MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by segmondy | 2025-08-22 20:19:56+00:00
be careful what you wish for, you are giving up your freedom to movement in the name of security. you might make the argument that you can hail a cab. that's more expensive than owning your own car and with self driving cabs you will lose your privacy when you use them. any movement between 2 points will always be recorded with at least video and as you are moving, someone else other than you can pinpoint your exact location. with your own vehicle, you could unplug your phone and car GPS/tracking device and have some privacy.
by Mawr | 2025-08-22 20:20:13+00:00
You're not being very precise about your exact issues. `nil` isn't anywhere as much of an issue in Go as it is in Java because not everything is a reference to an object. A struct cannot be nil, etc. In Java you can literally just `return null` instead of an `Optional<T>`, not so in Go.

There aren't many possibilities for nil errors in Go once you eliminate the self-harm of abusing pointers to represent optionality.
by thinkharderdev | 2025-08-22 20:20:24+00:00
It is definitely not good advice for all things. For workloads that are either end of the CPU/IO spectrum (e.g. almost all waiting on IO or almost all doing CPU work) it can be a huge win as you can get very good L1 cache utilization, are not context-switching and don't need to handle thread synchronization in your code because not state is shared between threads.

For workloads that are a mix of IO and non-trivial CPU work, it can still work but is much, much harder to get right.
by jonahx | 2025-08-22 20:20:26+00:00
In Miami, there is very little enforcement and reckless driving flourishes. I used to regularly see cars doing 90, weaving, pass cops who did nothing. I've also talked to multiple cops who confirmed that they rarely enforce unless specifically doing traffic duty. Which never made sense to me, since it's a revenue stream. But however the incentives are set up, they motivate cops to do nothing, and drivers know it.
by ToDougie | 2025-08-22 20:21:00+00:00
I haven't seen it. What I have seen is the folks who lie and steal get promoted -- they all seem to be in a big club together. Blatant stealing, too. Here's an example: my team created a new product to address a time-constrained market opportunity. We basically did 99% of the work that two teams would normally do. A VP for those two teams then gets on stage and gives an award to his two teams for doing 100% of the work. My team is given no credit or mention.

Another VP gave an award to one of his teams for implementing a company-wide system. His team was actually one of the last adopters of the system that my team identified, implemented, refined, and delivered.

Anyways, they are running two different companies now.
by nashashmi | 2025-08-22 20:21:12+00:00
The people who use these features are busy using these features. And they are not part of browser development. So they revolt in a nasty manner. Like when ftp was torn down.

It is nice to see workarounds. But those workarounds are not conducive to HTML purists who do things without JS. They are the real web developers. They have always relied on the browser to improve and become faster but not start abandoning old technologies.

Chrome OS also became popular on this point that a browser can do things like being universal viewers and so the need for programs goes away. There are so many lite OS who are also using the browser to do everything.

Now I understand that the web has failed XML and XML failed the web in favor of JSON. I also whole heartedly believe that XML and XSLT can do so much more for the web and do this natively.

But open systems are not in the interest of the big FAANG and Microsoft ecosystem. They abandoned RSS. They abandon APIs on a regular basis. And this turn of events is causing browser vendors to start developing for big companies rather than open indie developers.

There is much gain from XML and XSLT. But I want to see a specific development. I want to see XSL import an XML. I want to see the reverse. XSL will be the view. XML will be the model. And the browser will be the controller. MVC paradigm.
by jbentley1 | 2025-08-22 20:21:19+00:00
I am by no means an expert on this, but was reading this about the amoloid hypothesis this morning: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h...

He addresses the specific reasons that the mouse results don't translate, but the interesting part to me is that the scientific community seems to be behind the amyloid hypothesis while the media likes to run with any story that refutes it.
by pyuser583 | 2025-08-22 20:21:57+00:00
There is a fascinating alternative universe where XML standards actually took hold. I've seen it in bits and pieces. It would have been beautiful.

But that universe did not happen.

