MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by globular-toast | 2025-08-30 07:25:38+00:00
SQLModel is even worse as it couples everything together. It's only good for basically building a JSON interface on top of a database. I guess it could be useful for a very basic web app. But the moment you start needing logic on the backend beyond basic read/write permissions you're screwed. At that point you either rewrite or proceed to build a big ball of mud.

In my experience backends never stay simple enough for SQLModel so you might as well decouple from the get go. If it's literally just copy/paste between SQLAlchemy models and Pydantic just do the copy/pasting. Get an LLM to do it if you have to. It will be worth it in the long run. You'll want to change your db schema without breaking your API.
by zkmon | 2025-08-30 07:25:47+00:00
This is the "portal/broker" phenomenon that is gripping all domains for last couple of decades. Consumer and producer are de-linked by a third-party layer that is making things better for both at the cost of dependency on the layer for both.

When you order on amazon, you no longer deal with the merchant. When you order food, you no longer directly pay the restaurant. When you ask for information from web, you no longer want to deal with idiosyncrasies of the content authors (page styles, navigation, fragmentation of content, ads etc).

Is it bad for content owners? Yes, because people won't visit your pages any longer, affecting your ad revenue. Is it compensated? Now this is where it differs from amazon and food delivery apps. There is no compensation for the lost ad revenue. If the only purpose of your content is ads, well, that is gone.

But wait, a whole lot of content on internet is funded by ads. And Google's bread and butter lies in the ad revenues of the sites. Why would they kill their geese? Because they have no other option. They just need to push the evolution and be there when future arrives. They hope to be part of the future somehow.
by tkgally | 2025-08-30 07:26:42+00:00
Due to the interest in this project, I created a second, more comprehensive version of the leaderboard:

https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

This second version was vibe-coded with Codex CLI. I also tried Gemini CLI, but it didn’t work very well. The SQL scripts I ran at BigQuery were by Claude.

I am not a programmer or web designer, so I will leave these pages as they are, warts and all. It was a fun project, though. I never would have attempted something like this pre-vibe-coding.
by Oras | 2025-08-30 07:26:45+00:00
OpenAI has been doing something similar for generated images using C2PA [0]

It is easy to alter by just saving to a different format or basic cropping.

I would love to see how SynthID is fixing this issue.

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8912793-c2pa-in-chatgpt-...
by physicles | 2025-08-30 07:27:23+00:00
Could you describe what made those tests effective? I just wrote some tools to write concise tests for some analytics queries, and some principles I stumbled on are:

- input data should be pseudorandom, so the chance of a test being “accidentally correct” is minimized

- you need a way to verify only part of the result set. Or, at the very least, a way to write tests so that if you add a column to the result set, your test doesn’t automatically break

In addition, I added CSV exports so you can verify the results by hand, and hot-reload for queries with CTEs — if you change a .sql file then it will immediately rerun each CTE incrementally and show you which ones’ output changed.
by Agraillo | 2025-08-30 07:27:40+00:00
I felt also something like this before. Also integers seem pretty close to the reality around us. One of their functions is to symbolically represent the similarity of objects (there might be a better way to put it). Like, if you see 5 sheep in one group and 6 in another, after that point they’re no longer just distinct sheep with unique properties - the numbers act as symbols for the groups. Real numbers still can work in the brain, but they're most distant from the world around us, at least when it comes to going from visual to conceptual understanding.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-08-30 07:28:33+00:00
I don't think it scales, because I'm not sure it scales on private trackers already. I'm not deep into that space, but I think there's a lot of problems with it that will scale as adoption scales, particularly around policing the sale of invites - the hope would be it self-police through treebanning, but I'm not sure it does.

I think a sort of pseudo-anonymous auth system with backed in invites and treebans that website owners could easily adopt is interesting though. I'm not sure it's a business - for adoption reasons it likely needs to be a protocol - but it's an interesting idea, if it doesn't just turn into a huge admin headache for publishers.
by gloosx | 2025-08-30 07:28:40+00:00
There is nothing surprising at all? It's not rocket science to understand that Anthropic is a very greedy company – just by analysing their sales funnel/UX you can tell that money is all they ever care about. Their marketing teams will go for any tricks to gain direct access to your pockets.

In the LLM space no other company is different – they are highly unprofitable – so once funding starts to run dry they will have the pressure to invent new ways for going even deeper into your pockets.
by hnaccount_rng | 2025-08-30 07:28:47+00:00
I’m not sure if your statements are actually correct. What you are implying is that there are fewer tailors today than in the past. And I’m not sure if that holds. I’m not even sure that their relative position on the income ladder has deteriorated.

In the time before automated T-shirt production, almost nobody bought clothes. They were just far too expensive. There were of course people that did. And those paid extremely well. But those kinds of tailors still exist!

