MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kingstnap | 2025-08-14 19:34:13+00:00
It's a classic problem.

The lack of guardrails makes things more useful. This increases the value for discerning users, which in turn means it's Meta's benefits as having more valuable offerings.

But then you have all these dillusional and / or mentally ill people who shoot themselves in the foot. This harm is externalized onto their families and the government for having to now deal with more people with unchecked problems.

We need to get better at evaluating and restricting the foot guns people have access to unless they can prove their lucidity. Partly, I think families need to be more careful about this stuff and keep checks on what they are doing on their phones.

Partly, I'm thinking some sort of technical solution might work. Text classification can be used to see that someone might have a delusional personality and should be cut off. This could be done "out of band" so as not to make the models themselves worse.

Frankly, being Facebook and with all their advertisement experience, they probably already have a VERY good idea of how to pinpoint vulnerable or mentally ill.
by Arainach | 2025-08-14 19:34:27+00:00
>involve zooming in on it's most-controversial aspects, in a vacuum, without addressing the core principles and how they're completely necessary for delivering software at scale, warranting it's status as a seminal work.

It's not "zooming in" to point out that the first and second rules in Bob's work are "functions should be absurdly tiny, 4 lines or less" and that in the real world that results in unreadable garbage. This isn't digging through and looking for edge cases - all of the rules are fundamentally flawed.

Sure, if you summarize the whole book as "keep things small with a single purpose" that's not an awful message, but that's not the book. Other books have put that point better without all of the problems. The book is full of detailed specific instructions, and almost all of the specifics are garbage that causes more bad than good in the real world.

Clean Code has no nuance, only dogma, and that's a big problem (a point the second article I linked calls out and discusses in depth). There are some good practices in it, but basically all of its code is a mistake that is harmful to a new engineer to read.
by therein | 2025-08-14 19:34:29+00:00
I don't know why you are downvoted. And even more disappointingly, it is interesting how easily people overlook the fact that this is happening in lockstep across the globe, obviously the goal is to deanonymize the internet.

I can't wait for the next generation that will enjoy "nerding out" on how to best patrol every neighborhood with drones.

Let's put NFC tags on everyone at birth, we can then nerd out harder.
by amadeuspagel | 2025-08-14 19:34:33+00:00
Istanbul has a card that you can use to pay for some things like public transit and have to use to pay for public bathrooms (because that's so cheap that if you paid with credit card, the fee would more expensive than the payment).

Maybe this is a way to break the credit card duopoly: offer something (like public bathrooms) that requires your card, and then try to expand it from there.
by atonse | 2025-08-14 19:34:33+00:00
Sorry just to specify, it was more like a 20 amp I think (I will verify), it wasn't like I was going way higher.

I don't remember whether he ran another wire though. It was 5 years ago. Maybe I should not be spreading this anecdote without complete info.

He was a legit electrician that I've worked with for years, specifically because he doesn't cut corners. So I'm sure he did The Right Thing™.
by tptacek | 2025-08-14 19:34:35+00:00
Private tutors are much more expensive and not uniformly effective. Math Academy is an extremely low-risk bet for parents of math students (you'll know before the first usage period whether it's working out). I like the business model here a lot --- I also just think it's like something concocted in a mad scientists lab to annoy HN people, who always have a really hard time intuiting market/pricing segmentation.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-08-14 19:35:04+00:00
> WSJ is shilling for companies like Blackrock and other private equity

95% of WSJ is shilling for corporations. They're the most out-of-touch rag to currently exist.

How many times have they blamed "Millennials" (While somehow still believing that 20-30 year olds are Millennials) for businesses failing, rather than examining how businesses have enshittified their product or simply failed to adapt to changing market demands?
by bko | 2025-08-14 19:35:04+00:00
Happiness does not mean good and fulfilling.

