MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-02 19:34:07+00:00
> Elon will continue to mess with the algorithm until he gets his political goals.

Twitter/X has open sourced their algorithm (https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm). So what do you mean by “mess with the algorithm”? And how do you characterize the extreme moderation (AKA censorship) practiced by old Twitter? For example when they banned a sitting president on the flimsiest reasoning, that even their own blog post justifying it could not describe, that their former CEO agreed was a big mistake?

> It's too bad that most people don't care about fascists getting control of these huge media platforms.

Define “fascist”. These days it seems to just mean “someone not aligned with one end of the political spectrum”. The bottom line is Twitter/X is far less censored today than it was a few years ago and it isn’t even close. The vast scheme of censorship it practiced previously dramatically altered elections worldwide.
by gspencley | 2025-09-02 19:34:10+00:00
> The only difference between your phone and China's social credit system is that China tells you what they're doing. We pretend our algorithmic reputation scores are just “user experience features.” At least Beijing admits they're gamifying human behavior.

Um no. That is not the only difference by a LONG SHOT.

If I want to evaluate whether or not I want to involve myself with you, in any capacity, then that negotiation is between you and me. I can ask for references. I can ask for a credit check. I can go pay for a police background check. I can read public review sites. Or, I might decide that because you listen to country & western music you're not a real person and I can't know you and leave the vetting at that.

Consequentially, however, that dealing impacts our relationship and none other. You might find other people who don't care about the same "social credit criteria" that I do and you might find yourself dealing with them instead.

That's kind of the beauty of this thing we call "freedom." Anyone gets to choose who they want to deal with (or not) and make their own individual choices. The "systems" they opt in are always opt in (or at least they should be).

The difference between a government "social credit" system and individuals (businesses or people) vetting other individuals based on their own chosen requirements is force.

A government system mandates this across society in a broad authoritarian sweep. Get on the bad side of "the party" and now you are a social pariah and will not have any luck finding anyone who wants to deal with you, country music lovers be damned, because it is forced upon everyone. A business has no choice but to apply "the" system because if they don't they get punished. It is not opt-in, it is a one-sized-fits-all mandated by force of law system that removes individual discretion and choice from the equation.

That's a LOT different than just "we're upfront about it."

Furthermore, while I appreciate when authoritarians are honest about their violations of basic human rights and freedoms, that doesn't suddenly make what they are doing OK. I don't want to deal with a thief who is honest about their thievery any more than I want to deal with one who tries to hide it.
by sho_hn | 2025-09-02 19:34:11+00:00
I think a good first step would be if a ChatGPT user account could easily enter emergency contact information the system would notify in scenarios like this, making the escalation opt-in.

The moderation tech is already there, and if there's even a small amount of mentally ill who would fill this in on a good day and be saved by it on a bad day / during an episode, it'd be worth it.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-02 19:35:01+00:00
The answer is quite simply that where complexity exceeds the regular person's interest, there will be a cathedral.

It's not about capitalism or incentives. Humans have cognitive limits and technology is very low on the list for most. They want someone else to handle complexity so they can focus on their lives. Medieval guilds, religious hierarchies, tribal councils, your distribution's package repository, it's all cathedrals. Humans have always delegated complexity to trusted authorities.

The 25% who 'care about privacy or ownership' mostly just say they care. When actually faced with configuring their own email server or compiling their own kernel, 24% of that 25% immediately choose the cathedral. You know the type, the people who attend FOSDEM carrying MacBooks. The incentives don't create the demand for cathedrals, but respond to it. Even in a post-scarcity commune, someone would emerge to handle the complex stuff while everyone else gratefully lets them.

