MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cgriswald | 2025-08-10 16:36:59+00:00
Although it is a little odd and I'm not certain I've seen it in writing, I have definitely heard constructions like "John will both try and kill mosquitos." to mean, "John will both attempt to and succeed in kill[ing] mosquitos."

"John will both try and like sushi" makes perfect sense, although there's an implied "to eat" verb separate from the "to like" verb in there that isn't present in the constructions the article is talking about.

Likewise, "I tried and finished the assignment," means "I tried (to do) the assignment and I finished it." Again, maybe not in writing, but with a certain inflection on 'tried' (where in writing maybe you'd put a comma or semi-colon to indicate a pause) this is something people actually say; although they may emphasis it with "I finally tried and actually finished the assignment." (Whereas maybe previously they weren't confident they could even do it and maybe didn't try.)

Included for no real reason: "They tried and failed, all of them?" "Oh, no." She shook her head. "They tried and died."
by nudgeOrnurture | 2025-08-10 16:37:30+00:00
the obstacle are concerns and issues that are ignored, selectively or electively, for the sake of financial mechanisms, extraordinary agreements, to keep the balance sheets clean or late Soviet style management aka "don't let the leader know", or the shareholders.

at that point, you can't flatter no more and it's hard or impossible to remain constructive.

luckily that's a problem for less than 5 % of any workforce and thus, statistically irrelevant.

real issues and concerns thus turn into a 95 out of 100 kind of problem. and this has been going on for so long that the entire chains of command and hierarchies are easily corrupted.

in the Netflix adaptation of Cyberpunk 2077, the hierarchies in corporations only exist for the sake of flattery, so that there is someone below, without any real function except maybe to store some secrets in their brain and or make them accomplices that can take the fall whenever necessary.

I hope we'll never get there but our chains of command have been made for, by and of flatterers.

it's otherwise hard to impossible to imagine how all these small wars are going on or how media decides to portrait them, and how things like the right to repair, tiktock, cookies, web surveillance and fingerprinting for the sake of marketing could have happened.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-08-10 16:37:49+00:00
I live in Boulder and homelessness is a big problem here. Some people tie it to housing costs, which I don't buy. There are nearby towns with housing that is substantially cheaper, within a 30 minute bus ride if you really need to get to Boulder for some reason.

And how good is that support network if it leaves you camping in a tent down by the river? I'm not taking about moving across the state, just down the road a bit.
by SkiFire13 | 2025-08-10 16:38:02+00:00
> In C or C++ the type would take the place of that unnecessary `let`

In my opinion the `let` is not so unnecessary. It clearly marks a statement that declares a variable, as opposed to other kind of statements, for example a function call.

This is also why C++ need the "most vexing parse" ambiguity resolution.
by chiph | 2025-08-10 16:38:39+00:00
Because of that, I got good at creating multi-threaded GUI apps. Stardock were champs at this - they had a newsgroup reader/downloader named PMINews that took full advantage of multithreading.

The rule of thumb I had heard and followed was that if something could take longer than 500ms you should get off the UI thread and do it in a separate thread. You'd disable any UI controls until it was done.
by asa400 | 2025-08-10 16:38:42+00:00
I have worked Elixir/Erlang and Rust a lot, and I agree. Rust in particular gives ownership semantics to threaded/blocking/locking code, which I often times find _much_ easier to understand than a series of messages sent between tasks/processes in Elixir/Erlang.

However, in a world where you have to do concurrent blocking/locking code without the help of rigorous compiler-enforced ownership semantics, Elixir/Erlang is like water in the desert.
by kvemkon | 2025-08-10 16:39:52+00:00
I didn't mean to blame victims. I just mean that under totalitarian regime one need to put extra work to compensate the pressure from the state and try to do it wise. Right after the Stalin rule there have been official De-Stalinization and rehabilitation of Gulag prisoners. That's why under USSR I usually don't mean Stalin period. There was no one single and equal USSR whole 70+ years long. Every new party leader is a new era.

