MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dang | 2025-08-30 20:15:37+00:00
Generated comments and bots have never been allowed on HN (other than https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring of course), since long before ChatGPT. I've written about this a few times, e.g.:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747 (Dec 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24189762 (Aug 2020)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Whether to add it to the formal guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) is a different question, of course. I'm reluctant to do that, partly because it arguably follows from what's there, partly because this is still a pretty fuzzy area that is rapidly evolving, and partly because the community is currently handling this issue pretty well. This may change of course.

One important thing to know: plenty of things not allowed in HN don't show up explicitly in the site guidelines. They are in no way a comprehensive list!
by globular-toast | 2025-08-30 20:15:50+00:00
It's not too restrictive for me. I rarely need to write foreign place names or words (I'm British). Yeah I use the £ symbol so I'm not limiting myself to ASCII, just what is on my keyboard (I have € too). I just don't really consider a file full of characters I can't type to be "plain text" just because it's UTF-8, that's all.
by insanebrain | 2025-08-30 20:16:08+00:00
I love love love monorepo + fat encapsulated modules + a couple of deployables. Why does the software industry create fake complexity/creativity in the craft? Fashion/hype architectures for dopamine and fulfilment. You're just wasting energy finding new ways to create machine code for hardware. Why not get creative in the hardware and actually make something new? Another thing that really grinds my gears, is how many human hours are poured into js frameworks instead of improving browsers. What an utter waste of time. Maybe mediocre engineers like me who could never design a CPU or extend a browser need to feel seen by embracing a new domain whatever concept to make us feel warm and fuzzy but not really innovate the real hard things that move the needle.
by ghusto | 2025-08-30 20:16:09+00:00
Recently tried a Linux desktop and was delighted to see that any design decisions I didn't agree with could be easily configured.

I'm sure there are bugs, but I didn't encounter any.

On the other hand, many of the poorly thought out design decisions on Mac can not be touched (and the ones that can be configured have to be done via secret commands), and I run into bugs regularly.
by channel_t | 2025-08-30 20:16:28+00:00
Not me. More than half of my 20s were mostly defined by working service industry jobs, hanging around with party kids, staying awake until the sun came up, and basically getting by doing the bare minimum for everything. It was probably the lowest point of my life cognitively. It wasn't really until sometime around my mid-30s that I started feeling pretty sharp and performing well on cognitive tests. I didn't grow up in an environment where there were any cultural expectations of achievement in anything. I had to find all of that on my own through a lot of trial and error. That being said, who knows where I would be today if a nice chunk of my 20s had been less dumb? I ruminate about it fairly often.
by colesantiago | 2025-08-30 20:16:52+00:00
I bit the bullet rewriting my app from PHP to Go and it paid off for my company, we're talking 20K lines of PHP code, reduced to 4K lines of Go and with the added efficiency gains with it.

I think some orgs just need to take the jump and plan a rewrite, add tests (easier with Go) and just do this if they are a PHP shop, I would say it's worth it.

Instead of blending Rust/PHP or Go together and having an unmaintainable mess of a codebase.
by alphazard | 2025-08-30 20:17:14+00:00
I always tell people to worry about the data structures that you want the database to maintain for you, and not worry about the SQL. You can always use Google to look up the SQL, or now ChatGPT to generate it for you. SQL is a not-that-great language and it intentionally hides what's going on. It is also different enough between databases that you need to pay attention. So learning to design/think in terms of SQL is probably not worth doing.

The set of data structures that you use to model and index a dataset is worth understanding, and designing in that space is a skill worth learning.
by Animats | 2025-08-30 20:17:29+00:00
That's a good point. Thiel's "Zero to One" makes it.

In economics, a market needs several reasonably strong businesses to get price competition. An EU study indicated that the minimum number is about 4. Below 4, price competition seems to disappear and you have oligopoly, or, at 1, monopoly.

In areas where there's no inherent effect like distance to stop centralization, markets tend towards oligopoly. Look at the number of browsers, the number of big banks, the number of cellular phone companies, and so forth. They're all between 2 and 4. The stable state seems to be around 3 big players.

This probably applies to social networks. There's only so much attention available.
by scoodah | 2025-08-30 20:17:42+00:00
The virtual devices it implements are fairly limited in number, and you may find bottlenecks with high IO throughput applications.

It uses memory ballooning as its dynamic memory management. Managing this balloon requires some custom implementations if you want to do things like reclaim memory from the guest.

If a large file is created and deleted within the host that disk space stays claimed until the VMs disk is deleted.

No GPU support.
by arp242 | 2025-08-30 20:17:46+00:00
People have explaining things, at great length, many times. Many of these have been posted to HN before, either as submissions or comments.

Kent just does not listen. Every time the discussion starts from the top. Even if you do agree on some compromise, in a month or two he'll just do the same thing again and all the same arguments start again.

