MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by smcin | 2025-08-22 21:56:06+00:00
I don't follow your terminology or your reasoning.

What you want to call "The Symbolic Sovereign" boils down to a (reasonably) independent judiciary/Supreme Court/High Court + (optionally) a constitutional monarch or ceremonial president, which the US does not have as a separate office (that gap gets filled by other nonprofits, watchdogs, civic bodies, activists like Leonard Leo, media organizations, churches, commentators like Jon Stewart, interest groups, lobbyists, authors). Couldn't we just call that "rule of law + an independent civil society + media"?

But the US Supreme Court is(/used to be) credible not because it rarely took action, but because justices and their rulings (and the appointment process) were non-partisan. Pre-Citizens United (2010), anyway.

Post-2013 the US now has unlimited untraceable dark money in politics, amplified by social media to inject influence into the political process. I think that renders it utterly irrelevant now whether a country has a popular referendum process (or else uses the executive or legislature to change things). Clearly this leaked into other countries. At least a-decade-and-a-half ago.

If you have enough money you can now pervert/coopt any of these. The details are irrelevant (unless you're doing a post-mortem). Scott Galloway keeps warning about increasing inequality of wealth in US politics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E

You don't want to talk about social media + money replacing discourse, post-2010. I think that intentional omission alone invalidates everything else in your analysis. At least tell me why you disagree.

Pointing out the Brexit vote was only 51-49 doesn't matter; with more spending it could have been made 60-40 but then the electorate might have smelled the rat that's been there for smelling for a long time. Why have 40+ years of UK referendum process not resulted in any referendum on anything constructive, e.g. renationalizing UK water, electricity and railways? How has that not happened, if the UK is a functioning democracy?
by ChrisRackauckas | 2025-08-22 21:56:57+00:00
> More worryingly, something I don't see discussed enough is "review fatigue". It's far more fatiguing reviewing the output of an LLM than writing the code yourself a lot of the times. Early on in your career, this might lead to the tendency to just say "eh, looks alright enough".

I am definitely worried about that. I got into a mode of doing morning code review every morning due to having a bunch of active open source repos, so over time as they grow in activity I learned to adapt my schedule, mind set, and everything around how to do the right amount of code review (when to finish the PR yourself, when to give pointers to train a new contributor, when it's not worth your time yet to say more than "tests fail", etc.). I started for years pulling every piece of code locally, running it, figuring out why someone would make a change like that, etc. and then it took like 5 years before I could actually start to do code review well just by reading a git diff. I needed to know the domain, the language, the problem space, and how people tend to work, all well enough to make that simple enough to have a mental model.

Then, I tend to see some junior programmers put up LLM stuff and I go "oh just handle the extra memory allocations and it's good to go" and they go "wait handle what where?". If you can't eyeball that in under a minute of scrolling through the code... then you shouldn't be doing code review by scrolling through it yet. But if they keep doing it like this, they will never build that skill.

That's why I think the right LLM usage is really for those who have already built that code review skill. It's not to gate the usage of LLMs, but people will never learn if they aren't strongly engaging with the code at some level.
by davidandgoli4th | 2025-08-22 21:57:17+00:00
Hey VoidWhisperer, you've raised some excellent and valid points without knowing the underlying technology. It's understandable how the need to pass a an IP address could seem contradictory to the idea of anonymity. IP addresses are required to communicate on the internet whether at home, work, or on the go. Nobody can change that without changing the entire structure of the internet.

Your Changefly ID is anonymous and end-to-end encrypted. Changefly does not know who you are, who you are connecting with, or what your IP address is as we do not log IP addresses.

I encourage you to read more below to learn how the Changefly ID authentication process works and how Changefly is truly changing the game for privacy and security:

Changefly Anonymous Authentication FAQ: https://www.changefly.com/security

Changefly ID white paper: https://www.changefly.com/our-research

Changefly US Patent 12,301,546 B2 https://patents.google.com/patent/US12301546B2/en
by aaronblohowiak | 2025-08-22 21:57:26+00:00
>Rust has effectively made writing with the performance of C++ feel like writing Ruby, but with unparalleled low defect rates and safety on account of the type system.

