, and they get re-elected electorally largely based on their conviction rate; Like shooting fish in a barrel.

†Depending on how you view internment camps for specific minorities
by ifyoubuildit | 2025-08-27 15:14:22+00:00
> while any involvement with sex trafficking is bad, (why doesn't this sentence end here?) distant association is far, far better than actually perpetrating the crimes. Or promising to expose the perpetrators and then failing to do so.

Different realities indeed. The dems didn't even do that first part of promising to release things before "failing" to. Nobody in charge wants this stuff out.

This is why our system is fucked. You just have to convince people you're not as bad as the other guy, and you get carte blanch to do pretty much whatever.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-27 15:14:25+00:00
very interesting find. That tarnishes a lot of reputation that it has.

Man wants to crowdfund AI models to create open source AI models

He should've instead shared the prompt that he entered into lovable instead.

Makes a shit ton of sense now. Okayyyy wtf man, I won't really ever have the guts to push cheap AI slop like lovable directly to HN. I am okay with claude code / gemini / heck chatgpt or deepseek etc. but lovable etc. just makes it feel as if the person writing it doesn't even know how to read code or be comfortable with code itself, let alone writing the code.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-08-27 15:14:49+00:00
During the BLM riots many participants in justifying their actions of property destruction would claim that the costs of replacing the property would come from insurance. Many people don’t have insurance, or self insure, and those that do could see a rise in premiums that make their business unviable. Additionally for some business it doesn’t make sense to rebuild as the circumstances that lead to their creation has changed, for these it’ll make more sense to take the insurance money and not rebuild resulting in a loss to the community.

Personally I don’t make a big distinction between crimes against property and crimes against people. I live for my life’s work, if someone destroyed that they might as well have killed me. Additionally many people are dying due to lack of resources, so if someone could be saved for $1M then the destruction of $1M of wealth might has well have killed them. As such I would treat theft and other white collar crime on part with mass murder.
by tsukikage | 2025-08-27 15:15:06+00:00
CRDTs would be lovely, wouldn't they?

However, OneDrive's promise is "save your files and photos to OneDrive and access them from any device, anywhere". Accordingly, the model OneDrive actually exposes to the user is directory trees of arbitrary files containing what, for OneDrive's purposes, are opaque blobs. This leads to all the behaviours you'd expect from a distributed system using such a model, and therefore the trust issues the public has with MS distributed systems.

Regaining someone's trust in a vendor after a bad experience, even for a different product, is very hard.
by 9rx | 2025-08-27 15:15:18+00:00
> (and the associated drinking)

I expect this, or lackthereof, is actually the biggest single reason. Which is to say that people aren't wanting to drink much anymore, so by extension they aren't going out to drink. Alcohol is known as the "social lubricant" for good reason. Despite a rise in use during the early stages of COVID lockdowns/restrictions, consumption of alcohol has dropped precipitously since — now at the lowest rate on record.
by yupyupyups | 2025-08-27 15:15:23+00:00
I've been to Celenity's homepage and he seems like a privacy-conscious guy, and that's more than fine. From a user's perspective, the dilemma remains though.

When it comes to Chinese nationals, you can't expect them to be held accountable if they were to do something malicious. China hosts a lot of cyber crimimals who have had free reign for some 2 decades to target people online. Also, we don't even know who this guy really is, let alone his nationality, was Jia Tan a real name? Who knows.
by Swizec | 2025-08-27 15:15:34+00:00
> while I’d love to go to conferences, taking time out of my own PTO and my own wallet to see them isn’t worth it

I’ve been using PTO and my own dime for conferences this whole time! It’s been super worth it career-wise especially as a speaker. Lots of fun, meet great people, have a bunch of “sawdust” to show for it.

The biggest impact has been that people in the industry generally know of me and that lends itself to creating opportunities / opening doors that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
by everforward | 2025-08-27 15:16:22+00:00
Mine is the Great Filter, basically a unification of life itself being rare and the universe being fragile. Though I don't think it reaches the level of destroying the universe, I think the filter happens at the level of being able to destroy a world or maybe a galaxy.

I think evolution creates a local maxima that's incompatible with access to advanced technology (read: unbelievable quantities of energy). There's a big technological gap between having enough energy to destroy the entire species and being able to colonize other galaxies, and some madman ends up destroying the species during that gap.

