MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rand17 | 2025-08-22 19:46:36+00:00
XML and XSLT: an elegant tool for a more civilized age. Anything that came later was worse: YAML and JSON; while dark forces bastardized XML and silently killed XHTML.

See if you parse an HTML page these days - heck, if you're lucky Anubis girl will let you in and see the javascript trash soup, maybe even taste it.
by jlarocco | 2025-08-22 19:46:49+00:00
It's definitely worth thinking about the real problem, but I wouldn't say it's never helpful.

The underlying issue is unit conversion. "length" is a poor name because it's ambiguous. Replacing "length" with three functions - "lengthInBytes", "lengthInCharacters", and "lengthCombined" - would make it a lot easier to pick the right thing.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-22 19:47:27+00:00
Assuming you're american: you already do.

While the US Army isn't allowed to use your house in peace time, if it has any tactical value in war time, it can and will have access to your house. The US Army is the personification of the tax dollars of GP, through the government.

Because of the US's relationship with personal property, it has been decided that only the worst case scenarios lead to these rights being "shared", but on less important subjects, especially ones that cost you nothing in the case of having a copy of your work made, yes. Things like the Audio Home Recording Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act) make it legal for me to make a copy of your work. What happens with this copy depends, maybe I'll share it with friends (and in this case, IP law will consider it minor enough that they won't care), maybe I'll resell it and make money from it (which IP law definitely considers a big no no).

You must be naive if you believe that you have any right to both benefit from public protection _and_ keep full control over how <thing> gets used.
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-22 19:48:15+00:00
You might need to update the firmware for your Mac in order for the Internet Recovery to support updating to Big Sur. The firmware updates are installed at upgrade time usually, but you may be able to install them separately.

> About EFI and SMC firmware updates for Intel-based Mac computers

https://support.apple.com/en-us/101198

I would see if you can access this:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/macos-big-sur/id1526878132

Download it, then you can make a bootable flash drive if you want, or just install it from under macOS.

> How to download and install macOS

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102662

> Create a bootable installer for macOS

https://support.apple.com/en-us/101578
by soupfordummies | 2025-08-22 19:48:29+00:00
Ultimately I wouldn’t support this level of snitching (especially in our current political env) but I’ve had the idea of:

A bounty program to submit dash cam video of egregious driving crimes. It gets reviewed, maybe even by AI initially and then gets escalated to formal ticket if legit. Once ticket is paid, the snitch gets a percentage.

Again, I am fundamentally against something like this though, especially now.
by ASalazarMX | 2025-08-22 19:48:42+00:00
This might come as a big surprise, but not all our feelings are worth caring.

You feel anxious because work and personal life are at odds? That's worth caring, sure.

You feel anxious because you've deliberately neglected soft skills needed to interact with other people? That's barely worth caring for.

You feel threatened because your boss is someone you consider inherenthly inferior? That's so not worth caring for.
by dang | 2025-08-22 19:48:49+00:00
It's not that it's a repost; it's that it's mostly reporting on the content of another article. In such cases it's standard HN practice to prefer the latter, as the guidelines say (and have said since ancient times). It's not that you did anything wrong! and I'm sorry, I know it sucks to have an article doing well on the frontpage and then plummet for no obvious reason. But from a mod practice point of view this is a pretty clear call.
by asadotzler | 2025-08-22 19:48:54+00:00
They happen in subtle ways that aren't always easy and are rarely early in a project I want to just throw away.

"So what if you have to throw out a week's worth of work. That's how these things work. Accept it and you'll be happier. I have and I'm happy. Don't you see that it's OK to have your tool corrupt your work half way through. It's the future of work and you're being left behind by not letting your tools corrupt your work arbitrarily. Just start over like a real man."
by slipperydippery | 2025-08-22 19:49:21+00:00
The people stewarding the Web platform have neglected a lot of nice things, among them this—a major version two major versions ahead of what's in browsers, is eight years old.

