MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andrewla | 2025-08-29 20:28:13+00:00
Only so long as we use the rationals as an approximation. If we expect them to be exact then they are as bad as the integers.

The continuum is the reality that we have to hold to. Not the continuum in the Cantor sense, but in the intuitionalist or constructivist sense, which is continuously varying numbers that can be approximated as necessary.
by tagawa | 2025-08-29 20:28:15+00:00
Not the OP but…

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/healthline-media-agrees-to...

"Healthline.com provided an opt-out mechanism, but it was misconfigured and Healthline failed to test it, resulting in data being shared with third parties even after consumers elected to opt out.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65772154

"The company agreed to pay the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after it was accused of failing to delete Alexa recordings at the request of parents.”

https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/405635/califo...

"According to the [California Privacy Protection] agency, Todd Snyder told website visitors they could opt out of data sharing, but didn't actually allow them to do so for 40 days in late 2023 because its opt-out mechanism was improperly configured."
by GMoromisato | 2025-08-29 20:28:44+00:00
One of the ironies of this kind of advice is that it's best for people who already have a lot of experience and have the judgement to apply it. For instance, how do you know what the "simplest thing" is? And how can you be sure that it "could possibly work"?

Yesterday I had a problem with my XLSX importer (which I wrote myself--don't ask why). It turned out that I had neglected to handle XML namespaces properly because Excel always exported files with a default namespace.

Then I got a file that added a namespace to all elements and my importer instantly broke.

For example, Excel always outputs <cell ...> whereas this file has <x:cell ...>.

The "simplest thing that could possibly work" was to remove the namespace prefix and just assume that we don't have conflicting names.

But I didn't feel right about doing that. Yes, it probably would have worked fine, but I worried that I was leaving a landmine for future me.

So instead I spent 4 hours re-writing all the parsing code to handle namespaces correctly.

Whether or not you agree with my choice here, my point is that doing "the simplest thing that could possible work" is not that easy. But it does get easier the more experience you have. Of course, by then, you probably don't need this advice.
by ternaryoperator | 2025-08-29 20:28:48+00:00
It's a shame he doesn't give the origin of this expression in programming. It comes from Ward Cunningham (inventor of the wiki) in his work with Kent Beck. In an interview a few years back on Dr. Dobb's, he stated that as the two of them were coding together in the late 80s, they would regularly remind each other of the principle. Eventually, it became a staple of their talks and writing.

They were cognizant of the limitations that are touched on in this article. The example they gave was of coming to a closed door. The simplest thing might be to turn the handle. But if the door is locked, then the simplest thing might be to find the key. But if you know the key is lost, the simplest thing might be to break down the door, and so on. Finding the simplest thing is not always simple, as the article states

IIRC, they were aware that this approach would leave a patchwork of technical debt (a term coined by Cunningham), but the priority on getting code working overrode that concern at least in the short term. This article would have done well to at least touch on the technical debt aspect, IMHO.
by switchbak | 2025-08-29 20:29:04+00:00
If I was running a business and I could hire someone that I knew did good work, and did the simplest thing that could possibly work (and it actually worked!) - then I would absolutely do that as soon as possible.

"It turns out the complexities actually are often there for good reason" - if they're necessary, then it gets folded into the "could possibly work" part.

The vast majority of complexities I've seen in my career did not have to be there. But then you run into Chesterton's Fence - if you're going to remove something you think is unnecessary complexity, you better be damn sure you're right.

The real question is how AI tooling is going to change this. Will the AI be smart enough to realize the unnecessary bits, or are you just going to layer increasingly more levels of crap on top? My bet is it's mostly the latter, for quite a long time.
by daxfohl | 2025-08-29 20:29:06+00:00
I wholeheartedly agree with this. The challenge is perception though. Many managers will see a simple solution to a complex problem and dock you for not doing real engineering, whereas a huge convoluted mess to solve a simple problem (or non-problem) gets you promoted. And in design interviews, "I'd probably implement a counter in memory" would be the last time you ever heard from that company.
by SabrinaJewson | 2025-08-29 20:29:57+00:00
> Addressing your issue directly, the Axiom of Choice is actively debated:

The axiom of choice is not required to prove Cantor’s theorem, that any set has strictly smaller cardinality than its powerset.