This is a little overblown.. speaking VERY HAND-WAVILY, sea_orm < active record by a factor of about 10x more mental overhead but is at least that much more performant...

but yea, vibe-coding rust micro services is pretty amazing lately, almost no interactions with borrow checker, and I'm even using cucumber specs...
by J_McQuade | 2025-08-22 21:57:50+00:00
> this is really ignorant of how modern gaming and matchmaking works.

If you listen to the people complaining about cheating... it doesn't.

> I don't care how much of a social butterfly you are, you are not going to get 99 friends to get a PUBG match going.

True, but my county is able to get more than that number of people into a cricket league. You don't need to personally know everyone, just be confident that there is a system of trust in place that would weed out any rotters. Is such a system going to be perfect? No, but neither are any of the top-down approaches attempted in videogames. At least this one doesn't require me to install an umpire in my home at all times.

> As a sibling comment mentioned, even in the days of private servers you ended up with community-developed tools like Punkbuster.

The difference is that you could have played the game without doing that. If you didn't trust the people on that server, how likely would you be to install those tools?
by ryukoposting | 2025-08-22 21:57:51+00:00
The script is uncanny as well. My guess is the author used AI to generate the panels/dialogue, then stitched together cutouts from real xkcd comics over the top of the AI-generated panels here and there. That exact shape of the heads is too close to not be a copy-paste job, but other variations suggest AI involvement. The desk gets rotated in the third panel of the first comic, the female character in the second comic gets clothes out of nowhere, etc.

Regardless of how the author made the comics, they're very weird.
by ChrisRackauckas | 2025-08-22 21:58:00+00:00
> If you don’t mind the engineering skills atrophy then go ahead and vibe code. But know this. You will lose the skills.

I don't see why it's an either or. As explained in the article, I'm still coding all day. Just some trivial PRs are getting done and tidied up while I'm doing so. You still have to do all of the code review, and you still have to solve all of the hard problems, you just do less of the refactoring by hand.
by dilap | 2025-08-22 21:58:53+00:00
Yeah, I totally agree -- given Go's design, the behavior makes sense (and changing the behavior just to make it more familiar to users of languages that fundamentally work differently would be silly).

However, the non-intuitive punning of nil is unfortunate.

I'm not sure what the ideal design would be.

Perhaps just making an interface not comparable to nil, but instead something like `unset`.

type Cat struct {} type Animal interface{} func main() { var c *Cat = nil var a Animal = c if a == nil { // compile error, can't compare interface to nil ; } if a == unset { // false, hopefully intuitively } }

Still, it's a sharp edge you hit once and then understand. I am surprised people get so bothered by it...it's not like something that impairs your use of the language once you're proficient.

(E.g. complaints about nil existing at all, or error handling, are much more relatable!)
by eYrKEC2 | 2025-08-22 21:59:15+00:00
Yeah. Risky compared to Intel. Intel manufactures chips _right now_. They have lost their process edge, but if I have to put chips into a drone tomorrow, I'm betting on Intel rather than any bag of scrappy kids. The risk that they _can't_ produce chips is the same risk as that of Hillsboro Oregon getting carpet bombed -- which is of course not 0%.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-22 21:59:36+00:00
The verified bootloader would register the signature of the kernel into the TPM, so a malicious kernel would be noticeable. You could still exploit the kernel, of course.

Even a hacked kernel won't have access to the key material stored inside of the TPM, though, so it wouldn't be able to fake the remote attestation key material used to sign any challenges.

Using TPMs this way requires secure boot which only permits non-exploited, signed kernels to load signed operating system images and signed drivers. Revocation of exploitable software and hardware must be harsh and immediate. That means most dTPMs (which have been proven vulnerable to numerous side-channel attacks) are unusable, as well as some fTPMs from CPUs running old microcode. Several graphics cards cannot be used anymore because their drivers contain unpatched vulnerabilities. Running tools with known-exploitable drivers, such as CPU-Z and some motherboard vendor software, would imply a permanent ban.

