MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by uncircle | 2025-08-30 08:17:16+00:00
The entire website of the author is worth exploring: https://t3x.org/index.html

I love it so much, and seeing your bibliography makes me feel like a kid in a candy store. The confluence of Asian philosophy and computing is delightful.

To put you in the correct headspace this Saturday morning: https://t3x.org/whoami.html
by hliyan | 2025-08-30 08:18:37+00:00
I have a theory that it is a lack of artifacts/detail. Take most living or working environments from the present or past, and you'll see a lot of "things" adorning walls or placed on furniture, some accumulated over years of occupation and use. Sets of non-sci-fi shows or movies can use the real world as a reference and replicate these environments. When you do it for sci-fi shows, set designers probably stop when it starts looking "good enough", or they overdo it with details such as flashing lights or textures. I recall the Battlestar Galactica CIC being an exception.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-30 08:18:48+00:00
Yeah...

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to talk with one of the musicians who played at a friend's wedding.

They turned out to be absurdly skilled musicians in general who can each play multiple instruments and genres. They've got their own songs, their own musical tastes, their own selection of tracks that they really enjoy playing for their audiences.

And yet they are reduced to playing popular radio stuff to make money. Lowest common denominator stuff that gets pumped out like products to a wide global audience. That's what people ask them to play.

It just feels soulless.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-08-30 08:19:00+00:00
The slogan is unhelpful because the cost of failure cannot be factored into the meaning of "working".

"could possibly work" is clearly hyperbole as it would only exclude solutions that are guaranteed to fail.

But even under a more plausible interpretation, this slogan ignores the cost of failure as an independent justification for adding complexity.

It's bad advice.
by mattlutze | 2025-08-30 08:19:02+00:00
No pop psychology maxim is universally true. However in your example we're presented with the outdated understanding of "tech debt."

> As an example, it is possible to solve very many business or operational problems with a simple service sitting in front of a database.

If this is the simplest approach within the problem space or business's constraints, and meets the understood needs, it may indeed be the right choice.

> At scale, you can continue to operate, but the amount of man-hours going into keeping the lights on can grow exponentially. Is the simplest thing possible still the DB?

No problem in a dynamic human system can be solved statically and left alone. If the demands on a solution grows, and the problem space or business's needs changes, then the solution should be reassessed and the new conditions solved for.

Think of it alternatively as resource-constrained work allocation, or agile problem solving. If we don't have enough labor available (and we rarely do) to solve everything "best," then we need to draw a line. Decades of practice now have shown that it's a crap shoot to guess at the shape of levels of complexity down the road.

Best case you spend time that could go into something else valuable today, to solve a problem for a year from now; worst case you get the assumptions wrong and fail to solve that second "today" problem as well as still needing to spend future time on refactoring.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-30 08:19:51+00:00
The traditional UA fakery (adding Mozilla to the start and then just tacking on browser engine names) was the result of outdated websites breaking browsers.

The problematic fakery here is that bots are pretending to be people by emulating browsers to prevent rate limits and other technical controls.

That second category has also been with us since the dawn of the internet, but it has always been something worth complaining about. No trustworthy tool or service will pretend to be a real browser, at least not by default.

If AI agents just identified themselves as such, we wouldn't need elaborate schemes to block them when they need to be blocked.
by ljosifov | 2025-08-30 08:20:03+00:00
That's a consideration, for sure. But given the LLM-s have not got the ground truth, everything is controlled hallucination, then - if the LLM tells you an imperfect version of my email or chat, you can never be sure if what the LLM told you is true, or not. So maybe you don't gain that much extra knowledge about me. For example, you can reasonably guess I'm typing this on the computer, and having coffee too. So if you ask the LLM "tell me a trivial story", and LLM comes back with "one morning, LJ was typing HN replies on the computer while having his morning coffee" - did you learn that much new about me, that you didn't know or could guess before?
by seunosewa | 2025-08-30 08:23:39+00:00
The LLM objective is whatever they are trained to do, whether it's completing text, obeying instructions, coding, etc.