Actually, I can recount the proof here: Suppose there is an injection f: Powerset(A) ↪ A from the powerset of a set A to the set A. Now consider the set S = {x ∈ A | ∃ s ⊆ A, f(s) = x and x ∉ s}, i.e. the subset of A that is both mapped to by f and not included in the set that maps to it. We know that f(S) ∉ S: suppose f(S) ∈ S, then we would have existence of an s ⊆ A such that f(s) = f(S) and f(S) ∉ s; by injectivity, of course s = S and therefore f(S) ∉ S, which contradicts our premise. However, we can now easily prove that there exists an s ⊆ A satisfying f(s) = f(S) and f(S) ∉ s (of course, by setting s = S), thereby showing that f(S) ∈ S, a contradiction.
by agwa | 2025-08-29 20:30:02+00:00
The docs list 5 conditions that all must be satisfied for the journal to be considered hot: https://www.sqlite.org/atomiccommit.html#_hot_rollback_journ...

I believe they would all be satisfied.

I don't see any mention of checking IDs. Not saying you're wrong - I think the docs could very well be wrong - but could you provide a citation for that behavior?
by PhantomHour | 2025-08-29 20:30:09+00:00
> Does allow bots to access my information prevent other people from accessing my information? No.

Yes it does, that's the entire point.

The flood of AI bots is so bad that (mainly older) servers are literally being overloaded and (newer servers) have their hosting costs spike so high that it's unaffordable to keep the website alive.

I've had to pull websites offline because badly designed & ban-evading AI scraper bots would run up the bandwidth into the TENS OF TERABYTES, EACH. Downloading the same jpegs every 2-3 minutes into perpetuity. Evidently all that vibe coding isn't doing much good at Anthropic and Perplexity.

Even with my very cheap transfer racks up $50-$100/mo in additional costs. If I wanted to use any kind of fanciful "app" hosting it'd be thousands.
by nradov | 2025-08-29 20:30:17+00:00
Concerns over gun violence (or violence in general) are largely misplaced. Almost all of the violent crime happens in a handful of cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington DC that have been wrecked by decades of failed progressive policies. And even in those cities the violence is concentrated in few bad neighborhoods. We need to fix those places: the residents shouldn't have to live in gang war zones. But at the same time those aren't the same neighborhoods that HN users would live anyway. The rest of the USA is no more violent than most other developed countries.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-08-29 20:30:55+00:00
Definitely on the people with color issues. I have some red-green issues, for most purposes it makes me horrible at choosing colors and horrible at choices involving subtle colors (picking the good produce) but rarely interferes otherwise. But a thin line of color is another matter. I generally can't tell the difference between a 1-pixel wide line of FF0000 vs 00FF00. Nor can I tell the difference of a few-pixel-wide indicator. I can't crimp Ethernet because the fine line of the coloring of the wires reduces it to not much better than a guess.

And a whiteboard from across the room is likely to be thin enough lines to give me big problems.
by Nuzzerino | 2025-08-29 20:31:21+00:00
I got a lot of entertainment out of it, don't knock it till you tried it, it's just a prompt.

The great thing about xAI is that it is just a company and there are other AI companies that have AIs that match your values, even though between Grok, ChatGPT, and Claude there are minimal actual differences.

An AI will be anything that the prompt says it is. Because a prompt exists doesn't condemn the company.
by QuantumFunnel | 2025-08-29 20:31:29+00:00
If the past 25 years of tech companies is any indication of the future of these new AI endeavors, working there will be directly contributing to the enslavement of mankind in ways we can't even begin to imagine yet.