The bazaar doesn't lose because of capitalism. It loses because most humans, given the choice between understanding something complex or trusting someone else to handle it, will choose trust every time. Not just trust, but CYA (I'm not responsible for something I don't fully understand) every time. Why do you think AI is successful? I'd rather even trust a blathering robot than myself. It turns out, people like being told what to do on things they don't care about.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-02 19:35:48+00:00
That’s quite a pejorative, to claim that someone else is having their “brain cooked” because they follow a platform that is less censored than you’d like. Are you sure you support free speech when you describe being exposed to views you don’t support in that way? I think being open to new ideas, and therefore supporting free speech, means being comfortable with ideas being discussed that you don’t like.
by mgulick | 2025-09-02 19:36:02+00:00
My keepass database has around 400 different entries in it. If I needed to transfer to a new password manager, it's not feasible to go around to 400 different sites to register new passkeys. In case one might say the answer to that is oauth, I'm also not interested in putting my faith in Google/Microsoft/Apple being benevolent arbiters of my ability to access my accounts.
by DanielHB | 2025-09-02 19:36:33+00:00
It is because C# uses nominal types (C-like) and typescript uses structural types (ocalm-like).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_type_system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_type_system

Although nominal types doesn't necessarily mean OOP-ish (inheritance-heavy) it is a pre-requisite (for inheritance-heavy code).

The distinction between the two is not a black/white thing but (modern) typescript (and Flow as well) is heavily focused on structural typing while C# is heavily focused on nominal typing. In fact the whole composition vs inheritance discussion fundamentally is about making types that behave in a more structural manner.
by saubeidl | 2025-09-02 19:36:42+00:00
I find that part of being intellectually curious and a good engineer is questioning systems.

If we had a systems architecture in an engineering project that kept leading to bad results, we would consider rearchitecting how said system is run.

I believe it is important to make it clear to people that capitalism, too, is just a (imo deeply flawed) systems design. It is not a natural constant. If we find it leads to negative outcomes (which I strongly believe), we can and should talk about rearchitecting.
by sn9 | 2025-09-02 19:37:37+00:00
Oh sorry I wasn't pushing back against you specifically haha. Just those pushing the idea that learning calculus the traditional way is useless since we have computers.

I've been going through Math Academy with a IPython REPL open, too, and I've noticed that I need to avoid using it unless the problem specifically tells me to use a calculator or the implicit skill review in the problem gets skipped. Even writing little functions for myself to one-shot a problem means I'm missing chances to actively recall the steps.

Actually, given what you've said, you'd probably enjoy working through Sanjoy Mahajan's books on Fermi problems and estimations (the books are CC-licensed you can just download them): https://mitpress.mit.edu/author/sanjoy-mahajan-9006/
by coliveira | 2025-09-02 19:37:52+00:00
As I said above, everyone is subjected to the same work regulations, so it becomes a moot point. It is a form of tax, so that is not an issue that affects a single employer. And it doesn't come from "employer pockets" any more than the cost of raw materials. Every business owner treats the cost of raw materials with all taxes as a given, but then when it comes to workers they whine as if it was the end of the world. It only shows they're whining and frankly annoying people.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-09-02 19:38:03+00:00
I've had a similar history, and also switched mostly to reduce fatigue & the risk of RSI. Colemak seems easier to use, even if it's not any faster. Of course it's quite possible that the improvement is simply due to the deliberate practice needed to switch layouts; even more than learning to type in the first place switching layouts takes focus and therefore makes it easier to notice & correct bad habits.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-09-02 19:38:04+00:00
To play devil’s advocate, what ethical safeguards are OpenAI responsible for that they have failed to implement?

This is a wild and difficult to understand technology, even for the people building it. And their safeguards are constantly evolving.

I think you’re attributing to malice what should be attributed to people commercializing a novel technology that is, frankly, being exploited by users.
by Arnavion | 2025-09-02 19:38:13+00:00
Rust's behavior of moving without leaving a moved-out shell behind also simplifies the implementation of the type itself, because its dtor doesn't have to handle the special case of a moved-out shell, and the type doesn't even need to be able to represent a moved-out shell.

