MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by conductr | 2025-08-15 19:02:21+00:00
Absolute stability in that manner is nearly never the goal. Plenty of web standards have been deprecated. They gently push things in a direction and cull what is seen as low value or high risk.

I'm not advocating for or against this specific item, just saying we shouldn't perpetually add and bloat future maintenance demands just because we want to support every single thing that's ever been built. We should be able to remove/delete/deprecate in a way that allows reasonable notice to those that could be effected. I'm certainly not advocating for sweeping breaking changes like may be found in some web frameworks, etc. We should expect that browsers move slowly. But there still needs to be some process for culling things IMO.
by logifail | 2025-08-15 19:02:29+00:00
> I just stopped having a filter. When I think of someone, I just fire off a message

This.

I'm spending the week in my hometown with my 9-year old daughter to give her the chance of some time with her grandparents. We live hundreds of miles (and several countries) away.

While walking along I mentioned to her that an old college friend of mine also lived in this town along with her husband and their daughter.

For perspective: way back then we shared a house, during that time we both ground through our PhDs in parallel, later she and her husband came to our wedding, we went to their wedding, all that stuff.

I explained to my daughter that we've not been in touch for the best part of 20 years and I was a bit sad about that.

<my daughter thought for a bit>

my daughter: "did you have a fight?"

me: "no! of course not! why do you ask?"

my daughter: "maybe you should just write to her"
by duxup | 2025-08-15 19:02:30+00:00
People in power are drawn to more power. Non democratic governments provide them easy access to buying certainty and success.

Meanwhile SCOTUS has shown zero interest in taking action so if a CEO spoke up and Trump & Co. destroyed his business ... I would not blame them for thinking that the judicial branch will not save him.

In many ways SCOTUS's inaction has made all this possible, taken the usual path to resolving it away.
by sebmellen | 2025-08-15 19:02:32+00:00
I think you completely missed the point of my comment.

Yes it will have drastic and catastrophic effects. We are in a very bad position.

But to say that humanity is doomed and we should throw in the towel is so fucking stupid that I had to parody it.

I took the GP comment and rewrote it from the perspective of someone in the Ice Age.

Humanity has to find solutions and we will persevere.
by ameliaquining | 2025-08-15 19:02:35+00:00
The section "How secure is HTTP/2 compared to HTTP/1?" (https://portswigger.net/research/http1-must-die#how-secure-i...) responds to this. In short, there's an entire known class of vulnerabilities that affects HTTP/1 but not HTTP/2, and it's not feasible for HTTP/1 to close the entire vulnerability class (rather than playing whack-a-mole with bugs in individual implementations) because of backwards compatibility. The reverse isn't true; most known HTTP/2 vulnerabilities have been the kind of thing that could also have happened to HTTP/1.

Is there a reason you don't find this persuasive?
by Dig1t | 2025-08-15 19:02:37+00:00
Yes they do, there are many normal houses which can be bought for very cheap just spend some time on Zillow looking at areas outside of major metro areas.

You could very easily live in a big city and work a job to save up 50k or a down payment for a 50k mortgage and then buy one of these cheap houses to live in. But most people don’t want to do that. They want nice weather and fun things to do, access to a good job market, and good schools. But the reason why those houses are 50k is just because of simple supply and demand. There is very little demand to live in Louisiana or West Virginia and tons of demand to live in the Bay Area or Seattle. If you increase supply, eventually prices will fall and accessibility will increase.
by telesilla | 2025-08-15 19:02:42+00:00
Participatory economies such as those discussed here:

https://znetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/zbooks/htdocs/books/...

"In this book we argue for a new alternative based on public ownership and a decentralized planning procedure in which workers and consumers propose and revise their own activities until an equitable, efficient plan is reached. The vision, which we call a participatory economy, strives for equitable consumption and work which integrate conceptual and manual labor so that no participants can skew outcomes in their favor, so that self-motivation plays a growing role as workers manage their own activities, and so that peer pressure and peer esteem provide powerful incentives once excelling and malingering rebound to the advantage and disadvantage of one's work mates."
by danaris | 2025-08-15 19:02:47+00:00
Are you really here trying to claim that ADHD is not a real developmental disorder? To a bunch of people who have lived all their lives with ADHD?

