MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lionkor | 2025-08-25 09:37:04+00:00
I recently tried vibe-coding a pretty simple program. All I can say is that I'm horrified at people doing this. Not only did it produce extremely inadequate solutions (not for a lack of trying), but also these solutions were BARELY fulfilling the requirements, and nothing else.

At one point, I gave it a scenario which demonstrated a common failure case, such an important one that it would have broken horribly in production. Its reaction was to make hundreds of changes, one of which, hidden behind hundreds of other changed lines, was to HARDCODE the special case which I had shown it.

Of course, that test then passed, and I assumed it had fixed the problem. It was only much later that I discovered this special-case handling. It was not caught during multiple rounds of AI code review.

Another instance of such a fuck-up was that the AI insisted on fixing tests which were failing, which it had written, but it kept continuously failing to do so. It ended up making hundreds of changes across various functions, sometimes related, sometimes unrelated, and never figured out that the test itself was not relevant and made no sense after a recent refactor. The AI completely failed to consider, after many rounds of back and forth and trying, to take a single step back and look at the function itself, instead of the line that was failing.

This happens every time I touch AIs and try to let them do work autonomously, regardless of which AI it is. People who think these AIs do a good job are the same people who would get chewed up during a 5 minute code review by a senior.

I am genuinely afraid for the horseshit quality ""work"" people who use AI extensively are outputting. I use AIs as a way to be more productive; if you use it to do your job for you, I pray for the people who have to use your software.
by danielbarla | 2025-08-25 09:37:56+00:00
You're completely correct in your two points, however people _do_ regularly assert that LLMs cannot possibly generate anything novel: "they are just regurgitating and recombining the original".

I mean, sure. But so am I (in what is likely a far more advanced manner, but still). I also find it somewhat funny that I am also partially trained on stolen data without permission. I also jaywalk occasionally (perhaps I am trivializing the topic too much, but show me a researcher who hasn't _once_ downloaded a paper they really needed, in less than perfectly legal ways).
by trueismywork | 2025-08-25 09:38:04+00:00
People are not resistant to that concept. People are resistant to OpenAI making ehse claims without proper science practices.

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/114881418225852441

https://mashable.com/article/openai-claims-gold-medal-perfor...

Note that no one expressed skepticism of what google said when they claimed they achieved gold medal. But no one is willing to believe OpenAI.
by roenxi | 2025-08-25 09:39:10+00:00
I push back on the idea there is anything despondent there. If YouTube was enabling my lifestyle I'd be pretty happy about the situation and certainly not about to start piling public pressure on them. These companies get enough hate from roving bands of angry internet denizens.

Touching up videos is bad but it is hardly material to break out the pitchforks compared to some of the political manoeuvres YouTube has been involved in.
by hackrmn | 2025-08-25 09:39:26+00:00
This isn't accurate. I mean in generally you're pointing in the right direction. Your vague statements on "esoteric OS" are not helpful, and in fact I think that it is maybe _you_ who don't know your computer as well as the person you were replying to, do -- after all they bring up relevant and actual details while you point at generalities like "Mail > Google".

Let me try to steer this in a constructive direction -- you're implying use of "GMail" with your "Mail > Google". That is fine -- it's certainly possible to set up a Google account with Mac OS X through the "Accounts" feature, implying SSO and/or reusable credentials API.

But that does not come as default with the OS, and it requires active user participation, which makes your argument a bit of shifting the goal posts indeed -- Mac OS X does not send any data to Google by default, not out of the box. You do not need an "esoteric OS", and such an OS set up with something like described above for Mac OS X, or to demonstrate the simplicity of your argument, a Google Chrome binary blob (e.g. Ubuntu) makes the OS much less "esoteric" since it's now too a "Google vehicle". Point being that Mac OS is not a Google vehicle by default. Neither is Windows, for that matter. And this for a very simple reason -- normally both Apple and Microsoft are _competitors_ to Google, and they would very much prefer the data they would have been able to collect on the user, is sent upstream to Apple and Microsoft respectively, not to their competitor. But that is tangential, again -- the primary point is that by default Internet is not Google, not with e.g. Firefox on Windows.