You can't expect people to detail about four or five years of context in every single engagement for the benefit of interested 3rd parties like you or me.
by metalman | 2025-08-30 20:18:19+00:00
we can do much more with direct laser strikes, a laser will be able to blast through the dust and gass corona, if there was radar directed at the same time for precise timing and targeting. size, velocity, shape, and details of its shape, and composition in many areas and reach below the imediate surface we cant catch it, but we can certainly get a much better look
by kelseyfrog | 2025-08-30 20:18:30+00:00
I’m always in awe of characters like the author. When they recount their lives, it feels like watching someone narrate a mythological curse. Just enough introspection to map the pattern of their own compulsion and inevitable failure, yet not quite enough to grasp what would actually sever the loop and set them free.

On one hand, she sees with piercing clarity her inability to take hints, read the room, or navigate social subtext. On the other, she holds to this undeniable conviction that rejection itself will eventually sculpt her into something new, rather than seeing it as a painful signal to do the reshaping herself.

That conviction fascinates me. Where does it come from? An unshakeable sense of justice? A craving for recognition and boundaries that she cannot receive from other people? Or some deeper? Has the author always behaved like this or are there mile markers in the development of her beliefs?
by davecb | 2025-08-30 20:18:41+00:00
It's certainly killing companies, and multiple products that are open source. However, the community has the experience and knowledge to push back. Consider the Hashicorp license change in Terraform. A small community of businesses users forked it to create OpenTofu.

When an open source project starts to fail, it gets forked. If few use it, the new team will be small and mostly hobbyists. If multiple large companies are using the project, the new team will be larger, with more resources to help their sponsors and everyone else to move.

Broadcom is a rentier. That works if the program is closed-source. Less so with the Bitnami source code which is open-source and on GitHub.
by tptacek | 2025-08-30 20:19:13+00:00
I'm not claiming that there's no variation in innate ability, only that one island won't be innately better at juggling than the other (certainly one island will be better at juggling, because they will care about juggling more, pass down more juggling, push forward the juggling sciences, &c. But those won't be innate, biological differences).

In other words: if, 1000 years later, you somehow stole an infant from bad-juggling island and had them raised on good-juggling island, they'd likely behave as you'd expect a good-juggle-islander to behave, despite their provenance. (Stipulate that there aren't outwardly evident signs of which island you're from, like inherited skin tone or whatever, which would alter your interactions with your environment).
by LightBug1 | 2025-08-30 20:19:14+00:00
The irony-ometer is basically exploding right now.

And no. I'm not happy with any of it.

But there's an information war going on out there. And in that war Israel's hands are as bloody has anyone's.

And twice in that comment you put/suggested words into my mouth that I disagree with.

Let's get closer to home. Time for you to look at your own hands too.
by zero-sharp | 2025-08-30 20:19:18+00:00
"it is natural that curly braces can denote both a set and a sequence, depending on this implicit input."

?

I don't even know where to begin. Overloading symbols in mathematics occurs all over the place. There's nothing wrong with that. The difference between overloading a symbol and abusing it is whether there is an agreed upon definition/convention regarding its use and to what extent its use conforms to that definition/convention. What I'm saying in my original post is that the statement "{x_n} is a sequence" disagrees with the formal idea of what a sequence is and that most writers don't bother to explain their own notational use.

If you wish to re-define the curly braces to have a context-dependent meaning, knock yourself out. But, I would imagine that that practice would confuse a lot of people. Math is a human activity. It's not a programming language.
by hu3 | 2025-08-30 20:19:30+00:00
> In short, the modern PHP ecosystem gives us the best of both worlds: the ability to build quickly and confidently in PHP, while still having powerful options (C, Rust, Go) for performance-critical parts. This hybrid approach lets us stay productive without sacrificing speed where it matters most.

I understand this for a large codebase where rewriting is not feasible.

But if that wasn't the case, a C# APIs achieves both speed of development and execution in my experience. You'll rarely need to reach for C++ or Rust.

PHP is great but the language still doesn't allow things like typed arrays. It will happily accept string in a array of dates, for example.
by honeybadger1 | 2025-08-30 20:20:29+00:00
I didn't use an LLM to craft my retort, and in my opinion, I certainly didn't change the subject either. Why on earth bother fretting over hypotheticals that are never going to happen? Ten nuclear bombs dropping is precisely as consequential as none at all, since it's not happening, and there's zero historical precedence for such nonsense anyway.
by tekacs | 2025-08-30 20:20:47+00:00
It's interesting to see that there's the beginnings of an implementation for Claude Code, here:

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/crates%2Fage...

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@zed-industries/claude-code-ac...

Even though that doesn't seem to be mentioned on the site yet.
by colesantiago | 2025-08-30 20:20:56+00:00
The honest truth is that:

Nobody outside tech cares about decentralization or federation.

