MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stickfigure | 2025-08-29 13:23:35+00:00
This is disingenuous - it's like saying "Look at Dubai! UAE is the most advanced nation in the world!" You don't get to ignore rural China, those people count.

The average life in Taiwan is very different from the average life in China, even if the top 10%ers live more or less the same.

Going back to my original point - this viewpoint you are espousing right now is setting yourself (and the CCP) up for a fall. China has had a good run for the last few decades and it's tempting to imagine that trajectory will continue perpetually. Lots of suddenly rich people get the same idea, and it ends poorly when reality fails to match their grandiose expectations.

You can see it a lot in this thread - "China is the future! Look how modern and world class!" I'm old enough to remember this said about Japan, and Korea. It didn't turn out that way and it's not looking like it's going to turn out that way for China either. Growth is leveling off, the economy is struggling with massive malinvestment in real estate, and serious people are throwing around the term "demographic collapse". All on top of a potential collapse of world trade.

Do I think China will "fail"? No, not at all. But I don't think it's going to live up to the expectations you're setting. And then it will be interesting to see what happens to the CCP.
by chamomeal | 2025-08-29 13:23:59+00:00
That is definitely normally true but I feel like the scale and LLM usage turns it into a different problem.

If you can use all of the content of stack overflow to create a “derivative work” that replaces stack overflow, and causes it to lose tons of revenue, is it really a derivative work?

I’m pretty sure solution sites like chegg don’t include the actual questions for that reason. The solutions to the questions are derivative, but the questions aren’t.
by cmiles74 | 2025-08-29 13:24:00+00:00
People actually understand the input and the output. An LLM understand neither, it's generating output that is statistically likely, within some bounds. As Fowler said, it's a pleasant coincidence that some of this output has value to us.

(For sure, arguments can be made that the relationship betweens the terms that the model has encoded could maybe be called "model thinking" or "model understanding" but it's not how people work.)
by angrysaki | 2025-08-29 13:24:01+00:00
>Also, the design of this this method doesn't seem to make much difference to me anyways:

``` var strs = source.SelectNotNull(it => it); ```

vs

``` var strs = source.Where(it => it != null); ```

Wouldn't the first be IEnumerable<TR> and the second be IEnumerable<TR?>

I imagine that's the main driver for creating SelectNotNull, so that you get the nonnullable type out of the Linq query
by Swenrekcah | 2025-08-29 13:24:15+00:00
Currently yes, but it is not inherently so. The problem with the US regime is that it is compromised, corrupt and heading towards fascism.

The problem is not that the republican party used to be a conservative right party.

What I’m saying is this is not a sports competition where Musk is automatically an opponent of the Democratic party because he supported Trump. He supported Trump in order to improve his chances with the legal system because he knew Trump would be willing to be so corrupt.

Another world might be imagined in which the Democratic party was taken over in 2016 but that is not the world we live in.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-29 13:24:30+00:00
It is in hindsight unfortunate that this idea didn't get into the CLR itself.

The blog post doesn't mention this, but whereas if I say my function only takes this 32-bit signed integer value type, a VB.NET caller can't hand it "null" because that's not a 32-bit signed integer - if instead I say it takes string (not the nullable string?) too bad, the VB.NET caller can just pass null anyway because in the CLR there's no distinction.

You're actually expected (if you provide public surface) to write a null test, in your C# code which explicitly says in the function signature that this mustn't be null, otherwise it might blow up at runtime because the CLR doesn't care.
by komali2 | 2025-08-29 13:25:04+00:00
Reading this comment gave me a flash of vertigo as I realized how deep down the rabbit hole of "crazy dude that only pays in cash" I'd fallen.

I don't own a car and only take public transit or bike. I fill my transit card with cash. I buy food in cash from the farmer's morning market. My tv isn't connected to the Internet, it's connected to a raspberry pi which is connected to my home lab running jellyfin and a YouTube archiving software. I de Googled and use an old used phone and foss apps.