Yes, the symptoms of ADHD are mostly things that most people experience sometimes in their lives. The reason it's a disorder is because they occur commonly enough to affect our lives.

This is not that dissimilar from many other neurodivergencies and mental health issues: Many people feel anxious from time to time. Many people enjoy the rush of gambling from time to time. Most people do not have clinical anxiety or gambling addiction.

Next time you're tempted to come into a thread of people talking about a widely-recognized developmental disorder or mental health problem and drop your superior wisdom that actually, it's not real, and you're much more rational and intelligent than we all are, because you can recognize that the diagnostic criteria are "subjective," which is the same as saying they're meaningless, please consider turning off your computer and going outside instead.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-08-15 19:03:25+00:00
Oh, cool! I don’t recall a “primary” in the book — he suggests a range of different possible configurations that he was open to. What struck you as not matching?

Personally, I do think that the immaterial world of ideas must be primary—at least certain aspects of mathematics seem so necessary that they’d be discovered by intelligent life, no matter the galaxy… or simulation…
by epolanski | 2025-08-15 19:03:50+00:00
I also think that the biggest value in doing things manually is that you actually learn.

One of my clients used to make a nice curated list of the important financial and stock market news of the week, it was a niche part of a niche product but people loved it.

At some point he thought about automating everything, it became less curated, more spammy, it lost any value and in the end so did the product. Sure there was more news, but it was less curated, edited and the signal to noise ratio got worse.

In fact what they did manually was more valuable even if the scope was smaller.

Many companies don't understand that and rush into premature optimization.

I'll have another example: one of my clients wanted a scraper to automate something his company needed to do manually: check competitors prices on their ecommerces.

I built it, way simpler than they wanted (they thought they wanted an app with a proper front end, turns out it was better for both to produce an excel spreadsheet with the data) and they were happy.

Then after some time they understood that they were missing part of the experience: navigating their competitors manually allowed them to see new approaches to show the catalogue, new trends and products, they were actually learning from the competition.

Eventually they realized and got back to doing it, and left my scraper just for price analysis.

But the overwhelming majority of my clients keep putting automation before the product and problem and misses important learning opportunities.
by psunavy03 | 2025-08-15 19:04:27+00:00
Neither do so-called "assault weapons." You're statistically more likely to have someone beat you to death with their bare fists and feet. Do you go around worrying about that every day? I don't.

Nothing is gained by conflating unrelated topics like suicide, gang violence, domestic violence, and the occasional deranged lunatic spree killer just because they all abused the same tool to commit murder.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-15 19:04:38+00:00
> Who the fuck pays for a triple A video game if it’s morally right to pirate things?

Yours truly.

I have been a proud Steam customer for over 20 years. I have licensed over 200 games on Steam alone. I own multiple video game consoles from multiple generations and have quite the collection of titles for them.

Not a single person can accuse me of not supporting creators.

> The fact of the matter is your “morality” here cannot sustain the industry.

The fact of the matter is the industry shouldn't be sustained. It is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create a product whose price trends toward zero due to infinite availability. When that obviously fails, they get upset and invoke copyright in order to distort reality until they're profitable.

The simple fact is creators need a new business model. And that business model is patronage. It's the labor of creation that's scarce and valuable, not the finished product. Therefore creators should be paid continuously for the act of creating itself, not the finished product.

Macaulay’s 1841 address is the most vigorous defense of copyright I've ever read:

https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...

And even he realized that copyright was a monopoly, tolerated only due to the fruits it bears.

He rejected alternatives such as patronage due to fear of suppression. Rich patrons would of course decline to fund works that they didn't like.

