MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-22 05:13:23+00:00
My cousin used to tell me that things works because they were the right thing at the right time. I think he gave the idea of amazon only.

But I guess in startup culture, one has to die trying the idea of right time, as sure one can do surveys to feel like it, but the only way we can ever find if its the right time is the users feedback when its lauched / over time.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-22 05:13:25+00:00
I have been long enough around, not to be as hopeful, however I loved being proven wrong on this one.

Note that Native AOT doesn't do consoles, and Godot can't target them with C#, it is also why they've problems with targeting Web.

Also Native AOT, and proper C# still lack some of Burst (HPC#) capabilities.
by msgodel | 2025-08-22 05:13:38+00:00
Sure. What that looks like is always using ssh to access git and things like github going away. I think most of us can agree that's probably not good. For the tools non-technical people use it's probably far worse, pretty much the end of the open web outside static personal pages.

I think the ISPs serving these requests are probably going to have to start going after customers for being abusive in order for this to stop.
by famouswaffles | 2025-08-22 05:14:12+00:00
>There aren't a hundred critics worth counting, it's just garbage in garbage out; I don't want every-person-with-a-substack's review, I want the dozen or so top film critics.

This is an argument against aggregation itself, not for Metacritic over RT. If you only trust a dozen specific critics, you should just read them directly. The entire purpose of an aggregator is to gather a wide sample to smooth out individual biases. That's the opposite of 'garbage in garbage out'. If your sample isn't wide as an aggregator, that's a minus no matter how you spin it.

>No, for this year alone... there are 68 movies with a score above 75 on Metacritic.

This is a nonsensical argument. By this logic, if we have a phenomenal year for film where 100 movies get a score over 75, the score itself becomes less valid? A score's meaning is relative to the scale, not the number of films that achieve it.

And Literally hundreds of movies are released every year. 8 a month is a tiny fraction of that.

Your personal viewing capacity doesn't change the fact that 75/100 is objectively a high score.

>We've established that the number is not very useful, far less useful than a 9.7/10 type score is.

No, you've asserted that. We've established they measure two different things. RT measures consensus (% of critics who liked it). Metacritic measures average intensity (a weighted average score). Both are useful. One tells you how many critics would recommend it, the other tells you how much they recommend it, on average. Claiming one is "not very useful" is just stating your personal preference as well as demonstrably false, as rotten tomatoes is very widely used.
by jeffrallen | 2025-08-22 05:14:45+00:00
These are even more beautiful in real life. I don't know why they didn't show it, but the same lab has also built a structure of tubes made of bamboo strips that arch up and over a seating area into a dome. The tubes start at planters and there are vines growing up onto the structure. It's my new favorite thing in my neighborhood. Thanks EPFL!
by motorest | 2025-08-22 05:15:01+00:00
> Stuff like giving me code that’s using a mix of different APIs and sometimes just totally non-existent methods.

That has been my experience as well. We can control the surprising pick of APIs with basic prompt files that clarify what and how to use in your project. However, when using less-than-popular tools whose source code is not available, the hallucinations are unbearable and a complete waste of time.

The lesson to be learned is that LLMs depend heavily on their training set, and in a simplistic way they at best only interpolate between the data they were fed. If a LLM is not trained with a corpus covering a specific domain them you can't expect usable results from it.

This brings up some unintended consequences. Companies like Microsoft will be able to create incentives to use their tech stack by training their LLMs with a very thorough and complete corpus on how to use their technologies. If Copilot does miracles outputting .NET whereas Java is unusable, developers have one more reason to adopt .NET to lower their cost of delivering and maintaining software.
by aidenn0 | 2025-08-22 05:15:35+00:00
> Authors weren't just "made more comfortable" by this as a fringe benefit, as you say, but really, they were able to make a living from their creative work

By "made more comfortable" I was not referring to the existence of copyright at all, but rather the multiple extensions that were made from 1976 to 1998, where copyright terms went from 56 years to over 95 years[1].

