MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by delusional | 2025-08-24 18:20:13+00:00
Small languages, especially languages without an organization behind them, don't have anybody to manage the oddities of the humans creating it. Python had that one core developer that was banned by the oversight board. There was quite a bit of drama around that, but it was buried in the boring Bureaucracy of it all.

I'd be surprised if some of the Java developers wouldn't be assholes or weird, just statistically. The difference there is that you don't interact with the individual developers. Oracle handle all of that internally.
by GeoAtreides | 2025-08-24 18:20:21+00:00
??? explosives? in mud? (well, clay)?!

tunnels are bored depending on the soil, length, diameter. Most projects I have seen use TBMs and the New Austrian Tunneling Method. Explosives are quite the minority (not many tunnels are in solid rock), even the Gotthard tunnels were dug with TBMs
by politelemon | 2025-08-24 18:21:01+00:00
Their excellent backward compatibility and longevity is both their strongest point and their eventual weakness. Part of it is likely because the same familiar desktop environment is also able to act as a server environment, and so it's had a huge sticking power.

I'd like to think that Linux as a platform for running such systems would have gotten a mention but it seems that BBC is unaware it exists.
by forgetfulness | 2025-08-24 18:21:08+00:00
It was developer experience that precipitated this fallout, a language usually needs to be growing in user base for the developer experience to improve as people complain and tackle problems they encounter.

The old linked thread had some prominent figure saying “but just do <inconvenient thing>” in response to every issue, if the language isn’t growing, only people accustomed to the inconveniences stick around.

So, I’d say it used to be Clojure, but now I doubt there is one.
by neilv | 2025-08-24 18:21:25+00:00
> “Y Combinator — and the larger venture capital community — have long been hesitant to back app-based businesses that were poor investments due to the Apple Tax,”

This could be good, if it encourages people to re-learn the value of open standards, like Web is supposed to be, rather than helping to perpetuate the proprietary app stores.

Also, I think it's noteworthy that, once a company gets customers locked into a proprietary app store, they show their true extremely greedy, abusive, and indifferent side to third-party developers. No matter how warm and fuzzy a brand they craft for consumers.

Are Bay Area libertarian techbros ironically going to try to rely on government regulation to keep the awful proprietary app stores tolerable, or will they rediscover what industry has known for decades about the value of open standards, and direct their efforts consistent with that?
by mastax | 2025-08-24 18:22:02+00:00
I think I agree with you broadly, but to make the counter argument:

A big part of the reason why nuclear power isn’t cost-effective nowadays is because those costs have been at least partially internalized. The US federal government has stopped producing cheap nuclear fuel by disassembling nuclear weapons. Nuclear plants need to pay for the cost of storing their spent fuel on site indefinitely. Plant operators need to pay into a federal disaster insurance pool.
by capitainenemo | 2025-08-24 18:22:43+00:00
(oh, I should note that the 2nd link uses nth selector to apply any rules pseudo-randomly, not just tiles) ... and, hm, I guess you could "seed" the pseudorandom nth selectors if your pages had unique attribute selectors, by adjusting the primes and offsets. Like with drupal you could do different ones based on digits of the nid in the body tag.
by alt227 | 2025-08-24 18:23:44+00:00
The biggest capacity HD available today is 30TB.

17PB = about 567 of those drives... being totally filled... per day.

I was hoping somebody would come and say this is a simple spelling error or something.

The cost of the drives alone seems astronomical, let alone the logistics of the data center keeping up with storing that much data.

EDIT: I have just realised that they are probably only processing at this speed, rather than storing it, can anyone confirm if they store all the logs they process?
by kcplate | 2025-08-24 18:24:11+00:00
The Global Health Security and Biodefense Directorate inside the NSC was disbanded 18 months before Covid emerged. It was established by the Obama administration as a response to the Ebola outbreak. What’s your point exactly?