Having a family is hard. For instance, people with children are consistently less "happy" than their childless peers, yet many choose to have children knowing that. If you optimize for happiness you may be optimizing for selfish empty shallow existence. I'm sure you can take a drug to make you "happy" but that seems foolish.
by skybrian | 2025-08-14 19:35:14+00:00
I think it’s more about not taking posts out of context. Communities need boundaries between them. Substack and other blogging tools are good this way.

For Bluesky, the problem is that the replies to someone you follow can be pretty bad. (Official Bluesky posts are an example of this.) People can filter them individually, but it’s not the same as a blog with good moderation.

I don’t think I could do a whole lot if the replies to one of my Bluesky posts were bad?
by mahmoud-almadi | 2025-08-14 19:35:25+00:00
Right now we are taking the policies we signed with our LLM vendors as a verification of a zero data retention policy. We did also get their SOC 2 Type II reports and they showed no significant security vulnerabilities that will impact our usage of their service. We're doing our best to deliver value while taking as many security precautions as possible: our own data retention policy, encrypting data at rest and in transit, row-level security, SOC 2 Type I and HIPAA compliance (in observation for Type II), secret managers. We have other measures we plan to take like de-identifying screenshots before sending them up. Would love to get your thoughts on any other security measures you would recommend!
by mzhaase | 2025-08-14 19:35:25+00:00
So in Germany we have an ID card with a PIN, NFC and a government app. Website owners can request to be able to use this feature. They then get a certificate from the government that has the fields they are allowed to request stored within it.

Websites can request data from the user by sending that certificate, it opens the app, it shows you the categories of data to be send, you hold your ID card to the phone, enter the PIN, and the certificate is uploaded to the ID card which verifies it. If its valid, the ID sends back the data that is specified in the certificate.

You then get presented with exactly the data that is going to be sent to the website. You can then agree or disagree. So far that is only used to log in to government websites.

This way the government does not know which sites you visit, and you only send your age to the website.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-14 19:36:12+00:00
> common pitfall of techno-idealists

Common pitfall? It’s why these techno-idealists are loudmouthed on the internet, but don’t get respect anywhere politically. If you want to gain ground politically, you need to at least acknowledge what the problem is, or is perceived to be, and offer a real solution. “Nope we can’t do that because of this 0.1% edge case” doesn’t qualify. “Apple should just dump all schematics online regardless of what China might do” doesn’t qualify. “The internet is great at it is, and your political concerns are invalid” doesn’t qualify.
by ethersteeds | 2025-08-14 19:36:13+00:00
I'm of the "only way to win is not to play" mind with this exercise. I would peel off 10-20 million to eliminate lifetime financial concerns for my circle, and immediately go MacKenzie Scott on the rest, trying to put it towards maximum societal benefit.

Need to get that set up before the yacht brochures start arriving in the mail. Before the dark whispers take hold...
by kwie | 2025-08-14 19:36:50+00:00
Idling someone scapegoating Pigeoning Leviathan - bystander victim passive aggressor Kanye west “beg forgiveness” Swipe swipe swipe swipe Religion, culture, secularism leviathans on ppl (Beg) Illuminati “We kill” Myside bias - gr We dont be deep be hot Tropes
by judofyr | 2025-08-14 19:36:57+00:00
Here's a few workflows that I really enjoy in jj:

- While I'm working on something I can do `jj desc` and start writing the commit message. Every edit is automatically being added to this change.

- My work tree is dirty and I quickly want to switch to a clean slate. In Git: (1) either do `git stash` where I'm definitely is going to forget about it or (2) do `git commit -a -m wip && git switch -c some-random-branch-name`. In jj: `jj new @-`. That's it! If I run `jj log` then my previous change shows up. No need to come up with arbitrary names. It's so refreshing to move changes around.

- I'm working on a stack of changes and sometimes need to make edits to different parts. In Git (1): Each change is its own branch and I need to switch around and do a bunch of rebases to keep them in sync. In Git (2): I have one branch with multiple commits. I make changes towards the final state and then do `git rebase -i` to move them upwards to where they belong. Biggest downside: I'm not actually testing the changes at the point where they end up and I'm not guaranteed it makes sense. In jj: I do `jj new <CHANGE>` to make changes further up in the stack. Once I'm happy with it I do `jj squash` and every dependent change is automatically rebased on top.