At the same time, I do think that the comparison is less than apt. And a better one would be comparing it to the fate of lectors and copywriters. A significant amount of those have been superseded by spellchecking tools or will be by AI “reformulations”.

Yet even here I’m not sure if those jobs have seen a significant decline in absolute numbers. Even while their relative frequency kind if obviously tends to 0
by karmakurtisaani | 2025-08-30 07:28:51+00:00
I have this same issue with fusion. Who cares if the fuel is practically free, when building and operating the plant is extremely expensive and prone to failures due to the sheer complexity.

Of course the tech and science is cool, possibly useful in space or other niche environments, but whenever I see fusion proposed as some general energy solution, I just roll my eyes and move on.
by tsimionescu | 2025-08-30 07:28:58+00:00
The problem with this line of argument is that, in general, high level behavior (covered by integratuon tests) is dependent on low level behavior. So if your code is ascertained to work at the high level, you also know that it must be working at the lower level too. So, integration tests also tell you if your component works at a low level, not just a high level.

The converse is not true, however. It's perfectly possible for individual components to "work" well, but to not do the right thing from a high level perspective. Say, one component provides a good fast quicksort function, but the other component requires a stable sort to work properly - each is OK in isolation, but you need an integration test to figure out the mistake.

Unit tests are typically good scaffolding. They allow you to test bits of your infrastructure as you're building it but before it's ready for integration into the larger project. But they give you realtively little assurance at the project level, and are not worth it unless you're pretty sure you're building the right thing in the first place.
by skissane | 2025-08-30 07:29:30+00:00
> Tibet was a theocracy with a religious leader for a while until recent times.

Yes, but it was still like contemporary Iran - a country which happened to have a theocratic system of government, not a country whose sole raison d'être was to endow a religious group with the trappings of statehood.

> Also I think the Albanian plan is more on the lines of Mount Athos: it is technically an in independent administration with independent (monastic) government but still part of the Greek state

I don’t believe that is true - if you read Albanian PM Edi Rama’s statements on the topic, he always cites the Vatican as his inspiration, not Mount Athos - which makes sense given Rama himself is Catholic, not Orthodox. He isn’t proposing this idea out of any personal belief in Bektashi Islam… a cynic would say he is doing it because it is good PR both for his country and for him personally… he’d surely give more high-minded explanation, in terms of the Albanian state giving a magnanimous gift to the cause of interfaith tolerance and religious moderation… but definitely the model is the Vatican not Mount Athos
by JimDabell | 2025-08-30 07:29:33+00:00
> Large language models generate text one word (token) at a time. Each word is assigned a probability score, based on how likely it is to be generated next. So for a sentence like “My favourite tropical fruits are mango and…”, the word “bananas” would have a higher probability score than the word “airplanes”.

> SynthID adjusts these probability scores to generate a watermark. It's not noticeable to the human eye, and doesn’t affect the quality of the output.

I think they need to be clearer about the constraints involved here. If I ask What is the capital of France? Just the answer, no extra information.” then there’s no room to vary the probability without harming the quality of the output. So clearly there is a lower bound beyond which this becomes ineffective. And presumably the longer the text, the more resilient it is to alterations. So what are the constraints?

I also think that this is self-interest dressed up as altruism. There’s always going to be generative AI that doesn’t include watermarks, so a watermarking scheme cannot tell you if something is genuine. It is, however, useful for determining that something came from a specific provider, which could be valuable to Google in all sorts of ways.
by awjlogan | 2025-08-30 07:32:38+00:00
This is a pretty standard document length. Modern microcontrollers have similar lengths (e.g. ATSAMD51 is ~2000 pages). Some of it is not software related, things like pin outs and electrical and mechanical descriptions.

It does take a huge amount of work to write and maintain. Typically the authors are not technical, so it also relies on the designers being available to answer questions as well. Then there’s a choice of how it’s written: narrative and potentially imprecise but readable, or terse and precise but hard to read. There’s both styles in the same document, terse for register descriptions.
by CalRobert | 2025-08-30 07:33:40+00:00
My boss at a large company years ago wrote a query for daily stats and then proceeded to run it on the entire event history every day for the life of the company just to get DAU, etc. The solution was to just keep paying more for redshift until the bill was a few million a year. Suggestions to fix his crap were met with disdain.

That job taught me a lot.
by lll-o-lll | 2025-08-30 07:33:41+00:00
> Unfortunately people have ideas, projects, and solutions that they care deeply about.

This is true of course, but this is also true for the “search for truth” in science. Do we fail to point out the flaw in the reasoning of someone’s life's work for fear of offence? The truth is the higher ideal that must be strived for!

In the same way, an idea is only good once it has been challenged. It may fail and dissolve, it may survive, it may morph into something that can no longer be assailed. This is the forgers fire, and it is necessary.