I know people point to that in some sort of accusatory suggestion regarding Covid, but to my knowledge no one has provided any definitive proof that the pandemic would have been better or worse for the US if that council was around in 2020. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that the US response would have been different if it existed or the that the pandemic would have been prevented. It was re-established under Biden, but Biden’s coronavirus approach didn’t seem to be measurably better than Trump’s, in fact it was worse. They pretty much continued and doubled down on the same wrongheaded approach that Trump was doing.
by cowboylowrez | 2025-08-24 18:24:46+00:00
sure sure, except llms. I mean its valid and all bringing up tried and true maxims that we all should know regarding software, but whens the last time the ssl guys were happy with a fix that "has a chance of working, but a chance of not working."

defense in depth is to prevent one layer failure from getting to the next, you know, exploit chains etc. Failure in a layer is a failure, not statistically expected behavior. we fix bugs. what we need to do is treat llms as COMPLETELY UNTRUSTED user input as has been pointed out here and elsewhere time and again.

you reply to me like I need to be lectured, so consider me a dumb student in your security class. what am I missing here?
by rootsudo | 2025-08-24 18:24:53+00:00
True on the Government ID document but most of the times the portal to activate would allow for any sort of numbers as long as it was in a proper format - whether or not it was valid.

These allow for self activation, have a lockout of 5 failed attempts or so and can be done via sim card codes (not SMS, but you interact with a program on the simcard and low level carrier services.)
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-24 18:25:03+00:00
> Concurrency requires locks. Arc<T> is a global lock on references

Concurrency does not require locks. There’s entire classes of lock free and wait free algorithms. Arc<T> is also not a lock - it uses atomics to manage the reference counts and no operation on an Arc needs to wait on a lock (it is a lock-free container).

> “A lot” of Java objects don’t use synchronized. I’d even bet that 95-99% of them don’t.

Almost all objects that are used in a concurrent context will likely feature synchronized, at least historically. That’s why Hashtable was split into HashMap (unsynchronized) and ConcurrentHashMap (no longer using synchronized). Thats why you have StringBuffer which was redone into StringBuilder.
by ec109685 | 2025-08-24 18:25:07+00:00
The fact that every single system prompt has been leaked despite guidelines to the LLM that it should protect it, shows that without “physical” barriers, you are aren’t providing any security guarantees.

A user of chrome can know, barring bugs that are definitively fixable, that a comment on a reddit post can’t read information from their bank.

If an LLM with user controlled input has access to both domains, it will never be secure until alignment becomes perfect, which there is no current hope to achieve.

And if you think about a human in the driver seat instead of an LLM trying to make these decisions, it’d be easy for a sophisticated attacker to trick humans to leak data, so it’s probably impossible to align it this way.
by sireat | 2025-08-24 18:25:31+00:00
While I do have multiple OpenRouter accounts(personal and organizational) I did not even look into concurrent calls - it was sequential.

The job was set on Friday and ready on Monday. On average it was about 5k tokens (documents ranging from 1k to 200k in size) and only about 10 tokens out.

Average response was about 1.5 seconds ~ 40 hours for full set.

I really did some heavy prompt testing to limit output.

Even then every few thousand queries you'd get some double token responses. That is Gemini would respond in duplicate - ie Daisy Daisy.
by cyberax | 2025-08-24 18:26:05+00:00
> This truly is getting quite sad. Who cares if the 1 in 36 year event is solved with fossil fuels, biofuels, synfuels, hydrogen or whatever?

Because it requires maintaining costly infrastructure that needs to provide more than 100% of normal generation for these cases.

And even without considering _extreme_ events, normal weather variations still require multi-day storage capacity which is _still_ prohibitively expensive.

> The study of course did not specify what level of renewables they implemented. What would a 20% overbuild lead to? 50%? It would still cost a fraction compared to new built nuclear power.

Renewables need 10x (1000%) overbuild to ride through Dunkelflaute in Germany. And that's a conservative estimate.

> But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.

Why are Greens always lying? https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20240118-france-reclaims-title-...

