MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Arch-TK | 2025-08-28 14:47:48+00:00
It's not just about gibberish data. It's read failures, write failures, open failures, for a variety of reasons including permission errors, disk errors, space errors, etc.

You basically want to test your code does something sensical with either every possible combination of errors, or with some random subset of combinations of errors. This can be automated and can verify the behaviour of your program in the edge cases. It's actually not usually that helpful to only test "we read corrupt garbage from the file" which is the thing you're describing here.
by 8-prime | 2025-08-28 14:48:19+00:00
True, but I think its worth noting that inferring what a parameter could be is much easier if its something other than a boolean.

You could of course store the boolean in a variable and have the variable name speak for its meaning but at that point might as well just use an enum and do it proper.

For things like strings you either have a variable name - ideally a well describing one - or a string literal which still contains much more information than simply a true or false.
Show HN: Home sellers: incentivize your agent to get you a higher sale price
by ajcatton | 2025-08-28 14:48:40+00:00
I’m currently starting the process of selling a house for the first time (wish me luck!). As part of this, I began investigating the world of listing agents and their commission models and, like many before me, was pretty disappointed with the incentives built into the usual fixed-percentage commission structures: Basically the most rational thing for a listing agent to do under this model is to convince you to sell for whatever semi-reasonable price you can get quickly and without too much effort.

This is especially concerning given the amounts of money involved — real estate sales and purchases tend to be among the biggest and most consequential ones people make in their entire lives.

I wondered: what approach do I wish I could take, particularly one that doesn’t require “changing the whole broken system”. My favorite answer so far is Progressive Commissions: which reward listing agents very little for just getting a sale done at a low price, but scale up the reward quickly if they can get you a better and better sale price.

This page is a dynamic explainer / calculator to help people understand the concept and even come up with a specific commission structure that works for their home sale.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-28 14:48:42+00:00
The boolean type is the massive whaste, not the enum. A boolean in c is just a full int. So definitely not a whaste to use an enum which is also an int.

And usually you use operations to isolate the bit from a status byte or word, which is how it's also stored and accessed in registers anyway.

So its still no boolean type despite expressing boolean things.

Enums also help keep the state machine clear. {Init, on, off, error} capture a larger part of the program behavior in a clear format than 2-3 binary flags, despite describing the same function. Every new boolean flag is a two state composite state machine hiding edgecases.
by dlojudice | 2025-08-28 14:49:18+00:00
I think the DBSC is on the right direction but while it generates separate keys per session to prevent cross-session tracking (Google's ultimate ad dream), the spec acknowledges a critical vulnerability: malicious sites can collaborate by attempting to guess public keys until they find matches, creating persistent cross-site user identifiers, essentially weaponizing the security feature into the ultimate tracking system that survives cookie deletion and VPN usage
by neutronicus | 2025-08-28 14:49:36+00:00
> That being said- they could just build / use something more like a jupyter notebook and have a wildly more stable and rich experience.

Right, part of the reason it stands out is that we're conditioned to much more functional text input in claude.ai (or competing web apps like ChatGPT).

I assume part of the motivation for the terminal app concept is that all the tool calls run in a deterministic environment (whatever was the environment of the shell where you launched "claude"). A Jupyter-type approach would really muddle up that whole picture (at least from a user perspective).
by nutjob2 | 2025-08-28 14:49:58+00:00
> I now believe very strongly that you should virtually never have a boolean as an argument to a function. There are exceptions, but not many.

Really? That sounds unjustified outside of some specific context. As a general rule I just can't see it.

I don't see whats fundamentally wrong with it. Whats the alternative? Multiple static functions with different names corresponding to the flags and code duplication, plus switch statements to select the right function?

Or maybe you're making some other point?
by mathiaspoint | 2025-08-28 14:50:10+00:00
There isn't anything they could have practically done to prevent this except not allowing kids to use it.