Let me be perfectly clear -- there's zero tracking by Google unless you use one or multiple of a) a Google provided Web browser, e.g. Chrome, and b) use Google's Web services. By using e.g. Firefox (which is indeed funded by Google) your data are _not_ sent to Google by default, and a Web extension like uMatrix also nips attempts by sites to send data to Google, in the bud. None of this is an esoteric OS.

I have nothing against warning us against Google monopoly, but I find your follow-up replies to be deflections and doubling down when the person is making it perfectly clear that their network does not contain data being sent to Google (in as far as they can trust their packet logs, I would say, but if you were to contest that, you'd need to try harder indeed).
by afavour | 2025-08-25 09:39:41+00:00
Unfortunately a topic like this is perfect bait for a lot of the resentments folks have with the modern internet ecosystem.

There’s some rarely used tech that few have talked about in a long time. Tech giants have decided somewhat unilaterally to get rid of it because it’s barely used and has had security flaws.

There’s a discussion to be had about that specifically but most people didn’t care a jot about XSLT until it was threatened. What they do care about is tech giants controlling the fate of the internet. That’s a far bigger issue than can be solved in a GitHub discussion, but it doesn’t stop anyone trying.
by closewith | 2025-08-25 09:39:44+00:00
No, it's not naive at all. The UK in particular are not the good guys.

Apart from their appalling behaviour during their recent expeditionary wars, their current support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, their sexual and physical abuse of locals near British Overseas bases, they also have an incredibly poor record with their own citizens.

British behaviour in Northern Ireland was itself genocidal, and involved the regular murder of civilians from decades. Even today they are continuing the legal protection of the perpetrators.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-08-25 09:40:27+00:00
> The violence of what is today mainstram porn would have been extremely fringe

I want to push back against some of this comment. I would argue that for non-boomers, today's mainstream porn is most likely OnlyFans, where women have greater control than ever over adult content being created.

> Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten

This is a tiny, tiny fraction of adult content. The rest of your comment reads like "clutching your pearls" to me.
by missingdays | 2025-08-25 09:40:40+00:00
> was to HARDCODE the special case which I had shown it.

Happened to me as well while trying out GPT-5. My prompt was something like "fix this test", where the test contained a class Foo.

It gave me the solution in the form of "if element.class == 'Foo': return null". Gave me a laugh at least
by Jnr | 2025-08-25 09:41:54+00:00
Externally I use Cloudflare proxy and internally I put Crowdsec and Modsecurity CRS middlewares in front of Traefik.

After some fine-tuning and eliminating false positives, it is running smoothly. It logs all the temporarily banned and reported IPs (to Crowdsec) and logging them to a Discord channel. On average it blocks a few dozen different IPs each day.

From what I see, there are far more American IPs trying to access non-public resources and attempting to exploit CVEs than there are Chinese ones.

I don't really mind anyone scraping publicly accessible content and the rest is either gated by SSO or located in intranet.

For me personally there is no need to block a specific country, I think that trying to block exploit or flooding attempts is a better approach.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-25 09:41:56+00:00
I kind of want to do something to stop it though. It feels like not doing something is a betrayal of all that's good in the world, staying mildly by while evil is happening just in front of us.

With collective action and targeted scorn we might be able to prevent these abominations from becoming commonplace. At the same time, I know that the more people go for this approach, the more work there will be for me to fix their mess..but I still think we should stop them somehow.
by klabb3 | 2025-08-25 09:42:06+00:00
There's nothing wrong with, and possibly better, to start out with a protocol only to support an application. But nowadays the pipeline for graduating into open protocols has broken. We have 15 messaging apps and no interop. Even Facebook and Google Gchat used to support open protocols. That's gone. It's actually much worse than before the internet where telephones were all globally interoperable.
by yodsanklai | 2025-08-25 09:42:14+00:00
languages: I never used google translate, but I quite often ask language questions to chatgpt. For instance, "give me examples of sentences using expression XYZ", "fix grammar mistakes in this paragraph" and so on...

