MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hxorr | 2025-09-23 18:38:20+00:00
This is why your plastic ketchup bottle still smells like ketchup after washing it multiple times - at a microscopic level, plastics essentially look like uncooked ramen/instant noodles, basically a big tangle of polymer chains which act like a sponge.

Now, consider what happens when you wash that plastic with a cocktail of chemicals in your dishwasher...

Obviously very hard/dense plastics (melamine comes to mind) are less prone to this
by CM30 | 2025-09-23 18:38:31+00:00
Yeah, and it's kinda depressing how hard it is to get people to accept that. Every community and group seems to operate under the assumption that anyone who's not 'successful' is too lazy or selfish to deserve it, and that those who are winning have to be the smartest, hardest working people around.

The just world fallacy is strong in communities, especially for artistic and creative endeavours like writing, art, music, filmmaking, game design, etc.

Does that mean that effort is worthless? Of course not. Does that mean you should just say "well, I'm not successful, I guess that's just life?". Again no.

But you do need to be humble and accept that in some ways, both your successes and failures were affected by external factors as well as your own efforts. That for how tempting it is to look down at people, that it could just have well have been your life circumstances that didn't work out well, your bets that didn't pay off and your efforts that didn't amount to anything in the end.
by tjs8rj | 2025-09-23 18:38:33+00:00
White privilege is a specific case of the phenomenon: “if you live in the culture built by your culture, you will benefit”, which is the whole point of culture in the first place.

A Japanese person has Japanese privilege in Japan, an Egyptian in Egypt, etc

If you’re “culturally American” in America (regardless of race), you will benefit.

If you’re White and culturally American in parts of America where White American culture dominates (like our institutions, which reflect a country that has been historically 90%+ White), you will benefit

If you’re White and in a place where non White culture dominates, you will be relatively disadvantaged. Most countries around the world, and even parts of the US (parts of Chicago where you have significant disadvantages from being White).
by numbers | 2025-09-23 18:38:54+00:00
this reminds me of a friend who we've excluded from the group b/c of the age old advice of "the worst they can say is no". Well, we invited him to everything at first it was either no responses or late responses like "sorry was busy with work".

The whole friend group took their turns and attempts at inviting him.

It sort of stopped altogether when we started getting responses like "hey, don't call me without scheduling a call with me before" or getting a text 3 days later "hey what's up, I don't want to hang out".

He's a workaholic and believes his work is the most important thing (he switches jobs every 6-9 months) so the whole friend group has now just stopped trying.

For context, this has been going on for 10 years and about a year ago everyone stopped trying.
by sigbottle | 2025-09-23 18:39:09+00:00
How easy would it be to implement a tmux shim application that just has line numbers natively in the pty itself for copying?

Tmux copy mode is already great, my one gripe is no line numbers.

This script https://gist.github.com/Nimmidev/2cf4d5cc80dce32d0240ec7b3cf... is pretty good, but I still get frequent bugs with it, and also it just doesn't work in fullscreen mode (2 panes).

The core issue is that it's allocating a new tmux pane with the sole goal of mirroring line numbers; it would be nice if they synced up in the same pane, avoiding the above issue.

Piping it into neovim is an option that you can do on both neovim and zellij. zellij loses colors, and neovim is probably the best solution to this problem but then again I don't want to have to remember to turn on/off line numbers every time and I personally like one-off panes. Separation of responsibilities, I guess.

Long-winded rant to basically say: would a standard like this solve my issue easier? From what I understand of terminals, I would need to parse the underlying pty, maintain a scrollback buffer internally in the wrapper shim, and also be able to dynamically adjust toggling line numbers on/off.

If I'm doing this kind of translation, how "leaky" will the abstraction be until I'm basically re-implementing the logic in my middle layer, assuming that "for free" I can get the translation both in and out from the pty?

I've been trying to look closer at TUI tools, but that's what really bothered me. Given just how god awful the VT protocol is, you could get the state machine parsing correct, but the developer still has to learn basically every little quirk that was added over the years, no?

