MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by onesociety2022 | 2025-08-22 20:26:05+00:00
Even if AGI never happens, the existing models are already incredibly useful. I’ve switched to OpenAI Plus plan and almost never use Google search anymore. I pay $10/mo for GitHub Copilot for coding. So search and coding use cases are already seeing big improvements. But this same thing needs to happen to pretty much every product. So I think in the worst case they can just divert all of the training resources to just inference and be just fine. Sure the insane valuation multiples will drop if that happens and they will be valued as any other SaaS business.
by ineedasername | 2025-08-22 20:26:18+00:00
Safety/Compliance/Governance will in the long term be the value-add for buying vs using an open model. Don’t get me wrong— there is a real, strong need for things like mechanistic introspection and interpretability, but the guaranteed/certified/indemnified/regulatory-compliant angle is also real, and where the steady revenue stream lives.
by lotyrin | 2025-08-22 20:26:44+00:00
I don't know how anyone can trust these things at all.

What I want: a balanced, nuanced, deep engagement with a topic I don't already have mastered that may need to challenge my intuition or require of me some effort to research and correct my conception.

When I ask it to explain something I already understand quite well, which there is no broad public consensus about or the public consensus is known to be based in misconception, I will tend to get the public consensus view that there's no clear answer or provided an answer based in the misconception.

When I make it at all clear about what my conception is, I'll get a confirmation or reinforcement of my conception.

If I play a bit as a character who believes the opposite of my conception, unless my conception has a very, very clear basis in public consensus, I will get a confirmation or reinforcement of the opposite of my conception.

Why should I trust them in fields I'm not an expert in, given this? They want to please and serve rather than challenge you or inform you. Even when you ask them to be blunt and factual they do the theater of those things and not the substance. Their basis in Human linguistic outcome dooms them to pretend to be human which means people-pleasing or social-consensus-finding goals over truth-finding goals.
by standardUser | 2025-08-22 20:26:59+00:00
> insane chaos

Hardly. I live in downtown Manhattan. I used to live in downtown San Francisco and between the streetcars, cable cars, hills, and the extraordinarily large homeless population, it feels far more chaotic in the denser areas.

NY by comparison is big, flat and orderly. I feel significantly safer as a pedestrian here than I ever did in SF. And it's a much more pleasant place to drive.
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-22 20:27:16+00:00
Sure, that's the most efficient way. But you can still have the user allocate a read buffer, pass it to the read API & receive it on the way out. In fact, unlike what OP claimed, this is actually more efficient since you could safely avoid unnecessarily initializing this buffer safely (by truncating to the length read before returning) whereas safely using uninitialized buffers is kind of tricky.
by warkdarrior | 2025-08-22 20:27:19+00:00
> I would blame the adoption of containerization for the lack of interest in XML standards, but by the time containerization happened, XML had been all but abandoned.

Not sure how that is true. XML is a specification for a data format, but you still need to define the schema (i.e., elements, attributes, their meaning). It's not like XML for web pages (XHTML?) could also serve as XML for Linux container descriptions or as XML for Android app manifests.
by ksherlock | 2025-08-22 20:27:31+00:00
With xml/xslt, the browser fetches, eg, somefile.xml that looks like:

<?xml version="1.0"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="somefile.xsl"?> ...

Then the browser fetch somefile.xsl and uses that to transform the xml into html (which is then rendered as per the uzhe).

Whether the browser does all that in C or C++ or Rust or Javascript or by sending it to an LLM is an implementation detail.

If the browser drops xslt support and just displays it as text (or syntax-hilighted xml), I, as the xml author, can't polyfill that by adding javascript to the xml because it won't be executed. You need to back up a level.