And of course coding. Use case 1: replace stack overflow. use case 2: coding agent -> "perform this task for me".

Not life changing but useful.
by popcorncowboy | 2025-08-25 09:42:45+00:00
> partially-OSS SaaS is in for a rocky road

Agent-in-a-loop gets you remarkably far today already. It's not straightforward to "rip" capability even when you have the code, but we're getting closer by the week to being able to go "Project X has capability Y. Use [$approach] and port this into our project". This HAS to put a fat question mark over the viability of any SaaS that makes their code visible.
by umbra07 | 2025-08-25 09:42:57+00:00
Of course, it's not 'intuitive', but I firmly believe that the actual process of using just about any CLI package manager is easier to use than a GUI-installer approach. By "easier" I mean more streamlined, and a more standardized process. Every single time I install a piece of software on my machine with my package manager, I do it exactly the same way, with literally zero different steps taken. The same cannot be said for GUI-based installers. Surely the former would be a better experience for most home PC users?
by crossroadsguy | 2025-08-25 09:43:13+00:00
As long as they clearly give the option, at the time of first setup - or an upgrade, to select which app store becomes default; and make it very easy to change default app store later, just like default browser, default search engine et cetera. But they must not be allowed to disallow for the reason that "you are on another app store, we don't like you, go away!".

Yup, it's then fair and they can keep the banner in their App Store that screams at font size 38 "This Journal App Is Da Best", "No Other Note App Has Been Made Greater Than This One".
by tromp | 2025-08-25 09:43:21+00:00
The parent suggested that the number couldn't be encoded due to its largeness rather than its value. So while any number n with Kolmogorov complexity K(n) > 10^100 cannot be recursively encoded in the known universe, that number n need only be 10^100 bits long. On the other hand a number that's too large to be recursively encoded in the known universe would have to exceed BBλ2(10^100), where BBλ2 is an optimal busy beaver for prefix-free binary programs [1].

[1] https://oeis.org/A361211
by throwaway2037 | 2025-08-25 09:44:35+00:00
> Prosecuting crimes on the internet is near impossible due to the restrictions and often anonymity.

The US does it quite well. The FBI has a near endless number of court cases where they subpoena ISPs and content hosting platforms to de-anon and gather evidence to build cases. My biggest concern about the movement of crime from the streets to "cyberspace" is that almost all Internet crime is considered Federal (across state lines), thus carries much harsher penalties that state-only crimes.
by makkes | 2025-08-25 09:44:51+00:00
From what I can see on the CA/Browser Forum's website (https://cabforum.org/about/membership/members/), there is enough diversity in the forum to represent the Web community as a whole. Trade embargoes issued by a single country would likely not be represented by enough CA/B members to be pushed through the Forum.

I personally sleep much better knowing that e.g. all major browser vendors cooperate on the CA/B (and elsewhere, e.g. the IETF, W3C, ECMA) instead of the biggest one dictating the rules (which, to be fair, happens to a certain degree, e.g. with Chrome leading the way for certain technologies).
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-25 09:44:51+00:00
I think the UA is easily spoofed, whereas the AS and IP are less easily spoofed. You have everything you need already to spoof UA, while you will need resources to spoof your IP, whether it’s wall clock time to set it up, CPU time to insert another network hop, and/or peers or other third parties to route your traffic, and so on. The User Agent are variables that you can easily change, no real effort or expense or third parties required.
by kalaksi | 2025-08-25 09:45:46+00:00
And you just end up with poorly integrated moderation with extra steps when community starts cooperating to make it more efficient (e.g. maintaining filter lists). Or there's no effective moderation so people that want more curated content and better UX moderation-wise will move elsewhere. Nobody's forcing you to use moderated platforms either.