(And before someone makes a false equivalence, no, this isn't the case even with languages like c++ - I'm still learning quirks about it to this day, but I don't have to learn the entire thing to build proper, robust code. It does not seem the same with something like the VT protocol. So yes, I'm aware that some learning should take place, but I'm wondering how structured of a developer experience this will end up being.)
by NelsonMinar | 2025-09-23 18:39:33+00:00
You left out the really gross quote from Rafael França: "I’m not so sure I trust them to not sabotage rubygems or bundler." I'm not eager to work with a community with leaders who say things like that in it. Imagine spending years volunteering work that helps a company like Shopify only to have someone malign your work like that.
by dhorthy | 2025-09-23 18:39:52+00:00
i mean there's also the fact that claude code injects this system message into your claude.md which means that even if your claude.md sucks you will probably be okay:

<system-reminder> IMPORTANT: this context may or may not be relevant to your tasks. You should not respond to this context or otherwise consider it in your response unless it is highly relevant to your task. Most of the time, it is not relevant. </system-reminder>

lots of others have written about this so i won't go deep but its a clear product decision, but if you don't know what's in your context window, you can't respond/architect your balance between claude.md and /commands well.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-09-23 18:40:41+00:00
> I don't care if my bank card details leak because of CSRF or because of a bug in Chromium

Sure, but just by virtue of what these languages are used for, almost all CSRF vulnerabilities are not in code written in C, C++, Rust, or Zig. So if I’m targeting that space, why would I care that some Django app or whatever has a CSRF when analyzing what vulnerabilities are important to prevent for my potential Zig project?

You’re right that overall danger and incidence of vulnerabilities matter - but they matter for the actual use-case you want to use the language for. The Linux kernel for example has exploitable TOCTOU vulnerabilities at a much higher rate than most software - why would they care that TOCTOU vulnerabilities are rare in software overall when deciding what complexity to accept to reduce them?
by vunderba | 2025-09-23 18:41:12+00:00
I had a similar program designed as my "AWAY" bot that was trained on transcripts of my previous conversations and connected to Skype. At the time (2009) I was living in Taiwan so I would activate it when I went to bed to chat with my friends back in the States given the ~12 hour time difference. Reading back some of the transcripts made it sound like I was on the verge of a psychotic break though.
by duped | 2025-09-23 18:41:53+00:00
> Maybe we can just let people decide how many electrical outlets and parking spots they need?

The last people I expect to know how much of a resource they need are small business owners. Parking regulations are there when there isn't sufficient street or garage parking. It should be obvious that a restaurant needs more parking spots than say, a dry cleaner, so they shouldn't have the same burden. Parking capacity is inelastic, so if you under build then businesses and traffic suffer. Meanwhile if you overbuild, you're stuck maintaining empty parking lots and have inefficient use of space. It makes a ton of sense to me for this to be tightly regulated.

> No, politicians (who are omniscient) know exactly the right amount of parking spaces and electrical outlets that will work best for everyone in all situations.

I mean if you spend some time in municipal spaces you find out quickly this isn't decided by politicians, but by city planners and managers. The outlet stuff comes from building codes like the IBC which is widely used (and as the saying goes, written in blood).

As always when you have a beef with your local government the solution is to get involved instead of complaining on the internet. The barrier to entry is shockingly low.
by mey | 2025-09-23 18:42:35+00:00
I don't develop for Apple platforms so I don't deal with Xcode (apparently thank god), but all of this reminds me of web development back in the early days of Internet Explorer. Until Mozilla/Opera/Safari/Chrome started taking market share did the development information/stability really start to drastically improve. I'm inferring that it's basically impossible to build tooling for Apple because it is all proprietary/undocumented, so their own tools have no competition. It blows my mind that you can't CI/CD builds on servers readily requiring people to setup weird mac mini server farms since the whole xserver line died years ago.