Lots of "modern" tooling works around the need. For example, in a world of Docker and Kubernetes, are those standards really that important?

I would blame the adoption of containerization for the lack of interest in XML standards, but by the time containerization happened, XML had been all but abandoned.

Maybe it was the adoption of Python, whose JSON libraries are much nicer than XML. Maybe it was the fact that so few XML specs every became mainstream.

In terms of effort, there is a huge tail in XML, where you're trying to get things working, but getting little in return for that effort. XLST is supposed to be the glue that keeps it all together, but there is no "it" to keep together.

XML also does not play very nice with streaming technologies.

I suspect that eventually XML will make a comeback. Or maybe another SGML dialect. But that time is not now.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-22 20:21:59+00:00
You're kidding right? Your phone was a stationary dumb object that only made and recieved calls if you were there to answer or use it. Your post was sent by paper and a million ways existed to avoid having it traced to your home or to you.

In no real way are these comparable to the deeply granular, deeply rooted 24/7 surveillance of movement, habits, contacts and nearly anything you like, that's today possible against any normally digitally connected person who doesn't take pretty extreme steps to avoid it (steps that by themselves make that person stand out as unusual enough to soon be flagged) I could go on and on with all the ways in which the tracking is pervasive and applied to most of the things we do today, and how none of that existed so autoamtically before the last 30-40 years or so.

Nobody with half a brain here is referring to some bucolic pastoral existence, simply to one in which the tools for tracking were just not like they are today, and if any government wanted to apply tracking of the kind that's pretty much turn-key constant now, it took unusual effort, staffing and specialized procedures.

You're either being deliberately obtuse or have no sense of perspective or idea of what you're saying
by lenerdenator | 2025-08-22 20:22:22+00:00
> The U.S. and other countries need to use automated methods of detecting and applying penalties. Some busy intersections have cameras for this, but it seems to be very limited, maybe because of cost.

Ultimately, someone still has to send in a check, and if they don't, you go back to the same problem, which is having police officers interact with random drivers, this time with a no-show warrant.

This isn't as much of a problem in NYC, but here in KC, unfortunately, neither the traffic stop nor the warrant are trivially safe tasks.
Show HN: Steam Bookmarks – A home page for the Steam overlay browser
by Pifpafpouf | 2025-08-22 20:22:30+00:00
Hello HN! I finally took the time to go from a prototype to a clean and (hopefully) scalable version of this side project.

It's a small website that you can set as the home page in your Steam overlay browser settings. It allows you to register bookmarks on a per-game basis, and search the web with the search engine of your choice.

All your Steam Bookmarks data (your settings and your bookmarks) is exclusively stored in your browser, using localStorage.

Steam Bookmarks is open-source: https://github.com/tanguyMichardiere/steam-bookmarks - it's your typical Next.js + TailwindCSS app, the most interesting file is probably src/api/player-summary.ts, in which I implemented a non-trivial cache with Redis to avoid hitting the Steam Web API rate limit.

Cheers!
by throwaway920102 | 2025-08-22 20:22:49+00:00
Go Generics provides all of this. Prior to generics, you could have filter, map, reduce etc but you needed to implement them yourself once in a library/pkg and do it for each type.

After Go added generics in version 1.18, you can just import someone else's generic implementations of whatever of these functions you want and use them all throughout your code and never think about it. It's no longer a problem.
by dfabulich | 2025-08-22 20:23:08+00:00
I think there are two reasonable incompatible points of view at work here:

1. "Play Nice": Browser vendors are trying to do what’s right for the web with budgets that are substantially outside their control. But browser vendors have the right to control their budgets, and to make decisions about what features to support or not to support. Web developers have to persuade browser vendors in order to get what they want; they have no special moral rights here. It is both practical and ethical to treat browser vendors politely, and not to rudely shame them.

(Eric Meyer's blog post here is firmly in the "Play Nice" point of view. "Google has trillions of dollars," he writes. "The Chrome team very much does not.")