It's all happened so gradually I didn't even realize how far I'd gone!
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-29 13:25:11+00:00
> FSD can do so much more than my Kia EV6. That's a fact. Still the same level

The levels are set at the lowest common denominator. A 1960s hot rod can navigate a straight road with no user input. That doesn’t mean you can trust it to do so.

> Where did Tesla say FSD is SAE Level 5 approved?

They didn’t say that. They said it could do what a Level 5 self-driving car can do.

“In 2016, the company posted a video of what appears to be a car equipped with Autopilot driving on its own.

‘The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons,’ reads a caption that flashes at the beginning of the video. ‘He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.’ (Six years later, a senior Tesla engineer conceded as part of a separate lawsuit that the video was staged and did not represent the true capabilities of the car.) [1]”

> Tesla is full self driving with Level 2/3 supervision and in my opinion this is not missleading

This is tautology. You’re defining FSD to mean whatever Tesla FSD can do.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/07/14/nx-s1-5462851/tesla-lawsuit-a...
by Cheer2171 | 2025-08-29 13:25:22+00:00
More like do you trust what's left of the US judicial branch versus the private arbitration company to save you from the excesses of their respective executives.

I'll still take an increasingly stacked US federal court that still has to pay lip service to the constitution over private arbitration hired by the company accountable only to their whims.

What you mentioned has been repeatedly ruled unconstitutional, but the administration is ignoring the courts.
by merelysounds | 2025-08-29 13:25:24+00:00
For what it’s worth, iOS does warn when an app has full access to the photo library for a while. E.g.:

> "WhatsApp" has been able to access your entire photo library for 6 months. Do you want to continue to allow full access?

Screenshots: https://macreports.com/app-has-been-able-to-access-your-enti...
by pjmlp | 2025-08-29 13:25:38+00:00
The class/struct approach predates C#.

For example in Eiffel by default they are references, but can also be turned into value types if the are blesses ones like numeric types, or if the developer tags them as expanded classes, either at definition or declaration type.

Delphi makes the distinction between classical object, and records from Object Pascal (both value based, and explicit pointers are required), or class types, heap only.

Modula-3 classes and records also follow similar approach, OBJECT follows the same semantic model of REF RECORDS.

For more modern examples, also D and Swift follow this approach.

And plenty of other examples for anyone wanting to dive into SIGPLAN.
by rayiner | 2025-08-29 13:25:42+00:00
> And yet you dodge #1. How artful. Now I know that you've not been engaging in good faith, either intentionally or just how Fed Soc taught you.

I didn't "dodge" it. I explained it was irrelevant. The conduct for which Trump was convicted was having a payment to Stormy Daniels recorded in the books of his family owned company as "legal expenses" instead of "hush money." To turn that into a felony, prosecutors invoked several other uncharged crimes--which means they didn't have to prove them--in a triple-bank-shot legal theory so convoluted it's best explained with charts: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/charting-the-legal-theo.... The prosecution never clearly articulated the exact legal theory, but what comes closest to their trial presentation is something like:

1) Violation of New York records law (175.05). But this is a misdemeanor. To step it up to a felony, you need to prove that the records were misrecorded to cover up a second crime.

2) Stepping (1) up to a felony based on New York Election Law 17-152, which makes it illegal to influence an election by "unlawful means," which requires a third crime. According to the press: "Attorneys specializing in state election law believe the statute has never been prosecuted." https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-hush-money-case-relies.... Moreover, the prosecutors never actually charged this crime, meaning they didn't need to prove all the elements.

3) Supporting (2) based on violation of federal campaign finance law. Notably, the FEC, which is charged with administering federal election law, had declined to bring any charges against Trump in connection with the Stormy Daniels payoff. Prosecutors also never actually charged this crime, meaning they didn't need to prove all the elements.

The prosecution also threw out two alternative crimes for (2), and the judge then instructed the jury that they didn't need to be unanimous as to which other crimes the business records were doctored to cover up.

The merits of this prosecution are entirely about the legal theory and the legally relevant facts. Whatever else you think Trump did is completely irrelevant. That's one of the few things Fed Soc folks and liberals agree on. If the target of this prosecution had been a child-trafficking kingpin, the lawyers at my former white shoe firm would be lining up to take on the multiple Supreme Court cases that would come out of challenging this prosecution.

