MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jedimastert | 2025-09-29 13:05:47+00:00
Back in my day shakes first there were places where someone could do things that would normally be mildly embarrassing because they were in a supportive community. In this example, it could be playing pretend and possibly saying goofy things or falling over and tripping or getting your butt handed to you by someone half your age or something.

When I was young, it would have been playing open mics as a teenager. I wasn't amazing but it's really important to play publicly in order to grow as a musician, and that means kinda sucking in public. I would not have become a musician if I didn't have that supportive community.

In this day and age, if I were to do that, someone would probably live stream it or film it on their phone and put it on YouTube, then It would get found by the kind of awful kids that like to make other people feel awful for no reason, then they would have found my like Facebook or social media or something, I'd catch shit at school, and I never would have touched an instrument again.

So yeah, save your highlight reels for someone else, thanks.
by goku12 | 2025-09-29 13:05:58+00:00
The article I cited is from 2022. At that time, the principal scientist had left the academia and was working to commercialize it. So I'm guessing it's still within your decade threshold? Besides, perhaps that threshold should be longer under the current circumstances. One of the greatest medical advancement of the recent times is the mRNA vaccine technology. But it's true origin is in the 1970s. They were solving numerous related problems in the meantime, though it could have been finished sooner had someone invested in it as intensely as they did during the pandemic.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-09-29 13:06:28+00:00
> In particular, the most harsh arguments against using C++, i.e. memory unsafeness, can be significantly mitigated when developing with a certain modern subset of the C++ language.

So the quest for the one true “modern subset” of C++ continues.

How do developers continue believing in this after a decade of the standards committee proving over and over again that they’re not interested in this and won’t contribute toward it?
by metalman | 2025-09-29 13:06:37+00:00
I would suggest a slight modification to your idea, in that people should build local repositories for there stuff, and use the mega corp for whatever they are good at NOW, TODAY and keep a smirk ready for when the mega corp blunders off and the whole recovery is click, click, done cause if there is one thing the web is good at, it's signing you up for the newest flash, later today.
by rhetocj23 | 2025-09-29 13:07:06+00:00
Exactly.

And this should not be a surprise at all. Humans are optimisers of truth NOT maximisers. There is a subtle and nuanced difference. Very few actually spend their entire existence being maximizers, its pretty exhausting to be of that kind.

Optimising = we look for what feels right or surpassses some threshold of "looks about right". Maximizing = we think deeply and logically reason to what is right and conduct tests to ensure it is so.

Now if you have the discipline to choose when to shift between the two modes this can work. Most people do not though. And therein lies the danger.
by vitus | 2025-09-29 13:07:18+00:00
I tried implementing A* using pointwise Hamming distance, found that it was inadmissible (since it yielded a suboptimal result on par with my manual attempt), then tried again with row-wise Hamming distance but was pretty sure that's inadmissible too (although it did yield an optimal result). I then tried min(row-Hamming, column-Hamming) but I'm not convinced that's admissible either.

I then switched to pure Dijkstra which ended up being faster because evaluation was much cheaper at each step, and despite these heuristics being inadmissible, they didn't result in substantially fewer nodes expanded.

That's almost certainly a function of the problem size -- if it were 5x5, this approach would not have been as successful.
by menaerus | 2025-09-29 13:07:18+00:00
Data suggests that they are, and common sense too. And your point of reference is a little bit problematic since there's no code attached so it's hard for people to validate the measurements.

Since you have been laser-focused on sqrt "bad" performance, and obvious optimization with sqrtrec, but also decided to ignore the rest of the results, maybe you can explain why there is such a large difference in your measurements between seemingly very similar platforms in terms of compute. After all this is pure compute problem.

For example, why does 4.9GHz CPU (AMD Ryzen™ 5 7545U) yield 2x to 4x worse results than 5.5GHz CPU (AMD Ryzen™ 7 9700X)?