That it still has any use on notable sites at all seems like a decent cue to at least try not neglecting it before declaring nobody wants to use it.

... however, it's mostly useful for doing things that owners of walled Web platforms have no interest in, like working with interoperable protocols & formats. They've been killing those through active moves and neglect for 15 years, so why would they do something that makes that easier & nicer?
by mikepurvis | 2025-08-22 19:49:35+00:00
I relate to this a lot— I treat my colleagues' work with suspicion and distrust not because I don't trust them but because that's also my stance toward my own work, like "what is this BS? Is it absolutely necessary? Can it be half the length by leveraging a library or ignoring error handling in cases where a panic/crash is no worse than a controlled exit?"

I find working with copilot is just catnip to someone like this because it's endlessly willing to iterate and explore the problem space, certainly well past the point where a normal person would be like are you for real can we just merge this and move on.
by indigodaddy | 2025-08-22 19:49:55+00:00
I had an idea to find a multimodal or model that can listen but not just for SST/transcription, but to sort of describe/understand/interpret what it’s hearing—- and then have it listen to my entire music library, and then have it peg my exact music taste and recommend other music, or to just do something interesting or fun with what it has learned or interprets my library. I don’t think there are any multi modal models that could do this though?

Edit, just found a Reddit thread from 9 mos ago about this concept. Interesting, wonder what the current state of this idea is. Also, Pandora, Google/YT music have been able to do this for years— eg recommend music based off user taste/similar songs etc… I wonder how they are doing it? Obviously some sort of AI/algorithmic thing I would think, but not LLM related I wouldn’t think.

https://www.reddit.com/r/udiomusic/comments/1gzvk70/a_llm_th...
by torstenvl | 2025-08-22 19:50:06+00:00
I really wish people would stop giving this bad advice, especially so stridently.

Like it or not, code points are how Unicode works. Telling people to ignore code points is telling people to ignore how data works. It's of the same philosophy that results in abstraction built on abstraction built on abstraction, with no understanding.

I vehemently dissent from this view.
by benbojangles | 2025-08-22 19:50:08+00:00
my guess is tesla wants to offer cheap off peak electricity and allow people to use their tesla to power their homes during the day, thus affecting the corporate stranglehold on those huge profits from the worlds highest electricity bill nation. George Soros funded bestforbitain.org ran an article (https://www.bestforbritain.org/thousands_oppose_musks_uk_pow...) what does soros know what is best for britain?
by bitdeep | 2025-08-22 19:50:22+00:00
- I’ve seen a lot of debate here comparing Go’s issues (like nil handling or error scoping) to Rust’s strengths.

- As someone who’s worked with C/C++ and Fortran, I think all these languages have their own challenges—Go’s simplicity trades off against Rust’s safety guarantees, for example.

- Could someone share a real-world example where Go’s design caused a production issue that Rust or another language would’ve avoided?

- I’m curious how these trade-offs play out in practice.

Sorry, I don't do Go/Rust coding, still on C/C++/Fotran.
by exe34 | 2025-08-22 19:51:08+00:00
oh yes they do nix very well, but I asked cursor to set up a firecracker vm with networking for exposing a port on the host, and use conda inside to install a certain version of python with some libraries. I asked for a firecracker-vm.nix, a build.sh, a run.sh and a close.sh. it kept trying to run code inside its own fhs-env, which would run, and then when I tried it outside of the fhs, it would fail. I'd paste in the errors and it would without fail say oh let's try the proper nix version of python - which I explicitly didn't want, because I wanted to run conda versions on other machines. I tried to guide it through conda-shell but didn't get very far. in the end I ended up using docker instead, which it did set up without fail.

but when it was failing on my original idea, it kept trying dumb things that weren't really even nix after a while.
by jjice | 2025-08-22 19:51:23+00:00
I had this in my read later and finally had the chance to get to it.

The first few solutions are all fine for probably most cases. The dismissal of the fixed window solutions has no explanation behind why we don't want that.

