MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by viccis | 2025-08-30 18:59:55+00:00
Therefore is reasonable in that case, though it still reads a bit clumsy. "The lawsuit was dropped" seems like the most important part of that blurb, so leading with it flows better. "The lawsuit was dropped after he didn't send the letter" is so much nicer. You get to the point and explain it immediately after instead of giving the reader information you have to contextualize after. "Therefore" just reads as pedantic and overbearing in most situations in my opinion (and I guess my teacher's opinion too).
by citizenpaul | 2025-08-30 19:00:01+00:00
I'm not sure the author or most people that write these types of academic theory papers ever really see actual ball-of-mud-spaghetti code in real world scenarios.

I think anyone that thinks mudball is OK because business is messy has never seen true mudball code.

I've had to walk out of potential work because after looking at what they had I simply had to tell them I cannot help you, you need a team and probably at minimum a year to make any meaningful progress. That is what mudballs leads to. What this paper describes is competent work that is pushed too quickly for cleaning rough edges but has some sort of structure.

I've seen mudballs that required 6-12 months just to do discovery of all the pieces and parts. Hundreds of different version of things no central source control, different deployment techniques depending on the person that coded it even within the same project.
Ask HN: Alternatives or cheaper way to access GPT-5 thinking?
by zephyruslives | 2025-08-30 19:00:09+00:00
I love GPT-5 Thinking, it takes its time but it gets me the best results, even compared to Claude Opus Research for example. But, currently, I have two subscriptions, one to claude for claude code which seems like the best coding agent by far, and one to OpenAI for the GPT-5 thinking chatbot. I wanna get it down to under $20/month. Are there any other alternatives to GPT-5 thinking or just platforms that get me cheaper access to it? I honestly don't really care about image generation or the myriad of other options that OpenAI provides, I just want a low cost reliable alternative that gets me GPT-5 Thinking.
by yunruse | 2025-08-30 19:01:20+00:00
I took a brief gander at its code [0] and saw it mainly focusses on k-means clustering algorithms (in JS, no less). To my ken this is likely for suggesting new tabs, something a user is even less likely to use than renaming them.

Its constant drain even when not 'in use' seems to imply it's classifying tabs as they change page (though it might be telemetry or uncommented testing). If so, it's an example of premature optimisation gone very wrong.

It's a shame, because it overshadows the fact that naming tab groups is a perfect use case for an LLM, alongside keyboard suggestions and reverse dictionaries [1]. I'm ardently distrustful of LLMs for many, many purposes, but for the tiny parameter and token usage needed it's hard to not like. Which is a shame it's (somehow) such a drain.

[0] https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/blob/7b42e629fdef... exports a SmartTabGroupingManager, though how or why that is used without being asked eludes me

[1] https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/ Can be helpful in a pinch when a word's on the tip of your tongue, though its synonyms aren't always perfect.
by ranger_danger | 2025-08-30 19:02:02+00:00
> it's basically not possible to run any kind of outbound VPN connection (even to private servers) from inside of China anymore

This is not true anymore, and your own link says so:

> all circumvention strategies adopted by these tools are reportedly still effective in China

And while this paper is not the most up to date, there are actually many new kinds of obfuscating VPN/proxy/tunnel technologies out now, and they are currently not blocked. Some methods can even disguise themselves as unencrypted, plaintext legitimate-looking HTML and still tunnel traffic (slowly) through it.
by gonzopancho | 2025-08-30 19:02:55+00:00
When originally published they wouldn’t even ack Patrick Kelsey, the author of libuinet or that they had forked libuinet.

Now they say this: “Thanks to libplebnet and libuinet this work became a lot easier.”

F-stack is literally forked libuinet using DPDK instead of netmap.

The net-net is that Kelsey took his work private and tencent isn’t advancing the work.

Back in the day I was sponsoring work on libuinet in order to move enough of the kernel needed for a security appliance to libuinet to underpin a performance improvement for pfsense.

Then Tencent did what they did, Patrick reacted as he did and that was over.