> Fed Soc, eh? I'm shocked you'd consider Biden as everything I see about the org is as a right wing networking club, culminating in ownership of SCOTUS.

Fed Soc has far more Democrats than your typical non-ideological lawyer's organization (e.g. the American Bar Association) has Republicans. It's just lawyers who aren't feelers, and those are on both sides of the aisle.
by const_cast | 2025-08-29 13:26:25+00:00
And how much can the US government censor you versus companies?

There's tradeoffs. The government, at least, has to abide by the constitution. Companies don't have to abide by jack shit.

That means infinite censorship, searches and seizures, discrimination, you name it.

We have SOME protection. Very few, but they're there. But if Uber was charging black people 0.50 cents more on average because their pricing model has some biases baked in, would anyone do anything?
by giancarlostoro | 2025-08-29 13:26:46+00:00
I'm assuming they're taking advantage of the fact that these models share a design spec with military models, which both have the same flaws. I would assume the only difference is that the military model is full auto.

Edit: apparently not full auto, man we should have just let Glock take the contract when they started manufacturing in the US instead of Sig, their track record is much more sound.
by mritchie712 | 2025-08-29 13:27:01+00:00
an effective "vectorless RAG" is to have an LLM write search queries against the documents. e.g. if you store your documents in postgres, allow the LLM to construct a regex string that will find relevant matches. If you were searching for “Martin Luther King Jr.”, it might write something like:

SELECT id, body FROM docs WHERE body ~* E'(?x) -- x = allow whitespace/comments (?:\\m(?:dr|rev(?:erend)?)\\.?\\M[\\s.]+)? -- optional title: Dr., Rev., Reverend ( -- name forms (?:\\mmartin\\M[\\s.]+(?:\\mluther\\M[\\s.]+)?\\mking\\M) -- "Martin (Luther)? King" | (?:\\mm\\.?\\M[\\s.]+(?:\\ml\\.?\\M[\\s.]+)?\\mking\\M) -- "M. (L.)? King" / "M L King" | (?:\\mmlk\\M) -- "MLK" ) (?:[\\s.,-]*\\m(?:jr|junior)\\M\\.?)* -- optional suffix(es): Jr, Jr., Junior ';
by the_other | 2025-08-29 13:27:02+00:00
I didn't trust them much to begin with, so I generally avoid talking too much personal stuff with Claude. But I had plenty of chats with surface level discussion of topics I'm interested in and some of my relevant experience and history with those topics. So, I have deleted all my chats and am closing my Claude account (as soon as customer services get back to me; somehow the self-serve option is missing for my account, possibly because I once enabled API access).

I'll use Claude with my employer's Copilot account, but was I wasn't putting anything personal there anyway.

Time to learn how to do local models...
by arman_nocapro | 2025-08-29 13:27:29+00:00
Sama-sama bro, confirming this from Jakarta. It's a mess. My group chats were blowing up yesterday when WARP and Twitter suddenly went down. Felt like they pulled the plug right when everyone needed info on the protests.

Be very careful with random free VPNs being shared around on WhatsApp right now, many could be honeypots.

Like others have said, the most reliable long-term fix is rolling your own. I've had a cheap VPS in Singapore for years for moments just like this. The latency is low and it's been rock solid. I'm using v2ray with a simple setup, and it's been working fine because it just looks like normal web traffic to my ISP (Indihome). The guides posted in the top comment are excellent starting points.

For my less technical friends, I've been helping them set up ProtonVPN. Their 'Stealth' protocol seems to be holding up for now, but who knows for how long. The hardest part is getting this info to people who aren't tech-savvy.

Stay safe out there, everyone. Jaga diri.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-08-29 13:28:02+00:00
At one job I had access to some paid AWS support tier. It's basically a bunch of consultants. We needed to process a datastream of events from user actions on a website. We asked about serverless / AWS Lambda. Their answer was something like "Well yeah it'll work but don't do that. It'll cost too much money and you'll wind up rebuilding it around EC2 anyways"
by camwest | 2025-08-29 13:28:15+00:00
Agreed. I'm happy they're training on my data.