They may have chosen not to age restrict it because

1) It's really not practical to do that effectively

2) more importantly (and they seem to care about this more than most companies) it would push kids to less safe models like those used on character.ai

What OpenAI does now is what trying to make AI safe looks like. Most of the people arguing for "accountability" are de facto arguing for a wild west situation.
by Frostlike1417 | 2025-08-28 14:50:52+00:00
As someone who has served as a reviewer for several MDPI journals, I personally haven’t found their overall quality to be particularly high—which was a factor in my decision to stop reviewing for them. Of course, it’s possible that some specific journals or articles are exceptions, but I would encourage readers to critically evaluate work published by MDPI on a case-by-case basis.
by grim_io | 2025-08-28 14:51:06+00:00
Maybe it's just the nature of being early adopters.

Other fields will get their turn once a baseline of best practices is established that the consultants can sell training for.

In the meantime, memes aside, I'm not too worried about being completely automated away.

These models are extremely unreliable when unsupervised.

It doesn't feel like that will change fundamentally with just incrementally better training.
by bob1029 | 2025-08-28 14:51:26+00:00
The power consumption of modern gaming is getting a bit out of hand. This AI stuff is taking it to the next level.

Ray tracing and other forms of real time global illumination are extremely resource intensive approaches to lighting a scene. Every client machine has to figure out how to light everything every single frame. Contrast this with baked global illumination where the cost is incurred exactly once and is amortized across potentially millions of machines.

We need more things like baked GI in gaming. This class of techniques makes the development iterations slower and more deliberate, but it also produces a far more efficient and refined product experience. I'd be very interested in quantifying the carbon impact of realtime vs baked lighting in gaming. It is likely a non-trivial figure at scale. Also bear in mind that baked GI is why games like the batman series still look so good in 2025, even when running on period hardware. You cannot replace your art team by consuming more electricity.
by initramfs | 2025-08-28 14:51:34+00:00
"But to critics of the deal, it seems weird for the US to swoop in and take stake in a company that doesn't need government assistance. The only recent precedent was the US temporarily taking stake in key companies considered vital to the economy that risked going under during the 2008 financial crisis.

Compare that to the Intel deal, where Tan has made it clear that Intel, while struggling to compete with rivals, "didn't need the money," Reuters noted—largely due to SoftBank purchasing $2 billion in Intel shares in the days prior to the US agreement being reached. Instead, the US is incentivized to take the stake to help further Trump's mission to quickly build up a domestic chip manufacturing supply chain that can keep the US a global technology leader at the forefront of AI innovation.

Investors told Reuters that it's unusual for the US to take this much control over a company that's not in crisis, noting that "this level of tractability was not usually associated with relations between businesses and Washington."

In the 2009 PBS Documentary Breaking the Bank, The Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson summoned the top 7 Banks' CEOs to Washington on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 before the markets opened Monday morning, after Lehman's Brother's went into bankruptcy the week before:

https://youtu.be/sYmGNetu-UU?t=1622

29:40

lots of doubts. >> NARRATOR: Richard Kovacevich, chairman of Wells Fargo, led the charge.

29:48

Kovacevich stood up and said, "I don't want the money. "I don't need the money. "I don't want the money. I want to have nothing to do with this."
by antonvs | 2025-08-28 14:51:51+00:00
> showed that LLMs usage decrease productivity for experienced developers by roughly 19%.

That’s a massive overstatement of what the study found. One big caveat is this: “our developers typically only use Cursor for a few dozen hours before and during the study.” In other words, the 19% slowdown could simply be a learning curve effect.

> one has to be really early in their career to benefit from their usage.

I have decades of experience, and find them very beneficial. But as with any tool, it helps to understand what they are and aren’t good at, and hope to use them effectively. That knowledge comes with experience.

Be careful of dismissing a new tool just because you haven’t figured out how to use it effectively.
by pontus | 2025-08-28 14:52:06+00:00
Just to pile on here, there's also ambiguity around how the observed girl is selected. Consider the following framing:

I go to a random house on a random street and knock on the door. A young girl opens the door. I ask how many siblings they have and they say one. What's the probability that they have a sister?