That said, I think the showdead setting in HN is good to have, so you can still opt to see content that would otherwise be filtered.
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-25 09:45:55+00:00
Your link says "battery storage and pumped hydro will have complimentary roles to play - batteries focusing on the flexibility and speed and ability to provide system services, and pumped hydro on dealing with longer storage requirements, such as extended periods of low wind and solar output." It acknowledges that battery electric storage is short-term only, meant to smooth out daily peaks.
by metalman | 2025-08-25 09:46:22+00:00
I have met plenty of millenial's, veterans of the worst of deviant art and 4chan, and the kids are allright.Perhaps a bit extra adult and focused, but that's a good thing right! They have no fucks to give, and rightly expect the worst from there overlords, but make light of it in an obnoctios abrasive kind of way, while standing and fighting the most egregious excesses and violence brought from our governments, who want pasty soft and confused masses of worky workers to exploit, rather than alert, 18 year old vetrans who have seen, heard, and fought depravity on the internet and beyond. So now, bieng too late, the gubberment, is trying to use strong arm and smeer tactictics to controll everything, when they dont grasp the basic realitys that everything on a computer is a file, and all processors have an input/output interface and some kind of widly availible comunications protocol, oh and hundreds of millions of significantly intelligent and pissed of people who are not buying it. key word in the title is "justify", but these are purely self justifications from a dangerous and out of touch group who have taken all of the strings of power and wealth into there clutchy overfull desperate grasp. The truely sureal part of banning file sharing is that the powers that be would rather have people rip thier media, than end up talking with each other and sharring there own.
by cm2187 | 2025-08-25 09:47:02+00:00
But also ww2 is this black and white thing from our history books. As we get older we get to know more about how recent and relevant it is, we met people who lived it and told us about their actual experience. But it still feels like something that belongs to history rather than a recent event. That's kind of the "anything that happened before my birth I don't care" attitude of today's teenagers.
by atoav | 2025-08-25 09:47:45+00:00
Doesn't bringing up the topic of different projections still act as a good reminder that maps of spherical planets will always have one issue or another?

Graphical representations of things have an impact on preception and then by proxy on thinking. Maintaining aome degree of general awareness of these impacts leads to better thinking that is more reflective of the ground truth.

Some would call that "woke" with bad intentions, but hey, they got an agenda and that agaenda doesn't care about facts.
by pen2l | 2025-08-25 09:47:47+00:00
People here miss the value of a tightly moderated walled garden: I don't have to worry about downloading things that are misleading or are chock full of dark patterns, because it has been vetted by an App Store that I trust. And when I download an app with a subscription through App Store, I can see any time how much it costs, I can cancel it any time no fuss: https://www.iphonelife.com/sites/iphonelife.com/files/styles...

Meanwhile, any subscription I sign up for through another channel, I have to wade through a sea of dark patterns to reach a cancel screen.

This is why I choose to have an iPhone, because the garden is walled and I can relax. If you want freedom to have multiple different app stores, Android is a better option for you.
by crote | 2025-08-25 09:48:00+00:00
Short-term, it'll get rid of a bunch of competitors who are slower at setting up automated renewal infrastructure.

Mid-term, it'll reduce the risk of noncompliance, as large customers can no longer demand that you delay revocation. CAs no longer have to fear customers switching to their competition.

Long-term, it'll reduce their operating cost, as it is no longer necessary to handhold customers through the certification issuance and installation process. You just give them a URL, id, and key to enter a single time, and it should Just Work.

The revenue loss of small customers can be compensated by regulatory capture and price hikes for EV. Tell the politicians that "everyone can get a basic cert these days", and that the really important stuff (like banking, hospitals, power grids) should be forced to buy EV certs.
by lyu07282 | 2025-08-25 09:48:17+00:00
> We talked a good talk about democracy when we had communism to compare it to

You can't think yourself a free thinker to realize the west is a force for evil in the world and simultaneously believe the western's propagandist depiction of what communism is it makes for a very incoherent world view. "It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time."
by Doxin | 2025-08-25 09:48:21+00:00
Cursive is wildly easier with a fountain pen. You don't know how much pressure a ball point requires and how much friction it has until you try a fountain pen. My "regular" handwriting is mostly legible but rather ugly. If I do cursive with a ball point it's nearly indecipherable (even to me). If I do cursive with a fountain pen it's legible and decent looking. If I take my time it'll almost look like the examples in the school books I had as a child.