France had a rough 2 years when they took offline multiple plants due to deferred maintenance and bad luck. Now it's back to normal.
by godelski | 2025-08-24 18:26:35+00:00
For sure some can. I mean the LLMs are susceptible to priming. The OpenAI demo had an error in the airplane wing part because of that. It is a very common mistake (included in many textbooks) but the LLM repeated it. More importantly, I saw someone be able to get it to give the right answer without spoiling it through the prompt.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-08-24 18:26:39+00:00
For what it's worth, utilities do care quite a bit about leaks (it's service they are providing which they can't bill for!) and use various testing apparatus to locate leaky parts of underground systems for repair and replacement.

Considering the difficulty and cost of repairing underground anything, most of which will be there for many many decades, it's never going to be perfect, but there's a lot of resources that do go into improving this.
by jrflowers | 2025-08-24 18:26:45+00:00
But you don’t think that, fundamentally, giving software that can hallucinate the ability to use your credit card to buy plane tickets, is a bad idea?

It kind of seems like the only way to make sure a model doesn’t get exploited and empty somebody’s bank account would be “We’re not building that feature at all. Agentic AI stuff is fundamentally incompatible with sensible security policies and practices, so we are not putting it in our software in any way”
by jijijijij | 2025-08-24 18:27:03+00:00
DNS resolution is absolutely not the same as advertisement (and murder not the same as copyright infringement.....). You only deal with DNS after forming the intention to go somewhere. DNS is meant to be impartial infrastructure. Since DNS blocking can be done completely opaquely (to most people anyway), it's more like gaslighting, really. I don't think most people want some entity to covertly define their reality.

If someone did copyright infringement (according to your country) on HN (which almost certainly happened), how do you feel about your browser suddenly telling you "There is no such thing as HN!", while the site is doing just fine?
by freshtake | 2025-08-24 18:27:53+00:00
An interesting debate!

A few things to consider:

1. This is one example. How many other attempts did the person try that failed to be useful, accurate, coherent? The author is an OpenAI employee IIUC, so it begs this question. Sora's demos were amazing until you tried it, and realized it took 50 attempts to get a usable clip.

2. The author noted that humans had updated their own research in April 2025 with an improved solution. For cases where we detect signs of superior behavior, we need to start publishing the thought process (reasoning steps, inference cycles, tools used, etc.). Otherwise it's impossible to know whether this used a specialty model, had access to the more recent paper, or in other ways got lucky. Without detailed proof it's becoming harder to separate legitimate findings from marketing posts (not suggesting this specific case was a pure marketing post)

3. Points 1 and 2 would help with reproducibility, which is important for scientific rigor. If we give Claude the same tools and inputs, will it perform just as well? This would help the community understand if GPT-5 is novel, or if the novelty is in how the user is prompting it
by sarchertech | 2025-08-24 18:28:00+00:00
> are all usually quite polished given the timespan

The open secret is that they might not start coding or building assets until the start time, but they have spent a lot of time thinking about the ideas before then (even when the "theme" isn't known before hand people tend to make ideas fit theme with tweaks), which just speaks to the "code is not the bottleneck" thesis.
by McAlpine5892 | 2025-08-24 18:28:42+00:00
> To update today's government to be an Apple Store like experience

Please, no. There are few things worse as a consumer than going to the Apple Store.

The overall design is…lacking. It’s fine for a regular website one might stumble upon. For a demo of America’s prowess in design it’s pretty bad and bland. The GIF loop (as mentioned by another commenter) is borked. The text goes to the edges of my screen. The italicized blurb towards the bottom has weird commas and capitalization. The copy just reads weird too.

18F walked so that we could, uh, regress back to crawling around on the floor babbling?
by MisterMower | 2025-08-24 18:29:15+00:00
From the Typhoid Fever page on Wikipedia:

“Industrialization contributed greatly to the elimination of typhoid fever, as it eliminated the public health hazards associated with having horse manure in public streets, which led to a large number of flies, which are vectors of many pathogens, including Salmonella spp.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoid_fever

I appreciate the compliment, but no, I’m not an LLM, just an ordinary guy who has more understanding of these issues than you do.

Here’s a wild idea: fact check the stuff you claim I’m making up before you make a fool of yourself.