> singing Ukrainian songs you can go to the russian prison

I'm not sure how is this right now, I fear it got worse, but on August 2022 it was possible(*). Russian guitarist performed a Ukrainian song in Ukrainian original in public:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPu5WQKXsjM (cut)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82argH8zZXQ&t=1041s (full, 10.89 million views)

And it is not just some beautiful Ukrainian song. It is a prominent "I will not surrender without a fight" (2005). Which sounds provocative enough these days. Yeah, he did not continue doing it again and again, thus it's by no means a prove one can safely practice this on a daily basis.

This song must be known by almost every Russian (and Belorussian), since this song was used once Zelensky played the main male role in the rus-ukr movie "Office Romance. Our Time" (2011) remake of the famous 1977 USSR original.

OTOH one of the most prominent (former) Ukrainian singers and since 2014 Russian singer Taisia Povaliy could sing her Ukrainian songs on December 2024 at the main State Kremlin Palace in Moscow. (Obviously, because she openly supports the state.)

[1] https://www.mk.ru/social/2024/12/11/marshal-kadysheva-buynov... (rus.)
by nine_k | 2025-08-10 16:41:04+00:00
Does anybody find it mildly ironic that LLM prompts, which are intended to be plain informal text, accumulate more and more structure around them, including a markup language in question?

This is not unlike the way the language of legal documents is highly formulaic, structured, and codified. When precise meaning is desirable, firmer structures tend to arise. With a bit more time, proper code languages may start to appear, to help tell LLMs exactly what we mean or want.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-08-10 16:41:32+00:00
In my experience, control will outweigh other important factors (like profit) - providing those other factors aren't applying immediate pressure.

In corporations: We see this when copyright maximalists want more copyright control, even when it chokes off likely avenues of profit (eg: shutting down fan-created efforts).

On a much larger scale, there is a force that ruins everything eventually.

No one anywhere wants to clean their own house.

From what I see, it is enabled by (and thrives under) the compulsion for control. eg: Beneficial labor unions of the 1930s were corrupt by the 1950s because union members preferred the safety of power over the uncertainty of excising corruption.

Closer to home: Hiring portals auto-trash classes of viable applicants. eg: 1st time job seekers, breaks in job history, irrelevant+minimal criminal records, unwanted zip codes, etc.

cont: I have learned that many chronic complainers are also natural-born troubleshooters. It's practically hidden knowledge because they are universally dismissed w/o consideration.

Taking a risk is trading control for the unknown. Our desire for control is so strong, we'll skew the equation by downplaying the gains.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-10 16:42:03+00:00
That also goes for other fields as well. I've seen enough comments here on HN from people who thought their employer would offer them a Sillicon Valley wage if they moved to the middle of nowhere to live like royalty, often because they thought companies pay them based on how much value they add, especially when WFH became more widespread during COVID.

All companies pay people as little as they can to keep a certain amount of employees of certain quality around to do the work. The fewer options you have (or the more options your employer has), the worse the deal you'll have to accept becomes, and the lower your pay will be.

As for skills, I know plenty of people in IT who would go crazy working retail or interacting with customers within a month. Flipping burgers may be the easy part, but resilience against customer behaviour and monotonous/uninteresting work isn't something everyone has.
by microtonal | 2025-08-10 16:42:35+00:00
I would rather say it's a Chinese conglomerate. E.g. Think.* are said to be designed in the US, Taiwan, and Japan. They are often assembled locally (e.g. my ThinkStation was assembled in Hungary). They have offices in many local markets and can be held accountable for warranty, issues, etc.

I agree with your general point though, 'Chinese' does not mean bad quality, warranty, etc. It's more a property of a bunch of Chinese computer companies selling through AliExpress, Amazon, etc. Their quality and service might improve as they grow.

