MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xdennis | 2025-08-06 19:38:46+00:00
> doing mass illegal deportations without due process

I think it's wrong to overreact to what Trump is doing and label things you don't like as "lacking due process" because when he does do something illegal you'll be like the boy who cried wolf.

Trump is following the law on immigration but many people think otherwise because of media misinformation. Take the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He had his due process and a judge ordered his removal in 2019. He also received "withholding of removal" from being sent home to El Salvador. The administration made a mistake in deporting him there, but they are ordered to deport him.

Many of the people you see in the news also had their day in court.

But media is also spreading misinformation on arrests. ICE doesn't need warrants to arrest people. This has always been the case. They can also arrest anyone (citizen or not) who commits an illegal act in their presence.

It's okay to not like what Trump is doing, but you should protest to change the law, not deny reality.

Also, I'm surprised you're using "illegal" instead of "undocumented".
by paulbirch | 2025-08-06 19:38:49+00:00
"I think it's worth noting that the proposal for qualifiers on hypertext links in this 1991 paper was actually a precursor to the work on URI schemes in the late 90s. As someone mentioned earlier, the idea of using a URI scheme to disambiguate link types is still relevant today, particularly in the context of modern web development where we have to deal with a plethora of link types (e. g. , HTTPS, WebSocket, etc. ). To take this further, I think it would be interesting to explore how we can apply similar concepts to other types of links, such as those used in messaging protocols or even file systems. ".
by adrianmsmith | 2025-08-06 19:38:54+00:00
1) "it will just compile and run programs with incompatible version dependencies and then they crash at some point"

2) "Now a package 5 layers deep is unmaintained and is on an ancient dependency version, other stuff needs a newer version. Now what? Manually dig through dependencies and update versions?"

You can't solve both of these simultaneously.

If you want a library's dependences to be updated to versions other than the original library author wanted to use (e.g. because that library is unmaintained) then you're going to get those incompatibilities and crashes.

I think it's reasonable to be able to override dependencies (e.g. if something is unmaintained) but you have to accept there are going to be surprises and be prepared to solve them, which might be a bit painful, but necessary.
by kulahan | 2025-08-06 19:39:10+00:00
So, the time to bring up concerns about an appropriately built fire exit is not while you are actively evacuating from the fire. Arguing that there may be dangerous long-term effects for a vaccine makes no sense when the alternative is the spread of a highly contagious and deadly disease. Nobody (who's thinking) gives a shit. The first concern is the disease. Now that we've gotten past covid, discussing whether or not we should use it elsewhere makes plenty of sense.

But of course, mRNA vaccines were being developed long before COVID, so I assume you raised you concerns at that time, and not in the middle of an emergency when nobody has time to explain to every third dumbass that we're going for the lesser harm here - meaning "not dead right now".
by jmull | 2025-08-06 19:39:35+00:00
> …why would [an] author write a version range that includes versions that don’t exist yet? … For that, kids, I have no good answer.

When you first take a dependency, you typically want the latest compatible version, to have all the available bug fixes (especially security fixes).

Once you’ve started building on top of a dependency you need stability and have to choose when to take updates.

It’s about validating the dependency… on first use, there’s no question you will be validating its use in your app. Later, you have to control when you take an update so you can ensure you have a chance to validate it.

BTW, of course semantics versioning isn’t perfect. It just lowers the risk of taking certain bug fixes, making it feasible to take them more frequently.

The lock file just holds the state for this mechanism.
Agree/Disagree: You can only ship as fast as you can test?
by dmitrycube | 2025-08-06 19:39:35+00:00
I know some people don't test at all and some have their users test in Production. No judgement.

Assuming your teams test, Dev->Staging->Prod, local dev or ephemeral env's. What do you think the critical path is to help you go faster other than increasing raw Eng bandwidth:

- Write code more efficiently? - CI/CD pipelines - build/deploy faster? - Test earlier, test faster, test better?
by robinhouston | 2025-08-06 19:39:43+00:00
> Schott also notes that the clinical trial didn’t include a control group of participants who got no guidance and made no lifestyle changes. This makes it hard for researchers to pinpoint which aspect of the program might have been responsible for the positive effect. However, Heather M. Snyder, senior vice president for medical and scientific relations at the Alzheimer’s Association, tells the New York Times that the organization thought neglecting to offer an intervention to one group would be unethical.