If the Ace paperback edition of LoTR was piracy, then I question the meaning of the term, since the original US publisher imported British editions which lacked the (then required) US copyright notice. Note also that Ace ceased publishing this edition (and paid Tolkein) due to public pressure, not any legal threats.

(Also lest I misrepresent myself, there were many good changes to copyright in 1976, including removing the notice requirement that caused Tolkein so much trouble).

1: Prior to 1976 the lifetime of the author did not involve in the calculation, and literature is one place where works-for-hire are still rare this is more complicated than just 39 years longer; nevertheless 70 years from the (last in the case of multiple) author's death is always more protection than 56 years, and may be considerably more for a young author. This also reinforces my point that media corporations (where work-for-hire is the norm) benefited from this rather more than authors.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-22 05:15:43+00:00
> That said, I'd be curious to hear a legitimate example of using it to implement "structural subtyping that you can't express with Protocols/ABCs alone".

ABCs with __subclasshook__ have been available since Python 2.6, providing a mechanism to inplement runtime-testable structural subtyping. Protocols and @runtime_checkable, which provide typechecking-time structural subtyping (Protocols) that can also be available at runtime (with @runtime_checkable) were added in Python 3.8, roughly 11 years later.

There may not be much reason to use __subclasshook__ in new code, but there's a pretty good reason it exists.
by booleandilemma | 2025-08-22 05:15:54+00:00
I hope AI attracts all the people I hate to work with the most in software engineering. The pretenders, the hype chasers, the people looking for money, the ladder climbers. I hope they all become AI engineers and leave our profession alone.

Some already became "data scientists" and "ML engineers", I hope this AI wave takes the rest.
by eschaton | 2025-08-22 05:16:14+00:00
It doesn’t, it provides an assurance (but not provenance) you didn’t use AI.

Assuring you didn’t include any AGPLv3 code in your contribution is exactly the same kind of assurance. It also doesn’t provide any provenance.

Conflating assurance with provenance is bogus because the former is about making a representation that, if false, exposes the person making it to liability. For most situations that’s sufficient that provenance isn’t needed.
by abenga | 2025-08-22 05:16:23+00:00
That is your opinion. The role of government should be whatever the citizens decide through democratic processes. If they want the government to go around feeding people from milk bottles, that is what it will be. If they decide it is to run the fight club that decides who eats and who dies, that will be its role. Americans have decided that the role of government is going to be closer to the second than the first, as is their right. Other countries lie in a different points in the continuum, but they are not any more wrong.
by senectus1 | 2025-08-22 05:17:05+00:00
Had the same issue with a Crucial drive from amazon. looked just like the real thing but for some small discrepancies. Performed like an absolute dog and the SMART data was waaaay off.

amazon just refunded me the whole amount and I pulled it apart to see what was inside: https://imgur.com/a/NUSuuEh

quite annoying, though also amusing.
by sureglymop | 2025-08-22 05:17:11+00:00
Yes. All of that works in my experience. It's a drop in replacement. You set it up once in the docker CLI with `docker context ` or just symlink it to the right location. Then you can forget about it basically.

I use this on my server with compose together with traefik which listens on 127.0.0.1:{8000,4433}. Then I have a small nftables config that does the port forwarding to 80/443.
by oska | 2025-08-22 05:17:32+00:00
I had never heard of 'shopkeeper's privilege' but looked it up [1] and yes, seems to be a real thing in the United States and nowhere else, according to a quick scan of that wiki article.

More evidence to me that the US was set up to serve corporatist interests over pretty much everything (and everyone) else. Why else provide shopkeepers with some special legal status? (Which again, they don't have in any other country.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopkeeper%27s_privilege
by jchw | 2025-08-22 05:17:45+00:00
If you are running an immutable system like Bazzite it is significantly harder to get yourself into an unbootable state by accident, since if your system-wide change does actually break the machine, you can just boot into an older one. NixOS is quite a bit different, but likewise it is really hard to make the system unbootable just by making changes, since I can just boot into an old generation. I haven't used rescue media for my own machines in probably 5 or 6 years now.
Ask HN: Do Cellphones Tap into Infant Care Evolved Behavior?
by giardini | 2025-08-22 05:18:17+00:00
I seek a ready analogy for the relationship people have with their cellphones. Little seems so apt as the relationship between a parent and an infant.