> The first downside is a client could submit all his requests for a given second at the end of that second, and then submit all his requests for the next second at the start of that next second, which is not what we want.

I'm okay with that. My current company gives customers API limits per minute. Do you want to fill that up in ten seconds or across the full minute? Doesn't matter, we let you do it. I assume plenty of services acknowledge that this is fine for their use case too.

> We needed to use a transaction to do something that’s supposedly trivial for a given database product

What is the use of a transaction bad? It's not explained.

I've written quite a few Redis based rate limiters for services that get a good amount of traffic and I've never had an issue. I'm not writing APIs that get AWS or OpenAI levels of traffic, but most people aren't. Redis has never hiccuped on me with rate limits in a way that I've ever noticed. Plus the code was written within an hour or two each time, along with tests.

And then, as many of the other comments here have pointed out, this is from a rate limits as a service company, so that explains the empty attacks on Redis for this use case. Not to knock this product - it may be incredible for some serious rate limiting use cases, but most people using Redis for their rate limits don't have that.

I also wouldn't be surprised if having a hosted ElastiCache cluster in AWS is cheaper than their service while providing the same benefit for the majority of companies' scale, while also avoiding vendor lock in (because I can get Redis anywhere I turn). Hell, at a previous place I worked we also threw other unrelated cache data in the same ElastiCache cluster without thinking about it, because Redis is so convenient and powerful when it's appropriate.
by mgens | 2025-08-22 19:51:35+00:00
A month ago I saw a Waymo turn left into a tiny alley in Palo Alto and continue at full 25mph speed, which was alarming. I guess the alley is marked as a regular road in the software? Highlights how even if it's safer than humans on average, they need to minimize these weird behaviors in order to get socially accepted and avoid $$$ liability when there is an accident.
by kixelated | 2025-08-22 19:52:03+00:00
Hey folks, it seems like an admin merged my post with the Cloudflare post :(. Here's the original (and much funnier) post: https://moq.dev/blog/first-cdn/

And for context, Cloudflare is using a fork of my open source library (kixelated/moq) that I've been working on for a few years, plus I authored the original MoQ drafts. I know my post might look derivative at first glance... but it's the other way around.
by ramoz | 2025-08-22 19:52:59+00:00
The underlying model architectures have issues that perpetuate as models get better. We're still using transformers and RL.

* Optimized for task completion, with limited attention resources for global alignment (RL/RLAIF reward loops/hacking) * These systems run outside of chat now. file systems, CLIs, DBs, browsers → real-world side‑effects that you cannot train for. Hallucination becomes a problem of contradiction in the real world, and alignment is something an agent will struggle with as it's optimized to complete tasks. Which is why you see things like databases being dropped today. * These are baked-in problems, not even considering the the adversarial nuances of things like prompt injection.

As AI advances, so do these issues.

Maybe it's cliche from an AI safety perspective. But I can never get over https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence as we see micro instances of it in our day-to-day with today's agents. Again, an issue that has existed from the dawn of these types of models. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5qqjyGiBdc&t=1853s
by boston_clone | 2025-08-22 19:53:00+00:00
> If you can articulate it precisely, that would be nice for all of us

Strongly agree - how nice would it be if this administration cared enough to do just that?

In any case, your understanding is severely incorrect; please read the second half of the article. Here are some helpful paragraphs:

>The administration has steadily imposed more restrictions and requirements on visa applicants, including requiring them to submit to in-person interviews. The review of all visa holders appears to be a significant expansion of what had initially been a process focused mainly on students who have been involved in what the government perceives as pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel activity.

>Officials say the reviews will include all visa holders’ social media accounts, law enforcement and immigration records in their home countries, along with any actionable violations of U.S. law committed while they were in the United States.

>The reviews will include new tools for data collection on past, present and future visa applicants, including a complete scouring of social media sites made possible by new requirements introduced earlier this year. Those make it mandatory for privacy switches on cellphones and other electronic devices or apps to be turned off when an applicant appears for a visa interview.