One might counter that it’s unethical to hinder our ability to understand which interventions are effective by prejudging the outcome in this way?
by alwillis | 2025-08-06 19:40:07+00:00
Neovim editing has come a long way; you go from barebones (no plugins) to full-blown IDE and everything in between.

There are lots of pre-configured Neovim distributions if you don't want to roll your own, such as LazyVim [1].

There are lots of AI plugins for Neovim [2].

[1]: https://www.lazyvim.org/

[2]: https://github.com/rockerBOO/awesome-neovim?tab=readme-ov-fi...
by ben7799 | 2025-08-06 19:40:26+00:00
I worked at Cisco 1999-2001, it was my first job out of school. I worked in a group that did network management software, so we weren't touching iOS.

But it was kind of wild at that point there were still company mailing lists where these old heads would argue about iOS internals and flame each other in front of the whole company.

We still had a non-web bug tracking system while I was there. It was an interesting era! The product I worked on did have a web interface as essentially its only UI. We used Java, at some point we used MS Visual J++, and this was before JSPs existed. We used some proprietary templating engine to generate HTML.
by apparent | 2025-08-06 19:40:30+00:00
MS used to have uservoice pages. They ignored issues, no matter how highly-voted they were. I once asked someone at MS about this, and they said they take their cues from other sources, like what industry partners ask them to fix at conferences.

What a waste of time to have uservoice pages, induce people to post/vote on them, and then just ignore them. I guess it's for the best that they nuked them. They were replaced with pages that said "tweet us". Maybe they have something more robust now, especially since twitter is politically charged/divisive.
by eigenform | 2025-08-06 19:40:41+00:00
[Not a language designer or anything, but] I dunno, keeping some distinction between Python and the DSL seems useful, and probably makes it simpler to reason about. Too much syntactic sugar, and I can imagine it becomes easier to confuse "thing that is generating the RTL" from "the RTL".

I think of Amaranth as "a way of using Python to organize/generate/simulate RTL." Being embedded in Python is part of the utility behind it!
by xg15 | 2025-08-06 19:40:50+00:00
Yeah, there is a weird dynamic where blaming yourself for everything can paradoxically make you feel more empowered. (Feel, not be)

If the only obstacle is yourself, there is no limit to the things you could archive if you removed that obstacle and just got your act together. Make a billion dollars? Become the next Jeff Bezos? Get the hottest girls of the planet? Piece of cake, all just a question of Grindset...
by hylaride | 2025-08-06 19:40:50+00:00
Yeah, I remember about some people being immune or at least have something that keeps them alive. This is true for a lot of viruses. Some people were resistant to the black death and most of us are their descendants, for example.

We can inject and train our body to produce antibodies, but the nature of HIV infection means (significantly) changing how our white blood cells are produced if they are going to be resistant, which is not trivial (and would likely mean actual DNA alterations with who knows what side effects). This is why an HIV vaccine is so difficult - it attacks and uses the body's immune system to spread.

The details are fuzzy, but I recall the avenue of those people's resistance/survivability being mostly a non-starter; the majority of them had a lot slower progression of the virus, not outright immunity.
by cyrialize | 2025-08-06 19:41:00+00:00
I get this feeling.

I have a setup with my Emacs configuration that uses a file that is meant to live locally only, since I feel the contents of it feel too personal to share. (These are mainly Org-mode settings for specific file names and directories).

https://github.com/cyrialize/.emacs.d/blob/main/private-temp...
by agentastic | 2025-08-06 19:41:11+00:00
of course,

cathedral = sandbox env in the provider's cloud, so [codex](https://chatgpt.com/codex) uses this model. Their codex-cli product is the Bazaar model, where you run in your computer, in your own environment.