This approach can work well for remotely validating the state of devices in a highly secure government programme with strict asset management. For gaming, many hardware and software configurations wouldn't be validatable and you'd lose too much money. Unfortunately, unlike on consoles, hardware and software vendors just don't give a shit about security when there's a risk of mild user inconvenience, so their security features cannot be relied upon.

You can do what some games do and use TPMs as your system's hardware identifier, requiring cheaters to buy whole new CPUs/motherboards every time an account is banned. You can also take into account systems like these but don't rely on them entirely, combining them with kernel-level anticheat like BF6 does (which requires secure boot to be enabled and VBS to be available to launch, though there are already cheaters in that game).
by xyzzyz | 2025-08-22 22:00:04+00:00
You can easily treat `&str` as bytes, just call `.as_bytes()`, and you get `&[u8]`, no questions asked. The reason why you don't want to treat &str as just bytes by default is that it's almost always a wrong thing to do. Moreover, it's the worst kind of a wrong thing, because it actually works correctly 99% of the time, so you might not even realize you have a bug until much too late.

If your API takes &str, and tries to do byte-based indexing, it should almost certainly be taking &[u8] instead.
by palata | 2025-08-22 22:00:55+00:00
Note that they mention using a custom domain. I strongly encourage you to do this (sounds like you don't), because then you don't depend on the mail provider. After Gmail, I started using my own domain and changed provider every year (Proton, Fastmail, and I landed on Migadu).

The key is that if you have your domain, you can swap the provider and nobody has to know about it.
by ChrisRackauckas | 2025-08-22 22:01:00+00:00
> I really think there needs to be a different term for professional solution engineering using LLMs (like "prompt engineering" but for coding) to differentiate from casual prototyping or simple web UI hacking by non-devs that uses "vibe" coding.

Yeah, maybe it needs another name because yes when you say you're vibe coding everyone imagines some 20 year old kid with sunglasses spitting out Javascript and calling it Python. While the tools are the same, the understanding and the discipline is very different.

I think "tech lead managing offshore development" is an excellent analogy.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-08-22 22:01:42+00:00
Yes. But usually one at least tries to do that based on evidence.

What happened here mostly wasn't that, but rather something panicked, based on assumptions, to not losing face, to appear to be in control of the sitiution, not losing authority.

At times implemented rather totalitarian, also combined whith corruption and chronyism regarding various backroom deals in the context of procurement deals of masks and vaccines.

Also especially funny regarding the availability of masks: at first they were pronounced useless in places, because there can't be panic/uproar when there aren't enough available.

As evidenced by all the public sock-puppets in the media turning coats/going with the wind, when that situation changed, doing a sharp u-turn to influence public opinion the opposite way.
Show HN: Generate Colorful Fractals in the Browser
by keithlfrost | 2025-08-22 22:01:43+00:00
See https://github.com/KeithFrost/KeithFrost.github.io/blob/main... for the source code. This is a javascript version of the code from https://github.com/KeithFrost/frac5 described in https://keithfrost.github.io/2025-08-08-frac5.html
by palata | 2025-08-22 22:01:47+00:00
> supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there

What are the tradeoffs? I have been following GrapheneOS for a while, and it doesn't seem like there are many tradeoffs.

> OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.

OpenStreetMap is a database, and most commercial services that are not Google use it. E.g. Uber or Lyft.

You just need to find an app that you like. CoMaps is nice, OSMAnd has a lot of feature but the UX is harder. And of course you can contribute to OSM and make it even better than it is! You'll see it's a great community!
by antichronology | 2025-08-22 22:02:08+00:00
I watched an interview with one of the co-founders of Anthropic where his point is that although benchmarks saturate they're still an important signal for model development.

We think the situation is similar here - one the challenges is aligning the benchmark with the function of the models. Genomic benchmarks for gLMs and RNA foundation models have been very resistant to staturation.