You could set up a web page that fetches the xml and fetch the xslt and transforms it into html and then displays it (so a browser in your browser so you can browse while you browse) but I wouldn't call that a polyfill exactly. If you're going to do that, it would be less work and a better user experience to do the transform server side.
by superkuh | 2025-08-22 20:27:41+00:00
The problem with places that have real winters is that lanes migrate. They are not absolutely positioned. Nor are the sides of the road edges which may project well out into the street and parked cars even further. No road markings visible. Humans make their own lanes. This situation can happen for many weeks-long periods in a typical winter in, say, Minneapolis or Buffalo suburbs.

If a self-driving car does the right thing staying "in lane" while all the human drivers do the wrong thing flocking to new emergent paths (which swing back and forth across the "lanes"), then the self-driving car is wrong and dangerous. I'm not talking about when it's actively snowing either. I mean the snow on the ground just remaining there, covering things.

It's not about dealing with slippage or skill driving, it's about complete lack of context markers. I don't think any current or near future self-driving solution can adapt to this.
by kuschku | 2025-08-22 20:27:46+00:00
The core freedoms are about allowing anyone to run, inspect, understand and modify software.

Even if the game itself doesn't grant me that freedom, my OS and drivers should not prevent me from attaching a debugger to the game without it noticing.

My computer, and the software on it, should obey me, and me alone. Never should they obey a developer's desire to restrict what I can and cannot do.

That is the ideological basis of the free software movement, and as you may have noticed, incompatible with client side anticheat.
by tau255 | 2025-08-22 20:27:58+00:00
I used SciDavis a lot and before that tried QtiPlot. When I had a chance to I used Origin. SciDavis was clunky and had some issues (liked to crash) but it worked well enough for what I wanted. Had some problems with setting plots styles, maybe it was just me but it wasn't obvious how to copy style between plots.

Tried LabPlot recently and had issues with csv import with datetime data not really recognising date and time series format even after using advanced import options and setting it myself manually. Tried to find some solutions, the LabPlot manual website is just a bunch of youtube videos [1]. That is really not helpful, I am not browsing manual to be forced to watch clips of what I already tried. Developers really need to think about making traditional manual.

There is also a AlphaPlot, a more or less alive fork of SciDavis. Still have its own issues but still has the same issue with yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss.zzz dates. Other than that it is a useful bit of kit.

But when I want to do some batch processing and generate multiple plots, automate and have it reproducible I go with gnuplot. The learning curve is steep, but after writing gnuplot scripts few time you just have a personal template and know relevant parts. It is really good.

All in all I am glad there is an opensource movement in this area. It is always better to have more options.

1. https://docs.labplot.org/en/2D_plotting/2D_plotting_xycurve....
by stockresearcher | 2025-08-22 20:28:03+00:00
From what I remember they ran that car on banker/stockbroker hours - the average commuter would have never seen it.

Part of the draw, I'm sure, is that Metra allows alcohol on trains. So you've basically got 50+ friends drinking together on the way home, every day. Speaking of which, I thought I heard something about them bringing back the bar cars to increase revenue. (For those that don't ride the train in Chicago - it is BYOB. In the old days they actually had a public train car with a bar and bartender you could purchase from).
by IT4MD | 2025-08-22 20:28:09+00:00
Mango just had a civil case's penalty rejected as excessive under the 8th amendment. That penalty was the sum of MoneyCollectedFromFraud + interest and yet, it was deemed excessive.

There is legal wrangling that's more complex, but the above is what occurred, regardless of legal twists.

How many fines in your life were deemed excessive?

Same here.
by cletusw | 2025-08-22 20:28:11+00:00
The difference is for proprietary features, you can just charge that subset of users that care for its maintenance, using that money to hire additional developers, etc. For OSS you instead have a relatively fixed budget of time & resources and have to balance competing interests in a zero-sum manner. On the flip side, there's nothing preventing the vocal minority from forking if the feature is important enough to them!
by rasengan0 | 2025-08-22 20:28:18+00:00
>it is the shoulder that moves the hand which is incidentally holding a pen.