- And finally: I can solve merge conflicts when I want to! If any rebasing leads to a merge conflict I don't have to deal with it right away.
by sethhochberg | 2025-08-14 19:37:19+00:00
Typically with this sort of thing the way it really works is that you, the startup, use a service provider (like OpenAI) who publish their own external audit reports (like a SOC 2 Type 2) and then the SOC 2 auditors will see that the service provider company has a policy related to how it handles customer data for customers covered by Agreement XYZ, and require evidence to prove that the service provider company is following its policies related to not using that data for undeclared purposes or whatever else.

Audit rights are all about who has the most power in a given situation. Just like very few customers are big enough to go to AWS and say "let us audit you", you're not going to get that right with a vendor like Anthropic or OpenAI unless you're certifiably huge, and even then it will come with lots of caveats. Instead, you trust the audit results they publish and implicitly are trusting the auditors they hire.

Whether that is sufficient level of trust is really up to the customer buying the service. There's a reason many companies sell on-prem hosted solutions or even support airgapped deployments, because no level of external trust is quite enough. But for many other companies and industries, some level of trust in a reputable auditor is acceptable.
by _swfb | 2025-08-14 19:38:24+00:00
Outside of some jobs requiring LinkedIn, I've never actually heard of anyone being declined for not having social media.

I haven't had a Facebook account since 2015, I don't have an Instagram and I hadn't updated my Twitter for years until I deleted it (about two hours ago). As far as I'm aware, a lack of social media presence hasn't been a factor.

Only social media I have now is Hacker News.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-14 19:38:48+00:00
Patents are literally for rent-seeking.

They are explicitly not to maximize the number of people who can benefit from a product in the short term, but precisely to limit it so the inventor can make more money.

The idea being that in the long run the inventions it incentivizes outweigh the people who are limited from benefiting in the short term.

Judges aren't in the position to weigh societal benefits in each individual patent case. Your framing implies that cost-benefit tradeoff. But that's not how it works. The only question is whether a product infringes or not.
by sandworm101 | 2025-08-14 19:38:52+00:00
When I was at university, one of my classmates was a cop. He was petrified because that day, due to schedule issues, he had all his cop stuff locked in the trunk of his personal car. At the time, having that sort of weaponry on campus was a big deal. He would have been better off comming to class in full uniform (the exception for cops would not apply if he wasnt on duty or at least in uniform.) He knew what might happen if someone discovered his handgun/taser/mace was on campus.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-08-14 19:38:55+00:00
At 9 I was playing with a cardpunch machine and a mainframe client terminal that displayed news and stocks.

The former was in a DC police admin office. The latter was in the History and Tech Museum on the Mall. I routinely wandered DC on my own (after riding in with my mom to work).

Tack it on to the long and forever-growing list of things we've taken away from kids.
by giovannibonetti | 2025-08-14 19:38:58+00:00
Roc [1] is the language I think does the best trade-off among high-level instructions, design simplicity, performance, and pragmatism to handle real-world tasks.

It started as a purely functional language, but the authors are adding some escape hatches, such as imperative for loops, for cases where the functional approach is too complex (e.g., implementing quicksort). And it is pragmatic like Go when it comes to simplicity, compiling fast, and running fast.

AI programming and a compiler that catches bugs through good language design make a great match.

[1] https://www.roc-lang.org/
by bko | 2025-08-14 19:39:10+00:00
Happiness is a positive emotion, pleasure, or contentment. It tends to be episodic and reactive, arising from enjoyable experiences, satisfying desires, or reaching short-term goals.

I am "happy" watching Netflix (smile). I am not happy on a long vacation with screaming children (frown).

If you were to optimize for smile - frown, you would do more Netflix, less children. In fact childless people report themselves much happier than people with children.
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-14 19:39:11+00:00
> Google Pixel is supposed to ship a more complete desktop in Android 16 QPR1. Also has a Linux VM.