I know this isn’t as black and white as I’m painting it, but the ideal is still something worth striving for.
by fsflover | 2025-08-30 07:34:00+00:00
You should just compare the number of CVEs. Qubes security is stronger even than the one of Xen used in servers: https://www.qubes-os.org/security/xsa/#statistics. Even Snowden uses Qubes.

No single app has access to any data thanks to hardware-assisted virtualization. Last time a VM escape in the modern Qubes implementation was discovered in 2006 by the Qubes founder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_(software).
by wenc | 2025-08-30 07:34:12+00:00
NY to Toronto actually doesn't make sense because there is a border. I took that train ride and it took 2 hours to clear the border. Even today the guideline is 90 mins - 2 hours. The whole trip took 15 hours. Never again.

I could have flown it in less than 2 hours, security included. The flight would have cost less too!

The only way it would work is PreClearance on both sides (but then again, Canada has never been interested in staffing PreClearance in the US, even though they had reciprocal rights to do it). They only started their first one this year in rural NY.
by gwd | 2025-08-30 07:34:40+00:00
I took "I can see a good reason why it failed" to mean, "There was an obvious flaw in the craftsmanship of the game": The story wasn't good (if it relied on story), the mechanics weren't good, the graphics were sloppy or ugly, it was buggy or incomplete or something else.

The claim is: Make a solid game - a solid story, solid mechanics, solid graphics, no bugs, etc., and the game will succeed.

And that's an easy claim to refute -- point out just one game that was at least "solid" on all those fronts which nonetheless failed. He's asking you to show him one, so that he can update his beliefs.

"They didn't spend $500k promoting it" doesn't seem like a "good reason why it failed".
by mittensc | 2025-08-30 07:35:23+00:00
That's a really naive and wrong take.

He is popular, he was elected mayor of Bucharest.

He led a lot of anti corruption efforts for a very long time. (founded USB/USR)

He is smart (as you noted by olympiad, speaking multiple foreign languages)

He is religious as well (pretty important aparently)

All his opponents were much less competent.

A PSD candidate will never be president in a two term election unless the counter candidate is worse (because of iliescu and corruptiob)

The AUR candidate really is a russian puppet and not that smart either, he's mostly there for the 30% vote extremists always get and which were taken by georgescu first time. It's a shame he got far and shows how much influence external actors can have over facebook/tiktok etc.

The USR candidate that managed to squeeze through first time has no charisma and was a backup since Nicusor refused the first time...

So what else is left?
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-30 07:35:48+00:00
I have had to disable at least one service because AI bots kept hitting it and it started impacting other stuff I was running that I am more interested in. Part of it was the CPU load on the database rendering dozens of 404s per second (which still required a database call), part of it was that the thumbnail images were being queried over and over again with seemingly different parameters for no reason.

I'm sure there are AI bots that are good and respect the websites they operate on. Most of them don't seem to, and I don't care enough about the AI bubble to support them.

When AI companies stop people from using them as cheap scrapers, I'll rethink my position. So far, there's no way to distinguish any good AI bot from a bad one.
by themadsens | 2025-08-30 07:35:51+00:00
Sweet, very impressed.

To be really usable, for embedded and otherwise, a well documented and ergonomic C API for bindings is needed though.

The closest I could find was "If you need to add more predefined functions, add them in intrinsics.h." I will take a look though, this seems really promising

EDIT: Looks to be pretty easy to tack an external registration mechanism onto intrinsics.h. Good to go then ..

.. Only two SO comments at this point .. come on folks :-)
by lucumo | 2025-08-30 07:37:56+00:00
> And no, nothing was different before 2022. Just look at google, the largest bot scraping network in the world. Since 1996.

I'm sorry, but this statement shows you have no recent experience with these crawlernets.

Google, from the beginning, has done their best to work with server owners. They respect robots.txt. I think they were the first to implement Crawl-Delay. They crawl based on how often things change anyway. They have an additional safeguard that when they notice a slowdown in your responses, they back off.

Compare this with Anthropic. On their website they say they follow robots.txt and Crawl-Delay. I have an explicit ban on Claudebot in there and a Crawl-Delay for everyone else. It ignores both. I send an email to them about this, and their answer didn't address the discrepancy between the docs and the behaviour. They just said they'll add me to their internal whitelist and that I should've sent 429s when they were going too fast. (Fuck off, how about you follow your public documentation?)

That's just my experience, but if you Google around you'll find that Anthropic is notorious for ignoring robots.txt.

And still, Claudebot is one of the better behaved bots. At least they identify themselves, have a support email they respond to, and use identifiable IP-addresses.

A few weeks ago I spend four days figuring out why I had 20x the traffic I normally have (which maxed out the server; causing user complaints). Turns out there are parties that crawl using millions of (residential) IPs and identify themselves as normal browsers. Only 1 or 2 connections per IP at the time. Randomization of identifying properties. Even Anthropics 429 solution wouldn't have worked there.

