MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dmsnell | 2025-08-10 19:15:36+00:00
At some point I think I read a more complete justification, but I can’t find it now. There is evidence that it came about as a byproduct of the interaction of the HTML parser and JS parsers in early browsers.

In this link we can see the expectation that the HTML comment surrounds a call to document.write() which inserts a new SCRIPT element. The tags are balanced.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/236073/why-split-the-scr...

In this HTML 4.01 spec, it’s noted to use HTML comments to hide the script contents from render, which is where we start to get the notion of using these to hide markup from display.

https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/scripts.html

Some drafts of the HTML standard attempted to escape differently and didn’t have the double escape state.

https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/WD-html52-20161206/semantics-scri...

My guess is that at some point the parsers looked for balanced tags, as evidenced in the note in the last link above, but then practical issues with improperly-generated scripts led to the idea that a single SCRIPT closing tag ends the escaping. Maybe people were attempting to concatenate script contents wrong and getting stacks of opening tags that were never closed. I don’t know, but I suppose it’s recorded somewhere.

Many things in today’s HTML arose because of widespread issues with how people generated the content. The same is true of XML and XHTML by the way. Early XML mailing lists were full of people parsing XML with naive PERL regular expressions and suggesting that when someone wants to “fix” broken markup, that they do it with string-based find-and-replace.

The main difference is that the HTML spec went in the direction of saying, _if we can agree how to handle these errors then in the face of some errors we can display some content_ and we can all do it in the same way. XML is worse in some regards: certain kinds of errors are still ambiguous and up to the parser to determine how to handle, whether they are non-recoverable or recoverable. For those non-recoverable, the presence of a single error destroys the entire document, like being refused a withdrawal at the bank because you didn’t cross a 7.

At least with HTML5, it’s agreed upon what to do when errors are present and all parsers can produce the same output document; XML parsers routinely handle malformed content and do so in different ways (though most at least provide or default to a strict mode). It’s better than the early web, but not that much better.
by Bender | 2025-08-10 19:16:02+00:00
- 3 gratuitous arps every minute

- 'chronyc makestep'

- Overwrite the console with ASCII art.

- Refresh DNS A/NS cache for a few hundred domains in Unbound DNS.

- fstrim once a week.

- Custom log rotate and truncate.

- RSnapshot

- Gateway check, arp deletions if gateway fail-over occurs.

Some of that on workstations, some on servers, some on both.
by zubspace | 2025-08-10 19:16:35+00:00
It's a shitty system, if one side just needs to succeed one time while the other side needs to succeed over and over again.

What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same. Once a mass surveillance proposal like this is defeated, it shouldn't be allowed to be constantly rebranded and reintroduced. We need a firewall in our legislative process that automatically rejects any future attempts at scanning private communications.
Tell HN: AI hype is bs but AI models are useful
by behnamoh | 2025-08-10 19:16:50+00:00
I see a lot of posts about AI, LLMs, MCP, vibe-coding, <buzz-word-of-the-month> on HN and other places, but most of them are quite honestly void of any value.

Don't get me wrong; I use AI models almost everyday one way or another, and I think we've come a long way since the first GPT. But the hype around AI has gotten out of hand. It seems the secret sauce to promote your blogspam is to throw in some keywords like "MCP" in the title and subtly talk about your product in the article.

I'm sick of it and am sure I'm not the only one who feels this way, but as a community we must do a better job not giving a platform to all this bs.
by yosefk | 2025-08-10 19:16:52+00:00
This is interesting. The "professional level" rating of <1800 isn't, but still.

However:

"A significant Elo rating jump occurs when the model’s Legal Move accuracy reaches 99.8%. This increase is due to the reduction in errors after the model learns to generate legal moves, reinforcing that continuous error correction and learning the correct moves significantly improve ELO"

You should be able to reach the move legality of around 100% with few resources spent on it. Failing to do so means that it has not learned a model of what chess is, at some basic level. There is virtually no challenge in making legal moves.
by rikroots | 2025-08-10 19:17:06+00:00
I was going to respond saying how much I dislike the way the narrator reads the poem - like a vicar 45 minutes into an overlong Sunday sermon, as bored as the congregation - then I saw the OP article included a link to Eliot reading his own poem. And that one sounds like the vicar now entering the third hour of his overlong Sunday sermon. So I have to agree: your favourite reading is the better reading of the poem.
by Centigonal | 2025-08-10 19:17:53+00:00
In the US, we have government programs like PRISM and unchecked oligopolies that surveil us and use that information to identify dissent, sell us ads, and alter our behavior. In the EU, there are these initiatives to surveil us in the name of safety.