Yes, arms instead of fingers, thanks for the great ergonomic video link, this was the most surprising finding when I got into fountain pens and feels like a totally different skill from the school days of handwriting cursive: https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/372976-recomm...
by quickthrowman | 2025-08-22 20:28:28+00:00
Ah yes, DC motor speed is controlled by voltage. Glad to see Cunningham’s Law still holds true, thanks :)

I’m much more familiar with three-phase AC induction motors from my day job and the speed on those are (most commonly) controlled by adjusting the frequency with a variable frequency drive while maintaining the same voltage instead of directly controlling the voltage like on a DC motor.
by th0ma5 | 2025-08-22 20:28:32+00:00
Some of what your saying could be confusion on the part of many people about what a standard is and isn't... And I think that while I don't necessarily agree that Google shouldn't be involved, I think this confusion is in the neighborhood of your concerns. It used to be much more the case, and indeed with other standards work it is the case, that a corporate entity was just another schmoe and people didn't necessarily have so much reflexive deference perhaps? Thank you for posting this honest opinion.
by kragen | 2025-08-22 20:28:47+00:00
Oh, I meant that you were mistaken about handling nom-UTF-8 filenames (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44986040) and in 90% of cases a deferred mutex unlock makes things worse instead of better.

The kind of general reason you need a mutex is that you are mutating some data structure from one valid state to another, but in between, it's in an inconsistent state. If other code sees that inconsistent state, it might crash or otherwise misbehave. So you acquire the mutex beforehand and release it once it's in the new valid state.

But what happens if you panic during the modification? The data structure might still be in an inconsistent state! But now it's unlocked! So other threads that use the inconsistent data will misbehave, and now you have a very tricky bug to fix.

This doesn't always apply. Maybe the mutex is guarding a more systemic consistency condition, like "the number in this variable is the number of messages we have received", and nothing will ever crash or otherwise malfunction if some counts are lost. Maybe it's really just providing a memory fence guarding against a torn read. Maybe the mutex is just guarding a compare-and-swap operation written out as a compare followed by a swap. But in cases like these I question whether you can really panic with the mutex held!

This is why Java deprecated Thread.stop. (But Java does implicitly unlock mutexes when unwinding during exception handling, and that does cause bugs.)

This is only vaguely relevant to your topic of whether Golang is good or not. Explicit error handling arguably improves your chances of noticing the possibility of an error arising with the mutex held, and therefore handling it correctly, but you correctly pointed out that because Go does have exceptions, you still have to worry about it. And cases like these tend to be fiendishly hard to test—maybe it's literally impossible for a test to make the code you're calling panic.
by bdangubic | 2025-08-22 20:29:19+00:00
I’ve been doing this sht for 30 years and one thing I can tell you I learned - when you see something as “groundbreaking” (controversial?) as llms and see many people telling you how much more productive they are with it there are almost always two camps:

- those fighting HARD to tell you at the top of their lungs “oh this is sht, I tried it and it is baaaad

- those going “hmmm let me see how I can learn etc to get to the point where I am also a lot more productive, if ____ and ____ can learn it so can I…”

You always want to be in the second camp…
by Telaneo | 2025-08-22 20:29:34+00:00
I've been pretty happy with Mailbox.org. The web interface isn't great compared to Gmail, but I prefer Thunderbird anyway for normal usage. They used to have a weird 2FA setup, but they've since switched to the same kind everybody else use, thankfully.

Microsoft's been a bit annoying, since some emails I've sent to @hotmail.com domains go to spam, but at least they do arrive and aren't just bounced, as I've heard from some horror stories. Sending to @gmail.com accounts seems to work perfectly though. I don't send a lot of outgoing mail from my personal account anyway, so it doesn't really matter in the end. Some mails seem to take longer to arrive, but I had that problem on Gmail too, so I don't think there's anything actually wrong per se.
by smcin | 2025-08-22 20:29:43+00:00
Ok but I already gave you my short version on UK vs Japan:

In 7+ centuries Britain(/UK) the ruling class never had a revolution/civil war that lasted longer than a generation, hence the builtin default action is to continue with the monarchy and associated class system. This also avoids all the (enormous) internal and external turmoil I cited. (PS In the age of social media I don't think you can call a popular referendum 'democracy', Brexit being the very obvious example. It depends on how literate the electorate at large are, and how tight(/loose/nonexistent) the controls on media spending to manipulate them are.)