2. "Fight the Power": Browser vendors are in a position of power, and that creates a moral responsibility to web developers. Their budgets are substantially within their control, and if their moral duty requires them to spend more on browser development, then that’s what duty requires. Frequently, browser vendors will try to shirk their duty to web developers in order to manage their budgets; this is always wrong, every time they do it.

There are two sub-bullets under "Fight the Power."

2a. When browser vendors shirk their responsibility, we all have a duty to shame the ones doing it in a noisy protest, not because that’s a practical way to persuade browser vendors, but because protesting/shaming wrongdoers in positions of power is ethical for its own sake.

2b. Browser vendors will try to shield themselves from protests by putting “code of conduct” rules in place against protesting/shaming them, especially against personal attacks. But it’s unethical for browser vendors (actors in a position of power) to enforce a code of conduct that prevents powerless web devs from shaming them, so the code of conduct should be protested, too; browser vendors should furthermore be shamed for having a code of conduct that interferes with the right/duty of web devs to protest shameful behavior. At a minimum, web devs should non-violently resist the code of conduct by actively violating it, and by shaming browser vendors for trying to enforce it.

I think the majority point of view here on HN is "Fight the Power." Google's up to no good, again, huh? Then we've all gotta shame them into doing the right thing again with a righteous flame war, no holds barred, including direct personal attacks. ("Should Mason Freed be removed from web standards?")

And if they try to delete/suppress our flamey personal-attack posts calling out their shameful behavior, why, that's even more shameful, and we've gotta call that out, too.

I think both points of view are reasonable. The problem is when people don't even realize that the other point of view exists.
by creatonez | 2025-08-22 20:23:10+00:00
Both of them were eventually decrypted. The decoy was a misdirection attempt to get people to shut up about the whole thing, since the original contained a passphrase that had been reused multiple times for Mojang's internal operations. But it only caused more people to go digging as they noticed the hash changed, along with an employee acting highly defensive about it.

They used "boxpig41" for the original and "thespicemustflow" for the decoy. Both of them contain the jar and assets for Minecraft 1.0, but the original also contained an ordinary copy of the Minecraft launcher, so that the files could used to run it during a live event even if internet access goes down, hence the larger file size.
by kragen | 2025-08-22 20:23:19+00:00
That's semantically okay, but giving &str such a short name creates a dangerous temptation to use it for things such as filenames, stdio, and command-line arguments, where that process of conversion introduces errors into code that would otherwise work reliably for any non-null-containing string, as it does in Go. If it were called something like ValidatedUnicodeTextSlice it would probably be fine.
by nkko | 2025-08-22 20:23:34+00:00
Just do the stuff in the same space, either by aligning your current work or shipping hobby projects, writings, opinions on social media. You will quickly “map” the people in the area you are interested in and your only task is getting on their radar. Then you can expect them to reach out. This solves all the tediousness of cold outreach or interviews, etc. Worked well for me for the last two decades.
by Telaneo | 2025-08-22 20:24:04+00:00
You can pay for your domain upto 10 years in advance. It's a frontloaded cost, but if you can do that (or even just 5 years), you'll have a pretty good buffer if you just happen to be busy at whatever time of year you need to renew. This assumes you still check up on your renewal yearly, but you'd need to do that anyway if you pay yearly.
by mrguyorama | 2025-08-22 20:24:18+00:00
Also people tend to use "Expert" wrong in the AI world. No, your programmer who has ten years experience integrating and deploying ML models is not an "AI Expert", they are programmers with expertise with some libraries. Building a system that integrates with ffmpeg for media conversion does not make you a "Video compression expert".

Go check out anthropic's careers page and see just how few positions even require a formal training in statistics.

Meanwhile I don't see a lot of real statisticians who are that hyped about LLMs. More importantly, it feels like there aren't even that many scientists at the AI companies.