In pre-training, we drop a lot of human-written text in them. This allows them to learn the rules of language and grammar and common language patterns. At this stage, the objective is to predict the next token that makes sense to human beings.

Examples: The capital of US is ... Why did the chicken ...

The next step is instruct training, where they are trained to follow instructions. At this point, they are predicting the next token that will satisfy the user's instructions. They are rewarded for following instructions.

Next step, they are trained to reason by feeding them with reasoning examples to get them going, and then rewarding them whenever their reasoning leads them to good answers. They learn to predict the next reasoning token that will lead them to the best answers.

The objective is imparted by their training. They are "rewarded" when their output satisfies the objective, so that as they are trained, they get better and better at achieving the objectives of the training.
by dijit | 2025-08-30 08:23:48+00:00
I've been hiring people for a while and I use my "common sense" to violate conventions because of humanity, but I think you'd be surprised how defensive it becomes.

I always tell people why they didn't pass the interview, or why we didn't select them. Usually in a reasonably detailed way.

A plurality of individuals have tried to argue with me, that I didn't understand them (which, if true, could be a communication issue and thus: still an issue). Some try to litigate the issue (not in a court of law, but to say things like "but you didn't say that on the ad" (knowing how TCP works shouldn't be on an ad), or "I can learn" etc). A minority of those will go out of their way to hound me on social media.

My "HR" person doesn't get any of that because she gives no reason.

I'll continue to do it, because I think it's the right thing to do: but there are people in the world who disincentivise it. And after all; you're rejecting someone for a reason, so there is a higher probability that you will interface with someone who is as described: as they might not be finding work and thus circulating more and you are rejecting them for a reason... which could be related to attitude.
by ljosifov | 2025-08-30 08:24:47+00:00
My experience in the UK medical systems has been the opposite - wrote here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066321

Google knows what "Home" is for me only in Gmaps, because I went out of my way (put a Label etc) to tell it. I want to be able to tell Google "My home is XYZ", and for Google to use that information about me in all of Google ecosystem. When I talk to Gemini it should know what/where "LJ home" is, when I write in Gdoc it should know my home address (so to insert it if I want it), ditto for Gmail, when I search in Google photos "photos taken at home" it should also know what "home" is for me.

I have the impression that we ended up in the worst case scenario. People I don't want to have my data, have access to it. People I do want to have my data, are afraid to touch it, and use it - yes! - for theirs, but also for my benefit too.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-30 08:25:02+00:00
The content you host will only be blocked from being indexed if you decide to use a service that blocks indexing. If you host your content on other people's services, then you never had the power to make that decision anyway.

If you want your content to be indexed, simply don't use Cloudflare. Host your own servers. Use a different CDN if you want the benefits of Cloudflare's networks.
by keiferski | 2025-08-30 08:26:02+00:00
Yes, thank you. A huge percentage of historical European immigration to the US was by groups that functionally had zero wealth or social mobility in their home countries. Working in a steel mill in the new world was hell, but it beat generational rural poverty back home.

The hyper-individualism of modern America is something that has developed fairly recently, even if it had earlier roots.
by Symbiote | 2025-08-30 08:26:41+00:00
Using the HN public dataset in Google BigQuery [0], which I think fits easily in the amount of free queries allowed:

SELECT EXTRACT(YEAR FROM timestamp) AS year, SUM(CASE WHEN text LIKE '%—%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS withDash, COUNT(*) AS total, SUM(CASE WHEN text LIKE '%—%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) / COUNT(*) AS fraction FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` WHERE type = 'comment' GROUP BY year ORDER BY year; year with— total frac 2006 0 12 0.000 2007 13 70858 0.000 2008 461 247922 0.001 2009 1497 491034 0.003 2010 3835 842438 0.005 2011 4719 1044913 0.005 2012 5648 1246782 0.005 2013 7881 1665185 0.005 2014 8400 1510814 0.006 2015 9967 1642912 0.006 2016 12081 2093612 0.006 2017 14530 2361709 0.006 2018 19246 2384086 0.008 2019 23662 2755063 0.009 2020 27316 3243173 0.008 2021 32863 3765921 0.009 2022 34657 4062159 0.009 2023 36611 4221940 0.009 2024 32543 3339861 0.010 2025 30608 2231919 0.014

So there's definitely been an increase.