My reasoning: I use AI for development work (Claude Code), and better models = fewer wasted tokens = less compute = less environmental impact. This isn't a privacy issue for work context.

I regularly run concurrent AI tasks for planning, coding, testing - easily hundreds of requests per session. If training on that interaction data helps future models be more efficient and accurate, everyone wins.

The real problem isn't privacy invasion - it's AI velocity dumping cognitive tax on human reviewers. I'd rather have models that learned from real usage patterns and got better at being precise on the first try, instead of confidently verbose slop that wastes reviewer time.
by gruez | 2025-08-29 13:28:38+00:00
>But now Whatsapp retains access to all the photos I added unless I go into settings and revoke access to those photos. Creepy.

Not really, given whatsapp could be theoretically keeping a local copy and the operating system can't really do anything about it. It would also be a pretty weird case to code. Imagine writing an app where if you tried to save a file, you couldn't immediately access it afterwards.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-29 13:28:46+00:00
Nullable types came into C# during the .NET Framework days, back when the team had very high bar to ever add features that would change the runtime as OS component.

Hence why async/await is such a mess of IL bytecode, as it was implemented in userspace so to say.

Only with .NET Core, they followed other languages in not tying the runtime to the OS, a lesson that Google also had to learn (ART is updatable via PlayStore since Android 12).
by DanielHB | 2025-08-29 13:29:16+00:00
The problem with CSS is the C: Cascading. Which is what you are calling "inheritance"

Cascading is a nice feature for documents, that present data in the same way over and over. It not good for anything interactive. A lot of modern styling techniques are all about making CSS _not_ cascade. UI components (which is the majority of modern frontend dev) is basically a pre-requisite to achieve that.

The layout system is a bit of a separate discussion, and it is a mess yes, but mostly for backwards compatibility. If we could live in a world where all layout is default flexbox or grid and never mix inline with non-inline in the same container it would work out just fine. In fact that is _exactly_ how it works in React Native and it doesn't cause problems there. Styling in React Native also doesn't cascade which also makes it a lot easier to manage.
by const_cast | 2025-08-29 13:29:27+00:00
And what technology do you think they use to do said imprisonment and seizing?

Why do you think the military and police outsource fucking everything to the private sector? Because there are no rules there.

Wanna make the brown people killer 5000 drone? Sure, go ahead. Wanna make a facial crime recognition system that treats all black faces as essentially the same? Sure, go ahead. Wanna run mass censorship and propaganda campaigns? Sure, go ahead.

The private sector does not abide by the constitution.

Look, stamping out a protest and rolling tanks is hard. Its gonna get on the news, it's gonna be challenged in court, the constitution exists, it's just a whole thing.

Just ask Meta to do it. Probably more effective anyway.
by techpineapple | 2025-08-29 13:29:39+00:00
On the one hand, I think people on the outside(maybe as well as people on the inside) are bad at differentiating between good conflict and bad conflict. A shift like this is going to cause drama, and there’s no way to integrate all these personalities without problems.

On the other hand, I wonder if AGI will be Silicon Valley’s white whale.

“Wang and Zuckerberg have struggled to align a timeline to achieve the chief executive’s goal of reaching superintelligence” is a bananas sentence.
Show HN: Sosumi.ai – Convert Apple Developer docs to AI-readable Markdown
by _mattt | 2025-08-29 13:30:16+00:00
I got tired of Claude hallucinating Swift APIs. It does a good job at Python and TypeScript, but ask it about SwiftUI and it's basically guessing.

The problem? Apple's docs are JavaScript-rendered, so when you paste URLs into AI tools, they just see a blank page. Copy-pasting works but... c'mon.

So I built something that converts Apple Developer docs to clean markdown. Just swap developer.apple.com with sosumi.ai in any Apple docs URL and you get AI-readable content.

For example:

- Before: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swift/double

- After: https://sosumi.ai/documentation/swift/double

The site itself is a small Hono app running on Cloudflare Workers. Apple's docs are actually available as structured data, but Apple doesn't make it obvious how to get it. So what this does is map the URLs, fetch the original JSON, and render as Markdown.