Ballmer's "developers developers developers" moment will forever be burned into my brain, but that wasn't wrong on a strategy level.
by vunderba | 2025-09-23 18:43:26+00:00
I remember reading the source of the original MegaHAL program when I was younger - one of the tricks that made it stand out (particularly in the Loebner competitions [1]) was that it used both a backwards and forwards Markov chain to generate responses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_Prize
by on_the_train | 2025-09-23 18:44:09+00:00
I have a confession: I don't know the difference between a console, terminal (-emulator?!?), shell, bash and all these things. It's all just a black window with text for me. I've never understood why people talk so much about git shell when my normal windows cmd/Powershell can do just the same git commands. I'm also a prolific and successful software engineer. These two things shouldn't mix. So please tell me what I missed in life when these things are completely alien to me.
by jandrese | 2025-09-23 18:44:09+00:00
Which makes me wonder how much these guys spent per phone number. If you figure you can use a phone number maybe 2 or 3 times per service before it gets blocked they could create literally millions of accounts with this operation across various services. I don't know what the black market value for a Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, HN, etc... account is, but I suspect it is more than the price of a SIM card.
by vinceguidry | 2025-09-23 18:44:12+00:00
Really looking forward to this, writing my own personal editor in Ruby and not having a library for parsing terminal input is leading me to write my own kitty keyboard protocol parser (which ghostty implements) and having to hand-code lookup tables is driving me batty. I really don't like the idea of using an existing TUI framework as none of them actually implement the kitty protocol.

* https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/keyboard-protocol/#
by lazide | 2025-09-23 18:44:16+00:00
Russia is hollowing out its male population which was already under severe strain.

Even if Russia ‘wins’ the Ukraine war (takes all Ukrainian territory), it’s even more fucked than when it started demographically.

It’s also spent pretty much all of it’s currency reserves and destroyed it’s normal economy destroying all that ‘new’ land in a way it will be incredibly hostile to productive use for a generation+. Not counting insurgencies and rebellions.

The well is solidly poisoned, regardless of who ends up owning it.
by drewnick | 2025-09-23 18:44:38+00:00
Not OP, but I use Codex for back-end, scripting, and SQL. Claude Code for most front-end. I have found that when one faces a challenge, the other often can punch through and solve the problem. I even have them work together (moving thoughts and markdown plans back and fourth) and that works wonders.

My progression: Cursor in '24, Roo code mid '25, Claude Code in Q2 '25, Codex CLI in Q3 `25.
by bpt3 | 2025-09-23 18:47:19+00:00
> The only reasonable way for them to be entitled to prevent density is for them to own the property and not build anything.

Of course.

> Well then those people should buy the land and keep it low density. Can't afford it? Too bad. Pro-housing folks aren't trying to force people to do something with their property, it's the other way around.

Pro-housing people in my area absolutely are trying to force people to do things with their property and in their neighborhood by barring covenants and other restrictions that can be put in place by municipalities and HOAs.
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-23 18:47:36+00:00
Under the hood, LLMs are vector analysis engines. They benefit from spaces where the result of change is smooth.

Adding levels of indirection and secondary reasoning to the search interface makes the results less smooth. This is one of the things humans complain about often when using e.g. Google: "I'm interesting in searching for X, but all these results are Y." Yes, because X and Y are synonyms or close topics and Google is mixing in a popularity signal to deduce that, for example, your search for `tailored swift database` is probably about a corpus of Taylor Swift song lyrics and not about companies that build bespoke Swift APIs on top of data stored in Postgres.

If you're driving the process with an LLM, it's more of a problem for the LLM if it's searching the space and the search engine under it keeps tripping over the difference between "swift means a programming language" and "swift means a successful musician" as it explores the result space. A dumber API that doesn't try to guess and just returns both datasets blended together fits the space-search problem better.
by blakepelton | 2025-09-23 18:48:38+00:00
Some recent academic work suggests implementing caches directly in network switches. Tofino switches are programmable enough that academics can implement this today.