As an aside, Lenovo are pretty awesome. For ThinkStations, ThinkPads, etc. they have in-depth guides for supported memory configurations, disassembly, repair etc., often with part numbers. Their hardware also works well with fwupdmgr and they provide their own Linux support (like WWAN FCC unlock scripts).
by SkyPuncher | 2025-08-10 16:42:59+00:00
> The last 20%, while possible to attain, is ultimately not worth it for the amount of time you spend in context hells. You can just do it yourself faster.

I'm arguing that there's a skill that has to be learned in order to break through this. As you start in a new code base, you should be quick to jump in when you hit that 20%. But, as you spend more time in it, you learn how to avoid the same "context hell" issues and move that number down to 15%, 10%, 5% of the time.

You're still going to need to jump in, but when you can learn to get the LLM to write 95% of the code for you, that's incredibly powerful.
by socram8888 | 2025-08-10 16:43:37+00:00
Turns out the backend always send the image data, regardless if you're allowed to see it, alongside a flag ("interstitial_action") that tells the frontend to hide it.

If you simply clear the flag, you can access all the sensitive media as always, without providing any identity.

I've made a simple user script that monkey-patches XMLHttpRequest to test it, and works pretty well.

Another proof that you should not trust the user client.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-08-10 16:43:54+00:00
Indeed, and ridiculous exams at that. Imagine being at school and they had a several question exam from anything across a four year degree. No information on what area to focus on, because there’s no focus on purpose.

Quarter of a million dollars in a suitcase, loaded gun, and a copper ticking clock on the table next to you. Picture of your kids that need new school clothes.

Miss one question and you fail. Must also be confident, friendly, and not too old while doing it.

—> “I can’t find anyone that can pass my simple test, they must all be frauds.”

This is not how proper exams work, and for good reason.
by cgriswald | 2025-08-10 16:43:57+00:00
The problem with "one spelling the way it is said" is that (1) pronunciation varies among native speakers even within the same country or region. (So, at best, you'd have to pick a winner or just count them all as different languages with their own spellings.) (2) Pronunciation drifts over time (and I'm not sure an official spelling and pronunciation could stop it).
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-10 16:45:18+00:00
Not possible, you'll need to pass the captured variables explicitly into the 'lambda' via some sort of context parameter.

And considering the memory management magic that would need to be implemented by the compiler for 'painless capture' that's probably a good thing (e.g. there would almost certainly be a hidden heap allocation required which is a big no-no in Zig).
by mh- | 2025-08-10 16:45:20+00:00
It clearly (to me) shows that it's providing a docx for background knowledge, the way all of the existing providers allow you to upload a file as part of creating a new prompt. It's in a <document> tag, under a <hint> with a caption attribute that has a value "Background Knowledge".

No one is suggesting you write a prompt in docx..
by mananaysiempre | 2025-08-10 16:45:43+00:00
> Because at the time [the utility of metaclasses] was obvious, Smalltalk was the C++ companion on OS/2 [...].

Maybe? I have to admit I know much more about Smalltalk internals than I ever did about actually architecting programs in it, so I’ll need to read up on that, I guess. 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.

> Aggregation is not inheritance, rather a workaround, using delegation. And it has been always a bit of the pain to [...] avoid writing all the boilerplate by hand.

Meh. Yes, the boilerplate is and always had been ass, and it isn’t nice that the somewhat bolted-on nature of the whole thing means most COM classes don’t actually support being aggregated. Yet, ultimately, (single) implementation inheritance amounts to two things: the derived object being able to forward messages to the base one—nothing but message passing needed for that; and the base object being able to send messages to the most derived one—and that’s what pUnkOuter is for. That’s it. SOM’s ability to allocate the whole thing in one gulp is nice, I’d certainly rather have it than not, but it’s not strictly necessary.

