MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zamadatix | 2025-09-06 14:26:05+00:00
If you're talking about "censorship from what the forwarder will resolve": You're free to pick any forwarders you'd like (in this case), not just ones that censor, and a forwarder is likely to perform better for most people's use.

If you're talking about "censorship of unencrypted DNS traffic in general": The censorship (or security/privacy risk or whatever your reason for caring it's unencrypted) doesn't care if you're sending traffic to a root nameserver for recursive resolution or traffic to a forwarder. What you need is something like encrypted DNS over another commonly encrypted channel that won't be blocked (e.g. DoH), which actually fits better with using a forwarder since most servers you'll recurse to don't support such transports.

Recursive resolution of public domains is really not as useful as it may sound for most people. The folks it perhaps helps the most are those interested in having the fewest external dependencies in their infrastructure. I have another comment about how to maximize that goal more than just resursing to the public root servers.
by instig007 | 2025-09-06 14:26:27+00:00
> What you describe using many completely unnecessary mathematical terms

Unnecessary for you, surely.

> Believe it or not, but in the software industry, nobody is defining a new “version number” with “strictly defined algebra” when they want to add a new field to an communication protocol between two internal backend services.

Name a protocol that doesn't have a respective version number, or without the defined algebra in terms of the associated spec clarifications that accompany the new version. The word "strictly" in "strictly defined algebra" has to do with the fact that you cannot evolve a protocol without strictly publishing the changed spec, that is you're strictly obliged to publish a spec, even the loosely defined one, with lots of omissions and zero-values. That's the inferior algebra for protobuf, but you can think it is unnecessary and doesn't exist.
by grantdong | 2025-09-06 14:26:31+00:00
In China, its birthplace, '996' always seen as practice of failed management. Because for at least half of the 72-hour workweek, most employee will mentally checkout (in Chinese we call this 摸鱼). Although middle managers know their subordinates are inefficient, they still impose working hour KPI on their team, so they can demonstrate their own value to upper management.
by mannykannot | 2025-09-06 14:26:51+00:00
Well, it continued to bother Newton. Here, he seems to be foreshadowing the concept of fields:

"It is inconceivable that inanimate Matter should, without the Mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon, and affect other matter without mutual Contact... That Gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to Matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance thro’ a Vacuum, without the Mediation of any thing else, by and through which their Action and Force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an Agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this Agent be material or immaterial, I have left to the Consideration of my readers."

https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/qm-actio...
by gus_massa | 2025-09-06 14:27:38+00:00
> Rating bathroom experiences: because everything needs a digital feedback loop

At least here in Argentina, clean bathrooms was a huge selling point in the 1990' for Burger King and McDonald's.

For example you can go to study to one of them with a few friends, and be there for hours because they have clean bathrooms, and from time to time one of the employees may come to offer coffee refill and ask if you want to buy something to eat with the coffee. [The free coffee refill changes from time to time. I'm not sure it's working now.]
by gravypod | 2025-09-06 14:27:50+00:00
> The PhiCode runtime for example - a complete programming language with code conversion, performance optimization, and security validation. It was built in 14 days. The commit history provides trackable evidence; manual development of comparable functionality would require months of work as a solo developer.

I've been looking at the docs and something I don't fully understand is what PhiCode Runtime does? It seems like:

1. Mapping of ligatures -> keywords (ex: ƒ -> def).

2. Caching of 3 types (source content, python parsing, module imports, and python bytecode).

3. Call into phirust-transpiler which seems to try and convert things into rust code?

4. An http api for requesting these operations.

A lot of this seems to be done with regexs. Was there a motivation for doing string replace instead of python -> ast -> conversion -> new ast -> source? What is this code being used for?
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-06 14:28:19+00:00
It depends on what level of understanding, and who you are talking about. For the 99% of people outside of software development or machine learning, it is totally irrelevant, as is any details of the Transformer architecture, or the mechanism by which a trained Transformer operates.