I managed to find a minor identifying property in some of the requests that wasn't catching too many real users. I used that to start firewalling IPs on sight and then their own randomization caused every IP to fall into the trap in the end. But it took days.

In the end I had to firewall nearly 3 million non-consecutive IP addresses.

So no, Google in 1996 or 2006 or 2016 is not the same as the modern DDoSing crawlernet.
by vntok | 2025-08-30 07:37:57+00:00
Things like books are proof that actual humans use em dashes, that wasn't ever the contention.

What's needed is a writing comparison before/after 2022 for these users. If there's a sudden 200% increase in the use of em-dashes from one month to the next, it's a very strong indicator that the user started LLMing their posts.
by nickm12 | 2025-08-30 07:39:44+00:00
This piece is arguing against what is often called "over-engineering" or unnecessary abstraction (YAGNI). Over-engineering is a problem in software systems because it generally takes longer to build and it makes the systems unnecessarily more difficult to understand. While a problem, I don't think it is the most important design issue I see in software systems.

The bigger problem I see is lack of abstraction, or systems where the components have too much knowledge of each other. These are fast to build and initially work just as well as the more "heavily engineered" systems. However as the code evolves to meet changing requirements, what happens is that code becomes more complex, either through even more coupling or through ad hoc abstractions that get implemented haphazardly.

It can be really difficult to know where to draw the lines, though. When you are trying to decide between a simpler and more complex option, I think it's worth starting with the simplest thing that could possibly work, but build it in a way that you can change that decision without impacting the rest of the system.

On a tangent, I'm not a fan of Uncle Bob (to put it mildly) but this topic makes me think of his quote "a good architecture allows decisions to be deferred". I would restate it as "a good architecture allows decisions to be changed in isolation".
by dns_snek | 2025-08-30 07:39:46+00:00
This is why we can't have nice things. People contribute to communal efforts such as free software but inevitably some assholes come around to exploit everyone's good will and their contributions for their own gain. That's not enough of course, so you further demoralize them for being stupid enough to believe that they would be protected by laws that were specifically designed to protect them, and mock them for pursuing higher ideals than immediate personal enrichment through paywalls.

And no, sharing your labor for free with anyone who wants it (as long as they agree to a few simple rules) is nothing like putting up a billboard and "demanding to decide who gets to look at them".

The entire premise of billboards is to force people to look at something they had no intention or desire to look at. You weren't forced to search for, look at, or use someone's free software or other type of content. You did so willingly and intentionally.
by knorker | 2025-08-30 07:40:19+00:00
Sigh. It's really depressing how a technical discussion on merits of a solution keeps getting reported to HR. I've seen it many times.

Someone said your preferred design won't work, and you go to HR.

I gladly throw my idea under the bus when I hear why it's bad.

Now offering any critique of a thing in order to help the company comes with a career risk.
by izacus | 2025-08-30 07:40:30+00:00
Yeah, people getting really angry if you say anything bad about a product (!) is a depressing commonality in certain places these days.

I got angry emails from people because I wrote "replacing a primary page of UI with this feature I never use doesn't give me a lot of value" because statements like that make "the team feel bad". It was an internal beta test with purpose of finding issues before they go public.

Not surprisingly, once this culture holds root, the products start going down the drain too.

But who cares about good products in this great age of AI, right?
by znkr | 2025-08-30 07:41:58+00:00
> The equal sign should be reserved for comparisons, because that is what it means in mathematics.

This is touching on a pet peeve of mine: Mathematics and programming are similar in many aspects, but this is not one of them. In mathematics = is not a comparison, but a statement.

More generally, mathematics is about tautologies, that is statements that are always true. In programming, a comparison is evaluated to either true or false.

That doesn’t mean that there’s no room for conditionals in mathematics (one example is piecewise function definitions). But it’s not the same. Heck, even the definition of “function” is different between mathematics and programming.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-30 07:42:06+00:00
> These are cultural artifacts, like deeply personal poetry, made purely for the process of it. Not practically useful, not state of the art, not research level, but... a personal journey?

I can't speak for the author but this is exactly how I look at the lisp I'm developing. It's a lifetime project. I had some kind of vision depicting how different things could be, and at some point I started trying to make it happen. I want to convince myself I'm not insane for thinking it was possible in the first place.
by k7d | 2025-08-30 07:42:11+00:00
That’s just not true. I’m from Europe but lived in Boulder for several years. For example this shooting (1) happened 5 min walking distance from my home. My kids’ school had several lockdowns due to gun-related stuff in the neighborhood. Something like that is unimaginable in Europe, and big part of why we moved back.

1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Boulder_shooting