Querying for the users who use "—" most as a proportion of all their comments:

SELECT `by`, SUM(CASE WHEN text LIKE '%—%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) / COUNT(*) AS fraction, COUNT(*) AS total, MIN(timestamp) AS minTime, MAX(timestamp) AS maxTime FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` WHERE type = 'comment' AND timestamp < '2022-11-30' GROUP BY `by` HAVING COUNT(*) > 100 ORDER BY fraction DESC LIMIT 250;

zmgsabst uses them the most [1], westoncb [2] is an older account that uses them fourth-most.

[0] https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/y-combi...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=zmgsabst

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=westoncb
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-08-30 08:26:46+00:00
It's not the colour scheme, it's the shapes and architecture. Everything is plastic and coded as either technology or efficiency. Straight lines, industrial curves, blinky lights, holographic panels or touch displays. Clean, shiny, geometric, emphasis on shape and space. Form follows function. No superfluous decoration. No dirt on the ground.

Textbook modernism.

The alternative is the industrial-warehouse-in-space Alien aesthetic - all unlit metal gantries and dripping chains - which is a different kind of efficiency. But still utilitarian.

When you get an organic incursion of veins, branches, or tendrils, it's either a self-contained Memory of Home arboretum, or a signifier of danger and a Very Bad Thing.
by card_zero | 2025-08-30 08:27:46+00:00
Yes, there was plenty of anti-nazi propaganda in WW2. It wasn't rational argument. It would have been more noble not to use any propaganda. So perhaps it's wrong to use it. However, opinions forced on the public aren't all incorrect just because they're forced. Or for another example, there's anti-smoking propaganda. Changing people's minds by disgusting them with pictures of disease is manipulative, and I don't like it, but the general message that smoking is unhealthy remains true. This justifies nothing, but is a fact.
by cromka | 2025-08-30 08:28:05+00:00
> until you factor in the cost of doing so and realize you would get 10x the return on adding a few more panels.

You're looking what the cost would be now and I don't think they were suggesting that, but rather as a direction of development for panels.

Luckily this is exactly how things work and why we have continues progress in the area, including with the batteries. Because 10 years ago you wouldn't even bother with super expensive Lithium batteries for home energy storage and go with NiCd, right?
by oytis | 2025-08-30 08:28:51+00:00
Having been through a post-Soviet school system, it's not about rote memorization, at least not in maths. The point is spending as much time with a problem as necessarily, without having a predefined algorithm, until it cracks. It's such a useful skill and satisfying experience that I feel sad that some children are denied it for the sake of psychological comfort.
by milen | 2025-08-30 08:28:51+00:00
Yup, that's me! EventBox [1] was rebranded as Socialite after it got acquired [2] by Realmac Software.

[1] https://milen.me/software/eventbox-walkthrough/

[2] https://www.macworld.com/article/200462/realmac_eventbox.htm...
by mattlutze | 2025-08-30 08:29:26+00:00
> a few days ago, i had the surreal experience of joining a private fireside chat with werner vogels, the cto of amazon, during startup summit 2025 in florianópolis. it's one thing to follow his talks online – it's another to be in the same room, listening to him unpack two decades of lessons from building some of the most critical infrastructure on the internet.

It seems he does indeed tell us that he was a listener in a small-audience conversation that Vogels had.
by huflungdung | 2025-08-30 08:29:26+00:00
Contrarian blog post trying to challenge the status quo without understanding the implications in order to look like a visionary.

I say this in interviews just to look smart. And people think it’s revolutionary. Everyone loves an outspoken opposition -what do they know, where did they get this knowledge?!

Only a couple have ever pushed back and those that do are the companies that I want to work with.