For the man in the street, inclined to view "AI" as some kind of artificial brain or sentient thing, the best explanation is that basically it's just matching inputs to training samples and regurgitating continuations. Not totally accurate of course, but for that audience at least it gives a good idea and is something they can understand, and perhaps gives them some insight into what it is, how it works/fails, and that it is NOT some scary sentient computer thingy.

For anyone in the remaining 1% (or much less - people who actually understand ANNs and machine learning), then learning about the Transformer architecture and how a trained Transformer works (induction heads etc) is what they need to learn to understand what an (Transformer-based, vs LSTM-based) LLM is and how it works.

Knowing about the "math" of Transformers/ANNs is only relevant to people who are actually implementing them from ground up, not even those who might just want to build one using PyTorch or some other framework/lbrary where the math has already been done for you.

Finally, embeddings aren't about math - they are about representation, which is certainly important to understanding how Transformers and other ANNs work, but still a different topic.

* US population of ~300M has ~1M software developers, of which a large fractions are going to be doing things like web development and only at a marginal advantage over someone smart outside of development in terms of learning how ANNs/etc work.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-09-06 14:28:44+00:00
that's wrong. there is probably a categorical difference between making something up due to some sort of inferential induction from the kv cache context under the pressure of producing a token -- any token -- and actually looking something up and producing a token.

so if you ask, "what is the capital of colorado" and it answers "denver" calling it a Hallucination is nihilistic nonsense that paves over actually stopping to try and understand important dynamics happening in the llm matrices
by numpad0 | 2025-09-06 14:29:00+00:00
> VR headsets are heavy and uncomfortable. USB powered XR glasses are not. And the reason for that is because you don’t need to make those XR glasses as literal portable computers with heavy batteries.

no it's lenses and chassis. Lenses work precisely because of their density difference against air, so the better they are, the heavier they are. Chassis weigh a lot because they use impact resistant ABS and don't make them in forged Al-Li or Ti or molded Mg, which they should consider for hilarity, but then the product will cost like a bad joke. The mobile computer part weighs nothing, they're like somewhat soggy potato crisps. Those 0.8mm PCBs, boy they feel like cardstocks. Batteries weigh a bit, but they're also usually lipo pouches, like 0.5kg/L. You're not putting dozen 18650 into a VR headset.

Especially VR lenses are heavy and bulky because they need short focal lenses with massive pupils for max FOV and max transmittance. The panels tend to be way bigger than that for smart glasses thanks to Palmer Luckey which he deserves credit for. Smart glasses tend to use way smaller panels and prisms with fractions of FOVs relative to VR, like 1/6th? 1/12th? They carry some amount of weight but not nearly as much, especially if it's waveguide or holographic or working as pure fresnels.

I'm not going into the second half of this response. I am sorry but I don't think it's worth anyone's time if I explained why DP Alt don't count as USB and all that stuffs.
by delusional | 2025-09-06 14:29:07+00:00
> You mention "var", why would we ever want in Java to hold a variable that you can't read immediately what is the type?

I've been a full time java developer for the past 7 years. Let me start by agreeing that I have very little interests in the functional "innovations" they added. They're fine, but most of my colleagues agree that code using streams or lambdas very quickly becomes harder to debug then if you just wrote the code with loops and.

That's far from true for every java feature though. Switch statements have been super cool, Green threads are a promising road out of the CompletionStage hell the children are dreaming of these days. "var" is a very nice way to reduce double typing ("Thing x = new Thing()" -> "var x = new Thing()") and also a nice way to avoid changes to unrelated files ("Thing x = getFoo(); f(x);" -> "var x = getFoo(); f(x)" means changing the name of class Thing doesn't require any change to the code) that's been helpful in a lot of cases.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-06 14:29:34+00:00
When founders put 996 in their job descriptions or Tweet about their 996 culture it’s a helpful signal to avoid that company.

The only time I’d actually consider crazy schedules was if I was the founder with a huge equity stake and a once in a lifetime opportunity that would benefit from a short period of 996.

For average employees? Absolutely not. If someone wants extraordinary hours they need to be providing extraordinary compensation. Pay me a couple million per year and I’ll do it for a while (though not appropriate for everyone). Pay me the same as the other job opportunities? Absolutely no way I’m going to 996.