Related work: America (1987), “Inheritance and subtyping in a parallel object-oriented language”[1] for the original point; Fröhlich (2002), “Inheritance decomposed”[2], for a nice review; and Tcl’s Snit[3] is a nice practical case study of how much you can do with just delegation.

> As for WinRT, I used to have it in high regard, until Microsoft management managed to kill everything good that UWP was all about [...].

Can’t say I weep for UWP as such; felt like the smartphonification of the last open computing platform was coming (there’s a reason why Valve got so scared). As for WinRT, I mean, I can’t really feel affection for anything Microsoft releases, not least because Microsoft management definitely doesn’t, but that doesn’t preclude me from appreciating how WinRT expresses seemingly very orthodox (but in reality substantially more dynamic) implementation inheritance in terms of COM aggregation (see link in my previous message). It’s a very nice technical solution that explains how the possibility was there from the very start.

[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-47891-4_22

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20060926182435/http://www.cs.jyu...

[3] https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Snit%27s+Not+Incr+Tcl
by Rotundo | 2025-08-10 16:46:44+00:00
Usenet worked because it started with people that valued the medium. The Netiquette was a voluntary code of conduct. It worked, as long as the influx of people was small enough that they could learn how to behave.

And then the masses got onto the Internet. Lookup the term "Eternal September" [1]. The whole culture got overwhelmed by people that did not value the medium. Spam got out of hand, trolling was a most popular pastime. That killed Usenet, as normal discussion was impossible.

Can Usenet be revived? Not while there is money to be made on the Internet. Any attempt to gather people online gets perverted by someone smelling money.

Usenet was great until the mid-nineties.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
by mathiaspoint | 2025-08-10 16:47:00+00:00
One of the forums I often post to frequently went down the other month for a couple weeks (everyone thought it was gone for good) so I went back to idling on IRC for a while.

These things are still there, I occasionally peak at newsgroups from time to time (there are free providers for the text trees) they're just not growing. IMO a lack of growth these days is probably a good thing.
by djtango | 2025-08-10 16:47:19+00:00
I did an introduction into the basics of linguistics in secondary school and something my teacher pointed out that a rule of thumb is that common phrases or words are the most likely to break grammatical rules.

He then told me a story about a language that was invented to be perfectly regular, and then there was a generation of native speakers of this artificial language and the first thing that happened was common phrases became irregular.

I believe the language must be Esperanto but I'm struggling to find a reference to this anecdote
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-08-10 16:47:37+00:00
> Bad from a traditionalist software engineering perspective, but great from a business perspective (which is what matters). Not everything needs to scale after all. Anyway, I do question whether the author has actually worked with LLM's a lot. I would think that the strengths failings of LLM's would get obvious rather quickly to anyone who uses them.

Few things I've seen here.

> If you're working in a field where "good enough" is fine, then I imagine that LLM's can do a lot for you.

There's some specific timesheet software used for Gov Contractors that's hands-down, the worst web "application" I've ever used. Opening devTools on one of these pages is a riot--one of the "APIs" used return HTML documents with js file extensions so the browser fails to parse, every JS file is 1K lines long with blocks of global variables with various naming conventions, using 'back' in the browser just sort of fails and returns you to the sign-in page.

Any modern web programmer would have a stroke looking at this thing. Apparently it's the standard software used for this purpose, relied on all over the industry.

At a previous employer, I had to deal with some internal site for financial transactions and billing. Same story, ancient looking and performing web 'app' that had specific incantations to get it to actually work "don't refresh the page until that loads", piles of JS vomiting bizarre errors in the console, just a remarkable piece of junk.

Anyway, short story long, there's LOADS of software that's terrible by any metric that have crucial purposes floating around that are far worse in terms of 'code quality' than any LLM would spit out.