The greenfield projects arising from this leap look benign now, but I can almost guarantee that won't be the case in the next decade once these technologies optimize their revenue generation engines and enshittification takes hold. Humanity will be at the whim of the AI compute overlords much more so than we are now, and that's an inevitable nightmare dystopia that I'm not looking forward to. The gilded age will look like child's play by the time we figure this out as a society.

I suppose that if your ambition is to be on the winning end of that hellscape, then by all means, go for it.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-08-29 20:31:47+00:00
The risk is eventually we have fewer and fewer good horses to pull our collective weight. This is the entire idea of education and higher education: to create a surplus of technically literate people who go on to lift all boats. The entire concept of AI would never have materialized without these technical people. The opportunity cost of losing potential technical people and the inventions they could produce is incalculable.
by JohnMakin | 2025-08-29 20:31:58+00:00
> The same is true online. A cryptographic signature that claims “I am acting on behalf of X” means nothing unless it is tied to something real, like a verifiable infrastructure or a range of IPs. Without that, I can simply hand the passport to another agent, and they can act as if they were me. The passport becomes nothing more than a token anyone can pass around.

how does this person think jwt’s work?
by WA | 2025-08-29 20:33:07+00:00
Yeah but other people share their contact list with WhatsApp and they have you in there, with your name and phone number and possibly more info.

I never understood why Apple allows access to the full address book including all Apple-specific settings such as "spouse" and "home address" that are useful within iOS. There should be a minimal permission mode: name and phone number only.
by m4houk | 2025-08-29 20:33:19+00:00
I hacked together this tool for visualizing codebases (only Python for now).

P.S. Performance isn't the best with large graphs, so be wary of trying to load a huge repository because your tab will probably freeze up :)

P.P.S. My apologies for mobile users but the site isn't designed or optimized for smaller screens yet.
by andrewla | 2025-08-29 20:33:41+00:00
Why are rationals special? They represent an exactness in a similarly unphysical way as the integers. The rationals are infinitely precise. 1/3 is not the same as 0.33333 or 0.33333333 or 0.3.

The real numbers exist and are approximable, either by rationals or by decimal expansion. The idea of approximability and computability are the critical things, not the specific representation.
by moritz | 2025-08-29 20:33:45+00:00
> I always feel like I'm having to decode it. But I can easily and happily work with some programming languages that most devs would cross the street to avoid.

Those languages happen to be "imperative"? – the few backend devs I know who at least sort of vibe with CSS are all used to declarative programming. I think that might be at least one of the reasons?
by havok_at | 2025-08-29 20:34:05+00:00
We use outline (https://github.com/outline/outline) at work and it works pretty well for us. It supports collaborative editing, which was the main reason we went with it.

Personally, I use bookstack (https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack) at home. Mostly because I really like the mental model of using Bookshelves, Books, Chapters and Pages to sort my notes in.
by hakanshehu | 2025-08-29 20:34:08+00:00
I did look into it back then, but was not very convenient for my use case. Apart from the data model, I wanted to use Yjs for conflict resolution and wanted more direct control over the sync.

p.s Just wanted to say thank you for all the contribution you do here on HN. Colanode (the app I'm building) is an alternative to Notion and I learned a lot about how you (Notion) build things through reading your comments.
by Moldoteck | 2025-08-29 20:34:38+00:00
1- no, it's not ongoing but stalled. Last year almost a billion was spent for searching. Can you pinpoint where the money went?

2- It's covered by kenfo, auto reinvested fund paid by operators. It has about 24bn. In comparison Onkalo in Finland did cost 1bn to build. A similar repository is built in Sweden in Fosmark

3- Goesgen data does include the tax for both waste handling and decommissioning, didn't you read the data?

4- you don't seem to understand why Goesgen is offline. It's not about being brittle. They installed new equipment that performed too good and they need to upgrade other connected components

5- Flamanville did cost merely ~a single year of German EEG subsidies for renewables

6- 2024 was record TWh from nuclear, for like, ever. It'll grow more, mostly due to Asia unless Hitachi/Whous/EDF will do something
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-29 20:35:36+00:00
> While Israel is home to the largest number of Jews on Earth,

Depends on your standards for who is a Jewish person: by many standards (including those used by the Israeli Law of Return), the US has more Jewish people than Israel.