In my experience, the 996 teams aren’t actually cranking out more work. They’re just working odd hours, doing a little work on the weekends to say they worked the weekend, and they spend a lot of time relaxing at the office because they’re always there.
by jfengel | 2025-09-06 14:29:51+00:00
It is where the slippery slope leads but a lot of materialist cultures manage to find a midpoint and stick there.

In a sense this isn't even materialist: you are chasing numbers in an account for their own sake. A materialist wants things, and might sacrifice everything else to get them, but doesn't want to do the work for its own sake.

Ultimately this is feeding the ego, the least material thing of all. And I can't actually fault people for that; in the end what else do we have? But even an egotist needs to be able to ask themselves, "am I in fact feeling what I want to feel, or have I missed myself?"

There are certainly those who want the ego rush of feeling like they've worked as hard as they possibly can and taken every chance to show off their skill. But we've fetishized them, and even if they are happy, it often won't achieve the same for us.
by aroy21 | 2025-09-06 14:30:08+00:00
Thank you for your advice!

I'm still currently applying as this is my last semester to new grad roles to see if I can get anything better. I think what I decided on (not sure if I'll feel the same way in 3 yrs) is to take the job offer and if I can't pivot or get a job I enjoy, I'll apply for a masters. Tbh I feel I don't know what I like or don't like due to my limited interactions with industry and as you said the grass is not always greener on the other side.
by paul_h | 2025-09-06 14:30:31+00:00
Thank you for TaOS, Chris. 1991 give or take. There's scans of byte mag from back them, but here's one article as words not a PNG - https://sites.google.com/site/dicknewsite/home/computing/byt... (dick pountain's pages - The Taos Operating System (1991))
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-06 14:30:42+00:00
It's not. I can get a detailed spec in place via back and forth with chatgpt + some templates + a validation service in 10 minutes that will consistently get an agent to power for 3+ hours with the end result being 85% test coverage, E2E user story testing, etc so when I come back to the project I'm only doing acceptance testing.

The velocity taking yourself out of the loop with analytic guardrails buys is just insane, I can't overstate it. The clear plan/guardrails are important though, otherwise you end up with a pile of slop that doesn't work and is unmaintainable.
by fumeux_fume | 2025-09-06 14:31:14+00:00
In the article, OpenAI defines hallucinations as "plausible but false statements generated by language models." So clearly it's not all that LLMs know how to do. I don't think Parsons is working from a useful or widely agreed upon definition of what a hallucination is which leads to these "hot takes" that just clutter and muddy up the conversation around how to reduce hallucinations to produce more useful models.
by crawshaw | 2025-09-06 14:31:36+00:00
The most interesting point in this post, which resonates with me, is to those of us who work a lot, 996 sounds ridiculous. It sounds ridiculous because to work a lot, you have to fit in the gaps around your life. I have done about 60hrs/week for the last 15 years. My scheduled work is barely 10-4 five days a week, with a lunch break, and with a break three days a week for the gym. To get the hours in I wake up at 5:30 most days and start work, unless a kid needs me, or I'm sick, or one of a dozen other things comes up. I won't take your call at that time, I won't respond to texts, and I'm not going to promise to be up then, because long hours require a lot of flexibility. You don't have to be espousing the four-day workweek or a part-time lifestyle to roll your eyes at the 996. If I can't long-term schedule 60hrs/week, there's no universe where someone's scheduling 72hrs/week. It's just performative nonsense.

I'm sure the people in China who claim to work 996 and those who demand it all know that the truth of hard work is complicated. I'm certain they all work damned hard, and the results are there for the world to see with the amazing success their country is having at absolutely everything. The nature of hard work doesn't fit some silly schedule.
by _fw | 2025-09-06 14:32:00+00:00
The biggest problem with this is outsized gains for the company compared to the employee. You sacrifice time with loved ones, wellbeing, mental health… to churn out extra hours for some Series A firm that won’t think twice about showing you the door in a down round.

I’ve seen founders work round the clock again and again. That kind of makes sense.