Also, I have more experience than I like to remember dealing with 'body shop' codebases. There is no way that an LLM is even capable of generating such low quality code. I legitimately think several of the projects I saw were sabotage; there's no way a human would deliberately write such inscrutable junk. Ever seen random python runtime errors cause the type of something would change depending on which branches were hit?
by cowmix | 2025-08-10 16:47:59+00:00
I’m just getting into MCP (building my own server and trying some canned ones), and one thing I’ve noticed — some servers seem to devour your context window before you’ve even typed a single token / question.

My favorite example is the public Atlassian one — https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/remote-mcp-serv...

Even with Claude or Gemini CLI (both with generous limits), I run out of context and resources fast.

With local LLMs via LM Studio? Forget it — almost any model will tap out before I can get even a simple question in.
by zavec | 2025-08-10 16:48:16+00:00
Super cool! One of the things on my to-do list is some articles I have bookmarked about people who do something similar with org-mode. They use it to take notes, and then have plugins that turn those notes into slides or blog posts (or other things, but those were the two use-cases I was interested in). This is a good reminder that I should go follow up on that.
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-10 16:48:16+00:00
You don't need operator overloading for vector and matrix math, see pretty much all GPU languages. What Zig is missing is a complete mapping of the Clang Extended Vector and Matrix extensions (instead of the quite limited `@Vector` type):

https://clang.llvm.org/docs/LanguageExtensions.html#vectors-...

https://clang.llvm.org/docs/LanguageExtensions.html#matrix-t...
by raesene9 | 2025-08-10 16:48:24+00:00
Indeed a consequence for the individual user could be spammed posts, but for scams, I'd guess that HN would fall back on their standard moderation process.

The question was though, what are the consequences for HN, rather than individual users, as it's HN that would take the cost of implementation.

Now if a lot of prominent HN users start getting their passwords compromised and that leads to a hit on HNs reputation, you could easily see that tipping the balance in favour of implementing MFA, but (AFAIK at least) that hasn't happened.

Now ofc you might expect orgs to be pro-active about these things, but having seen companies that had actual financial data and transactions on the line drag their feet on MFA implementations in the past, I kind of don't expect that :)
by paulryanrogers | 2025-08-10 16:49:01+00:00
> AI and agentic AI doesn’t improve SaaS. It replaces the need for it. Not the functionality—the entire concept of software as an intermediary between intent and outcome.

This paints with a pretty broad brush. Are agentic AI solutions precise yet? Are they secure? How costly are the mistakes they intrinsically make?

Is questioning the premise of the article just going to be met with dismissive bucketing into recycled stages of grief?
by jll29 | 2025-08-10 16:49:11+00:00
I'm interested in this from a research point of view.

How do you define a community? I'm guessing you just use the technical "meeting place" in cyberspace as defining the boundaries plus a topic, say people who like fishing, people who have a particular sexual or political orientation, or people that believe in a particular religion; is that correct?

How do you _name_ communities? "Vegans in Austin, TX", "kids that love LEGO", "Pentecostal Christians on Reddit from r/evangelical", "East Coast independent voters" or "Global spicy Thai food connoisseurs"?.

There could be real value add by bringing people from the same community together (= aggregating) that are scattered across different online places.
by gylterud | 2025-08-10 16:49:13+00:00
This is a text I wrote a few years ago about the false dichotomy between logic and creativity. But with the advent of LLMs I thought about again.

I think current LLMs are capable of both logic and creativity, but still to a limited extent. While LLMs can solve competition math problems, they often fail at simple variations of logical puzzles and cannot yet contribute proofs of novel mathematical theorems. In the creative department, they can make simple combinations of ideas, but I have yet to hear of some really breathtaking creative output. It very easily falls into cliche, or disintegrates into non-sense.

My completely unsupported theory is that these two shortcomings are related, and that with greater logical and mathematical ability comes greater creativity. Much like how LLMs got a lot better in all parts when we trained them on code. Perhaps once they are trained on formalised logical reasoning, they will create truly astounding new ideas?
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by adlkiarash | 2025-08-10 16:49:31+00:00
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