A wild example, let’s delete a test that ensures a heart pump works at the correct duty cycle given its parameters. Now someone comes along and redefines milliseconds to microseconds for some unrelated component. The tests are all fine. Patient now has a 60000 bpm heart rate.

Stupid idea.
by mingus88 | 2025-08-30 08:30:12+00:00
Wasn’t it always just money laundering?

Need to turn a million dollars of shady money into legit profit? Mint an NFT or coin and set a ridiculous price on it. Make the transactions on an anonymous ledger. Sell it to yourself.

I mean, come on. Art and real estate have always been vehicles for wealthy people to dump money offshore. Crypto made it so much easier to invent assets out of thin air and set whatever price you want on it.

With NFTs you don’t even need to hype up some artist as the next big thing, or trade in antiquities. Just generate a picture of Trump as a beefcake fireman or something and sell it for 1.8 million. That actually happened.

And golly, nobody is talking about it anymore. The fad just dried up just like all the money. Huh, go figure.

Time to harvest those losses.
by wtcactus | 2025-08-30 08:32:32+00:00
In part that’s an interesting question. Some of the processors on the Ugreen line are Xeons, so they should support ECC, but I’m not sure the MB does.

But you don’t really need ECC for ZFS. That’s a kind of myth that has been debunked several times. Sure, it’s always good, but ZFS works just fine without it.

(I’m on my phone so it’s dificult to find a good source for the claim, but if you search a bit, you’ll find some good blog posts talking about it).
by kristopolous | 2025-08-30 08:32:39+00:00
People really love scifi on hn, and that's fine ... but the investment capital has spoken and renewables are being funded 30x nuclear. Not 30% more, 3,000% more. It's even 2x over ogc infra (oil, gas, coal)

https://knowledge.energyinst.org/new-energy-world/article?id...

It's a 12-1 over OGC in what the IEA labels "advanced economies" https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2025
by ljosifov | 2025-08-30 08:32:46+00:00
It's not a satire, you can check mu comments on this topic easily.

I dispute 'most people'. Revealed preferences of most people are that they value their data privacy very cheaply, almost zero. Even one click extra to share their data less, is one click too many, an effort too high - for most people. This is their real, observed behaviour. I think our current predicament is the case of "public lies, private truths." A small cadre of vocal proponents of a particular view, established "the ground truth to what is desirable". (in this case - maximum privacy, ideally zero information sharing) The public goes with it in words, pays lip service - but in reality behaves different, even opposite to what they say they desire.

And even if 'most people' wanted what you say they do, I still think the companies could and should accommodate a minority group like myself that want otherwise to what 'most people' want. I don't think the will of the majority is the highest ideal, so high as to trump what I personally want.
by simonask | 2025-08-30 08:33:00+00:00
It's more correct to say that the job market is split between unionized labor and high-skilled office positions ("funktionær" = "official"), which is basically anything requiring a university education. In recent decades, the latter category has grown exponentially as industrialized economies have turned into service economies.

Collective bargaining and stepladder salaries are not really a thing for officials, and never has been (outside of a few cases in the public sector, like doctors).
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-30 08:33:05+00:00
I know the line between an agent and a workflow is blurry, and there is some confusion between the two, but this isn't even that! This is a collection of prompts. To call them "agents" is only adding to that confusion. These are prompts suited for cc. "Personas", maybe. But definitely not agents in their own right.
by arp242 | 2025-08-30 08:34:12+00:00
> Noem's statement gave few specifics about the nature of the breach except to blame FEMA's staff, two dozen of whom she said she had fired. Noem said the hack threatened "the entire Department and the nation as a whole" but at the same time said that "no American citizens were directly impacted." She added: "No sensitive data was extracted from any DHS networks."

So it's a breach that's extremely dangerous for the entire nation, but also there is no real impact on American citizens or extraction of sensitive data. Eh?

The entire thing smells of a pretext for a political purge. Either it's a minor incident hugely blown out of proportion, or it's just outright fabricated.
by trallnag | 2025-08-30 08:34:25+00:00
So talking about eugenics in a positive way equals racist commentary?