The (person, cellphone) relationship is considerably weaker than the (person, infant) relationship. In my case, I rarely wish to have the cellphone present at all, quite contrary to the way I feel about infants/children.

- Is this analogy apt?

- Might this provide insight into why cellphones+social media seem so intrusive? Do they tap into extant evolutionary mechanisms (infant care & protection, etc.)?

- Do some others view their cellphone as an unneeded annoyance that should usually be turned off?(I do!)
by alexey-salmin | 2025-08-22 05:18:22+00:00
Well, no? You can lose your money or access to your money which is very close by the practical means.

A friend of mine wired his money across the border following his relocation, transaction got blocked on KYC for several weeks, rollback became impossible because the source bank got sanctioned in the meanwhile. Money was forfeited with very little chance of recovery.

My personal account was frozen once due to KYC which made it impossible to pay the rent. Luckily I've had some reserves to live but paying for an appartement in cash isn't legal in my country of residence.

Saying "it's just the institution won't work for you" is extremely deceptive, on purpose or not. There are complementary laws that make sure you HAVE to deal with these institutions so when they close the door you're screwed.
by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t | 2025-08-22 05:18:56+00:00
Go outside, touch grass and trees.

The internet, smartphones, social media, all want your attention by bombarding you with information. Too much information to process.

You need to go outside in nature, go hiking, do some sports outside, read a book, have a picnic.

Everything in life is about balance, even with technology consumption.
by cm2187 | 2025-08-22 05:19:14+00:00
ebay is inundated with those fake retail SSDs. Designed to look like WD (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306437612011) or Samsung (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/396854754678), but without the logo. Internally they contain maybe 100GB of flash, a controller that pretends to have 4TB, and they brick themselves when you write 1 byte more than the underlying capacity. Ebay doesn't police that.

Haven't seen that for enterprise SSDs yet.
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-22 05:21:23+00:00
It will be chaos for those working at Meta and those invested in them too much without an appropriate hedge. I doubt I will notice much, to be honest.

Even if Meta tanked, unless Messenger/Whatsapp stop working, it’s kind of beside the point how much their stock trades for. Everyone will just use whatever has or keeps the most public interest, whether that is Meta-owned or something else.

The worrying aspect is that for Meta to really tank in value, the shit has to have already hit the fan, and it probably would not be isolated to Meta.

My point in my prior comment was that Meta serves the purposes of the IC status quo just by doing what they’re already doing. Cloudflare too, in a way.
by bawolff | 2025-08-22 05:22:26+00:00
New blackmail scheme:

Get some sort of job in the company, do something illegal, threaten your manager with going to the feds, since at this point they are criminally liable for your act.

More generally, i get where you are coming from - its frustrating when the ceos are like, i just work here, totally wasn't me, excuse me while i cash my bonus cheque. But i still think morally its important that we punish people for things they actually did (or failed to do), not just by mere association.

Although perhaps something like an enhanced version of how supervisory responsibility in war crimes works would make sense - basically the way that works is if you are aware or ought to have been aware that someone under you is commiting a crime, and you don't investigate/take measures to punish/take measures to stop them, you are on the hook for the crime.
by bettyboo4 | 2025-08-22 05:23:33+00:00
It’s common sense to avoid putting things in your pocket in stores. What’s with the creepy write up about this? You sound like you were going to spaz out and attack multiple people if this escalated. Why not simply open your backpack and show them what’s inside? A lot of MIT types look like they haven’t been outside in months , school shooter types , so I don’t get that analogy either.
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-22 05:24:08+00:00
One thing I don't fully understand in all this is how the IP address stuff works. Like I keep hearing people saying somebody can get 10 gazillion residential IPs so they become unblockable, but how? This article also mentions crawlers should publish there IP ranges. Like, yeah? What if using more than X number of IPs to crawl was a criminal offense unless you got a permit, which would require you to identify and publish all those IPs up front?
by sky2224 | 2025-08-22 05:24:18+00:00
> I’m not even sure AI is good for any engineer, let alone junior engineers. Software engineering at any level is a journey of discovery and learning.