So, looks like we have intentional ambiguity coupled with mass surveillance. Do you not see how that is problematic?

> [...] the article is not sufficiently objective.

Might there be some confusion between objectivity and your own bias? Playing the innocent enlighted centrist about immigration policies this far in to 2025 seems either wildly ignorant or dangerously veiled.

Here are some links from several months ago for understanding and "engagement":

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/03/deporting-in...

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-scraps-guidance-limit...

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/06/27/dhs-terminates-haiti-tps...
by fancyfredbot | 2025-08-22 19:53:39+00:00
Commercial enterprises can only support standards if it's commercially viable.

It's commercially beneficial to make the web standard so complex that it's more or less impossible to implement, since it lets you monopolise the browser market. However complexity only protects incumbents if you can persuade enough people to use the overcomplicated bits. If hardly anyone uses it, like xslt, then it's a cost for the incumbent which new entrants might get away without paying. So there's no real upside for Google in supporting it. And you can't expect commercial enterprises to do something without any upside.
by lovich | 2025-08-22 19:54:07+00:00
The discussion was started on IP law, you have to agree on abstract concepts of ownership as a bedrock of the entire system since you can’t physically be in possession of an idea.

If you need to bring us down to kindergarten or toddler level for us to no longer need to come to an agreement on the definition of ownership, I’m not sure there’s much more to discuss
by exe34 | 2025-08-22 19:54:31+00:00
basically religion worked so well that it stopped working.

I think they got caught with their pants down due to progress in communications. there was a time they could suppress information and get away with it. they didn't realise soon enough that the world had changed. in fact secularism helped give a refuge to the victims - if the highest law of the land was the church, then the old ways would have worked just fine.
by wsintra2022 | 2025-08-22 19:54:39+00:00
Let’s just call it like it is, Vibe coding takes away the thinking of the execution of steps to solve the problem and offloads that part of our mind to a text generator with intelligent emergent properties. If you enjoy keeping the intelligence sharp for laying out the steps to solve the problem and executing the steps then don’t vibe code. If you don’t mind the engineering skills atrophy then go ahead and vibe code. But know this. You will lose the skills.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-08-22 19:55:30+00:00
Aside: what's up with the traffic speed cameras in Sweden? It feels like they're not designed to catch anybody. In my recent drive there it seemed like most of the cameras were in an 80 zone just before it switch to 50 for a tiny town. They wouldn't catch a typical driver who does something like 10 over everywhere -- they would likely have already started slowing down for the 50.

In my city in Canada, that camera would be in the 50 zone.
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-22 19:56:29+00:00
Minor nit but the second example is ostensibly still just functional scoping (as in not literally but more pragmatically) because you don’t contain any branching outside of the try block within your method.

But that’s a moot point because I appreciate it’s just an example. And, more importantly, Go doesn’t support the kind of control flows you’re describing anyway (as I said in my previous post).

A lot of the comments here about ‘defer’ make sense in other languages that have different idioms and features to Go. But they don’t apply directly to Go because you’d have to make other changes to the language first (eg implementing try blocks).
by JohnFen | 2025-08-22 19:56:30+00:00
Indeed. I'm deeply skeptical of the proposition that LLMs can have taste at all. However, there's an even more fundamental question: is "taste" an objective thing in the first place? If not, then it has no meaning to say anyone's (or anything's) taste is "good" or "bad". The most you can say is how similar another's taste is to yours.
by xyzzyz | 2025-08-22 19:57:29+00:00
> There are a lot of operations that are valid and well-defined on binary strings, such as (...), and so on.

Every single thing you listed here is supported by &[u8] type. That's the point: if you want to operate on data without assuming it's valid UTF-8, you just use &[u8] (or allocating Vec<u8>), and the standard library offers what you'd typically want, except of the functions that assume that the string is valid UTF-8 (like e.g. iterating over code points). If you want that, you need to convert your &[u8] to &str, and the process of conversion forces you to check for conversion errors.
by simonw | 2025-08-22 19:58:21+00:00
I'm from the UK, took driving lessons in the UK but then passed my driving test in the USA (in California).