At some point, everything converges to centralization.

No amount of Mastodon servers or any fediverse self hosted instances spun up will change that.

There is a reason that mastodon.social is the biggest instance and that they couldn't close registrations to promote decentralization.

Hell, I would even say that threads is the biggest mastodon instance.
by MilnerRoute | 2025-08-30 20:21:18+00:00
Many years ago I wrote a "bespoke" blogging CMS just for a friend of mine. (The big innovation I'd wanted to try is JavaScript that would preview your post while you were typing it in...)

What I learned is it's fairly simple to make a text editor - but there's also the occasional fiddly little bug that has to be sorted out. (It could've also had security holes -- it was protected by obscurity...)

I was frustrated with downtime at my blogging site at the time -- but in the end I just switched to "live-editing" my blog posts directly on the server using Pico.
by lukeschlather | 2025-08-30 20:22:24+00:00
For me, I think it makes it more likely I will pick simple abstractions that have good software verification. Right now the idea of a webservice that has been proven correct to a spec is ridiculous, no one has time to write that, but it seems more likely that sort of thing will become ordinary. Yes, I won't be able to hold the webservice in my head, but reviewing it and making correct and complete statements about how it functions will be easier.
by onetimeusename | 2025-08-30 20:22:37+00:00
There's something about this I think is illuminating. I don't think the social issues fall into partisan politics. It's like we've abstracted away people into something like a corporate entity. Even in large residence buildings in cities, people don't know each other right next to them. That's in contrast with small villages where everyone knows each other for generations. Another example is roads and how road rage forms as a result of dehumanizing people into entities.

So it's like the US is primarily for corporate entities to interact in predefined contractual settings that have abstracted away anything human about them. Even families are kind of like corporate entities interacting with each other. I am not sure how it got to this point but maybe something like pursuit of income at the expense of social ties and over-litigation caused it. I'm not sure.
by sandreas | 2025-08-30 20:22:39+00:00
You're welcome. I'm not sure money is the most important thing here, especially if you are not in financial trouble ATM.

My advice would be to focus on skills and experience. I would happily take a job with a great skilled team and less money working 8h day instead of earning 200k+ a year working 14h a day in a messed up environment - yet still: A good balance is important. A great team earning < 20k a year is also bad.

Keep in mind: In your early career phase nobody (not even good customers) will pay you a fortune without an exceptionally great idea, great planning and a good portion of luck. There is a lack of trust... you're unknown, hard to assess, etc.

Building a stable and growing career based on knowledge is much "healthier" (literally) - less up and downs, more stability, more planning (instead of having luck). Earning too much money too early can cause great damage to your life.
by nostrademons | 2025-08-30 20:23:15+00:00
App permissions in iOS and Android are both too coarse-grained to really be considered capabilities. Capabilities (at least as they exist in something like Eros or Capsicum) are more "You have access to this specific file" or "You can make connections to this specific server" rather than "You have access to files" and "You have access to the network". The file descriptor is passed in externally from a privileged process where the user explicitly decides what rights to give the process; there is no open() or connect() syscall available to user programs.
by yorwba | 2025-08-30 20:23:52+00:00
Plenty of research involves small models trained on small amounts of data. You don't necessarily need to do an internet-scale training run to test a new model architecture, you can just compare it to other models of the same size trained on the same data. For example, small-model speedruns are a thing: https://github.com/KellerJordan/modded-nanogpt
by marxism | 2025-08-30 20:23:55+00:00
I want to weigh in here because I see comments focusing on how these products are useless trash. I think that's missing the point.

This wealthy engineer mindset is too literal. The AI-generated photos and fake reviews aren't bugs. They're features. They let the poor American with $100 of disposable income pretend they found a way to get an Apple Watch for $11. Just for a few days, they get to believe it might be real. When it arrives and it's crap, they knew it would be. But they got to play the fantasy.

TEMU's tagline is "Shop like a billionaire." I want you to really think about that. Marketers test hundreds of combinations to find what resonates. TEMU probably has thousands of marketers. They've tested millions of possible hooks. Millions. And this is what won.

"Shop like a billionaire" is the message that brought new people in the door above all others. Now what about churn? That's not the tagline's job. Don't let your knowledge of what exactly TEMU does and how it functions conceal from you this signal of what many (not all!!) people want.

However I believe they're not scamming people. They're delivering exactly what they're selling, which is the experience of feeling like you could have nice things.

Twenty years ago you could go to a matinee movie for a dollar. Two hours of escapism for a dollar. That product doesn't exist anymore. Theaters decided to serve a different customer base. They went upmarket. But people still want cheap escapism. Now it's $1-3 on TEMU to get that same escape. You browse, you dream, you wait for the package. It's entertainment.