It's a shame fountain pens are slightly too fiddly for every-day use since they still have some real advantages over more modern writing instruments. I've never had a fountain pen fail to produce a line unless out of ink. With ballpoints I feel like they don't work more often than they do.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-25 09:48:42+00:00
It's a tradeoff. You may have the knowledge and risk awareness to install anything, circumvent protections like you still can on MacOS, but the vast majority does not and should not have that power; this led to huge botnets during the Windows XP era when many internet connections were first set up. They overcompensated with Vista, asking permissions for everything so people developed a kneejerk "just hit accept". The iPhone came out not long after, with a safety by default - which invariably meant restricting what a user can and cannot do and install on their system.

I think it's been a net positive overall. The percentage of people that want to do and install more with it is small.
by mattashii | 2025-08-25 09:48:52+00:00
I hope that ZeroSSL has improved their policies and procedures in the past years so they're more safe and robust. Four and a half years ago, there were some significant oversights in certificate lifecycle management, TOS, and handling of key material, which needed external parties to notify them of those issues before they fixed them. To me that was an indication of limited awareness of WebPKI and security principles.

See e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1698936, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699756
by belorn | 2025-08-25 09:48:55+00:00
There are no easy solutions or free lunch, only true costs. Nuclear has its benefits and drawbacks (most which don't need to be repeated). Hydro power is a great natural resource, except for that extinction aspect and flooding risks. Solar and wind is great for use cases where that production variation matches the consumption and human behavior. Natural gas and other fossil fuels should just not be used in the grid, and the arguments in favor of continued use are simply wishful thinking or malicious.

What is simple is that the energy bill is going up in a speed that is much faster than inflation, while the cost of production of energy is going down. As such, the production cost of energy is a poor indicator for the price that users of energy is paying. If we want cheap energy than what we need to care about is the true cost of energy delivering, since that is what the energy bill will reflect. That include the cost of production, the time and place of production, the cost of maintaining grid stability, transportation, and market inefficiencies.
by bob1029 | 2025-08-25 09:48:58+00:00
The backwards compatibility also means that the frustration over concurrency and synchronization is largely a waste of time. Most SQLite builds are created such that all activity is serialized through a single mutex by default.

> In serialized mode, API calls to affect or use any SQLite database connection or any object derived from such a database connection can be made safely from multiple threads.

https://www.sqlite.org/threadsafe.html

Many libraries get this wrong and make it unsafe to use from multiple threads despite the underlying provider being capable. I think these are effectively bugs that should be resolved.

In my C# applications, I use System.Data.SQLite and share a single SQLiteConnection instance across the entire app. This connection instance typically gets injected as the first service, so I can just take a param on it any time I need to talk to SQL. Absolutely no synchronization occurs in my code. I've tried Microsoft.Data.Sqlite but it seems to have rare problems with sharing connections between threads.
by umbra07 | 2025-08-25 09:49:07+00:00
Regarding Linux machines, I frequently hear "oh yeah I haven't had to re-install Linux in 5+N years, my computer just keeps running fine!" Linux system maintenence, bug-squashing, documentation, and fix-applying is all very transparent.

Over in Windows-land, you frequently hear "oh yeah you gotta reinstall Windows every couple of years, or whenever you do xyz operation (say, disk cloning)". Troubleshooting Windows is a huge pain in the ass. There's no good centralized documentation, SEO sucks, registry hacks are common, etc. I've spent much more of my computing life on Windows machines, and I still have no idea how they truly work. I have no idea why sometimes the only way to fix an hardware/driver issue is by running the built-in troubleshooters, etc.