I think in NLP the problem is that they are victims of their own success where the models can be overfit to particular benchmarks really fast.

In genomics we're a bit behind. A good paper on this is DartEval where they provide levels of complexity https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.05430

in RNA the models work much better than DNA prediction but it's key to have benchmarks to measure progress.
by weinzierl | 2025-08-22 22:02:35+00:00
"ß as SS that's an error in Unicode"

It's not. Uppercase of ß has always been SS.

Before we had a separate codepoint in Unicode this caused problems with round-tripping between upper and lower case. So Unicode rightfully introduced a separate codepoint specifically for that use case in 2008.

This inspired designers to design a glyph for that codepoint looking similar to ß. Nothing wrong with that.

Some liked the idea and it got some foothold, so in 2017, the Council for German Orthography allowed it as an acceptable variant.

Maybe it will win, maybe not, but for now in standard German the uppercase of ß is still SS and Unicode rightfully reflects that.
by cornholio | 2025-08-22 22:02:39+00:00
"Medicare for all willing to pay 10% of taxable income" seems like a way to sneak universal healthcare through the political backdoor. It will initially have a funding shortfall due to adverse selection (it will attract primarily people with low incomes, high risks or both) but you would gradually move all public subsidies towards that program and remove all incentives, tax credits and rate protections from those who choose the free market option, and when just a minority still hangs on to the private providers, you make the 10% health tax mandatory to all.

The way I see it, you will never wrestle away the trillion dollar bone from the mouth of the US healthcare industry, but you can make it wither away indirectly by creating a better universal system and dismantling the status quo. It's not like Europeans are forbidden the option of private insurance, it's just that it can't take hold and grow to control a significant part of the spending because everyone can see it's not the solution that will save you when you will get really really sick.
by moefh | 2025-08-22 22:04:15+00:00
I'm not GP, but I think you're completely missing their point.

The problem they're describing happens because file names (in Linux and Windows) are not text: in Linux (so Android) they're arbitrary sequences of bytes, and in Windows they're arbitrary sequences of UTF-16 code points not necessarily forming valid scalar values (for example, surrogates can be present alone).

And yet, a lot of programs ignore that and insist on storing file names as Unicode strings, which mostly works (because users almost always name files by inputting text) until somehow a file gets written as a sequence of bytes that doesn't map to a valid string (i.e., it's not UTF-8 or UTF-16, depending on the system).

So what's probably happening in GP's case is that they managed somehow to get a file with a non-UTF-8-byte-sequence name in Android, and subsequently every App that tries to deal with that file uses an API that converts the file name to a string containing U+FFFD ("replacement character") when the invalid UTF-8 byte is found. So when GP tries to delete the file, the App will try to delete the file name with the U+FFFD character, which will fail because that file doesn't exist.

GP is saying that showing the U+FFFD character is fine, but the App should understand that the actual file name is not UTF-8 and behave accordingly (i.e. use the original sequence-of-bytes filename when trying to delete it).

Note that this is harder than it should be. For example, with the old Java API (from java.io[1]) that's impossible: if you get a `File` object from listing a directory and ask if it exists, you'll get `false` for GP's file, because the `File` object internally stores the file name as a Java string. To get the correct result, you have to use the new API (from java.nio.file[2]) using `Path` objects.

[1] https://developer.android.com/reference/java/io/File

[2] https://developer.android.com/reference/java/nio/file/Path
by lenerdenator | 2025-08-22 22:04:33+00:00
Missouri has the option of yanking your license [0]

... which kinda makes it hard to drive to work to get the paycheck that you need to pay the fine, at least legally. If you get caught it's a misdemeanor [1]

[0]https://dor.mo.gov/faq/driver-license/fact-nrvc.html [1]https://law.justia.com/codes/missouri/title-xix/chapter-302/...
by PapaPalpatine | 2025-08-22 22:05:23+00:00
I don’t know about advanced Unicode features… but I use them all the time as a backend developer to validate data input.

I want to make sure that the password is between a given number of characters. Same with phone numbers, email addresses, etc.