OrbitCache is one example, described in this paper: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/nsdi25-kim.pdf

It should solve the thundering herd problem, because the switch would "know" what outstanding cache misses it has pending, and the switch would park subsequent requests for the same key in switch memory until the reply comes back from the backend server. This has an advantage compared to a multi-threaded CPU-based cache, because it avoids performance overheads associated with multiple threads having to synchronize with each other to realize they are about to start a stampede.

A summary of OrbitCache will be published to my blog tomorrow. Here is a "draft link": https://danglingpointers.substack.com/p/4967f39c-7d6b-4486-a...
by kmill | 2025-09-23 18:48:50+00:00
That second operator is the <|> operator, from the Alternative typeclass.

The first one has some arbitrariness (do you take the left or right value if both are Just). But, thankfully the Applicative typeclass gives both <* and *>, which lets you choose which value you want:

Just A <* Just B = Just A Just A *> Just B = Just B

(There's the possibility to merge values too, with f <$> Just A <*> Just B, which evaluates to Just (f A B). I feel like this is a "don't try to understand it, just get used to it" sort of syntax. It can be pretty convenient though.)
by mjd | 2025-09-23 18:50:13+00:00
I usually do that too, but this seemed to me like it's not really a git utility. It's just a filter.

I can see the argument in favor of `git-` also.

But I think I'd prefer `git-changed-twice` to be a wrapper that takes a reflist argument, and runs `git-log --stat reflist | what-changed-twice`.
by xg15 | 2025-09-23 18:50:35+00:00
I think there is a difference between making it clear to a person they'll always have the option to join - and pushing that person to join.

Anna in the story did not express regret that she never joined. And as far as we know, Alexei wasn't expecting her to take his invitations either - because it wasn't about actually getting her to go to the party, it was just about communicating to her that the "we've stopped inviting you to our group events because you always say no" moment never happened and she was still a part of the group. That was what she had appreciated in the end.

On the other hand, what your group attempted seems more like a concerted push to change the person's behavior. Most people would probably reject that if they want to stay in control of their own plans.
by bvoq | 2025-09-23 18:50:55+00:00
Reasoning from first-principles:

Autism is a neurological disorder where you have more island neurons than long reaching connected neurons.

Vaccines can't cross the blood brain barrier, thereby they can't cause autism. Simply ruled out. Acetaminophen on the other hand is a drug that numbs the brain. It can at least feasibly have an influence.

Next, let's think about painkillers. They numb pain. Pain is linked to far reaching memories and connections. Again, plausible.

Sometimes a crazy man says something true.
by rancor | 2025-09-23 18:51:28+00:00
It took a fair amount of reading between the lines, but here's what appears to have happened: 1) People and entities with partial control over RubyGems attempted to cancel DHH. 2) In response, elements aligned with DHH kicked the former out of RubyGems. 3) Everyone involved is now attempting to legitimize their motives as "good engineering."

In other words, "When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die."
by pixelbeat | 2025-09-23 18:51:52+00:00
Phoronix didn't link the full NEWS: https://savannah.gnu.org/news/?id=10816

Some extra notes...

Accurate (cgroup aware) nproc is important, as detailed in: https://danluu.com/cgroup-throttling/

The new base58 encoding performs well being around 500 times faster than arbitrary int implementation internal to cpython 3.13 for example
by Pet_Ant | 2025-09-23 18:51:54+00:00
Serial port or serial port over "ethernet"[1] (technically it's 8p8c[2]).

My router doesn't have a video port, but it does have a dummy terminal port. I had to scrounge a video card for my server to set it up, but it does have a serial port [3]. So that would have been nice.

Also would be nice for a modern remake of dumb terminal with abandoned monitors.

[1] https://www.cabling-design.com/references/pinouts/EIA-TIA-56...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_connector#8P8C

[3] https://serverfault.com/a/529159
by technocrat8080 | 2025-09-23 18:52:18+00:00
How do you folks think about the Manus finding on dynamic tool selection? https://manus.im/blog/Context-Engineering-for-AI-Agents-Less...