Is there any regime out there who's not trying to mass-surveil their citizens for one reason or another?
by chubot | 2025-08-10 19:18:32+00:00
militaries do not win wars merely by acquiring new gadgets, but by developing the institutions, training regimens, logistical networks, and doctrinal concepts that enable those tools to be used effectively at scale

That makes sense to me ... sort of like if you want to build a big software project, the team / the communication structure / the product / the motivation will matter a lot more than whether you're using Claude Code or Copilot, etc.
by croes | 2025-08-10 19:18:48+00:00
The EU countries also have constitutions with laws that make that illegal.

Still they try because there is always an exception that allows breaking those laws.

Chat control isn’t something the EU invented, they tried to implement CSAM in Apple devices and the whole chat control thing in the EU was heavily lobbied by Thorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-08-10 19:19:08+00:00
> Yes it does. [paragraphs of stuff that don't reflect a need to raid factories in order to seize legal workers]

No. It does not. Raiding factories of legal workers does not improve my life.

Creating a state of persistent fear for legal residents - this also does not improve my life. It does however degrade the lives of legal residents and citizens I know and care about.
by twoodfin | 2025-08-10 19:19:21+00:00
If they were trying to sell their environment to the PC programmer demographic, then their marketing was definitely mistargeted, but I never considered the utility was obvious to them rather than the whole thing being an academic exercise.

IBM wasn’t selling to developers. SOM was first and foremost targeting PHB’s, who were on a mission to solve the “software crisis”. We somehow managed to easily escape that one despite no one coming up with a silver bullet solution.
by rayiner | 2025-08-10 19:20:14+00:00
> Raiding factories of legal workers does not improve my life.

They're illegal workers who broke the law not only by immigrating illegally, but by using stolen identification to get past the federal employment verification system:

"In his experience, E-Verify was good at checking numbers, not people. The government maintained that Glenn Valley employees had been using IDs that were stolen. One number belonged to a nursing student in Missouri, who lost her student loans as a result of the identity theft. Another came from a disabled man in Texas, who could no longer get his medications."

And if the article is correct in suggesting that illegal workers are getting past the eVerify system, that suggests that identity theft and identity fraud is a much bigger part of the issue than anyone realized previously.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-10 19:20:16+00:00
>everyone needs a hobby?

They would need a job first. Where do these unemployed people have the money for all this action?

I still don't get why we don't investigate who is funding these groups.

Tinfoil-hat version of me believes at the core of all these protests groups and NGOs that negatively affect EU development and seek to economically, socially and politically destabilize it, lies funding from Russia, China and maybe US(AID) since they're the most likely to profit from this.
by sebastiennight | 2025-08-10 19:21:40+00:00
Is there any part of your comment that would not have been applicable as-is in the 14th century based on the known laws of economics and physics in pre-Colombian America?

And, from there, is there any reason to believe that we now have perfect understanding of economics and physics, which would warrant the level of absolute certainty you're showing above (despite the fact that such certainty was unwarranted in the past)?
by Arainach | 2025-08-10 19:22:47+00:00
A workshop full of tools is worthless if you never use them.

Modern phones and web browsers are full of weaponized distractions with billions of dollars in forces fighting to steal your attention. To actually be productive, many (most?) people benefit from a device that does less.

It's why reMarkable is vastly superior to eInk Android tablets that do "more". It's why some people have switched to cameras instead of phone cameras and to other analog technologies - be it a paper notebook or what have you.

Fewer tools but fewer distractions beats many tools and push notifications.
by willvarfar | 2025-08-10 19:23:05+00:00
Although the article is spot on about how its not just technical but also organisational and doctrinal that the US isn't ready for the drone wars if it were to be fighting a peer today let alone tomorrow, it also describes aircraft etc as "few but exquisite" as though the examples of what the US military industrial complex is pushing are cheap and affordable.

The drones that Anduril and Palantir are pushing are also 'exquisite'.

The drones being used so effectively in all domains in Ukraine by both sides are orders of magnitude cheaper still.

The US military industrial complex is out to get good margins selling exquisite systems. No change here, even with the new injection of Silicon Valley cover.
by vkou | 2025-08-10 19:23:33+00:00
What makes you think that conscription for women isn't being discussed in Korea?

1. Do you have evidence that it isn't?

2. You do realize that Korea is not actually a society with a lot of gender equality (or equality in general, as I'll note in point #4) as-is, right?

3. Which 'gender equality champions' exactly do you expect to be shouting about this so that you will hear about it? Americans and Europeans posting on Reddit and Hacker News?

4. Do you think that the existing problems regarding equality in conscription (with every connected person's sons actively dodging the draft) may be poisoning the well for anyone advocating - or considering advocating - throwing more bodies into that machine?
by maccard | 2025-08-10 19:25:01+00:00
My preferred loop is:

15m recruiter screen (1hr Take home goes here if you’re doing it) 30m hiring manager call 1hr tech interview 1hr team fit

And a go/no go at that point. You can put the hiring manager call at the end if the hiring manager is a senior enough person that you need to protect their time.