That concern no longer exists. We now have technology in the form of platforms like kickstarter and patreon which democratize funding and patronage, greatly reducing or eliminating the risk of suppression. There is no longer any need for copyright.
by rootnod3 | 2025-08-15 19:05:15+00:00
The non S/W folks are currently all using it because it's free to a certain degree. There's no chance in hell they'll be paying for it. So the only other way for the AI companies to make money out of it is to add Ads to the whole shitshow, turning it into an even greater shitshow that not just dumbs down the planet but adds commercials on top of it.
by bilferton-1 | 2025-08-15 19:05:34+00:00
Game dev / producer here. If they haven't tried it, they can't really comment on the potential value, can they? That's like devs in the early days of AI saying, "It sucks, it'll never be good."

One easy case -- it's great at debugging issues that include data in Unity scenes. It can quickly look at a snapshot of editor state / component configuration / serialized data and tell you, "oh, this gameObject's Vector3 pos value is wrong".

Not revolutionary on its own, but a great feature, and there are more.
by sunaookami | 2025-08-15 19:05:38+00:00
There is no "uncertainty" in this story, it's made up to outrage bait people who are "against AI". Telling people to disable random stuff in about:config (that does not even help) is not something a journalist should do. There is nothing to dispute here.

As it stands this article is just embarassing, dishonest and pure clickbait. If you can't be bothered to research (you even LINKED the Bugzilla bug AND quoted a Firefox spokesperson) then stop being a journalist and stop making the world a worse place.
Show HN: Miniexact – An efficient DLX Exact-Cover solver with a Python interface
by maximaximal | 2025-08-15 19:06:22+00:00
I've been hacking on this project for quite a while and now finally released it on PyPI for Linux, MacOS and Windows! The release includes a binary (miniexact) that solves exact cover problems in your terminal, and a similarly named Python module you can use to encode problems. Everything is implemented in C without any other dependencies, so this compiles cleanly on every system. You can select the algorithm you want to use in the console or use the Web-UI.

I haven't found a faster solver yet in my benchmarks, so I would be happy to see other implementations! The big caveat is that it still purely relies on the Dancing Links technique and not on the newer Dancing Cells from Christine Solnon and the TAOCP Fascicle 7. While my implementation has a different memory architecture than the standard one (arrays of fields instead of an array of node structs each containing the same fields), this could be an interesting addition to the provided algorithms. There is nothing preventing this addition but the involved implementation effort.

Would be nice to read some thoughts about Exact-Cover and the problems you solve with it! Maybe this project encourages somebody to look at this nice paradigm again :)
by bee_rider | 2025-08-15 19:06:40+00:00
Nowadays their return policy is really generous though. And it gets me to buy more games, a couple hours is long enough to figure out if a game works on my end.

Of course, I’d never use their generous only-superficial-questions-asked-if-you-don’t-play-much return policy to, basically, get a demo of a game. Because that isn’t what it is intended for. But, I wonder if that ability has gotten them more sales…
by dr_dshiv | 2025-08-15 19:06:42+00:00
> accidentally conjure a horde of demons.

If we have a certain perspective on demons as self-sustaining information processing loops—we’ll, yeah, demons abound.

And, yes, this hn post from BenBreen — is amazing. We’ve been in touch!

And if Ben is reading, we’ve made progress on our version controlled community—LLM book translation prototype. Of course, it’s much to early to share on hn. Or whatever, it’s great, take a peek: https://www.philosopherslibrary.com/

Upload books, get translations. We have a separate system where neolatin scholars can evaluate randomly selected paragraphs — so we can measure and report on the base rate of different qualities for each book as a whole.

I don’t know if it is technically important for advancing AI, but it might be.

80% of the Neo-Latin books in the library have not been translated. Most NeoLatin hasn’t been translated. And it is even worse with Sanskrit. So much material has not been digitized or translated.