For example, a moved-out-from tree in C++ could represent this by having its inner root pointer be nullptr, and then its dtor would have to check for the root being nullptr, and all its member fns would have the danger of UB (nullptr dereference) if the caller called them on a moved-out shell. But the Rust version could use a non-nullable pointer type (Box), and its dtor and member fns would be guaranteed to act on a valid pointer.
by andrewla | 2025-09-02 19:38:31+00:00
I haven't looked at Strang's approach.

The "x = b / A" is a bit of a gut-punch on first look because my mind immediately tells me all the ways that that does not work. It makes a some sense once I take a second to think about it, and I can see why it would make you want to jump in a little deeper, but matrices being non-commutative makes me cringe at the idea of a division operator which does not very very clearly spell out where it appears in the chain.

Ax = b is all well and good, but AxA^-1 = bA^-1 is not meaningful; the application/composition order is very important.
by kspacewalk2 | 2025-09-02 19:38:49+00:00
Cities in Europe and Asia that are actually healthy, and have rejected car culture, don't have these tunnel thingies. Instead of moving pedestrian traffic away from streets, they improve their streets to make them friendly to pedestrians. The idea that climate issues necessitate this kind of divorce from the outdoors would be a strange concept indeed to people in Barcelona and Helsinki alike.

This is in fact a classic, 80s-90s North American car-infested big city band-aid. Leave the streets for the cars, leave the tiny sidewalks for the homeless and the trash, connect office buildings and plazas with pathways so the nine-to-fives can drive or subway in, go for their lunch or whatever, then drive/subway out without meeting the poors (because who else lives downtown anyway?) Et voila! Who needs to make downtowns actually liveable after all.
by xp84 | 2025-09-02 19:39:37+00:00
> " If Anthropic's internal version of Claude Code gets so good that they can recreate all of google's products quickly"

I know you aren't asserting this but rather just putting the argument out there, but to me at least it's interesting comparing a company that has vendor lock-in and monopoly or duopoly status in various markets vs one that doesn't.

I'd argue that Google's products themselves haven't been their moat for decades -- their moat is "default search engine status" in the tiny number of Browsers That Matter (Arguably just Chrome and Mobile Safari), being entrenched as the main display ad network, duopoly status as an OS vendor (Android), and monopoly status on OS vendor for low-end education laptops (ChromeOS). If somehow those were all suddenly eliminated, I think Google would be orders of magnitude less valuable.
by syncsynchalt | 2025-09-02 19:39:39+00:00
Yes, it makes sense, but it still resulted in a lot of work.

Most Unix syscalls use C-style strings, which are a string of 8-bit bytes terminated with a zero byte. With many (most?) character encodings you can continue to present string data to syscalls in the same way, since they often also reserved a byte value of zero for the same purpose. Even some multi-byte encodings would work if they chose to avoid using 0-value bytes for this reason.

UTF-16LE/BE (and UTF-32 for that matter) chose not to allow for this, and the result is that if you want UTF-16 support in your existing C-string-based syscalls you need to make a second copy of every syscall which supports strings in your UTF-16 type of choice.
by warrenm | 2025-09-02 19:39:40+00:00
>I've tried having them run a maze, but instead of giving them the whole maze up front, I have them move one step at a time, tell them which directions are open from that square and ask for the next move, etc.

Presuming these are 'typical' mazes (like you find in a garden or local corn field in late fall), why not have the bot run the known-correct solving algorithm (or its mirror)?
by xg15 | 2025-09-02 19:40:09+00:00
Everything that directly interacts with an event loop object and calls methods such as loop.call_soon() [1].

This is used by most of asyncio's synchronization primitives, e.g. async.Queue.

A consequence is that you cannot use asyncio Queues to pass messages or work items between async functions and worker threads. (And of course you can't use regular blocking queues either, because they would block).

The only solution is to build your own ad-hoc system using loop.call_soon_threadsafe() or use third-party libs like Janus[2].

[1] https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/e4e2390a64593b33d6556...