EDIT: To be clear, I am not, in noting this fact, arguing against the parent's argument that (this is a paraphrase) the opinion of the head of a state with a large Jewish population (whether or not it is actually the largest in the world) does not itself constitute the response of world Judaism, either in general or specifically as an exoneration of an alleged expression of fascist sympathies; that position is absolutely correct, irrespective of which country happens to have the largest Jewish population.
by zamalek | 2025-08-29 20:35:52+00:00
When I truly grokked complex numbers, I felt as though real numbers were a lie - though I would now say that it was a convenient omission. There are many things that are more naturally described using complex numbers - waves (which much of reality boils down to) immediately come to mind. Even if something does align better with real numbers, it's still just x+0i. Maybe I'll change my mind ~when~ if I finally grok quaternions.
by eszed | 2025-08-29 20:35:54+00:00
Hey! Good to meet a fellow artist. I made it to 40 before I sold out. You?

One thing outsiders don't understand is that, for actors, auditioning IS the job. Getting cast, and working on a show, is a joy (some more than others, of course!), but the rest of your life is nothing, nothing but looking for work.

The were two things that made that "it's all cool" shift happen for me. The first is that once I'd been in the industry long enough I could pretty much guarantee that when I went in for an audition I'd see someone I knew, or at least with whom I had an immediate second-degree connection. Auditions stopped being a grind, or mainly about courting rejection - instead, they became an opportunity to hang out with some cool people for a while. I started looking forward to them!

The second was realizing that choosing and performing my audition pieces was the only time that I was in complete control. No one was telling me what to do or how to do it: I could make my own choices, and take whatever creative risks I wanted.

I think both of those approaches made me a much better auditionee than most. My batting average was a lot higher than most of my peers - even some that I thought were better actors.

I don't know how well those insights generalize. I've never (thank god!) had to do leet-code, but I'd hope that (though maybe only in a second screening?) taking a creative approach - if you can talk about it sensibly, and pivot if it doesn't ultimately work - would impress fellow engineers. I strongly believe that adopting a "what can I learn from this experience, and these people?" mindset is a good way to reduce the pressure you'd otherwise put on yourself.
by gizzlon | 2025-08-29 20:36:05+00:00
I'm not calling him a snowflake because I don't think he is a victim. You do, but since he still has everything, I thought you meant he got his feelings hurt.

When I first heard about it I thought "yeah right, media is exaggerigating again". Then I saw it, and I mean wtf!

I do not at all believe that's something you do by accident. Twice! Also, he could have excused it or try to explain afterwards. He did not. He just trolled.
by rayiner | 2025-08-29 20:36:09+00:00
> He's wrecking your countries' institutions left, right and center and those institutions are the glue that kept the country alive and together.

What keeps America alive and together is the virtue of the average American, not counter-democratic "institutions." America was a stable democracy from the beginning long before we had any of these institutions. I'd trade every Ivy-league grad in the world in all the most august institutions for a million ordinary Iowans.

>> > But why bring my skin color into it?

> Because unless you are living under a rock it should be painfully clear by now that you've voted massively against your own interests.

But that wasn't relevant to our discussion. Why are you so fixated on the racial angle that you brought it up in unrelated conversation? Why does it feature so prominently in your mental model of Trump?
by jfim | 2025-08-29 20:36:13+00:00
Even in the case of coal mining, jobs fell as output increased. See the two charts in https://acoel.org/the-rise-and-decline-of-coal-mining-jobs-1...

Peak coal jobs was in the 1980s but peak output was in the early 2000s, while employment went from 200k to about 75k in that period. Sure, coal might have been cheaper but it didn't translate into more jobs overall.
by jayd16 | 2025-08-29 20:36:27+00:00
They have a special build of the Unreal Engine for Fortnite maps called UEFN. They have a similar pay for user playtime kind of payout model. They're trying very hard to be the the omni-game engine of choice.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/uses/uefn-unreal-editor-f...
by hinkley | 2025-08-29 20:36:33+00:00
It’s a frustrating argument to lose.