But Stebbings… I’m not going to put 996 in for any firm in your portfolio. And anybody who does is a mug.

This 996 bullshit is a skill issue. Need extra hours at school to finish your work? That’s a shame, all the clever kids are at home already (working on their side hustles that are 10x more likely to pay off).

It doesn’t surprise me that this stems from China: a place where ‘face’ and hours-behind-the-desk culture are extremely prominent.

People should be able to show up, put a shift in and go the fuck home. Sometimes there are reasons to work a little longer…

But expecting this kind of behaviour is objectively shitty leadership.
Show HN: Convertedbook – Live LaTeX Preview in the Browser
by wklhuey | 2025-09-06 14:32:15+00:00
Hi,

Convertedbook is a Nodejs cli tool that spins up a server which monitors changes you make to your LaTeX document, and it then renders a preview in your browser.

Use this tool to work on a simple LaTeX document that you want to output to PDF, EPUB, or HTML.

Sources Github - https://github.com/williamhuey/convertedbook Npm - https://www.npmjs.com/package/convertedbook

Thanks
by Fraterkes | 2025-09-06 14:32:40+00:00
In my spare time I code my own projects, I draw, I talk and write about my ideas. So yes, I'm also "working" on stuff for 12 hours a day, but obviously the work I do for myself, based on decisions I made myself, and the talking and thinking, are not at all "work" in the same manner that the drudgery of an actual job is work. The work I do for money is not just time-consuming and tiring, it's hard and boring and most importantly, often meaningless to me.

A ceo trades time and peace for money, and that is arguably difficult in it's own ways. But that doesn't make it work in the same way that what you and I do is work. These people do not work a 100 hours a week. They live charmed lives that also happen to often be exhausting.
by sokoloff | 2025-09-06 14:32:48+00:00
I think there are two differences there:

FSF wants to be able to relicense as/if the legal landscape evolves, but in a way consistent with the original license aims. I fully support this (and I want to give them this flexibility), but admit that this is based on my trust in FSF more than anything else.

FSF wants a contribution agreement to ensure that it doesn’t have to litigate with 1000s of companies who might claim some contribution that an employee of theirs made was corporate IP*. I also understand this, particularly given the incentive for a company to intentionally cause a “tainted” contribution to get into FSF products.

My willingness to “go along” with an FSF CLA is much, much greater than for a random company who wants to trade on and benefit from the goodwill of the “we’re open-source!!” banner and yet be able to rug-pull later.

* - I think I have exactly one tiny change into emacs from decades ago. It took me way longer to get corporate sign off on the CLA than it did to author the change.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-06 14:33:00+00:00
LLMs have that knowledge. Just not nearly enough of it. Some of it leaks through from the dataset, even in base models. The rest has to be taught on purpose.

You can get an LLM to generate a list of facts that includes hallucinations - and then give that list to another instance of the same LLM, and get it to grade how certain it is of each fact listed. The evaluation wouldn't be perfect, but it'll outperform chance.

You can make that better with the right training. Or much worse, with the wrong training. Getting an LLM to be fully aware of all the limits of its knowledge is likely to be impractical, if not outright impossible, but you can improve this awareness by a lot, and set a conservative baseline for behavior, especially in critical domains.

"Fully aware of all the limits of its knowledge" is unattainable for humans too, so LLMs are in a good company.
by bicepjai | 2025-09-06 14:34:47+00:00
What is Extreme Programming => XP is an agile methodology that keeps teams laser‑focused on delivering working software through short iterations, tight feedback loops, and simple design, using practices like pair programming, test‑driven development, and continuous integration to adapt quickly to changing needs. It optimizes for learning and quality over raw output: build the smallest thing, test it, ship it, and iterate with the customer. ~ GPT5 in perplexity
by benoau | 2025-09-06 14:34:56+00:00
Github, TypeScript, VSCode, Playwright, NPM.