The USA driving test is so much easier than the UK one!

UK: Varied junctions and roundabouts, traffic lights, independent driving (≈20 minutes via sat nav or signs), one reversing manoeuvre (parallel park, bay park, or pull up on the right and reverse), normal stops and move-offs (including from behind a parked car), hill start, emergency stop.

California: Cross three intersections, three right turns, three left turns, lane change, backing up, park in a bay, obey stop signs and traffic lights.

My understanding is that the USA test is so much easier because it's hard to get by in most of the USA without a car, so if the test was harder people would likely just drive without a license instead.
by zenlot | 2025-08-22 19:58:21+00:00
Lol, yeah, most of the times on the server we have more perms than IT assigns on our laptops. I am not in that environment anymore, but in banking was very much the case.

I want the dotnet run to work out, that means I could start using C# more. We have a mixed bag now Go(biggest chunk), C#, Python, JS/TS, and lots of .sh. Some powershell(in search for better shell scripting). Some very little Rust.

Do you do any GUI apps with C#? If yes what you go for? Did MAUI took off already, or it's not being well adopted? The promise was nice. I still miss Delphi and drag and drog components. Well there is Qt now, but that's a different story.
by dhosek | 2025-08-22 19:58:35+00:00
I’d go farther and say that extended ASCII was an unmitigated disaster of compatibility issues (not to mention that more than a few scripts still don’t fit in the available spaces of an 8-bit encoding). Those of us who were around for the pre-Unicode days understand what a mess it was (not to mention the lingering issues thanks to the much vaunted backwards compatibility of some operating systems).
by richardlblair | 2025-08-22 19:59:28+00:00
I obviously don't know you, so take my last paragraph with a grain of salt. All I can do is relate what you wrote and my interpretation of it with my knowledge and experience.

Although, I don't make comment about whether you're getting your emotional needs met outside of work. I'm glad that you do - a lot of people out there aren't, and they are feeling really lonely.
by neom | 2025-08-22 19:59:42+00:00
Ketones Reverse Brain Aging During Midlife Critical Window 19 points by rhodescolossus 4 months - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43506791

Study reveals blood sugar control is a key factor in slowing brain aging 150 points by gnabgib 9 months ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42049418

Study Reveals Immune Driver of Brain Aging 232 points by oedmarap on Jan 22, 2021 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25871347

Brain aging shows nonlinear transitions, suggesting a midlife "critical window" 276 points by derbOac 79 days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175905
by commandersaki | 2025-08-22 20:00:10+00:00
(1) tech support that actually reads your messages and replies with a solution demonstrating comprehension of the message that you wrote. Amazing. I've emailed them twice and gotten a great response both times.

Tech support forwarded an inquiry I was asking about an IMAP command in my MUA which led to an actual engineer that said my MUA was using an outdated/deprecated part of the IMAP protocol and provided the RFC for the new way of doing things, which then lead to a patch in said MUA. Very few companies offer this calibre of support, the only other one I can think of is Tarsnap.

(2) it is the best UI I've seen outside gmail

I think it's a much better UI overall than gmail; at least I found with gmail you had to manually paginate things, I can easily do a search in FM that might have 10000 emails over 20 years and I can usually jump to a specific month/year very quickly via scroll and then from there a specific day.

(5) Instead of inbox 0, I practice inbox 50k and it handles it fine.

Similar, 37k in my Inbox, nay issue. I have probably 200k overall across different folders. But I know I'm outsourcing a service, so I do full infrequent backups via IMAP.

Here's my (7):

Fastmail has the only web interface I've come across that handles (catch-all) aliases correctly and knows how to respond with the correct one every single time. Maybe roundcube/squirrelmail can do this, but roundcube/squirrelmail overall is not very good.