I think this conversation is over. You’re clearly an angry, closed minded person. Have a nice day.
by awalsh128 | 2025-08-24 18:29:19+00:00
I find these moments to be teaching a person to learn to fish. Not only tell them how to get the answer, but then ask questions to see if they put in the work needed before coming to you. If it persists, maybe address it directly in a one on one meeting. If it's systemic across different people, maybe there is a documentation or organizational problem. Sometimes it's training the person to help themselves, other times it's seeing things that are broken that prevent them from helping themselves. I see this especially in highly complex systems where there are large and multiple teams, and the person needs to be able to work across these areas.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-08-24 18:29:29+00:00
I think it was an agenda years in the making. I saw the groundwork being laid for this in 2021 and it somehow survived a general election and an entirely new government with a different political alignment. Ive seen other laws like this. It was nothing to do with the politics or the politicians, it has to do with civil servants who are working with their own agenda. Just like yes prime minister.
by ghaff | 2025-08-24 18:29:37+00:00
You have your system/routine, TSA-Pre/etc., probably a club membership. At some point, I also largely said to hell with driving into the airport in most cases and just got a car service; no one pushed back. Whereas in a long ago job I'd sometimes use a shared van service which was... less good.

Still, as you say, some bad travel stories with delays and missed connections but you're better prepared to roll with those punches.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-08-24 18:29:47+00:00
Will chatgpt be able to do this after people stop creating the content it trained on? AI is an entropy machine. The people making the content that AI needed to ingest in order to be useful...will be fired because AI will take their jobs. Those people will stop posting and AI will be stuck in 2025. And so will every industry AI touches and absorbs. 3d tools will have to stay at 2025 levels to stay AI compatible. No more artistic development (sure 1 or 2 home hobby people will break though, but nothing like the hundreds of thousands of works in every niche we have today), no more job development, no more tools development. AI is an entropy machine.
by OskarS | 2025-08-24 18:29:55+00:00
Several! You're correct that Lisps is the most famous, and there's also languages like Erlang that have this as a core functionality. But it's also used in things like game engines for C/C++. You do have your "updateAndRenderFrame()" function in a dynamic library, having it take a pointer to the full game state as an argument. When you want to reload, you recompile your dynamic library, and the main loop can swap out the implementation, and the game keeps running with the new code. I don't see a reason why you couldn't do this in Rust, though I imagine it's trickier.
by rafaelmn | 2025-08-24 18:30:26+00:00
Is it really 2x or is it 2x at max load ? Since, as you say, you're not peggig the CPU - would be interesting to compare power usage on a task basis and the duration. Could be that the 3D cache is really adding that much overhead even to idle CPU.

Anyway I've never regretted buying a faster CPU (GPU is a different story, burned some money there on short time window gains that were marginally relevant), but I did regret saving on it (going with M4 air vs M4 pro)
by yorwba | 2025-08-24 18:30:48+00:00
That comparison doesn't make sense. FISC can only be a rubber stamp because only the US government can bring a case before the court. Any rando can sue German ISPs for not fulfilling their DNS blocking duties under copyright law, but certainly not just any rando can get their DNS blocking request rubberstamped.

The policy change also doesn't create a new court. The CUII is a voluntary cooperation whose members exchange information about sites they think they're required to block and agree to all block them simultaneously. Because this structurally looks like an illegal cartel, there used to be a review step by the Federal Network Agency Bundesnetzagentur to make sure that no illegal cartel things were going on.

The Bundesnetzagentur felt that this wasn't really part of their core duties, especially considering that there was a perfectly fine court system ready to use, so they asked the CUII to find another way of not looking like an illegal cartel.

Now the CUII will wait for one of their ISP members to get sued, in regular civil court, and if the ISP is ordered to perform a block, the CUII will put it on their list and the other ISPs will follow suit without having to redo the legal proceedings for each of them.

This change might very well end up increasing the number sites that get blocked, not due to rubberstamping, but because losing a civil suit is less risky than accidentally doing illegal cartel stuff and incurring a correspondingly large fine.
by MrGinkgo | 2025-08-24 18:31:04+00:00
The way to fight it without coming off that way is by advocating for a form of age check that doesn't require personal information, which I haven't heard any really water-tight suggestions yet.