On a recent project I fixed our deployment and our hotfix process and it fundamentally changed the scope of epics the team would tackle. Up to that point we were violating the first principle of Continuous: if it’s painful, do it until it isn’t. So we would barely deploy more often than we were contractually (both in the legal and internal cultural sense) obligated to do, and that meant people were very conservative about refactoring code that could lead to regressions, because the turnaround time on a failing feature toggle was a fixed tempo. You could turn a toggle on to analyze the impact but then you had to wait until the next deployment to test your fixes. Excruciating with a high deviation for estimates.

With a hotfix process that actually worked worked, people would make two or three times as many iterations, to the point we had to start coordinating to keep people from tripping over each other. And as a consequence old nasty tech debt was being fixed in every epic instead of once a year. It was a profound change.

And as is often the case, as the author I saw more benefit than most. I scooped a two year two man effort to improve response time by myself in three months, making a raft of small changes instead of a giant architectural shift. About twenty percent of the things I tried got backed out because they didn’t improve speed and didn’t make the code cleaner either. I could do that because the tooling wasn’t broken.
by getnormality | 2025-08-29 20:36:35+00:00
It's not hard to do data engineering to the standards of software engineering, and many people do it already, provided that

1. You use a real programming language that supports all the abstractions software engineers rely on, not (just) SQL.

2. The data is not too big, so the feedback cycle is not too horrendously slow.

#2 can't ever be fully solved, but testing a data pipeline on randomly subsampled data can help a lot in my experience.
by soperj | 2025-08-29 20:36:50+00:00
I remember once having to make a SOAP call that just wasn't connecting for some reason, but another end point on the same service was working, which made no sense. We tried calling the working endpoint right before calling the busted endpoint just for kicks, and that actually functioned. Still to this day makes no sense at all to me, we ended up moving off of soap eventually, but that code was in there until we did.
by sfpotter | 2025-08-29 20:36:53+00:00
Generally speaking, when I hear people say this, it's a huge red flag. Really, any time anyone puts forth any kind of broad proclamation about how software development should be done, my hackles go up. Either they don't know what they're talking about, they're full of shit, or both. The only reasonable thing to conclude after lots of experience with software development is that it's hard and requires care and deliberation. There is no one-size-fits-all advice. What I want to see is people who are open-minded and thoughtful.
by vkou | 2025-08-29 20:36:59+00:00
The definition of 'works' depends on whether my employer wants to spend its resources (the time I'm working) on fixing it.

If they want to use those resources to prioritize quality, I'll prioritize quality. If they don't, and they just want me to hit some metric and tick a box, I'm happy to do that too.

You get what you measure. I'm happy to give my opinion on what they should measure, but I am not the one making that call.
by Razengan | 2025-08-29 20:37:03+00:00
I'm fine with that

only if we got more Heretic/Hexenlikes too!

… Ya know, I think Doom may have actually been a parallel-universe/built-by-aliens type of fluke: It seriously accelerated gaming and the social perception of gaming, and in turn pushed computer technology adoption towards 3D cards (and everything else required to support them) much faster than it may have happened without Doom.

So I think if certain "killer apps" weren't released when they did, then maybe people might have been fine with tech chugging along at a more relaxed pace..
by chatmasta | 2025-08-29 20:37:23+00:00
The typical Monty Hall formulation has similar ambiguity because it’s not clear whether or not the host knows the right door. Just like in this question, it’s not clear if the “narrator” knows the first child is a girl.

(Also, this problem has an additional layer of ambiguity where “birth order is irrelevant,” but MF and FM are treated as distinct items in the probability set. Is the order irrelevant to the probability, or is it impossible to distinguish the age of the two children? It would be clearer to simply say “each birth is an independent event.” One of the comments on the blog explains this better than I can.)