Is it meaningful to try to get this humanist core into our language models? Maybe including only modern writing is a good bias, but I doubt it.

It will take at least 2 years to get all this stuff scanned, digitized, translated and published.

So it’s kind of urgent, given all the AI training taking place over the next two years.

I’m writing this in a rush, but I’m at the Houghton Library at Harvard and they just brought up 5 books from Marsilio Ficino, published 1497 and 1516.

(If you or anyone is into this kind of thing, my email is in my profile — it’s my favorite hobby)
by bayindirh | 2025-08-15 19:06:52+00:00
Working in an area you're passionate about doesn't mean you have to work more, even if it's a startup.

I know people who work in startups do great work, but no overtime, and finish what they have to finish on time. On the other hand, I have seen established companies which expect you do overtime with no overpay, because they pay you more than competitors already.

While I'm not working in a startup, I turned down numerous job offers just because I love my job and money is not my primary motivation, like the author of the post. I also did my share of overtime and oft-glorified all-nighters for a long period of time. On the other hand, I'll argue that all-nighters are unnecessary most of the time, and a good indicator of mismanagement.

Game developers love their job and I respect them with all my being, but they are exploited far too often. This still rings in my head from time to time: https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
by danaris | 2025-08-15 19:06:58+00:00
There are ways in which ADHD is a societal issue rather than an individual one, sure.

But they're not the whole of ADHD.

If I habitually lose track of time, get wrapped up in the game that I'm playing, and forget to meet up with my friends when we've agreed to because of it, I'm going to lose friends. That's not a societal problem, that's just how relationships work.

If I absentmindedly leave a half-eaten yogurt out on the counter, and my clutter blindness makes me forget it's there for a week, it's going to grow mold. That's not a cultural thing, that's just how mold works.

And so on.
by psychoslave | 2025-08-15 19:07:02+00:00
>Virtually all the languages we humans use—spoken, written, or artificial (such as programming languages)—are fundamentally one-dimensional.

Anyone having a look at a musical score can conclude this is wrong.

Even when it comes to spoken language, intonation is conveying a lot, even in languages which are not classified as tonal.

All that said, that's nice to see an exploration of exotic expression form. It doesn't need to down other approach to make shine its own.
by narrator | 2025-08-15 19:07:02+00:00
One of the interesting things I realize when I meet occult practitioners of the Hermeticist varieties is they refuse to acknowledge they are a religion and what they believe is only as true as any other religion. Like one adherent told me the universal consciousness has parts and I said, "that's fine that you believe that, but you acknowledge that is your religious belief?" and this person refused to even say that instead claiming that it was the absolute truth and not religion. I mean only the most bigoted religious zealot would claim that all other religions are false and his was the absolute truth and not a religion because it was absolutely true.
by tejpalv8 | 2025-08-15 19:07:20+00:00
Today, AI agents are static - they're built with a fixed set of tools, prompts, and configurations that remain unchanged throughout their operation. But what if an agent could evolve and adapt its own capabilities based on the tasks it encounters?

This came from frustration with the agents I’ve been using to automate my workflows—they keep breaking on edge cases. Soon, I want it to take the day’s conversations, build a fine-tuning environment, and train itself overnight so it’s better for me the next day.

This was a fun hackathon project, but I'd love to continue hacking on it with others! Feel free to DM me if you're interested.

Github: https://github.com/tejpalv/god-agent/tree/main
by crinkly | 2025-08-15 19:07:22+00:00
Going through that now. I’m part of the Chernobyl clean up team already. Mostly because my part of the org is the only one with a positive ROI and isn’t a fucked up mess still so I’ve got plenty of time to deal with everyone else’s problems.

How did we get in this situation? Avoid all the fucking fads.
by AndyKelley | 2025-08-15 19:07:29+00:00
My point is that the application doesn't have to care if it's running in Gnome or KDE. It just speaks Wayland protocol and then it gets a Window and some UI in it. The gnome window manager / KDE window manager then makes that UI properly native.