I have a genetic mutation (de novo) that leads to a disability and that I don't want to pass on. Natural approach: Die, due to the lack of therapeutic modalities. No chance of offspring. With the help of medicine, I am alive. Now, to prevent passing on mutated genes but still have children, I could use something like IVF and reproductive genetics. This is textbook eugenics(?)

Obviously I disapprove of the stereotypical eugenics of the century. Ranging from Germans murdering disabled children to Danes forcing Greenland women on birth control.
by saghm | 2025-08-30 08:36:30+00:00
To me, the benefit of simplicity is that it can help avoid the need to try to guess what future requirements will be by leaving room for iteration. Making something complex up front often increases the burden when trying to change things in the future. Crucially, this requires being flexible to making those changes in the future though rather than letting the status quo remain indefinitely.

The main argument I've seen against this strategy of design is concern over potentially needing to make breaking changes, but in my experience, it tends to be a lot easier to try to come up with a simple design that can solve most of the common cases but leaves design space for future work to solve more niche cases that wouldn't require breaking the existing functionality than trying to anticipate every possible case up front. After a certain point, our confidence in our predictions dips low enough that I think it's smarter to bet on your ability to avoid locking yourself into a choice that would break things to change later than to make the correct choice based on those predictions.
by ljosifov | 2025-08-30 08:37:03+00:00
You know little about me, so it's better to assume less, no? My personal experience with medical data specifically is, that I would have been harmed by obstacles to data sharing that the UK medical system has in place, having not been familiar with computers and tech enough to anticipate the ways lack of data sharing will lead to outcomes undesirable to me. I wrote about that in a comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45067219
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-30 08:39:52+00:00
Perplexity is the problem Cloudflare and companies like it are trying to solve. The company refuses to take no for an answer and will mislead and fake their way through until they've crawled the content they wanted to crawl.

The problem isn't just that ads can't be served. It's that every technical measure to attempt to block their service produces new ways of misleading website owners and the services they use. Perplexity refuses any attempt at abuse detection and prevention from their servers.

None of this would've been necessary if companies like Perplexity would've just acted like a responsible web service and told their customers "sorry, this website doesn't allow Perplexity to act on your behalf".

The open protocol you want already exists: it's the user agent. A responsible bot will set the correct user agent, maybe follow the instructions in robots.txt, and leave it at that. Companies like Perplexity (and many (AI) scrapers) don't want to participate in such a protocol. They will seek out and abuse any loopholes in any well-intended protocol anyone can come up with.

I don't think anyone wants Cloudflare to have even more influence on the internet, but it's thanks to the growth of inconsiderate AI companies like Perplexity that these measure are necessary. The protocol Cloudflare proposes is open (it's just a signature), the problem people have with it is that they have to ask Cloudflare nicely to permit website owners to track and prevent abuse from bots. For any Azure-gated websites, your bot would need to ask permission there as well, as with Akamai-gated websites, and maybe even individual websites.

A new protocol is a technical solution. Technical solutions work for technical problems. The problem Cloudflare is trying to solve isn't a technical problem; it's a social problem.
Show HN: Interactive bash session for coding agents
by renonce | 2025-08-30 08:40:12+00:00
In Claude Code, the bash tool allows for a single round of interaction only - supply command, run and get the output. Even when running in the background, the tools only allow fetching outputs from bash periodically, and does not support interacting with it or providing inputs. This prevents models from using certain programs such as gdb and Python REPL.

I've written a very simple script in ~30 lines that allows Claude Code to spawn bash and interact with it. User can attach to the terminal and type into it as Claude Code is working simultaneously. It additionally logs terminal history which can be replayed with `scriptreplay`.

See it use vim and gdb in real action (somewhat lame): `asciinema play https://github.com/vincent-163/bgbash/raw/refs/heads/asciine...`

This is a minimum working sample with lots of rough edges. Looking forward to extensions of this idea!