I'm actually really excited for this and am watching it closely, although I believe right now it's limited to Debian? It might be the thing that finally tempts me out of iOS & the whole Apple ecosystem.

I want the one device dream, but I want to be able to run my own OS on it, even if it's in a VM for desktop mode, so I can bring my arch+hyprland setup with me. It can run Android in "phone" mode that's fine, then when I hook it up to my dock or a kb+mouse it'll launch arch.

I won't go all in on it though until it looks like Google is committed for the long haul. I don't want to switch "ecosystems" and rely on it only for them to kill it by Android 18 or whatever.
by zosima | 2025-08-14 19:39:24+00:00
The beautifully named 32024R1689, aka AI Act, prohibits a lot of random stuff. It definitely makes many AI efforts into a legal minefield. It does not just cover live facial recognition in public spaces, which I personally could live without.

"Private parties" refer to non-governmental entities, such as individuals or businesses. You may be acting on a governments behalf, but I am not.
by sgtwompwomp | 2025-08-14 19:40:02+00:00
Thanks! And yes, so our pathfinder agents utilize Sonnet 4's precise coordinate generation capabilities. You give it a screenshot, give it a task, and it can output exact coordinates of where to click on an input field, for example.

And yes we've found the computer use models are quite reliable.

Great questions on scale: the whole way we designed our engine is that in the happy path, we actually use very little LLMs. The agent runs deterministically, only checking at various critical spots if anomalies occurred (if it does, we fallback to computer use to take it home). If not, our system can complete an entire task end to end, on the order of less than $0.0001.

So it's a hybrid system at the end of the day. This results in really low costs at scale, as well as speed and reliability improvements (since in the happy path, we run exactly what has worked before).
by mjr00 | 2025-08-14 19:40:37+00:00
> Don't ever implement good-enough-for-now APIs

Agree in theory, in practice this is impossible. Even if you're an absolute domain expert in whatever you're doing, software and requirements will evolve and you will end up needing to implement something for which your current API is not suitable. Just ask S3:ListObjectsV2 or golangs' `encoding/json/v2` etc.

I push back hard on this one because a lot of developers will try to be "clever" and basically turn their api into

def my_api(parameters: dict[str, str]) -> dict[str, str]:

or an equivalent, and now you have an API which theoretically can handle any requirement, but does so in a way that's extremely unfriendly and painful to use.

It's better to accept that your API will change at some point and have a versioning and deprecation strategy in place. With well-architected software this usually isn't hard.
by kazinator | 2025-08-14 19:41:01+00:00
If you're a web person who understands SSL, privacy-preserving age verification can be explained by analogy.

It's a system which requires a central agency, probably a government agency, analogous to a certificate authority.

You are authenticated with that agency; it has personal info about you. But you are externally identified by some impersonal identifier, not your name.

The agency issues you a certificate binding this identifier to an assertion like "is over 18 years old".

When you interact with a site that wants to know whether you are over 18 years old, you present the certificate. The site can see that it's signed by the authority and that it has the assertion that you are over 18.

You can't just give that site someone else's certificate because it has to be the one tied to the abstract identity you are presenting (which contains no personal info; it's some kind of UUID or whatever). Plus the cert can be bound to a specific device and such.

The cert has a private keys with which you can prove that you own that cert; or at least that you are the authenticated operator of a device to which that cert was issued.

It's something like that. I may have some key details wrong. The main idea is that some brokerage that does have info about you can attest that you are over 18 without revealing any of the personal info via certificate-like objects.

It sounds like, in theory, the system can achieve good privacy in age verification. But not perfect age verification; people will find ways around it.