TEMU is making things people want.
by mimischi | 2025-08-30 20:24:07+00:00
I don’t think there’s a correct answer here. Whatever floats your boat. Do you want to scribble things by hand into a physical notebook? Great! Want to use Notepad on Windows for .txt? Or create a .docx using Word?

Don’t follow trends and seek the “next best way to hack your productivity”. Most of those things are snake oil and a waste of time. Just use whatever you have available and build a process yourself. That’s what most people have done that are successful in applying this. They just use the tool they are comfortable with, and don’t over engineer for the sake of it
by daxfohl | 2025-08-30 20:24:29+00:00
Yeah maybe if an agent workflow is decomposed into steps, each step having certain permissions, and the context optionally wiped or reset back to some checkpoint between steps to prevent accidental leak.

This is actually pretty nice because you can check each step for risks independently, and then propagate possible context leaks across steps as a graph.

There's still potential of side channel stuff, like it could write your password to some placeholder like a cookie during the login step, when it has read access to one and write access to the other, and then still exfiltrate it a subsequent step even after it loses access to the password and context has been wiped.

Maybe that's a reasonably robust approach? Or maybe there are still holes it doesn't cover, or the side channel problem is unfixable. But high level it seems a lot better than just providing a single set of permissions for the whole workflow.
by Kye | 2025-08-30 20:25:18+00:00
I wouldn't be surprised if they wanted to do semi-holographic interfaces like we eventually see in most sci-fi from the 2000s and on. Those tricorders make a lot more sense if you pretend there's a holographic readout hovering above it.

TOS era tricorders had a small TV in them and big chunky buttons you could see poor Ensign Ricky fiddling with before falling into the lava pit. LCARS just didn't work well with the tiny little displays of TNG tricorders.
by tptacek | 2025-08-30 20:25:26+00:00
Ok I think you're making a well-considered and interesting argument about devicemapper vs. feature-ful filesystems but you're also kind of personalizing this a bit. I want to read more technical stuff on this thread and less about geek cred and yelling. :)

I wouldn't comment but I feel like I'm naturally on your side of the argument and want to see it articulated well.
by honorary-hickup | 2025-08-30 20:25:29+00:00
> It will happily accept string in a array of dates, for example

While completely true, you are using static analyzer anyway which won’t let you do this.

The generics support will likely come in the near future, there has been momentum in it again: https://thephp.foundation/blog/2025/08/05/compile-generics/
by sarlalian | 2025-08-30 20:25:52+00:00
It really doesn’t matter at this point whether someone is able to document it or not. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence of uncommanded discharge (yes the plural of anecdote is not data), and the reputational damage to the gun and the brand has already happened. If I were in the market for another handgun at this point, I would personally skip the Sig, because even at a %0.001 chance that this is a legit problem, my risk tolerance around firearms is pretty low, so I’ll just spend more and get a Glock where I’m certain it’s safe.
by gardnr | 2025-08-30 20:28:35+00:00
From my perspective: that's the point of the web toy. It shows who was using these em dashes before they were likely copied and pasted from ChatGPT (or generated from APIs). The em dash is widely identified as a single character that highly increases the "smell" of text as being generated by AI.

It is novel to see which users were producing text with an em dash before the rise of AI slop. User 'derefr' was 5 years ahead of everyone.

I do wonder if there was some journalism CMS involved, or if these users figured out how to produce the character on their own volition.

EDIT: 'lynndotpy' has an explanation in this thread.
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-08-30 20:28:45+00:00
yeah and Doom Guy takes a lot of issues with Masters of Doom. You get the impression that MoD was looking to create a McCartney vs Lennon story and stretched the truth to do so (there are several factual errors in the book).

In Doom Guy, though, Romero says that after he left iD, he heard from others still working there that the company had become something of a dictatorship under Carmack, and that within X months (I forget how many), half the company had quit. Romero also qualifies several times that they were all in their early/mid-20s and didn't have the requisite life experience to be handling business situations well
by gary_0 | 2025-08-30 20:28:49+00:00
There are lots of ways they could make a sustainable income without disrupting Bluesky's current status quo and be comfortably rich for the rest of their lives... but that's completely out of character for them and will never happen. I do think the geeks currently running Bluesky are sincere in keeping it decentralized, but the money people will someday probably force them out and squeeze the user base for a quick buck. A hardcore nerd minority will splinter off, though, and keep the decentralized version running, so whatever. History repeats. Frog swims, scorpion stings.
by dang | 2025-08-30 20:29:40+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

"Localhost tracking" explained. It could cost Meta €32B - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44235467 - June 2025 (274 comments)

Meta found 'covertly tracking' Android users through Instagram and Facebook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182204 - June 2025 (93 comments)

Meta pauses mobile port tracking tech on Android after researchers cry foul - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175940 - June 2025 (28 comments)

Covert web-to-app tracking via localhost on Android - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115 - June 2025 (344 comments)