Your average programmer does not have nearly the "question your assumptions and test your beliefs" training that an actual scientist has, which is funny since nearly every bug in code is caused by an assumption you shouldn't have made and should have tested.
by cstoner | 2025-08-22 20:24:25+00:00
> all i know about these LLMs is that even if they understand language or can create it, they know nothing of the subjects they speak of.

As a recent example of this, I was recently curious about how the heart gets the oxygen depleted blood back to the heart. Pumping blood out made sense to me, but the return path was less obvious.

So I asked chatgpt whether the heart sucks in the blood from veins.

It told me that the heart does not suck in the blood, it creates a negative pressure zone that causes the blood to flow into it ... :facepalm:

Sure, my language was non-technical/imprecise, but I bet if I asked a cardiologist about this they would have said something like "That's not the language I would have used, but basically."

I don't know why, but lately I've been getting a lot of cases where these models contradicts themself even within the same response. I'm working out a lot (debating a triathlon) and it told me to swim and do upper body weight lifting on the same day to "avoid working out the same muscle group in the same day". Similarly it told me to run and do leg workouts on the same day.

> i do like it as a bit of a glorified google, but looking at what code it outputs my confidence it its findings lessens every prompt

I'm having the exact same reaction. I'm finding they are still more useful than google, even with an error rate close to 70%, but I am quickly learning that you can't trust anything they output and should double check everything.
by Mawr | 2025-08-22 20:24:32+00:00
> Set, Tree, etc types. Those are fundamental CS building blocks

And if you're engaging in CS then Go is probably the last language you should be using. If however, what you're interested in doing is programming, the fundamental data structures there are arrays and hashmaps, which Go has built-in. Everything else is niche.

> Also, as mentioned by another comment, an HTTP or crypto library can become obsolete _fast_. What about HTTP3? What about post-quantum crypto? What about security fixes? The stdlib is tied to the language version, thus to a language release. Having such code independant allows is to evolve much faster, be leaner, and be more composable. So yes, the library is well maintained, but it's tied to the Go version.

The entire point is to have a well supported crypto library. Which Go does and it's always kept up to date. Including security fixes.

As for post-quantum: https://words.filippo.io/mlkem768/

> - otoh, in Go, it was found out that net.Ip has an absolutely atrocious design (it's just an alias for []byte). Tailscale wrote a replacement that's now in a subpackage in net, but the old net.Ip is set in stone. (https://tailscale.com/blog/netaddr-new-ip-type-for-go)

Yes, and? This seems to me to be the perfect way to handle things - at all times there is a blessed high-quality library to use. As warts of its design get found out over time, a new version is worked on and released once every ~10 years.

A total mess of barely-supported libraries that the userbase is split over is just that - a mess.
by turnsout | 2025-08-22 20:24:43+00:00
If you read my comment, I agree with you; the AI bubble is going to burst, and AI companies will go out of business. And yet, AI will be more important than ever 10-15 years from now.

Just because the bubble is going to burst does not mean the technology will go away. That didn't happen to the internet, and it won't happen to AI.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-22 20:24:52+00:00
I hope some form of include makes it into the HTML standard and popular browser implementations before XSLT is gone. It’s perhaps the single largest gap in HTML’s capabilities and could reduce need for SSR, JS, and a build step in a lot of circumstances. Until now XSLT has been able to fill that gap for those who need that capability, but if it’s going away…
by JohnFen | 2025-08-22 20:24:59+00:00
> Does your view of the universe include any kind of divine higher power or supernatural force (such as a God, gods, or spiritual energy) that is separate from ourselves?

The very first question and it's already impossible to for me to complete the quiz. It requires a "yes" or "no" answer to this, and the question is far too vague and makes baseline assumptions that prevent me from being able to answer "yes" or "no".
by dcrazy | 2025-08-22 20:25:11+00:00
You’re arguing against a strawman. The advice wasn’t to ignore learning about code points; it’s that if your solution to a problem involves reasoning about code points, you’re probably doing it wrong and are likely to make a mistake.