[2] https://github.com/aio-libs/janus
by m-hodges | 2025-09-02 19:40:13+00:00
I like Quarto¹ which supports authoring websites, blogs,² books, and presentations. It also supports publishing directly from Jupyter Notebooks, if that's the type of work you're doing. My only (minor) complaint is there isn't much of a thriving theming community for it.

¹ https://quarto.org/

² https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-blog.html
by wolrah | 2025-09-02 19:40:15+00:00
> security isn't a compelling reason?

For legacy hardware like this it's usually not anywhere close to as important as it is for modern systems.

These systems are not being used to browse the modern web, they're too slow.

They're not being used to host production multiuser environments beyond a few retrocomputing homelabbers' toy systems, where the worst case scenario is a restore from backup and banning a user or two rather than data loss/breach and/or legal action.

The ones still in actual active use are almost all appliance systems that mostly haven't seen a kernel update in years or ever because they are usually exist to go with some piece of hardware that never got an in-tree driver and thus can't work with anything much newer than what it shipped with and/or some software that depends on ancient libraries no distro ships anymore. These systems don't need to (and shouldn't) be exposed to untrusted networks, users, or content, they can (and already should) be locked down by a skilled admin to only communicate with the minimum number of systems needed for whatever purpose they serve. If the admin isn't sufficiently skilled to confidently handle that, the system and admin should both be replaced.

---

I have an old IBM PS/2 that's my family's first computer, which still has its original Windows 3.1 install on it. I imaged the original hard drive and moved it to a CF card, but that also means I can screw around with it and not worry about breaking anything because I can just restore the last known good image. I don't connect it to the internet often but if on one of those rare times I happened to somehow stumble upon someone who had been saving a drive-by exploit for IE 3.0 or a RCE against Trumpet Winsock that then infected my system I'd just do the same. Anything this old is small enough to be imaged easily.
by card_zero | 2025-09-02 19:40:33+00:00
OK, a second theory: the situation is messy and complex. Society tolerates the use of physical force less, and has higher standards of health and safety, and more suing and seeking compensation. The police and security then favor electronic methods over potentially injuring themselves or anybody else. Then there's more potential to be bad in small ways because nobody's going to grab you by the collar. Meanwhile, there's opportunities for internet crime, or electronic organized crime, or just mobs and riots. Then the shift in emphasis to electronic control spills over into the private sphere, and the public kind of support it while resenting it at the same time.

In summary, everybody has started liking doing everything in a hands-off way via the internet, but also everybody hates it.
by drewrbaker | 2025-09-02 19:40:37+00:00
Love that goalkeeper line. 100% my experience with so many SaaS companys.

@netlify I hope you see this. You are terrible at the buyer-pull. We want log shipping, but to get that, we have to go into the "enterprise" tier... We are a startup with very little money, and what is log shipping worth to us? Not hundreds a month. Honestly it's worth a little less than whatever the cost of us moving to Vercel is (where log shipping is not part of enterprise).

So now I've now been through multiple sales emails from them trying to get me on a call to "discuss how we can help you" which I know is just going to be Netlify trying to upsell me into a bunch of "enterprise" features we don't need. Just tell me the price and let me click a button to enable it!
by ilc | 2025-09-02 19:41:14+00:00
You are trying to derive emotional value from your job. I did that for a long time.

I don't anymore. I learned it actually made me worse at the job, and didn't allow me to contribute to the things I DEEPLY care about, because I'm actually just pushing work.

It is not an easy lesson. But I'll take the money, and derive my value to society elsewhere. Alot easier that way.
by neilv | 2025-09-02 19:41:37+00:00
The solution might be easy: recognize liability.

When a human cajoles someone into killing themselves, they probably get a criminal trial, as well as a civil lawsuit from the family.