A grown up can certify themselves to be over 18 and then hand the device to a teenager; and such an operation can likely be scaled to some extent. And of course no cryptographic system can eliminate the possibility that minors are looking at the screen of a device operated by an adult, who may even step out of the way to let them operate it.
by betaby | 2025-08-14 19:41:30+00:00
On the subject I can recommend the original paper from Google about Maglev https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

and subsequent enhancement from Yandex folks https://github.com/kndrvt/mhs

Explanation is at https://habr.com/ru/companies/yandex/articles/858662/ use your favorite translate site.
by boricj | 2025-08-14 19:41:41+00:00
I've seen relational database schemas degenerating into untyped free-for-all key-values because they weren't expressive enough. I've seen massive code duplication (and massive amounts of bugs) because no one invested into a quality core set of libraries to address basic use-cases of a given platform. I've seen systems crumbling under tech debt because of chronic prioritization of features over maintenance.

I've worked on large software projects. The only ones I've met that weren't dreadful to work on had engineering and management working together with a shared, coherent vision.
by irchans | 2025-08-14 19:41:44+00:00
Even after reading the article, I think there are reasonable ways to set up a low cost system that uses zero-knowledge proofs to "prove" your age without disclosing your identity. I do think that you will need trusted entities and the system will only stop most, maybe 80 or 90 percent of children under 18 from seeing porn. But, if you do this, then maybe 99% of kids under the age of 14 will have a lot of difficulty viewing porn which is a good thing. There may be valid a slippery slope argument for not setting up the age validation system even if everything I said above is true.
by devman0 | 2025-08-14 19:41:46+00:00
I would argue, the issue is that they had exclusive control over the customers bank accounts. I have no problem with fintech that integrates with existing accounts over the top.

The issue is with fintechs that are not really banks, so they keep your money in a "program bank" where you are not the direct customer. You can't go to the program bank and say Fintech XYZ went belly up and I want my money, because you are not the banks direct customer (even though in some cases your name is legally on the account for FDIC insurance reasons).

Open banking tech is way more about the former than the latter.
by habitue | 2025-08-14 19:41:57+00:00
I mean C89 has no support, it's not getting an update or a bugfix, the standard is what it is. So if vendor support is your overriding concern, you should be constantly updating your software to LTS versions.

I meant support in terms of there's an active community of people using the language and building things with it. It's not going to die as a language like Algol 68 or Pascal.
by leecommamichael | 2025-08-14 19:42:14+00:00
He’s sitting at a system that thousands of people built together simultaneously. We have gripes with our OSes but they’re all capable of nearly perfect uptime (depending on the hardware and workload.) So I am not convinced individuals need to own modules. I think it’s good for things to work that way, but not necessary.

I didn’t find much fault at all with what he’s saying about SDL. It’s just an example of the “layered design” he’s advocating for. You may have drawn your conclusion a little early; he immediately follows up with his API for graphics, which is actually a very practical example. He’s really just saying people should consider writing their own APIs even if it’s implemented with a library, because you can select exactly how complex the API needs to be for your app’s requirements. This makes the task of replacing a dependency much simpler.

He’s actually trying to prevent relying on things you don’t need. YAGNI.
by soganess | 2025-08-14 19:42:57+00:00
From the wiki on his daughter:

"After Lisa was born, Jobs publicly denied paternity, which led to a legal case. Even after a DNA paternity test established him as her father, he maintained his position. The resolution of the legal case required him to provide Brennan with $385 per month and to reimburse the state for the money she had received from welfare. After Apple went public and Jobs became a multimillionaire, he increased the payment to $500 a month."

"Despite the reconciliation between Jobs and Lisa their relationship remained difficult. In her autobiography, Lisa recounted many episodes of Jobs failing to be an appropriate parent. He remained mostly distant, cold and made her feel unwanted, and initially refused to pay her college fees."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Brennan-Jobs
by bko | 2025-08-14 19:43:16+00:00
[written from my iPhone]

I think the net effect of people like Jobs is a huge positive in this world. Why do you judge people that did great things by the standards of everyday interaction. You think this could be related? Perhaps there is something unpleasant about the person that had some effect on his ability for greatness? Or do you think people are like a video game with knobs where you can turn down "don't be a jerk" without affecting anything else?