I wouldn't say I have a dependency, I could excise all of this from my work pretty easily. But I certainly agree it feels problematic, especially with how easily most of this could be adversely impacted by a round of layoffs or other cost-cutting initiatives. Another thing that mildly concerns me is the "walls going up" as Microsoft feels encroached-upon by competing services like with Cursor and VSCode extensions.
by anotherpaulg | 2025-09-06 14:35:06+00:00
Below are some great videos on the physics and practicalities of single mode fiber. They are Thorlabs videos, so are slanted more towards the use of SMF in a laser lab rather than a telecom setting. They reference a lot of the theory, but also provide a good intuition about how and why SMF works so well.

https://youtu.be/FbOXRuBQt_U

https://youtu.be/HvJeXakc8Kc
by ec109685 | 2025-09-06 14:35:08+00:00
Car dealerships are so useless. Imagine making a profit but offering this level of service:

> Range Anxiety: Yes, it's overblown, but no, it's not non-existent. The day I bought my used EV, the dealership (which doesn't sell many EVs, even new) didn't have a 'Level 3' DC fast charger—and they had only charged it to about 16%. Letting it top off at L2 while I was dealing with finance, we got to 23%. I wasn't quite sure I'd make it home off the lot! Luckily I did, with 12 miles of range remaining.
by aroy21 | 2025-09-06 14:35:12+00:00
Thanks for your advice!

I did apply to those roles, but I would always get rejected. Do you have any advice on getting in through the side to such technically demanding companies? Should I just shoot my shot at these startups even though I have less experience? I graduate this december and I would start in August of next year. I was thinking of just cold emailing to see if I could just intern or help out in any way.
by djoldman | 2025-09-06 14:35:24+00:00
Assuming:

1. Jane, a security researcher, discovers a vulnerability in a Acme Corporation's public-internet-facing website in a legal manner

2. Jane is a US resident and citizen

3. Acme Corporation is a US company

... is it legal for Jane to post publicly about the vulnerability with a proof of concept exploit?

Relatedly:

Why do security researchers privately inform companies of vulnerabilities and wait for them to patch before public disclosure? Are they afraid of liability?
by mystraline | 2025-09-06 14:36:34+00:00
I found out that it was a very limited wavier in Chinese law that permitted a few companies to do 996 (or 9am to 9pm 6 days a week, or 72 hour workweeks).

Now, I'm seeing US companies demand that here. Like, hell no. My body and health isn't worth what you're paying, and the answer 996'ers aren't paying double, or even 1.5x the position.

Saner parts of the world are discussing 37.5h/weeks, and even going to 4 day workweeks.

I mean, hell, if I'm expected to work gross overtime, I expect overtime pay. Guess like I should get into electrician union.
by chickenpotpie | 2025-09-06 14:36:44+00:00
When the shopping cart was first introduced to grocery stores, nobody wanted to use it. People preferred to continue lugging around heavy baskets rather than push a cart. Actors had to be hired to walk around the stores pushing them around to convince people it normal and valuable to use them.

Sometimes people are resistant to use things that improve their life and have to be convinced to work in their own self interest.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/14/business/grocery-shopping-car...
by weitendorf | 2025-09-06 14:37:02+00:00
I guess I mean the legal risks to both sides. Security is only a portion of what I do and I only dabble in red teaming (this is the first time I ever tried it on a third party).

So I legitimately don’t know what the legalities of writing a “here’s how I hacked HypeCo” article are if you don’t have the express approval to write that article from HypeCo. Though in my case the company did have an established, public disclosure program that told people they wouldn’t prosecute people who follow responsible disclosure. TFA seems even murkier because Burger King never said they wouldn’t press charges under the CFAA…
by spamizbad | 2025-09-06 14:37:12+00:00
I am skeptical that you can get anywhere near 12 hours of productivity out of an engineer. Even in my 20s, I was mentally fatigued after 8 hours of (mostly) work with a few breaks sprinkled in. Once that fatigue sets in your productivity craters.

I’ve noticed people who promote these extreme work hours seem to spend a lot of time posting on (and I assume reading) social media. Perhaps they feel 12 hours is reasonable when they dedicate 4 hours to brainrot (ahem, or “building a personal brand”)