We pivoted to VPP. But back in 2016 it also needed a lot of work.
by echelon | 2025-08-30 19:02:58+00:00
Due to the expansion of the universe, we're also going to lose access to the rest of the universe in that time.

Time - Galaxies lost to us forever 1 million years ~ 0.02% 10 million years ~ 0.2% 100 million years ~ 2% 1 billion years ~ 20% 10 billion years ~ 80% 150 billion years ~ 99.9999997%

So we'll have to find somewhere to hunker down for the last forty billion years or so as we wait for all energy to dissipate.

That's all assuming we can't "break physics" and nucleate something new, find a tear in our current manifold, etc. Our peon brains are too small to reason about this and any claims that we're stuck are insufficiently computed.

Given our limited sensing capabilities and tiny time sample, I'm skeptical of our current understanding. Claims of current model predictions feel premature.
by tux3 | 2025-08-30 19:04:05+00:00
It's complicated, no one really knows what "externally maintained" entails at the moment. Linus is not exactly poised to pull directly from Kent, and there is no solution lined-up at the moment.

Both Linus and Kent drive a hard bargain, and it's not as simple as finding someone else to blindly forward bcachefs patches. At the first sign of conflict, the poor person in the middle would have no power, no way to make anyone back down, and we'd be back to square one.

It's in limbo, and there is still time, but if left to bitrot it will be removed eventually.
by tstrimple | 2025-08-30 19:05:02+00:00
I have a family of five and we’ve managed with a single vehicle for basically the last 20 years. So I’ve been in minivan mode a long time now. Recently I went car shopping with my son and it’s crazy to me how much more limited sight lines are in the smaller sedans. You have to be much more active leaning and looking around. I don’t know that I need a tank, but I absolutely love the minivan for driver visibility.
by Stranger_X | 2025-08-30 19:05:34+00:00
Remember when the internet felt alive? When you could meet someone random, share a story, laugh for 5 minutes, and never see them again—but somehow feel less alone?

That’s gone. Social media turned into algorithms, ads, and endless scrolling. Omegle shut down. Random, genuine human connection almost disappeared.

So we built StrangerMeet . It’s our attempt to bring that feeling back:

One click, one real conversation.

Text, voice, or video—your choice.

If it matters, you can continue later. If not, move on.

It’s not perfect yet. But it’s real. And we think the internet needs more of that.

Would love to hear if this resonates with anyone else here.
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-30 19:07:34+00:00
> ...You can borrow against it to get loans for money you can spend without paying taxes. ...

Are you assuming that loans don't need to be paid back at some point? What you're listing is ways of either investing wealth (that is, using it productively to make more wealth - which is far from easy or free of risk) or spending it down. Some ways of spending wealth down may be tax-advantaged in some locales, but this is offset by the fact that taxing income places an extra tax burden on the time-based and precautionary value of that same accumulated wealth. I.e. wealth that's being invested in a risky, long-term venture is in fact quite heavily taxed.
by vlaaad | 2025-08-30 19:07:46+00:00
I love this idea; I hope it gains traction. One thing that is not clear to me is file search vs unsaved files. It's common for agents to use, e.g., ripgrep to search the file system. But if the communication protocol includes read/write access to unsaved files, there is a desync in terms of accuracy.. rg can't search unsaved files.
by wolvesechoes | 2025-08-30 19:07:52+00:00
> just let them take Ukraine

Eh, I always forget it is kinda pointless to discuss politics here.

Never stated that they should just take Ukraine, or they are not "as bad". And please spare me lectures about lingering doom of the Easter Europe - I live in Poland, 20 km from the Ukrainian border. I am aware of stakes, especially considering idiocy of my government.

What I objected to is a proposition that "Europe" is some political monolith, and all countries here are equally threatened by Russia. Some European countries are under serious threat (mine among them), others are less threatened, and some are not threatened in any serious manner.

Lack of understanding this causes people to be constantly surprised that things look as they look.
by BlackjackCF | 2025-08-30 19:07:58+00:00
Do you think it’s really the fact that you were younger or just that you have a lot more responsibilities now?