Now it's 50% even though cosmetically it seems like it'd be fair to say that the family has at least one daughter. The reason is that once I see a girl at the door, I'm slightly more confident in that it's a GG household since a GB or BG household would sometimes show a boy opening the door (assuming the two kids are equally likely to open the door).

P(GG | G at door) = P(G at door | GG) P(GG) / P(G at door)

P(G at door) = 1/2 (by symmetry)

So, P(GG | G at door) = 1 * 1/4 * 2 = 1/2
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-08-28 14:52:09+00:00
If there were two possible statements they asked

"a random family has been sampled, the sample family has two childs, one of them is a girl"?

and

"a random family has been sampled, the sample family has two childs, one of them is a boy"?

and they selected each statement based on randomly picking a child from a random family then the probability actually becomes 50% boy/girl for the next child since the boy/boy or girl/girl has twice the chance of generating the above statement for the respective gender compared to the mixed gender children family.

Ie. if they say one is a girl that statement had a 50% chance of being generated by a girl/girl family (since we pick the statement based on a random selection of one of the two childrens gender and there's 2 girls, doubling the chance of a statement that one's a girl coming from a girl/girl family), there's 25% chance the statement was generated from a girl/boy family and a 25% chance the statement was generated from a boy/girl family.

If you take 50% chance girl/girl, 25% chance boy/girl and 25% girl/boy you'll see there's a 50/50 chance of the next child being either gender.

All this due to changing how we sampled.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-08-28 14:52:22+00:00
Why are you quick to call it settled and scientifically concluded on the strength of a single study? That’s incredible confidence

There is this paper that surveys results of 37 studies and reaches a different conclusion: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03156

> Our analysis reveals that LLM-assistants offer both considerable benefits and critical risks. Commonly reported gains include minimized code search, accelerated development, and the automation of trivial and repetitive tasks. However, studies also highlight concerns around cognitive offloading, reduced team collaboration, and inconsistent effects on code quality.

Why are you ignoring the existence of these 37 other studies and pretending the one study you keep sharing is the only in existence and thus authoritatively conclusive?

Furthermore from the study you keep sharing, they state:

> We do not provide evidence that: AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers. Clarification: We do not claim that our developers or repositories represent a majority or plurality of software development work

Why do YOU claim that this study provides evidence, conclusively and as settled science, that AI systems do not speed up many or most developers? You are unscientifically misrepresenting the study you are so eager to share. You are a complete “hype man” for this study beyond what it evidences because of your eagerness for a way to shut down discourse and dismiss any progress since the study’s focus on Sonnet 3.5. The study you share even says that there has been a lot of progress in the last five years and future progress as well as different techniques in using the tools may produce productive results and that the study doesn’t evidence otherwise! You are unserious.
by conor- | 2025-08-28 14:52:28+00:00
The Bitnami images and helm charts are just convenient repackaging of things that are already freely (gratis) available. There's nothing stopping you from still deploying Kafka or Redis, etc. into your k8s cluster without using the Bitnami helm chart or building your own charts.

I think that's the point of above of "now you have to do your job" There's an evaluation that takes place when choosing to use something as an engineer, and the writing should have been on the wall the moment that Broadcom bought Bitrock to start planning to reduce dependency on those things.
by churchill | 2025-08-28 14:52:29+00:00
Like we've seen with Karparthy & Murati starting their own labs, it's to be expected that over the next 5 years, hundreds of engineers & researchers at the bleeding edge will quit and start competing products. They'll reliably raise $1b to $5b in weeks, too. And it's logical: for an investor, a startup founded by a Tier 1 researcher will more reliably 10-100x your capital, vs. Anthropic & OpenAI that are already at >$250b+.

This talent diffusion guarantees that OpenAI and Anthropic will have to keep sinking in ever more money to stay at the bleeding edge, or upstarts like DeepSeek and incumbents like Meta will simply outspend you/hire away all the Tier 1 talent to upstage you.