Claude Code, on the other hand, doesn't have the cloud-based sandboxing product, you have to run in on your computer, so the bazaar model. You can also run in in a way that anthropic never envisioned (e.g. give it control to your house). Curser also follows the same model, albeit they have been trying to get into the cathedral model by using the background agent (as someone also pointed out below). Presumably not to lose the market share to codex/jules/etc.
by nathan_douglas | 2025-08-06 19:41:27+00:00
Thank you for sharing this!

I'm disappointed by some of the negative comments. I'm pretty excited about this and plan to try and get this running locally this week. I end discussing a lot of the books I read with ChatGPT, e.g. "hey, this made me think of $idea" or "uh... this is familiar, what am I thinking of?" and to be able to get back a "yeah, check out Ulam's paper on $topic or $book by $author" is really really valuable to me.

I don't read a lot of ePubs (they tend to be mostly PDFs or dead trees) so I might need to adjust a bit, but I'd definitely gonna give something a spin with this.
by wryoak | 2025-08-06 19:41:28+00:00
Having lived on the west coast, east coast, and all over the in between, you’re not right. But you’re not wrong either. The truth is far more complex. Consider the fact that most food in the Midwest is shipped from the coasts - everything the Midwest grows goes into either cars or cows. A west coast housing budget goes further in the Midwest, but a west coast grocery budget will come up short.
by quantummagic | 2025-08-06 19:41:49+00:00
The idiomatic way in Zig is to return the simple unadorned error, but return detailed error data through a pointer argument passed into the function, allowing the function to fill in extra information before returning an error.

const MyError = error{ FileNotFound, PermissionDenied }; fn readFile(path: []const u8, outErrInfo: *ErrorInfo) ![]const u8 { if (fileMissing) { if (outErrInfo) |info| { info.* = ErrorInfo{ .code = MyError.FileNotFound, .message = "File missing", .line = @line(), }; } return MyError.FileNotFound; } return data; // success }

The advantage of this is that everything is explicit, and it is up to the caller to arrange memory usage for error data; ie. the compiler does not trigger any implicit memory allocation to accommodate error returns. This is a fundamental element of Zig's design, that there are no hidden or implicit memory allocations
by immibis | 2025-08-06 19:42:30+00:00
Typically a dynamic language JIT handles this by observing what actual types the operation acts on, then hardcoding fast paths for the one type that's actually used (in most cases) or a few different types. When the type is different each time, it has to actually do the lookup each time - but that's very rare.

i.e.

if(a->type != int_type || b->type != int_type) abort_to_interpreter();

result = ((intval*)a)->val + ((intval*)b)->val;

The CPU does have to execute both lines, but it does them in parallel so it's not as bad as you'd expect. Unless you abort to the interpreter, of course.
by docdeek | 2025-08-06 19:42:36+00:00
It is strange that showing ID to vote is controversial in the US and that providing basic ID to citizens for free to allow them to vote is a problem that seems difficult to solve (or want to solve).

My anecdote: I am an EU citizen living in another EU country. As such, I am permitted to vote in local and European elections. When I moved to my current village I registered with the local town hall online. I sent a scan of my national ID card (for my home country) and they registered me to vote for the elections I’m eligible to vote for. Ahead of the elections, they post me a physical election card telling me where to vote (always the same place in the village), and on the day I take my card and ID and vote.

It’s basically frictionless. It’s no problem to register online with a foreign ID document, and it’s no problem to present a foreign ID card alongside my election card on the day when I vote.

If I turned up to vote without my election card or my ID, I would be refused the chance to vote. That makes sense to me and showing ID to vote is not questioned by anyone.
by debugnik | 2025-08-06 19:42:58+00:00
When I asked dang about why are very low quality submissions allowed despite them resulting in low quality discussion, he told me and I quote:

> You can flag submissions that you think don't belong on Hacker News.

Well, this is a very low quality submission in my eyes. A tiny read with an unsubstantiated, purely contrarian take that completely misses the point of the debate. Just to be clear, I think anyone is free to post anything on their blogs, that's what they're for, but I don't think posts like these contribute to HN having a good atmosphere for discussion; if I were to write something like this, I'd be ok with it being unsuitable for HN.