Yes, but when there are certain mundane things in that discovery that are hindering my ability to get work done, AI can be extremely useful. It can be incredibly helpful in giving high level overviews of code bases or directing me to parts of codebases where certain architecture lives. Additionally, it exposes me to patterns and ideas I hadn't originally thought of.

Now, if I just take whatever is spit out by AI as gospel, then I'd be inclined to agree with you in saying AI is bad, but if you use it correctly, like any other tool, it's fantastic.
by chrischen | 2025-08-22 05:24:28+00:00
The AI agents tend to fail for me with open ended or complex tasks requiring multiple steps. But I’ve found it massively helpful if you have these two things: 1) a typed language… better if strongly typed 2) your program is logically structured and follows best practices and has hierarchical composition.

The agents are able to iterate and work with the compiler until it gets it right and the combination of 1 and 2 means there’s fewer possible “right answers” to whatever problem I have. If i structure my prompte to basically fill in the blanks of my code in specific areas it saves a lot of time. Most of what I prompt is something already done, and usually 1 google search away. This saves me the time to search it up, figure out whatever syntax I need, etc.
by latexr | 2025-08-22 05:25:58+00:00
> I launched GitHub expecting to dive into my usual routine—flag poorly named variables, trim excessive tests, and suggest simpler ways to handle errors.

If these are routine, in what kind of state is the repository? All of those easily can and should’ve been done properly at write/merge time in any half-decent code base. Sure, sometimes one case slips by, but if these are routine fixes, there is something deeply wrong with the process.

> I can't write a function anymore without thinking about whether I'm teaching the system or just solving today's problem.

This isn’t a positive thing.

> When you're done reading this, you'll have the same affliction.

No, not all. What you have described is a deeply broken system which will lead to worse developers and even worse software. I hope your method propagates as little as possible.

> But AI outputs aren't deterministic—a prompt that works once might fail the next time.

> So I have Claude run the test 10 times. When it only identifies frustration in four out of 10 passes, Claude analyzes why it failed the other six times.

All of this is wasteful and insane. You don’t learn anything or understand your own system, you just throw random crap at it a bunch of times and then pick some of it that sticks. No wonder it’s part of your routine to have to fix basic things. It’s bonkers that this is lauded as an improvement over doing things right.
by TheDong | 2025-08-22 05:27:30+00:00
The existing pattern suggested above, "match ...:", will not match 'match = ...'.

Presumably the reason the parent comment suggested semgrep, not just a grep, is because they're aware that naive substring matching would be wrong.

You could use the playground to check your understanding before implying someone is an idiot.

https://semgrep.dev/playground/new
by dgs_sgd | 2025-08-22 05:28:10+00:00
I want to agree with the standard “it happened under your watch and it doesn’t matter if it happened without your knowledge”, but wouldn’t it get really messy in practice?

Let’s say one particular org at a company engaged in the activity in question, generating increased profits for the whole company. Taking this approach to the extreme, literally every shareholder could be liable because they benefited from those profits.
by novembermike | 2025-08-22 05:28:23+00:00
I think it's fair to call code LLM's similar to fairly bad but very fast juniors that don't get bored. That's a serious drawback but it does give you something to work with. What scares me is non-technical people just vibe coding because it's like a PM driving the same juniors with no one to give sanity checks.
by justinator | 2025-08-22 05:28:46+00:00
The more things change...