The only companies that'll reliably print money off AI are TSMC and NVIDIA because they'll get paid either way. They're selling shovels and even if the gold rush ends up being a bust, they'll still do very well.
by spooneybarger | 2025-08-28 14:52:48+00:00
Years ago I realized that reading and listening to music meant I wasn't getting full enjoyment out of either.

So I stopped doing both at the same time. I came to realize that I vastly prefer listening to music over reading.

That was pretty much the end of my reading for pleasure. Every time I consider doing it, I realize I'd rather listen to music.
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-28 14:53:13+00:00
I really hope nobody had themselves convinced that software engineering couldn't be automated. Not with the code enterprise has been writing for decades now (lots and lots and lots of rules for gluing state to state, which are extremely structured but always just shy of being so structured that they were amenable to traditional finite-rule-based automation).

The goal of the industry has always been self-replacement. If you can't automate at least part of what you're working on you can't grow.

... unfortunately, as with many things, this meshes badly with capitalism when the question of "how do you justify your existence to society" comes up. Hypothetically, automating software engineering could lead to the largest open-source explosion in the history of the practice by freeing up software engineers to do something else instead of toil in the database mines... But in practice, we'll probably have to get barista jobs to make ends meet instead.
by OskarS | 2025-08-28 14:53:27+00:00
Lua doesn't directly support keyword arguments, but you can simulate it using tables:

serialize(someObject, { prettyPrint = true })

And indeed that is a big improvement (and commonly done), but it doesn't solve all problems. Say you have X flags, then there's 2^X different configurations you have to check and test and so forth. In reality, all 2^X configurations will not be used, only a tiny fraction will be. In addition, some configurations will simply not be legal (i.e. if flag A is true, then flag B must be as well), and then you have a "make illegal states unrepresentable" situation.

If the tiny fraction is small enough, just write different functions for it ("serialize()" and "prettyPrint()"). If it's not feasible to do it, have a good long think about the API design and if you can refactor it nicely. If the number of combinations is enormous, something like the "builder pattern" is probably a good idea.

It's a hard problem to solve, because there's all sorts of programming principles in tension here ("don't repeat yourself", "make illegal states unrepresentable", "feature flags are bad") and in your way of solving a practical problem. It's interesting to study how popular libraries do this. libcurl is a good example, which has a GAZILLION options for how to do a request, and you do it "statefully" by setting options [1]. libcairo for drawing vector graphics is another interesting example, where you really do have a combinatorial explosion of different shapes, strokes, caps, paths and fills [2]. They also do it statefully.

[1]: https://curl.se/libcurl/c/curl_easy_setopt.html

[2]: https://cairographics.org/manual/cairo-cairo-t.html
Show HN: MCPcat – A free open-source library for MCP server monitoring
by kashishhora | 2025-08-28 14:54:07+00:00
Hey everyone!

We've been working with several MCP server maintainers and we noticed some difficulties getting drop-in logging and identity attribution working out of the box with existing vendors. A couple of challenges we hoped to solve were: - Baseline piping of tool calls to traditional vendors - How to tie tool calls to a “user session” - Understanding the context behind tool calls made by agents

So we built something. :) The MCPcat library is completely free to use, MIT licensed, and provides a one-line solution for adding logging and observability to any vendor that supports OpenTelemetry. We added custom support for Datadog and Sentry because we personally use those vendors, but we’re happy to add more if there’s interest.

Here’s how it works:

mcpcat.track(serverObject, {...options…})

This initializes a series of listeners that: 1. Categorize events within the same working session 2. Publish those events directly to your third-party data provider

Optionally, you can redact sensitive data. The data never touches our servers (unless you opt in to additional contextual analysis, which I mention below).

Some teams might also want a better understanding of “what use cases are people finding with my MCP server.” For that, we provide a separate dashboard that visualizes the user journey in more detail (free for a high baseline of monthly usage and always free for open source projects).