Whereas in Japan, it was the US occupation post-WWII which intentionally decided to keep the monarchy for social cohesion, while reducing it to being titular, and abolishing the nobility. This was the US's (and MacArthur's) architecting, not Japan's. It's not like Japan had a referendum or parliamentary debate about the Showa Consitution [0]. And one intent was to prevent Japan fracturing internally, but to keep it from going imperialist again, and totally dependent on the US militarily. (Japan didn't even have provision for a constitutional referendum until a decade ago, and if it ever achieves the 2/3 support to have one, it'll more likely be about removing the Self-Defense Clause than abolishing/reducing the monarchy.)

It would be an interesting what-if to conjecture how the US might have reshaped Britain in the 1940s, like Japan.

Re your article, it's a strength not a weakness that the US doesn't have a national/federal referendum, most states have a pretty active ballot initiative system, so e.g. state taxation, legalizing marijuana etc. can be tried out and then we have statistics to inform federal (legislative) policy-making, plus there's less inertia to undoing bad decisions, like when Michigan nearly taxed itself out of existence and all its jobs and young people emigrated (internally).

I wouldn't say the UK has a disciplined approach to referendums. You can't even tell what % of GDP was spent (by third-parties) on political/social-media influence campaigns during 2015/6 (Brexit referendum), not even now a decade later. Not just [1] but all the other campaigns and interest groups.

[0]: Showa Constitution of 1946, seems pretty clear it was authored by the US not Japan [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Japan]

[1]: "Arron Banks and the mystery Brexit campaign funds", FT 11/2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18382116

Archive: https://archive.ph/V4aHb
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-08-22 20:29:48+00:00
> If someone doesn't know about RSS/Atom, what's their reward for clicking on those links? A screenful of robot barf.

The microformats folks have a standard to embed machine-readable feed data into HTML, which seems a lot more practical to me after seeing how browser just ignore RSS:

https://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed

(I haven't tried it but it seems fine)
by torginus | 2025-08-22 20:30:06+00:00
Imo, Unity C# is almost 'not real' C#, as in it uses a completely different programming model, with different object lifetimes, programming and object models. I know the execution bits are the same, but programming for Unity feels very different in every way than writing ASP.NET code (and more different than moving from ASP.NET to Spring Boot)
by hobs | 2025-08-22 20:30:09+00:00
And so would that be a thing we can maybe have an issue with? The entire "handwaving away" bit is the fact that moving a decision another layer up a hierarchy doesn't change who is responsible or how that responsibility manifests, a different problem then "they get to decide on how they spend their money" - we don't have the resources vs we are not going to use them on what you want (which itself is something that is up for say, an influence campaign.)
by spankalee | 2025-08-22 20:30:50+00:00
People have had some huge understandings of what's actually going on:

- That Mason opening issues means that it's a Google-effort. It's not.

- That the "Should we remove..." issue for community feedback. It's not. Spec issues are a collaboration vehicle for spec maintainers. There's not enough of the community on GitHub for that to be a good feedback mechanism.

- That Mason or Google hide comments and locked the thread. I heard from good authority that it was Apple employees actually, in their role as spec repo admins.

- That Google brought up the idea. The best I can see from meeting minutes is that a Mozilla rep did this time, though it's been brought up occasionally for 10 years at least.

- That the spec PR will be merged. At this point the PR is to show what it would mean to move XSLT from the spec.

- That decision has been made. These things are the beginning of the process.