Consider input methods. That clearly belongs in the window manager process, not each application process. The application should simply ask for a text box, and then receive events when the text in the box changes. The fact that I'm typing Japanese into a fancy UI shouldn't make any difference to the application, other than what text it receives from the widget events.

And that should all be possible in a small, static executable, that is speaking the Wayland protocol, and has zero dependencies other than networking syscalls.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-15 19:08:18+00:00
> They were majority in the Reichstag

No, they weren't, they formed a coalition government with another far right party and still that was a minority coalition that was put into place by the (elected with a majority) President (who was not a Nazi) because there was no majority coalition formed.

Even in the first (and only multiparty) election after the Hitler-led minority coalition was installed, (which was very much not a free and fair election) the Nazis themselves still didn't win a majority, though the Nazi/DVNP coalition did secure a majority.

The Nazis did get an “elected” majority in the 1936 election, where only Nazi party members and Nazi-invited guests (one per seat) were on the ballot, in a single “approve/reject” slate in each constituency, but...

> Hilter wasn't even elected he was appointed by the Nazi Party.

This is true in the same sense that it is true that the PM of the UK is appointed by their party, not elected. Hitler was the leader of the Nazi Party, he and his coalition government were appointed by the President (who wasn't part of the Nazi Party)
by ameliaquining | 2025-08-15 19:08:24+00:00
It's not correct to attribute all bugs to carelessness, and therefore assume that engineer conscientiousness is the only criterion affecting defect rates. Some software architectures, protocol designs, programming languages, etc., are less prone than others to certain kinds of implementation bugs, by leaving less room in the state space for them to hide undetected. Engineers of any skill level will produce far more defects if they write in assembly, than if they write the same code in a modern language with good static analysis and strong runtime-enforced guarantees. Likewise for other foundational decisions affecting how to write a program.

The post makes the case that HTTP/2 is systematically less vulnerable than HTTP/1 to the kinds of vulnerabilities it's talking about.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-08-15 19:08:28+00:00
Investors have finite capital, and it's easier to corner a tight, pinched market than a large market with lots of liquidity.

You don't see PE making huge investments in gas stations, because you can always easily just go to another gas station, and there's way too many of them to easily corner the market. We could pretty easily make housing similarly unattractive.
by kulahan | 2025-08-15 19:08:47+00:00
I’m saying they’re pretending that they’re more moral than him. They aren’t, of course. Hell, for a tell-all book, it was extremely benign. Flouting minor laws, not taking care of his health, and being mean? Ahh!

And I’m not surprised that you think he’s some kinda monster. That’s the insane world we live in today, and why it’s such an obnoxious one. You’ve got nothing to balance any bad act on, besides “everything must be done with perfect kindness”, so even something as minor as being rude comes across as “some kind of monster”. You’ve artificially moved your Overton window to such a falsely soft world, you can no longer reasonably judge regular people.
by cole-k | 2025-08-15 19:11:15+00:00
> ... enough professional musicians use it as that I think I have to consider it that as well.

While not a bad proxy, I would say it is a sufficient but not necessary condition. Especially since many pros have the money to blow on overpriced gear (but perhaps you do too).

My own anecdote: as a kid I wanted to learn electric guitar and, of course being a kid, I shopped with my eyes. My dad bought me a $1.2k guitar. It's still a respectable guitar to this day, don't get me wrong. But if he had instead taken the old electric in the garage (bought for probably $500) and spent a hundred bucks on getting it set up, I would've had a guitar just as good. I know because I dug it out recently and I actually think it is quite nice.

An example to a more extreme degree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klon_Centaur#Legacy
by holowoodman | 2025-08-15 19:11:48+00:00
Hollywood is part of the economy, but only a small one, around 3% of US GDP. All of arts and entertainment is around 4.5%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/248004/percentage-added-...

And without the DRM, lockdown and prosecution demands of Hollywood, the internet would indeed be a better, freer place.