The tech test should be actual code, but not evaluated for syntax. I like a code review test but we’ve also done problem solving and writing pseudo code in the past. No let code, no algorithms and no tricky formulas. If you want one of those you should provide the formula. A good tech interview should be open ended enough that you can dig into whatever direction the candidate goes - if they go hard onto concurrency then follow that track, or if they go into testing then follow that track.
by eaglelizard | 2025-08-10 19:25:03+00:00
Do you mean "should've"? That's a common contraction of "should" and "have." In many American accents, the difference between "should've" and "should have" is negligible, and will sound like "should of" even though it isn't.

It also depends on the audience and medium, with "should've" being more appropriate for conversational/informal usage. It would be perfectly normal to say something like "he shouldn't've done that," but if I were writing a message, I'd at least expand the last contraction to "have."

I think there's a general perception that many of the common dialects of American English, especially in the South and West, are associated with being less educated. I am not sure where that comes from.

I'm a native English speaker, and my perception is that when someone speaks in a way where they don't use contractions, it seems verbose and stilted; I associate it with being scolded or disciplined, or when someone is speaking sternly to make a point (or out of anger). E.g.: "You don't know where you're going, you should've taken a left" - informative/neutral "You do not know where you are going, you should have taken a left" - critical/scolding

Omitting contractions can result in speech that sounds strange and unnatural in general: "Shouldn't we go?" -> "Should not we go?" "Aren't you coming?" -> "Are not you coming?" "We didn't, but we should've." -> "We did not, but we should have."
by jmull | 2025-08-10 19:27:31+00:00
> So basically...

Well, not really.

Consider lambdas in C++ (that was the perspective of the post I replied to). Before lambdas, you used functors to do the same thing. However, the syntax was slightly cumbersome and C++ has the design philosophy to add specialized features to optimize specialized cases, so they added lambdas, essentially as syntactic sugar over functors.

In zig the syntax to use an anonymous struct like a functor and/or lambda is pretty simple and the language has the philosophy to keep the language small.

Thus, no need for lambdas. There's no re-inventing anything, just using the language as it designed to be used.
by pmlnr | 2025-08-10 19:27:54+00:00
I don't remember the link to the essay that defined public, private, and secret information. Essentially it said that public is ok for anyone to hear, private is something that shouldn't concern others, whereas secret is something that needs to be kept under wraps.

Under these terms most of what we're protecting with encryption is private - finances, health records, etc. I shouldn't concern others.

Sadly, it does, because the world is full of pieces of shite people who want dynamic pricing on health insurance based on medical information, and all the similar reasons, for example. (Note: I'm from Europe. The while insurance system that's in place in the UK is disgusting, and it's nowhere even remotely close to the pestilence of the US system.)

I'm conflicted with the whole encryption topic. We initially needed CPU power for it, now we have hardware, but that means more complicated hardware, and so on. We now have 47 days long certificates because SeKuRiTy, and a system that must be running, otherwise a mere text website will be de-ranked by Google and give you a fat *ss warning about not being secure. But again, we "need" it, because ISPs were caught adding ads to plain text data.

Unless there are serious repercussions on genuinely crappy people, encryption must stay. So the question is: why is nobody thinking about strong, enforceable laws about wiretapping, altering content, stealing information that people shouldn't have, etc, before trying to backdoor encryption?
by mytailorisrich | 2025-08-10 19:29:01+00:00
Japan's population was 44 million in 1900, it is 123 million now.

South Korea's population was 25 million in 1960, it is 54 million now.

We need to stop going over the top with claims of "population collapse". The 20th century to this day was abnormal at historical scale in that human population exploded like never before, and perhaps like never again and probably for the best considering how we have brought the planet to its knees.
by repintel | 2025-08-10 19:29:05+00:00
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by foldr | 2025-08-10 19:29:08+00:00
If you check the parent comment, the 'most' applied to the fraction of mysteries, not the the fraction of instances of the construction that the analysis is supposed to apply to. But anyway, this isn't an exception. The overwhelming generalization is that "try and do X" means the same as "try to do X". This holds for imperatives like the OP's example just as much as for my examples. There's very little difference between the to/and variants of any of the following:

Try and/to do it quietly

Try and/to be a little more polite.

Try and/to hand your homework in on time.

I agree that in some specific cases there are slightly different shades of meaning. However, this doesn't seem to be a very systematic phenomenon, or one that obviously justifies the assumption that "try and" is an elliptical expression of a complex multi-clausal construction.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-10 19:30:40+00:00
The 1st, 4th and 5th have been repeatedly and systematically weakened both in practice and through the courts though.