I’m in my early 30s and I definitely feel less sharp than in my 20s, but I also feel like my priorities have changed and I have more responsibilities at work and at home, so I have much less ability to just be able to do very long periods of focused studying/thinking like I used to in my 20s

I asked my parents about this as they are both accomplished people and work in STEM/academia.

They both mentioned feeling less sharp when they hit their mid-to-late 30s, which corresponds to… when they had kids. I know correlation isn’t causation, but seeing all of my coworkers who have young children now all mention they’ve had a marked decrease in mental acuity for work due to sleep deprivation (and having to prioritize their kids), I’m going to guess this is it.

I also wonder if you just had a month to focus on refreshing what you learned in school how quickly it would all come back.
by tmtvl | 2025-08-30 19:08:01+00:00
Doing structural editing with unbracketed let bindings is pretty awful, though. And cond clauses being bracketed helps when needing multiple forms:

(cond ((printable? foo) (print foo) (newline) foo) (else (print-members foo) newline))

True, with modern machine-generated mass-operations refactoring is easier than with older tools, but that doesn't mean a given set of brackets is 'useless'.
by opan | 2025-08-30 19:08:14+00:00
Worked on my OnePlus 8T running LineageOS with no gapps and using Fennec F-Droid for the browser. Could you have a useragent or extension[1] it didn't like? I know that on my PC, GNOME's Gitlab specifically required me to change my UA to get it to load while every other Anubis config I've come across has been fine. I do notice LKML's is using difficulty 4, though, which I think is higher than I usually see.

[1] Due to an unrelated bug in latest Fennec, I currently have all my extensions disabled or else all pages stop loading at all. Normally use uBlock Origin, Tampermonkey, etc.
by dsego | 2025-08-30 19:08:14+00:00
Some certainly do. I have also noticed that the format of the code and structure used depend more on tools and hardware the developer uses rather than some philosophical ideal. A programmer with a big monitor could prefer big blocks of uninterrupted code with long variable names. Because of the big screen area, they can see the whole outline and understand the flow of this long chunk of code. Someone on a small 13" laptop might tend to split big pieces of code into smaller chunks so they won't have to scroll so much because things would get hidden. The other thing is the IDE or editor that's used. A coder who relies on the builtin goto symbol feature might not care as much about organizing folder and file structure, since they can just click on the method name, or use the command palette that will direct them to that piece of code. Their colleague might need the code to be in well organized file structure because they click through folders to reach the method.
by kingstnap | 2025-08-30 19:08:22+00:00
DNA damage inevitably accumulates. The big reason children are younger than their parents DNA wise is because the parents' DNA undergo random recombination to create something that is the mixture of the two.

This doesn't help overall. Mixing two roughly equally broken things just yields the mean of the two. But the trick is that roughly 60 to 70% of conceptions will not survive to birth. This rejection sampling is ultimately what makes children younger.

If you had a population of single cells that didn't undergo this rejection sampling at some point, entropy and Muller's ratchet would actually age the entire population and kill it.
by viccis | 2025-08-30 19:08:42+00:00
As I mentioned in a reply to the other comment, this often means you have your ordering mixed up.

As an example, here's what you original statement said (with some grammar corrected):

"Most times A happens before B, but the order is not guaranteed. Therefore, there is a possibility of {whatever}."

Here it is if you lead with the important outcome and provide the justification after, using a non-restrictive relative clause to add the fact that A often happens before B:

"There is a possibility of {whatever}, as, while A happens before B, the order is not guaranteed."

In my opinion, this is clearer in intent. It provides the important information immediately and then justifies it immediately after. The original sentence provides information without context and then contextualizes it using "therefore", which comes across a bit pedantic to me. I am a native American English speaker though, and the tone of prose does vary depending on the culture of the person reading it.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-30 19:08:44+00:00
Its an modern open-source and collaborative resource of IQ style questions for research studies. IQ has a lot of flaws, not the least of which is its usage outside of academic research, as a measure of job aptitude and hiring potential (spoiling its utility as a metric since the questions can be trained... setting aside its dubious usefulness as a hiring tool anyway).