This seems to have always been known as the length of the string.

This thread sounds like a bunch of scientists trying to make a simple concept a lot harder to understand.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-22 22:05:26+00:00
> Vanguard did end up banning those people eventually, since it can see what devices you have plugged in.

Only because the makers of those DMA cards do a bad job hiding themselves. They either use vague, recognisable names, or don't act like the devices they're spoofing.

The moment a cheat developer manages to reprogram an actual SSD (especially a common model), hardware detection like that becomes near impossible.
by Mawr | 2025-08-22 22:05:56+00:00
Yep, most of what the author complains about are trivial issues you could find in any language. For contrast, some real, deep-rooted language design problems with Go are:

- Zero values, lack of support for constructors

- Poor handling of null

- Mutability by default

- A static type system not designed with generics in mind

- `int` is not arbitrary precision [1]

- The built-in array type (slices) has poorly considered ownership semantics [2]

Notable mentions:

- No sum types

- No string interpolation

[1]: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19623

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39477821
by jimt1234 | 2025-08-22 22:07:24+00:00
> The Trump administration is hoping that by exerting control over Intel, it can begin dictating conditions to Intel's customers, thus the tech community at large.

This was my TDS-reaction as well. But, honestly, I feel like the "tech community" has moved on from Intel/x86 anyway. Or, at the very least, this move will accelerate that migration. ARM for the win!
by hintymad | 2025-08-22 22:07:44+00:00
There used to be a popular meme claiming that anything private tends to get cheaper over time, while anything regulated or run by the government keeps getting more expensive. But is that really true for all goods? If it is, then why do so many countries choose to adopt universal healthcare systems with tightly regulated insurance?

Maybe the more relevant question is: why is healthcare so expensive in the United States? It can’t just be because the U.S. is more advanced or developed. After all, one of the hallmarks of an advanced country should be making essential services affordable, if not cheaper.
by pixelatedindex | 2025-08-22 22:08:05+00:00
> the US expects China to invade Taiwan and this will kill TSMC in the process.

Would it though? The TSMC foundries are pretty much in every continent. Are they just going to stop operating if this happens? Because that seems akin to killing a golden goose.

Also what is up with Global Foundries? I don’t hear a peep about them.
Agent Native Remote Filesystem?
by dannyighsu | 2025-08-22 22:08:16+00:00
I'm considering migrating my current agent stack (plumbing built on Postgres + blob storage) to a filesystem for access to CLI tools. Does anyone know of a good solution that lets you do this at scale, ideally as close to out of the box as possible? The agent itself could be migrated to a CLI runtime (right now it's run out of an async Python server).
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-08-22 22:09:54+00:00
China has coal and not much gas. You can abstract away from simplistic comparisons by calculating the CO2 per KWh for the entire grid mix.

China is at 493 CO2 per kWh over the last 12 months.

The US is much richer and has easy access to gas and has 444 over the same period.

Germany, the laggard in western Europe is 314

Stats from electricitymaps:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-NW-WACM/12mo/monthly...
by dingnuts | 2025-08-22 22:10:44+00:00
is that why he's talking up Dyson Spheres in interviews? the guy is a lunatic and conman, either completely insane or evil, no other option. here's the stupid quote:

Sam Altman: I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time.

Theo Von: Do you really?

Altman: But I don’t know, because maybe we put them in space. Like, maybe we build a big Dyson sphere around the solar system and say, “Hey, it actually makes no sense to put these on Earth.”
by palata | 2025-08-22 22:10:45+00:00
> The last two providers offered true end-to-end encryption

This is not quite right. The only offer e2ee if you send an email to someone on the same provider (e.g. ProtonMail to ProtonMail). If you write to someone using Gmail, it's not e2ee.

IMHO this kind of e2ee is interesting for companies (because every employee is on the same provider, and it's better to have the internal communications on ProtonMail than shared with Google on Gmail), but for a personal email it doesn't matter so much.

What's really important is to have a custom domain so that you are not stuck with one provider.