1st - gag orders issued by secret courts, no trial, no apeal, can't even talk about it (can't even talk about the gag orders themselves, basically a gag order on a gag order). We only found out about it because Yahoo (out of all of them, the least you'd think would fight this) briefly tried to fight it. All the top CEOs got them. Yahoo briefly tried to fight it at some point and some court docs got out, but it wasn't much.

4th - multiple cases of confiscating cash without a trial, probable cause or anything of the sort. It's called "civil forfeiture", it's been done at both state and federal level, and it's so insanely full of mental gymnastics that at some point they tried to argue in court that "the person is not suspected of anything, the money is suspected of a crime". Bananas.

5th - there's a case where an executive was caught up in some investigation, and she was being held in contempt (jailed) over not divulging an encryption password. I haven't checked on the case in a while, but the idea of holding someone in contempt for so long defeats the purpose, and the idea of having to divulge passwords vs. having to provide a safe combination was apparently lost on the courts.
by abstractbeliefs | 2025-08-10 19:30:43+00:00
It's a statement of fact, which is neutral on its own.

Where it becomes a right wing talking point (or a discussion about the socio-economic future of a country) broadly comes down to how you present the causes, implications, and necessary actions.

The fact that many more-developed countries having shrinking native populations is a fact that governments must reckon with in some way, and salting the earth on discussing because one faction is trying to exploit it cedes the ultimate policy decisions to them.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-10 19:31:22+00:00
All countries will eventually experience population decline, it’s just the speed of each that is different [1]. Global fertility rate already appears to be below replacement rate. Even China appears to be below 1 at this time [2]. India and Africa will arrive there likely in the next ~5-10 years, depending on rate of empowerment of women.

[1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44851759
by threecheese | 2025-08-10 19:31:23+00:00
Are there any actual land line providers left? During the US east coast blackout 20 years ago, cellular networks and cable internet were both unavailable widely. It was frightening. However, land lines were generally usable given they had hardwired low voltage and didn’t rely on internet or cellular telecom infra. My current home has an old-school Verizon landline termination that’s unused.

My current “land line” is VoIP through my internet provider, and when the power or internet are down I have no way to communicate (given my cellular also rides the internet, using a Verizon femtocell, bc the local signal stinks).
by pessimizer | 2025-08-10 19:31:27+00:00
> What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same.

This very much exists in a lot of parliamentary rules authorities, but it's usually limited to once per "session." They just need to make rules that span sessions that raise the bar for introducing substantially similar legislation.

It can easily be argued that passing something that failed to pass before, multiple times, should require supermajorities. Or at least to create a type of vote where you can move that something "should not" be passed without a supermajority in the future.

It is difficult in most systems to make negative motions. At the least it would have to be tailored as an explicit prohibition on passing anything substantially similar to the motion in future sessions (without suspending the rules with a supermajority.)

I don't know as much about the French Parlement's procedure as I would like to, though.
by cellis | 2025-08-10 19:31:55+00:00
I have not found it to be better than Sonnet. I wrote this on another thread:

Claude Code certainly not as easy to engineer with, though it is less expensive. For instance the @feature isn’t as robust as cursors ime. Also no shift+enter is quite a pain. Linting doesn’t “just work”, cursor with Claude 4.0 max is really thorough, I think even better than GPT-5. Not that Sonnet is better but that whatever “ensemble” of models cursor uses with sonnet seems to both adhere and tool call better than with GPT-5. GPT-5 often says what it will do and then says “say go and I’ll go” or says “you should run command x”, but doesn’t just DO it. Also for bug fixes in difficult codebases nothing beats Gemini 2.5 pro
by impossiblefork | 2025-08-10 19:32:03+00:00
I think this view is incredibly wrong. I suppose it's probably true for today's drones, but I think a completely different device is possible:

An autonomous vehicle, flying at 1-2 metres, very fast, hardly targetable and carrying either a small bomb or a device which projects shrapnel precisely at an individual soldier.

At present machines like this would be expensive and limited in range-- you'd probably need a big GPU on it, you'd probably need some kind primary cell that outperforms rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, maybe split it in two half-- one attacking part and one slow gliding part. Thousands of dollars, and weight, complexity, etc. But I am fairly convinced that machines like this are possible and I don't see how human front-line soldiers can operate in an environment saturated with them. I don't even believe that long-range assaults, 1000 km etc., are something these kinds of things won't be able to do-- after all, many birds migrate vast distances, and I think aluminium contains more energy than fat per weight.
by bendigedig | 2025-08-10 19:32:21+00:00
> Do you mean "should've"? That's a common contraction of "should" and "have." In many American accents, the difference between "should've" and "should have" is negligible, and will sound like "should of" even though it isn't.

I think they specifically meant "should of" which is a colloquial form of "should've" in a number of places in the UK.

I went to school with a large number of people who would write "I should of done X instead of Y". In fact I'm pretty sure I made that "mistake" a number of times growing up.