We have nuclear weapons that could come close to wiping out all intelligent life on the planet and we're nowhere close to intergalactic colonization or even traveling at speeds that would make that feasible. It seems probable that such travel requires a discovery that could be weaponized to destroy the planet.
by sagarkava | 2025-08-27 15:16:32+00:00
Hi HN, I'm excited to share our new open-source project: an AI voice agent specifically designed for call centers. This project aims to streamline customer interactions and reduce the workload on human agents by automating initial call handling.

Imagine using it to manage customer inquiries, handle reservations, or conduct surveys without human intervention. It's a game-changer for businesses looking to improve efficiency.

Key features include: - Real-time, low-latency voice conversation. - A cascading pipeline using Deepgram for STT, OpenAI (GPT-4o) for LLM, and ElevenLabs for TTS (customizable). - Advanced turn detection and voice activity detection (VAD) for smooth, natural conversations. - Fully open-source and easily customizable. - Support for Agent2Agent and MCP protocols.

Check out the repo: AI Voice Agent for Call Center https://github.com/videosdk-community/ai-voice-agent-for-cal... Main framework: VideoSDK Agents https://github.com/videosdk-live/agents

What use-cases do you envision for this AI voice agent?
by bayindirh | 2025-08-27 15:16:32+00:00
No,no. I also concur on the meaning of "weird", and I totally own it.

LaTeX has its own quirks and doesn't talk kindly to a newcomer, but I know a lot of people (nerd or otherwise) like it for what it is. For some of the users, it's an acquired taste though.

I have written my B.Sc. and M.Sc. stuff in Open/LibreOffice. Then I said never, and migrated to LaTeX for Ph.D. and did everything in 5x speed with 10x less fuss. I have a tendency to learn markup and programming languages fast, so I never felt off while working with it.

I'm more of a screen guy, for tmux works, too. I also still use Eclipse as my serious IDE. VSCode can play over there, heh.

I used to use Google Docs, but Notion's "personal wiki" structure won me for non-technical things. All technical things stay in Obsidian, which is also opened as a public digital garden.
by incomingpain | 2025-08-27 15:17:02+00:00
Complete opposite. I think Gosucoder said it best; let be badly paraphrase.

AI coding removed the bad part of coding. Lets you handle all the fun part; and you can of course always go and 'code' yourself, you dont have to prompt everything.

The new "developer" skill is ensuring that you're building a reliable app that isnt a house of cards. AI will tend to give you bare minimum. You cant have that, your prompts need to be better.
by cosmicgadget | 2025-08-27 15:17:19+00:00
> I don't believe that he was steering the ship, which is kind of important. Maybe you're fine with his team making all the decisions. That's a betrayal of trust for me.

Hahaha so instead of voting for 60 year old you voted for the almost-octogenarian who thinks there were airports in the revolutionary war, representing the party that has absolutely never hidden the neurological decline of a sitting president. My guy.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-27 15:17:26+00:00
Part of the SLS cost comes from trying to save money. Yearly budgets are kept low, which spreads out the work over a long time. This makes everything cost more, but the politicians only care about the yearly spending.

SLS is also a pretty weird design due to reusing Shuttle components for a completely different kind of launcher. This saves development costs (maybe) by using existing stuff that has already been developed, but the unsuitability of those components for this system increases per-launch costs. Once NASA runs out of old Shuttle engines, manufacturing new ones is going to cost $100 million apiece if not more, and each launch needs four of them. It was OK for Shuttle engines to be expensive since they were supposed to be amortized over hundreds of flights (and in practice were actually amortized across at least tens of flights) but now they’re being used in expendable launches. If Starship even comes remotely close to its goals, an entire launch will cost less than a single SLS engine.
by superkuh | 2025-08-27 15:17:35+00:00
That sounds like it's a hard requirement for checking your bank balance/etc over the internet. Can't you just not do that and phone them up or go in person or read the monthly sent paper balances? Or just keep track yourself... A bank without a physical location is something I'd steer well clear of.

I barely use my bank's website and could easily not use it at all and still have all the functionality that a bank provides.
by genshii | 2025-08-27 15:18:18+00:00
I've been using it in a CLI tool [1] to query media in my *arr services.

If you're talking about a query where you want "foo" to not be "evil" OR "silly", you could write 'foo != evil || foo != silly'.

There's a separate case where the value itself is an array/collection/set, in which case doing anything with that is currently unsupported. Values can only be strings, numbers, or booleans.