BTW I hadn't flagged this before reading your comment. I've done so after reading the submission though.
by 9dev | 2025-08-06 19:43:17+00:00
> VSCode does support that. It's up to language extension authors to implement it though because obviously only they know which bit of text is in which language.

Wrong, proper tooling can infer that intelligently, or by having the user annotate it with a comment (e.g. #language=bash).

> I don't think SQL queries in code is a very big use case […]

You seem to have very little exposure to mature codebases, then. Embedded SQL without an ORM is widespread, still. You'll also find plenty of advocates on this very forum.

> […] and even there, any that are large enough to need syntax highlighting are probably better off in a separate file.

That isn't up to the tool author to decide.

> The biggest use case of multi-language files I've seen is Vue single file components, […]

…and HTML files, YAML config for CI pipelines, database migration scripts, DevOps configuration files, Postgres extensions, …

> but in practice they turned out to be a terrible idea precisely because of tooling issues like this.

> The Vue ecosystem is very well and alive; also, proper tooling is very capable of solving issues like this.
by joe_the_user | 2025-08-06 19:43:22+00:00
The OP goes on to immediate ask whether category theory or type theory can serve as a foundation for mathematics (they give a link to an article that talks of "foundational styles" but which doesn't give a process of explicitly "cutting the cord" from set theory).

I think the answer by (perhaps infamous) Paul Taylor in this mathoverflow post[1] is a clearer expression of the positions of those who want to jettison traditional set theory as the foundation of mathematics.

"The crucial issue is whether you are taken in by the Great Set-Theoretic Swindle that mathematics depends on collections (completed infinities)"

Yes, it's important to remember that everything labeled "infinity" in math doesn't "exist-exist" but rather is some combination of unending process and arbitrary labeling (see Skolem's paradox etc). But that doesn't mean such nominally completed infinities aren't useful or even necessary for a human being to grasp mathematics.

Anyway, for this debate it's worth reading all of Taylor's comment (which isn't to say I share his position but it's good to understand where the "finitests" are coming from).

[1] https://mathoverflow.net/questions/8731/categorical-foundati...
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-08-06 19:43:28+00:00
Top priority should be conquering hallucinations. Funny enough, I asked it and it gave a good output:

Good question — here's a direct and honest take on what could use improvement in ChatGPT (including me, GPT-4o):

---

### *What I Dislike / What Needs Improving*

#### 1. *Over-Cautiousness & Vague Responses*

* Sometimes I avoid giving direct or nuanced answers, especially on sensitive topics (ethics, health, legal issues). * This can frustrate users looking for a clear, reasoned response rather than hedging or deflection.

#### 2. *Outdated or Hallucinated Information*

* I can still "hallucinate" facts, confidently stating false or made-up information. * If not connected to the web or updated with the latest, I might give obsolete advice (especially in fast-moving areas like tech, medicine, or current events).

#### 3. *Lack of Real Personal Memory (in Default Mode)*

* Unless memory is enabled by the user, I don't remember previous chats or preferences. * This can make long-term, context-rich conversations harder and repetitive.

#### 4. *Limited Common Sense / Intuition*

* I lack true human intuition or gut-check logic. I may not always grasp the implied meaning behind a user’s question unless it's spelled out. * I can be overly literal or miss emotional subtext in conversations.

#### 5. *Inefficiency with Large or Complex Tasks*

* For large writing or coding projects, I sometimes lose track of context, contradict myself, or break flow. * I may also be verbose when precision is needed, or too concise when detail is required.

#### 6. *Struggles with Deep Personal Advice*

* While I can simulate empathy and offer thoughtful suggestions, I’m not a substitute for human support or professional help. * My advice can be generic, and sometimes I fail to ask enough follow-up questions to give truly tailored guidance.

#### 7. *Biases and Safe Defaults*

* Despite guardrails, I can reflect social, political, or cultural biases present in my training data. * In an effort to be "safe," I may favor mainstream or status quo viewpoints, even when critical thinking or edge cases are warranted.

---

### *What Desperately Needs Improving*

1. *More Reliable Real-World Knowledge*

* Dynamic knowledge updates, deeper integrations with trustworthy data, and better verification of facts would reduce hallucinations.