It seems like ICAR is spending a-lot of effort to remain scientific, and i feel like a website like this goes against that by spoiling the test utility for future potential participants.
by gnramires | 2025-08-30 19:10:22+00:00
I am not a super experienced coder or anything. But I like thinking about it[1].

The way I've been thinking about it is about organization. Organize code like we should organize our house. If you have a collection of pens, I guess you shouldn't leave them scattered everywhere and in your closet, and with your cutlery, and in the bathroom :) You should set up somewhere to keep your pens, and other utensils in a kind of neat way. You don't need to spend months setting up a super-pen-organizer that has a specially sculpted nook for your $0.50 pen that you might lose or break next week. But you make it neat enough, according to a number of factors like how likely it is to last, how stable is your setup, how frequently it is used, and so on. Organizing has several advantages: it makes it easier to find pens, shows you a breath of options quickly, keeps other places in your house tidier and so less cognitively messy as well. And it has downsides, like you need to devote a lot of time and effort, you might lose flexibility if you're too strict like maybe you've been labeling stuff in the kitchen, or doing sketches in your living room, and you need a few pens there.

I don't like the point of view that messiness (and say cognitive load) is always bad. Messiness has real advantages sometimes! It gives you freedom to be more flexible and dynamic. I think children know this when living in a strict "super-tidy" parent house :) (they'd barely get the chance to play if everything needs to be perfectly organized all the time)

I believe in real life almost every solution and problem is strongly multifactorial. It's dangerous to think a single factor, say 'cognitive load', 'don't repeat yourself', 'lesser lines of code', and so on is going to be the single important factor you should consider. Projects have time constraints, cost, need for performance; expressing programs, the study of algorithms and abstractions itself is a very rich field. But those single factors help us improve a little on one significant facet of your craft if you're mindful about it.

Another factor I think is very important as well (and maybe underestimated) is beauty. Beauty for me has two senses: one in an intuitive sense that things are 'just right' (which capture a lot of things implicitly). A second and important one I think is that working and programming, when possible, should be nice, why not. The experience of coding should be fun, feel good in various ways, etc. when possible (obviously this competes with other demands...). When I make procedural art projects, I try to make the code at least a little artistic as well as the result, I think it contributes to the result as well.

[1] a few small projects, procedural art -- and perhaps a game coming soon :)
by thrance | 2025-08-30 19:11:38+00:00
If by "both sides" you mean american democrats and republicans, sure. Although republicans are much worse for the working class than the democrats. Both are at the heels of capital, one side is just that much more overt and aggressive about it.

In the rest of the world though, there are actual leftist movements who are genuinely standing for the working class. But they don't get much power these days, and things are mostly going backwards for worker's rights globally.

One thing is sure though, it's that any progress workers enjoyed in the past didn't come from the right. Paid leave, minimum wage, healthcare, retirement... it all came from the left.
by hirvi74 | 2025-08-30 19:12:48+00:00
I still do not understand why we are wasting scientific resources trying to stack rank humans on arbitrarily defined concepts like cognitive ability or intelligence.

After over a century of psychometric research in cognitive abilities and intelligence, what do we have to show for it? Whose life has actually improved for the better? Have the benefits from such research, if any, outweighed the amount of harm that has already been caused?
by geekamongus | 2025-08-30 19:13:07+00:00
I've been a Firefox die-hard since it was called Phoenix a couple decades ago. That said, over the last two months I've been testing Orion Browser (from Kagi, to which I subscribe), and am smitten with it. It's Apple only at the moment, which is a drawback, but if you live in that ecosphere, it's worth a look.

Orion is Webkit-based, can install extensions from Chrome OR Firefox, privacy respecting, and a whole lotta niceties for per-website tweaks and other customizations.

[0] https://kagi.com/orion/
by jackthetab | 2025-08-30 19:14:23+00:00
Since I'm interested in local, small-use [1] cases of AI, what about the byte code VMs is not AI-scale? And what is AI-scale?