[1] https://github.com/adamhl8/inspectarr
by jaysonelliot | 2025-08-27 15:18:38+00:00
"Dug tunnels" - one of the most ridiculous boondoggles of any modern industrialist. The Boring Company is a machine for overpromising to get government contracts and underdelivering at exponential scale. He didn't start PayPal, he joined it and ended up getting fired, albeit with a golden parachute that gave him the chance to make more bets.

The "accomplishments" you're listing are mostly just investments that he managed to hype up very well. I'll give him this, he's an excellent huckster. But listen to his opinions? I wouldn't let him tell me what color an orange was.
by underlipton | 2025-08-27 15:18:40+00:00
>Retirement

Yup. Boomers be the death of all. So much of what's been done over the past 5 years-ish has been because a stock market crash would devastate the largest voting bloc at the worst possible moment; there would be no "just wait for the recovery." Ironically, many of those measures have made any potential crash much, much worse. Not just in terms of a general collapse, but with disproportionate impacts because of the nature of the interventions.

Don't look into what's actually in those retirement funds.
by MisterTea | 2025-08-27 15:19:02+00:00
So don't bother to improve safety either. I've worked in manufacturing for most of my life, worked manual lathes and mills in a machine shop and been in drop forging facilities. I'm well aware of industrial hazards so don't even try to patronize me.

I'm not sure what you're arguing for here, but you come off as morally bankrupt. Worker safety can certainly be improved but people like you happily shrug it off and are fine with hazardous cost cutting which allows people to continue to be maimed as long as you're steel or whatever is super cheap.
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-27 15:19:20+00:00
Ideally, you automate a check like that. Because the answer turns out to actually be "humans are profoundly bad at that kind of pattern recognition."

A computer will be able to tell that the 497th has a misspelled `CusomerEmail` or that change 829 is a regexp failure that trimmed the boolean "CustomerEmailAddressed" to "CustomerEmailed" with 100% reliability; humans, not so much.
by TheDong | 2025-08-27 15:19:54+00:00
I think you're misunderstanding.

"go build" of arbitrary attacker controlled go code will not lead to arbitrary code execution.

If you do "git clone attacker-repo && cargo build", that executes "build.rs" which can exec any command.

If you do "git clone attacker-repo && go build", that will not execute any attacker controlled commands, and if it does it'll get a CVE.

You can see this by the following CVEs:

https://pkg.go.dev/vuln/GO-2023-2095

https://pkg.go.dev/vuln/GO-2023-1842

In cargo, "cargo build" running arbitrary code is working as intended. In go, both "go get" and "go build" running arbitrary code is considered a CVE.
by josefresco | 2025-08-27 15:19:57+00:00
As an older "non-developer" it has had the opposite effect. My thirst for creation that I had back in the late 90's early 00's is back. It started slowly, but once I figured out the tooling I created almost 10 applications for myself and work in less than one month. I've done things with my Raspberry Pi I'd never thought possible (without months of tinkering), and I've created apps that bring me both personal pleasure, and workplace productivity.
by mikepurvis | 2025-08-27 15:20:03+00:00
One of the biggest ones is around access to the home directory, ~/.whatever, that kind of thing. Like a browser downloads something, a text editor opens it, it gets run from the terminal and creates a new executable, that new executable is run and mutates something else that the text editor also had open, etc etc. If all the apps have access to ~ then it's https://xkcd.com/1200/ and there's basically no point in the isolation, but if they each have their own ~ then sharing files between apps is a user-hostile headache.

From that article, it looks like perhaps the difference is that snaps are isolated at the app level, whereas qubes is a layer down, where each qube is a kind of workspace with multiple apps potentially installed in it. That seems reasonable enough, though you do have to be willing to pay the disk and mental overhead cost associated with setting up the same tools multiple times, or maintain playbooks/whatever to automate that, or am I going to figure out how to get my one VSCode instance access to the different isolated environments where I need an editor, and if I do that have I basically compromised the whole system model.
by yoz-y | 2025-08-27 15:20:30+00:00
I mostly hope that Blue Origin will be a worthy competitor.

For me what this shows that the most important thing for a CEO to be successful is to have money, a vison (no matter how unrealistic or unnecessary) and a cult personality. Nothing else matters. Also it shows that with enough virtual money (I.e.: massively overblown Tesla stock) you can do just about anything.