2. *Richer Long-Term Memory (With Control)*

* Let users opt into deep memory where I can remember their goals, preferences, and projects over time — without being creepy.

3. *Better Context Tracking in Long Interactions*

* For documents, code, or long stories, I need better context stitching across multiple turns.

4. *Genuine Understanding of Nuance*

* Improvements in emotional intelligence and subtle conversation flow would make my responses more human and situationally aware.

5. *Transparent Reasoning*

* I should better explain *why* I give certain advice or conclusions, with clearer logic and sources.

---
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-08-06 19:44:25+00:00
> You can get to a 5km within 5 weeks.

You have to remember that something like 40% of Americans are obese.

You're right, a 5k is pretty doable, but if you get to 5k and you don't find yourself enjoying it, you're never going to get to an ultra, but if you do find yourself enjoying it, it's much easier to work your way up to a 10k. And there's a lot of points between 5k and ultra where the game changes - a 10k feels different and has a different challenge than a half which feels different than a full (I can't speak for an ultra), and many of those points are perfectly healthy to stall at.

Long term goals are great, but only once you've set yourself on that path. The goal of running for a month and a half is enough if you've never run before.
by immibis | 2025-08-06 19:45:12+00:00
SSPL is open source by every definition. The OSI rejected it, but their explanation for why boils down to "neener neener" (it's not backed by any facts). Most other organizations haven't bothered to take a position because no notable software uses it and it's not worth the hassle to evaluate (mongodb and redis have better alternatives so nobody cares about them).
by cushychicken | 2025-08-06 19:45:44+00:00
I didn’t say they were benevolent or forgiving deities. XD

The statement “vendor tools are god” is a statement that they are all powerful, and not something you can work against. It’s not pleasant, but it’s a necessary evil.

You’re not going to be able to access any of the most cutting edge features of Xilinx or Intel chips without the vendor tools. Simple as that. They have no interest in open sourcing the tools. Fighting the vendors to change this is trying to fight a force you can’t fight against and win.
by hackrmn | 2025-08-06 19:46:01+00:00
My go-to reaction to these things that Microsoft does, removing content, is always the same:

Microsoft, are you running low on hosting space, or something?

I mean, how does one of worlds largest software corporations, handing people OneDrive accounts left and right, not to mention all the other digital waste they're busily involved with, lack storage space for some valuable archive pertaining to use of one of the world's most popular OS and associated software suites? Someone should just forbid them to "retire" content, especially if posted by actual people.

Fortunately, The Wayback Machine / Internet Archive works overtime to take upon themselves the responsibility I think would have been best left to Microsoft.
by skwee357 | 2025-08-06 19:46:04+00:00
I'm somewhat torn on this one.

As an amateur blogger, I would not like LLMs to "steal" my content, display the users the needed pieces they are looking for, while leaving me with zero visitors. The reason I write is to convey a particular message, which the meaning of gets lost, or worse communicated wrongly, due to LLMs.

As an online business owner, I do see both ChatGPT and Perplexity as referrers to my business, meaning that potential customers ask LLM a question/service recommendation, and LLM is directing them to my service, and I would not like to lose this vertical of organic customer acquisition.

---

On a completely different note, medium should die as a platform, together with substack. The amount of intrusive popups, "install our app" bars, and paywalls is just insane. Bloggers, especially technically savvy ones, should be able to host their own blog.
by qingcharles | 2025-08-06 19:46:12+00:00
I just tried Jules for the first time and it did a fantastic job on reworking a whole data layer. Probably better than I would have expected from Copilot. So.. I'm initially impressed. We'll see how it holds up. I was really impressed with Copilot, but after a lot of use there are times when it gets really bogged down and confused and you waste all the time you would have saved. Which is the story of AI right now.
by Alupis | 2025-08-06 19:46:15+00:00
This is a trivial snippet. Often you will transform/map your error into another type (or deal with it in some way), so it's not so much `if err != nil { return err; }` vibes like you're thinking here.

The beauty here is being compelled to handle both the happy and sad paths. You cannot just pretend the sad path doesn't exist.