If their real interest was in protecting children, they'd make a free, publicly accessible age blocking system that parents could choose to opt into, that isn't thrust upon all citizens at once
by marssaxman | 2025-08-24 18:31:12+00:00
> spending time at the airport is fun

People's preferences really do vary widely, don't they?

There's nowhere I feel less safe than a security checkpoint, and nowhere I feel less relaxed than a high-pressure commerce zone clamoring for attention I don't want to give and trying to squeeze me out of money I don't want to spend.

But there are people who voluntarily go to Las Vegas, on purpose, because they think they will enjoy it: so, we are clearly not all alike.
by CRConrad | 2025-08-24 18:31:41+00:00
> The goal of ANY software engineer worth their salt should be minimizing errors and defects in their end product.

...to the extent possible within their project budget. Otherwise the product would — as GP already pointed out — not exist at all, because the project wouldn't be undertaken in the first place.

> This goal can be reached by learning to write Rust; practice makes perfect.

Pretty sure it could (at least) equally well be reached by learning to write Ada.

This one-note Rust cult is really getting rather tiresome.
by nextos | 2025-08-24 18:32:42+00:00
The new x13 Gen 6 AMD with a U-series CPU and, ideally, configured with the 70Whr battery looks very nice. Should be less than 1 kg, similar to a MacBook Air.

I've used the previous generation, and it's possible to get 10 hours of use on battery with some tweaks.

It's a very popular model, so it's well tested and everything should just work with the latest kernel.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-08-24 18:33:10+00:00
Oyster came in as travelcard only, and was valid on all in zone transport including the pre-tfl North London Line etc.

It wasn’t valid to say Watford though.

When PAYG was introduced it was not valid on trains (other than a couple of exceptions)

But You’re right, Oyster PAYG came in the day TfL took over from silverlink - 11 November 2007. It was 2010 before it came out across the whole travelcard area on rail services. That was because the other TOCs didn’t like the idea and felt they’d lose out on revenue.
by sokoloff | 2025-08-24 18:33:14+00:00
To give them enough money to buy that $30 meal as a personal expense, you need to pay them around $50 in marginal comp expenses.

It can be a win for both sides for the employees to work an extra 30-90 minutes and have some team bonding and to feel like they’re getting a good deal. (Source: I did this for years at a place that comp’d dinner if you worked more than 8 hours AND past 6 PM; we’d usually get more than half the team staying for the “free” food.)
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-08-24 18:33:19+00:00
Who is going to create the content to train AI past 2025? If I don't have a job in 3d, I'm not posting to my 3d tools blog. If I can't sell classes on 3d tools, I'm not posting to my 3d tools blog nor creating classes for 3d tools. In fact, if I'm working a home depot job, a second part time hours job, and driving uber, all so I can try to live, I'm not posting ANYTHING useful. I'm too busy trying to survive. The 'posting useful/insightful things' in my spare time ecosystem requires a social class with the hours/energy/desire to do that.

Education has a shelf life. AI needs the pre-AI world in order for AI to train and be useful, but AI also wants to replace the pre-AI world with a new AI world. So the world will need to freeze in place between the two.

AI in an entropy machine.
by FireBeyond | 2025-08-24 18:34:29+00:00
When you are overseas you realize how mediocre things are here. You can make claims about excess and such, but even business class lounges like Qatar in Doha - chef made meals done restaurant style, with a wide menu, beautiful shower suites you can book a 45 minute slot (for free), etc, and very comfortable chairs and a huge amount of space…
by x775 | 2025-08-24 18:34:36+00:00
> Maple trees need to consume around 50 litres of water per day. Since street trees can’t get much of this from rainwater, which falls on concrete and drains into the city’s sewers, Poirier says the most likely explanation is that it is coming from Montreal’s leaky pipes, which lose 500 million litres of water per day.

I feel like this is burying the lede.

What can be done to reduce leakage?