[1] I'm looking at single-person/small office LLMs to do simple jobs: summarize these pdfs, structure this data, help drafting a document, that sort of thing, not a be-all end-all monster. Think of a bunch of highly intelligent Python scripts as opposed to Microsoft Office.
by balder1991 | 2025-08-30 19:16:05+00:00
Yeah, as much as I don’t like to use AI to write large portions of code, I’m using it to help me learn web development and it can feel like a following a tutorial, but tailored to the exact project I want.

My current approach is creating something like a Gem on Gemini with custom instructions and the updated source code of the project as context.

I just discuss what I want, and it gives me the code to do it, then I write by hand, ask for clarifications and suggest changes until I feel like the current approach is actually a good one. So not really “vibe-coding”, though I guess a large number of software developers who care about keeping the project sane must be doing this.
by dahart | 2025-08-30 19:16:36+00:00
> Are you assuming that loans don’t need to be paid back at some point?

No, what I said is you don’t have to pay taxes on those loans. Obviously a loan is paid back. The tax avoidance scheme here is that a loan is not income and you can use held stock (that hasn’t been taxed) as collateral for short term loans.

> this is offset by the fact that taxing income places an extra tax burden on the time-based and precautionary value of that same accumulated wealth.

Not sure what you’re referring to. Again, the mega rich often don’t have significant “incomes” from a taxation point of view, regardless of how much money they make or spend.
by echelon | 2025-08-30 19:16:56+00:00
I irrationally abhor a lot of what Animal Crossing is. The aesthetic is really cute and charming, but it's the closest thing to a real work simulator I've played. It is at least partially responsible for making me aware that all game loops are essentially just busy work masquerading as dopamine and cognition sinks.

All of that said, I absolutely love what you've done here. I said all of that negative stuff in preface because what you've done is provided the missing element Nintendo is too afraid to -- other people! The fact that you're sharing these anonymous notes with other people is incredibly charming and it's what Animal Crossing desperately needed.

This looks incredibly slick too. Your design skills are top notch!

(The fact that Animal Crossing asks you to write letters to the dumbest NPC AI and gives you occasional token rewards is downright depressing. It's cookie clicker level stuff.)
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-30 19:16:59+00:00
> multiplying 6 digit numbers in their head?

This kind of thing is quite easy. Which mental delay-line caches you exploit depends on how your mind works, but multiplying 6-digit numbers in your head isn't a hard trick to learn, if you care.

There was a time when I cared about such parlour tricks, and I could pick them up quite quickly. I once spent a few days memorising the first 10 digits of pi. Once I'd figured that out, it was the effort of a few hours over the subsequent weeks to memorise to 36 digits. If I had cared, I could have learned twenty new digits a day, using the following scheme:

3.14159 265358979 32384626 43383 2795028841 9716 93993 75105820 97494459 23078164 06286208 99862803 4825342 117067 982 14808 65132 823066 4...

See how it's lyrical? Just learn the poem. Except… I quickly found I didn't care, and at that point my motivation vanished, and I lost the "savant" ability. (Sure, if I wanted to, I could easily bootstrap the requisite intrinsic motivation – and I suspect I could learn a hundred digits a day thereby – but I don't want to.)

Despite my generally-absent enthusiasm, I'm still capable of aceing IQ tests, scoring highly in measures of cognitive ability that I do not possess, etc, because I have a certain stubbornness towards the idea that these tests truly measure anything important, which means I approach them sideways with the objective of breaking the tests, which means I break the tests. If anything of value hinged on my ability to quickly multiply 6-digit numbers in my head, I expect I could pick it up in… six months?

I do not say these things to brag: rather, the opposite. I don't think I am particularly exceptional: I never learned a thousand digits of pi, would probably take an hour to multiply 6-digit numbers in my head…

I am able to solve problems I've never encountered with computer systems I've never used, after half a second of thought, while concentrating on other things – but from the inside that doesn't feel exceptional at all: it's just a few tricks, well-practised. People who have memorised millions of digits of pi likewise claim to use a few tricks – and while those particular tricks don't always work for everyone, I don't think these people are innately exceptional.