It also provides an MCP interface that includes a tool to search the Apple developer website, which is helpful.

Anyway, please give this a try and let me know what you think!
by jolmg | 2025-08-29 13:30:28+00:00
> The extra hardware doesn't provide any practical benefit (at least IMO) for the typical person running a FOSS authenticator app on a mobile device with an up-to-date OS.

For the user (and in the context of Pinephones), the benefit would lie in getting banks out of their phones. Banks want a device that's not under the control of the user to use as 2FA. A dedicated hardware key would be a compromise for that. They used to give them out, but I pessimistically imagine that today they might prefer to lose a customer.
by rsynnott | 2025-08-29 13:30:33+00:00
> The only thing still alive is the endless, humiliating upsell and self-service. The drugstore, the bank, the dentist

Generally I feel like this article is mostly whiny nonsense ("why aren't airport lounges for special people like me special enough anymore?!", get a grip), but I must say I do find the ideal of dental self-service a little alarming.
by dfxm12 | 2025-08-29 13:30:39+00:00
moving fast through the yellow light, with nowhere to go.

My company has been preparing for this for a while now, I guess, as my backlog clearly has years' worth of work in it and positions of people who have left the org remain unfilled. My colleagues at other companies are in a similar situation. Considering round after round of layoffs, if I got ahead a little bit and found that I had nothing else to do, I'd be worried for my job.

Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable

Yes, I agree, but the deck is usually stacked against the worker, especially in America. I doubt this will be the issue that promotes any sort of collectivism.
by AlexandrB | 2025-08-29 13:30:43+00:00
This makes no sense to me. Driving involves all senses, not just vision - if you're not feeling what the car is doing because you're not engaged with the steering wheel what good is it to see what's around you? I also don't understand how one has trouble staying between the lines with minimal cognitive input after more than a few months of driving.

Oh! And also, moving within the lane is sometimes important for getting a better look at what's up ahead or behind you or expressing car "body language" that allows others to know you're probably going to change lanes soon.
by infecto | 2025-08-29 13:30:52+00:00
That’s great work, but even there you’re mostly building tools that make other engineers more efficient at building more tools. It’s not that the work lacks value it absolutely does, but it’s still part of the same recursive loop where the ultimate “benefit to society” gets pretty abstract. At the end of the chain, most of those tools are still helping businesses optimize, capture margin, or intermediate in some way.

It’s fine to take pride in craftsmanship, just maybe less fine to pretend it’s immune from the same critique applied elsewhere.
by lionelw | 2025-08-29 13:31:41+00:00
So how do you deliver design on the web, if not without code?

Remember that designing for the web is not like designing for print, where the dimensions of your canvas, and the amount and nature of your content, are known quantities. A web page is expected to accommodate every possible device, agent and viewport -- watches, phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, TVs, screen readers, ebook readers, etc. * portrait and landscape orientations * browser window sizes -- and content that can change by the minute and whose size is unknown until all of it has arrived on the device.

Think about all these conditionals and variables, and how much instruction you need to provide, efficiently, for making it all look as good as possible, to the browser/agent. Doesn't all this seem like the necessary purview of a domain-specific programming language?
by ryao | 2025-08-29 13:31:51+00:00
The point of a vtable is to implement virtual member functions that support inheritance and polymorphism without changing the base class implementations no matter what the child classes do. If you omit the this pointer, you cannot do inheritance that uses the this pointer in an override without changing the implementation of the parent to add the this pointer back, which would be like a tail wagging a dog. Thus, it is not a vtable. It is something similar, but different.
by Spivak | 2025-08-29 13:33:21+00:00
Do you consider all forms of "self-service" to not be automation of a job that previously required an additional human?

Like checking in at the airport via kiosk/app for example. Do you consider that to be "doing the work" of the desk clerk? Or say ordering at a restaurant by scanning a QR code, in both cases I have to look at the menu, decide what I want, and input my order into a system. But with the QR code there's no longer a human necessary.