> A natural reaction is to design a dynamic action space—perhaps loading tools on demand using something RAG-like. We tried that in Manus too. But our experiments suggest a clear rule: unless absolutely necessary, avoid dynamically adding or removing tools mid-iteration. There are two main reasons for this:

> 1. In most LLMs, tool definitions live near the front of the context after serialization, typically before or after the system prompt. So any change will invalidate the KV-cache for all subsequent actions and observations.

> 2. When previous actions and observations still refer to tools that are no longer defined in the current context, the model gets confused. Without constrained decoding, this often leads to schema violations or hallucinated actions.

> To solve this while still improving action selection, Manus uses a context-aware state machine to manage tool availability. Rather than removing tools, it masks the token logits during decoding to prevent (or enforce) the selection of certain actions based on the current context.
by iagooar | 2025-09-23 18:52:18+00:00
Yes, it is a web project with next.js + Typescript + Tailwind + Postgres (Prisma).

I started with Cursor, since it offers a well-rounded IDE with everything you need. It also used to be the best tool for the job. These days Codex + GPT-5-Codex is king. But I sometimes go back to Cursor, especially when reading / editing the PRDs or if I need the ocasional 2nd opinion by Claude.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-09-23 18:53:01+00:00
> 1. Describe problem with lots of details (often recording 20-60 mins of voice, transcribe)

I just ask it to give me instructions for a coding agent and give it a small description of what I want to do, it looks at my code, and details what I describes as best as it can, and usually I have enough to let Junie (JetBrains AI) run on.

I can't personally justify $200 a month, I would need to see seriously strong results for that much. I use AI piecemeal because it has always been the best way to use it. I still want to understand the codebase. When things break its mostly on you to figure out what broke.
by WhyCause | 2025-09-23 18:53:20+00:00
Also, MS Word auto-corrects <space>-<space> into an em-dash just like it fixes quotes. Depending on which software was used to write it, it's very likely that's what happened.

I'm never suspicious of only one em-dash, as they are a perfectly valid, if infrequent punctuation. Three or more in an article this length would make start looking at the rest of it more closely, though.
by zahlman | 2025-09-23 18:53:30+00:00
> Both things are true: The climate system is vastly complex, and we’re certain about what we are doing to it. How can we be so confident in a hundred-year projection when we can’t predict the weather with any reliability more than a week out?

TFA doesn't really seem to address this directly.

But it seems straightforward to me. It's because the hundred-year prediction is a much simpler claim (and also conditional on various models of future human behaviour), and also about a single-dimensional metric that readily allows for noise to be averaged out. When you get into questions of the detailed effects of an average global temperature increase (like sea level rises, loss of biodiversity or even, like, average local temperature increase in specific locations) it seems like the error bars are wider.

It's not any more paradoxical than noting that we can extract a trend in historical global average temperature, even when the slope of that trend is on the order of degrees per century within data that includes variations of tens of degrees per half-year, or even per day.
by ahmeneeroe-v2 | 2025-09-23 18:53:50+00:00
The quote is literally in this thread. Read upwards from your own comment. "Random lurkers" (including yourself) would have read it if they followed the thread to this point.

That's why I don't think davorak is here in good faith. Look how close he was to the quote.

What are you doing here? How did you get here without reading the quote?
by madeofpalk | 2025-09-23 18:53:50+00:00
I disagree with this framing as well. There's nothing wrong with "right-leaning" statements or opinions. DHH can talk all he wants about a desire for smaller governments, opinions on gun control, or conservative fiscal policy.

However, people that espouse intolerance of others based on the colour of their skin is just objectively bad. Sometimes there is a right and a wrong side to things. The problem is that some on the political-right seem to have aligned themselves with policy or viewpoints that stand for hatred.
by criemen | 2025-09-23 18:54:29+00:00
Yet a lot of people never bother to learn vim, and are still outstanding and productive engineers. We're surely not seeing any memos "Reflexive vim usage is now a baseline expectation at [our company]" (context: https://x.com/tobi/status/1909251946235437514)

The as-of-yet unanswered question is: Is this the same? Or will non-LLM-using engineers be left behind?