Imagine a company set up an advice telephone line, and staffed it entirely with humans who were known clinical bullshitters. The company knows each call has a significant chance of the staffer simply making something up, or saying something absolutely crazy. The company markets the clinical bullshitters as geniuses, and somewhere there's the most mild disclaimer they could craft, about how the staffer might say something incorrect.[*]

Every time one of their staff persuades someone to kill themselves... that company is looking at criminal and civil liability.

The company absolutely knew this would happen, and that it will keep happening, but they are betting that they can keep getting away with this and other "externalities", and become millionaires or billionaires. Before legislators and courts realize that, just because the company inserted this new-fangled telephone technology into the interaction, that doesn't mean that existing laws don't apply to the interaction.

[*] Analogous to the tiny gray smallprint search engine LLM summary one that isn't even shown unless you click to see more, and then only after you scroll all the way to the bottom of that and look for it. Or the chat UI tiny gray smallprint that says you should "double-check" (no explanation what that means), and makes even this weak disclaimer not even text-selectable, so even if you see it, it's lost when you copy&paste the LLM response. Understated, and in what looks like bad faith. On the telephone in our example, it's a single tiny beep, at and the end of the call, that's actually the words "This may not be correct" sped up 3x, and whispered, and is often missed because the customer hangs up, but that's by design.*
by tracker1 | 2025-09-02 19:42:23+00:00
It's definitely interesting to see, though a bit of a nitpick, would be nice to possibly see this extended to match language-library, in terms of the primary implementation library used.

For example, the TS/Deno example... while I like oak, I think hono is probably a bit more appropriate at this point. And in the Rust example, I would have gone for Axum over Actix.

I'm sure there are similar comparisons for all the languages in terms of differing frameworks where one may be the most widely recognized, but there's a clear up and comer that is likely a better choice if starting green.
by nathan_douglas | 2025-09-02 19:42:29+00:00
I think it's a symptom of much larger ailments to our society and species that we appear (to me, for now, at least) to have abandoned trying to address through systemic approaches.

My employer is a federal contractor, and our clients are federal agencies. I could excuse this mindset at an early-stage startup, maybe, but... we feds and contractors should be out on the street corner begging junior engineers to join us. We could field an enormous, sustainable, well-compensated, healthy workforce. Follow best practices, focus on quality and longterm sustainability and maintainability, and work for the public. What's not to like?

smdh. Sorry this turned into a rant.
by idle_zealot | 2025-09-02 19:43:07+00:00
> I have read many blog posts linked off 1st ranking position google queries in the past and found their answers to have inaccuracies as well, how is that better?

It's roughly as bad, if you assume the same degree of trust in both scenarios. I don't make that assumption. I get the sense that people are more likely to trust the AI answer at the top of the search results page or handed back to them in a ChatGPT conversation than they are to totally buy a random blogger. If I'm wrong, then great.
by dttze | 2025-09-02 19:43:18+00:00
> (The statistic I quoted also doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of exits from Gaza to Israel each year, or the undocumented exits through tunnels under rafah, so the exits were indeed much higher, not lower, than the official ocha figures.)

That is what you said. That report didn't support that claim. Which was obvious if you read the part you omitted. Which is why you didn't bother to quote it. It is the second article you linked where you deliberately misrepresented the data. Like your claim of 500k people exiting, when that article said 83% are laborers who go to Israel and back. You realize prisons allow work release too, right?

> There is photographic and video evidence of Israel destroying

There is plenty of video evidence of Israel destroying pretty much everything in Gaza. They have claimed many things, most of them not true. Like those supposedly hidden Hamas C&C facilities in the basements of hospitals (they weren't there, Israel just wanted to destroy the health system).
by phforms | 2025-09-02 19:43:25+00:00
As an autodidact who never learned this stuff at school/uni, his lectures are what made linear algebra really click for me. I can only recommend them to anyone who wants to get a visual intuition on the fundamentals of LA.

What also helped me as a visual learner was to program/setup tiny experiments in Processing[1] and GeoGebra Classic[2].

- [1] https://processing.org - [2] https://www.geogebra.org/classic