We have two SDKs so far: Python SDK: <https://github.com/MCPCat/mcpcat-python-sdk> TypeScript SDK: <https://github.com/MCPCat/mcpcat-typescript-sdk>

Other SDKs are on the way!
by dpoloncsak | 2025-08-28 14:54:11+00:00
pops up multiple times, too. One or two, sure maybe it's just a reflection of using LLMs often, but this many suggests that the article was (atleast) re-written by an LLM

I use Copilot to re-write emails all the time. I'm not going to act like I'm above it. I will say, it makes your emotional plea ring a little more hollow than it should, but so does posting it online, in text form anyway.

> This isn't job-hopping by choice—it's a survival pattern forced by systematic exclusion. > This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience. > The discrimination I'm documenting isn't just about hurt feelings or career setbacks—it has life-and-death consequences for people with schizoaffective disorder: > These aren't abstract statistics—they represent the human cost of the systematic exclusion I've experienced. (little looser here, but still fits the bill) > The pattern of discrimination I've experienced isn't unique—it's systematic. > The discrimination I've faced isn't my fault—it's a reflection of society's failure to move beyond tokenistic awareness toward genuine inclusion.
by ivewonyoung | 2025-08-28 14:54:15+00:00
Unions would just delay the inevitable while causing other downsides like compressing salary bands, make it difficult to fire non-performers, union fees, increasing chance of corruption etc.

For a recent example:

> Volkswagen has an agreement with German unions, IG Metall, to implement over 35,000 job cuts in Germany by 2030 in a "socially responsible" way, following marathon talks in December 2024 that avoided immediate plant closures and compulsory layoffs, according to CNBC. The deal was a "Christmas miracle" after 70 hours of negotiations, aiming to save the company billions by reducing capacity and foregoing future wage increases, according to MSN and www.volkswagen-group.com.
by JohnBooty | 2025-08-28 14:54:18+00:00
Non-negotiable tenet(s): all human lives are valuable, all humans deserve dignity, and when we as a society can't find a place for a valuable and talented individuals like the author then we have failed in some sense.

That said, within the current system...

Morally and legally, what are the limits of accommodation?

Accommodation, in my uninformed layman understanding, is about accommodating people who can do the job, but need to do it differently than others. For example, wheelchair accessibility for white-collar office workers.

Does it include the inclusion of people who can't perform all aspects of the job?

Communication and collaboration are absolute pillars of nearly any engineer's job, but by the writer's own statements it seems like his condition often prevents this.

How do we resolve this?
by nradov | 2025-08-28 14:54:29+00:00
I'm not necessarily opposed to unionization in general but it's never going to save many US software industry jobs. If a unionization drive succeeds at some big tech company then the workers might do well for a few years. But inevitably a non-union startup competitor with a lower cost structure and more flexible work rules will come along and eat their lunch. Then all the union workers will get laid off anyway.

Unionization kind of worked for mines and factories because the company was tied to a physical plant that couldn't easily be moved. But software can move around the world in milliseconds.
by Alex3917 | 2025-08-28 14:54:32+00:00
> I'm more talking about the particular contrastive structure.

But that's one of the main uses of emdashes, for signaling that the second half of the sentence is more important than the first half. If you Ctrl-F for emdashes on my blog, you can see I do it everywhere, even though all of my posts were written before LLMs existed:

https://alexkrupp.typepad.com/
by 542354234235 | 2025-08-28 14:54:39+00:00
It makes me wonder if you had been given lenses that started at small corrections, and you switched them out for greater corrections could allow your brain to adjust. Like the Invisalign of glasses. People are often able to adjust to diminishing eyesight, adapting and finding ways to make use of what is left, so it seems that if your vision got slightly better every two weeks, your brain could adapt and adjust. Hell, people are able to adjust to wearing mirror glasses that flip everything upside down, so eventually your brain would probably adjust and correct for the size difference.