Was working a Samsung exhibit where they were showing off their latest TV, some quarter million dollar beast. Part of the price tag was delivery and installation, as there was just no way a mere mortal could install this.

The problem wasn't that it was heavy -- it wasn't. Just fragile. The TV was made up of an array of much smaller borderless panels.

Think they sold a few to a coupla professional football players.
by eyelidlessness | 2025-08-22 05:28:48+00:00
Because HTML attributes are inherently stringly typed. Where CSS can propagate types, it’s because the CSS parser and object model are involved. For that to work with attr() would almost certainly involve extending that machinery into all aspects of the HTML spec, and then all that machinery too. Which is probably impractical for more reasons than I can think of, but I can think of several.
by scott_w | 2025-08-22 05:30:48+00:00
> The correct way to setup an analytics tool is to point it to an analytics db that is a replica of your main DB. It's a pretty common part of an HA setup to replicate your primary to an actual hot read replica and a cold analytics store. This way the analytics tool queries your analytics store and doesn't put load on your hot primary or hot read replica.

That doesn’t solve the problem of changing schemas causing issues for your data team at all. Something I see regularly. If you setup an AI Agent the same way you still give it full access, so you still haven’t fixed the problem at hand.

> I read this and feel that you still want imaginary internet points for something that is, at best, directionally correct.

And you’ve yet to substantiate your objection to what I posited (alongside everyone else), so instead you continue to talk about something unrelated in the hope of… what, exactly?
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-22 05:32:15+00:00
Human happiness is extremely elastic and subjective once the basic needs of life and essential safety from obvious, imminent, extremely visible threats are reasonably well covered.

This makes it easy to understand why many people self-report as unhappy despite having all measurable metrics of their material and fundamental existential well-being protected like at no time in human history.

Couple this with the bias in reporting on their subjective experience of unhappiness without ever having lived the harder kind of life that was normal in the past, for the sake of perspective.

Add to both the tediously demoralizing (unless you're resilient to it) effect of other social media-using humans trying to paint their lives as wonderful through selective reporting on a constant basis and all of this being visible for everyone else to see.

Also include in a moderate flow of (paradoxically) being saturated via media and social media with exaggerated, pathological over-focus on the dangers of generally uncommon problems and threats in life and the world.

The resulting pastry from all these ingredients: One very dubious notion of us haivng many more reasons to be unhappy today than before. We may think we have many reasons to be unhappy, but that's only because for the most part, we haven't seen what real reasons for deep unhappiness look like.

Obviously, i'm generalizing here. Not every unhappy person is unhappy due to frivolous things. There still exist many threats in life and many things that can bring on genuine misery, but they're more a minority now for more people than ever in the broad strokes of history.

One final point from all of the above: We're the source of our unhappiness. Technology is with rare exceptions just a tool, that we can use to interpret the world however we do, whether for bad or good.
by johnecheck | 2025-08-22 05:33:13+00:00
This is a debate over semantics, let's conclude by presenting our competing definitions.

A blockchain is ledger shared between multiple computers. Entries in this ledger contain the cryptographic hash of the previous entry, creating an append-only data structure where existing records cannot be modified.

While blockchains are generally used in p2p and open networks, this isn't a requirement. Bitcoin was a blockchain when Nakamoto was the only node. Popularity and openness are not required to meet this technical definition.
by bmcahren | 2025-08-22 05:35:37+00:00
This was a good read and great work. Can't wait to see the performance tests.

Your write up connected some early knowledge from when I was 11 where I was trying to set up a database/backend and was finding lots of cgi-bin online. I realize now those were spinning up new processes with each request https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface

I remember when sendfile became available for my large gaming forum with dozens of TB of demo downloads. That alone was huge for concurrency.

I thought I had swore off this type of engineering but between this, the Netflix case of extra 40ms and the GTA 5 70% load time reduction maybe there is a lot more impactful work to be done.

https://netflixtechblog.com/life-of-a-netflix-partner-engine...

https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...