- That XSLT even can be removed. Even though the vendors are tentatively in support, they are fully aware that this might not be viable in practice. I would guess that they think they can remove it, but they don't know for sure. They know usage numbers aren't always accurate, and they have ways of hedging bets like flags with different default in different channels, enterprise policies, reverse origin trials, etc.
by foldr | 2025-08-22 20:31:04+00:00
It's a two party system in the sense that only two parties have a chance of winning any given UK general election, but the popular vote is quite widely distributed among parties. In the last election, 33.7% of people voted Labour and 23.7% people voted for the second largest party (the Conservatives):

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1478478/uk-election-resu...
by thomashabets2 | 2025-08-22 20:31:14+00:00
> All the examples you've shown in your article were "huh? isn't this obvious?" to me.

It is. None of this was new to me. In C++ defining a non-virtual destructor on a class hierarchy is also not new to me, but a fair critique can be made there too why it's "allowed". I do feel like C++ can defend that one from first principles though, in a way that Go cannot.

I'm not sure what you mean by the foo99 thing. I'm guessing this is about defer inside a loop?

> Is fixing those perceived footguns really a missed opportunity?

In my opinion very yes.
by throwaway0123_5 | 2025-08-22 20:31:39+00:00
> I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.

I think it would be far more effective to make it easier to lose your license than it would be to make getting the license more challenging.

The absolute most dangerous drivers I see on the road aren't bad drivers in the sense that they're unskilled at controlling their car. I can't weave between cars at 120 mph or cross three lanes of traffic to make an exit I didn't see until the last second without killing myself, but I routinely see people do that. Sure they don't care about driving safely and/or following the law, but they're probably sane enough to pull it together for a brief driving test.

The other big category of dangerous drivers is drunk/distracted (texting) drivers. Again, most of the people engaging in these behaviors are probably smart enough not to do them during a driving test.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-22 20:31:49+00:00
These things have camera all around the vehicle and they are on and recording. So, any incident with aggressive driving, the driver is going to be misbehaving on camera. Doesn't sound like a smart move.

This might actually have the opposite effect: if there are lots of waymos with the cameras everywhere, people might actually feel pressured to behave a little and avoid breaking traffic rules on camera.
by johntash | 2025-08-22 20:32:10+00:00
Thanks! I probably will end up trying both at least a little bit.

Rust's memory management did sound neat when I was reading about it. Rust is also more mature, so probably more useful for now. I really like Go's simplicity though, which makes Zig sound interesting too.

I also just remembered Nim. I didn't get very far with it, but it also seemed cool.
by tonymet | 2025-08-22 20:32:31+00:00
even within the AI-paradigm, you could keep the juniors to validate and test the AI generated code. You still need some level of acceptance testing for the increased production. And the juniors could be producing automation engineering at or above the level of the product code they were producing prior to AI. A win win ( more production & more career growth)

In other words, none of these stories make any sense, even if you take the AI superpower at face value.
by fortran77 | 2025-08-22 20:32:54+00:00
> One of the great progressive legal breakthroughs in the US. Maybe one day we can have a legal environment where we can make progress like that again.

It was signed into law in on July 26, 1990 by President George H.W. Bush. I hope you get to see a progressive man like George H.W. Bush in the White House again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Ac...
by magicmicah85 | 2025-08-22 20:33:05+00:00
https://ourworldindata.org/trust Some of us live in a low trust society.

But this is such a cool talk. My local Giant (grocery store) has a wire that goes along the left side of their parking lot. Only about 20 spots there but once you cross that line, the wheel locks. It took me 2-3 trips of confusion why the cart was breaking before a store employee shouted at me "you're gonna lock it" right as I crossed the line. He came out to me, unlocked it and we had a long talk about how it all works.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-08-22 20:33:27+00:00
My experience with Starlark (buck2) is that it makes the whole system wildly complex and inscrutable.

No one actually knows how it works. It’s an undebuggable nightmare of macros. Everyone copy/pastes a few macros they know work. But one step off the beaten path and you’re doomed.

I hate code that looks like data but is infect code. Be data or be code. Don’t pretend to be both.

I tried adding support for Jai to public buck2. I didn’t even get close. I need static types and a debugger. Just make everything a Rust plugin.