Trying to handle code points as atomic units fails even in trivial and extremely common cases like diacritics, before you even get to more complicated situations like emoji variants. Solving pretty much any real-world problem involving a Unicode string requires factoring in canonical forms, equivalence classes, collation, and even locale. Many problems can’t even be solved at the _character_ (grapheme) level—text selection, for example, has to be handled at the grapheme _cluster_ level. And even then you need a rich understanding of those graphemes to know whether to break them apart for selection (ligatures like fi) or keep them intact (Hangul jamo).

Yes, people should learn about code points. Including why they aren’t the level they should be interacting with strings at.
Show HN: AgentState – Firebase for AI Agents, Written in Rust (Open Source)
by boulevard | 2025-08-22 20:25:21+00:00
AgentState to solve a problem I kept running into: managing state for multi-agent AI systems is surprisingly hard.

When you have multiple AI agents that need to coordinate, persist their state, and query each other's status, you typically end up with a mess of Redis/Postgres setups, custom queuing, and manual synchronization code.

The whole thing is ~3MB, written in Rust for performance and safety, runs in Docker, and handles 1000+ ops/sec. I've been running it in production for AI workflows and it's been rock solid.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-22 20:25:24+00:00
I think the US at least does sight tests periodically? The UK still doesn't do that, you're required to have decent vision to drive, but the license renewals are just paperwork, pay the money and click a web form.

There is talk in the UK of requiring sight tests for the elderly. Historically UK licenses required frequent renewal, when they were centralised for convenience they ceased to have a renewal step, and it was kinda-sorta reintroduced much later once they had photographs because of course a 40 year photo is unrecognisable. But because of the focus on photographs the renewal step is integrated to passports, and is a chain-of-likeness documentation process. If I look a big greyer than last time in the photo I upload, pay, wait a few days, OK, some mix of humans and machines says that's the same guy as the other photo except older, replace image, print new ID.

Since it's aligned with passports (which also care about image similarity) there's no room in that step for like "Do your eyes still work?" let alone "Do you know what this fucking sign means?" or anything resembling mandatory continuing education.
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-08-22 20:25:28+00:00
Isnt the main disadvatage of TCP over UDP, overhead, present only in unreliable connections? Afaik, when there is no loss or congestion, TCPs roundtrip or ordering does not cause significant delay.

So how relevant are the benefits you listed (faster development, multiplexing, congestion control) for residental end points? I am sceptical.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-08-22 20:25:35+00:00
I've witnessed this since more than a decade ago, in western parts of Hamburg, Germany.

Even when there is almost no traffic, in the deepest parts of night, there are birds singing. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

Furthermore, some are imitating technologic sounds, like ringtones of phones, toys like laser pistol sci-fi sounds, or acoustic signalings of scooters turning, delivery/utility trucks beeping while going backwards, alarms, and so on.

Making you think WTF!? when you're out there, on some path in the fields, where there is no such stuff, or from above you, in the trees on the side, and in the middle of the streets.

OFC nobody believing that, because the Hamburger Schnarchnasen don't experience that in their daily lifes, due to working schedules, or not being in places where one could notice that, while awake at night.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-08-22 20:25:58+00:00
Maybe it's only one part of an overall trend in cultural rot around rule enforcement.

A woman had her dog in the cart at Costco that kept barking at people.

I joked with an employee during check-out "So anyone can bring their dog to the store these days?" and she said they stopped confronting these people because it's not worth it and makes things worse. Worse for who?

Man, I thought that was the exact type of person worth confronting in civilized society. If we can't police minor antisocial behavior, what can we confront? We wait until it's so bad that we have no choice?
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-08-22 20:26:02+00:00
i got through about half the list before i realized that these are all just general articles against carbon offsets (which, i think, in general, are very stupid compared to regulating energy usage). i thought you had a specific point about the behavior of Ecosia and i was curious because i've applied there in the past and find it an interesting company (planting trees is... good? usually? if done right?).