AMD Ryzen 7 9700X Desktop: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Benchmark Time CPU Iterations ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- bench_getuid 38.6 ns 38.5 ns 18160546 bench_getpid 39.9 ns 39.9 ns 17703749 bench_close 45.2 ns 45.1 ns 15711379 bench_syscall 42.2 ns 42.1 ns 16638675 bench_sched_yield 81.7 ns 81.6 ns 8623522 AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 7545U Laptop: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Benchmark Time CPU Iterations ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- bench_getuid 106 ns 106 ns 6581746 bench_getpid 111 ns 111 ns 6271878 bench_close 116 ns 116 ns 5944154 bench_syscall 85.9 ns 85.9 ns 7317584 bench_sched_yield 315 ns 315 ns 2249333
by user_7832 | 2025-09-29 13:07:25+00:00
> I just am saying that Apple seems more trustworthy to me. And unless you can prove Android is actually better, then I still believe that.

And I say, windows XP seems more trustworthy to me. Fewer vectors to attack than the latest windows 11, it's the best! And I believe that.

How is this any different from your argument? You are not even providing a reason for your source of belief.
by smacker | 2025-09-29 13:07:36+00:00
While I really appreciate Workers platform "eleminated cold starts" advertising was always bothering me.

This is a curl request from my machine right now to SSR react app hosted on CF Worker: ``` DNS lookup: 0.296826s Connect: 0.320031s Start transfer: 2.710684s Total: 2.710969s ```

Second request: ``` DNS lookup: 0.002970s Connect: 0.015917s Start transfer: 0.176399s Total: 0.176621s ```

2.5 seconds difference.
by Simulacra | 2025-09-29 13:07:52+00:00
"If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about."

Eric Schmidt

At one point, being gay was against the law, abortion is against the law in some places, at one time being an atheist could get your head cut off. Let's do some nonstop recording of Larry Ellison, his children, his entire family, his neighbors, because they'll "be on their best behavior, a midnight nonstop recording"

The rich and elite never think about these things because they never consider that it might also effect them.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-09-29 13:08:44+00:00
It's kinda interesting, since many countries already have taxpayer paid archivers.

Not sure if the laws have changed, but every book published over here in my country needed to send a few copies to our "national library" for archival.

edit: https://www.nuk.uni-lj.si/informacije/obvezni-izvod-fizicni-... (yeah.. google translte it)
by bluGill | 2025-09-29 13:08:50+00:00
Rewrite needs to be seen in context of just fix the old code in place. You are always stoppable and making money, but spend some effort into cleaning up the things you wish you had done differently, enabling tomorrows features, while also have spare "manpower" to use to build new features.

Rewrites often do work out in the long term. However you end up spending 10 years on the rewrite and those are 10 years where the old thing isn't getting as many features (everyone knows it is dead long term so they only invest in the most important features thus allowing your competition time to catch up). Worse those, in 20 years (10 years after the rewrite replaces the old thing) the rewrite is showing age because of things you wish you had done differently.

Which is why I advocate for fixing the old code in place over time. No matter what your best ideas while turn out to be wrong in some way. Architecture decisions that seemed good turn out of have downsides. Languages that go obsolete. APIs everyone uses that you realize should have been done different (If they are only used in one places that is an easy change). Core data structures that no longer meet your needs, but you can't change without touching a million places that update it. You will need a long term effort to fix those mistakes whatever they are. Sure it will take longer to get the old thing to where it needs to be than the rewrite, but you are not saving anything as the new thing will have different mistakes that you will regret in 10 years.

Also the above is in context of a large program. My program to draw names for the family Christmas drawing is easy enough for anyone to write from scratch in an hour so who cares. When your are on a project that costs over 1 billion dollars to write you have different constraints (some of you are on small projects that it is better to write from scratch each time)
by sylware | 2025-09-29 13:08:55+00:00
This is implemented with instruction fusion. Just need to document properly and publish properly what will end up "standard instruction fusion patterns" (like the div/rem one).

Adding more instructions is kind of non productive for a R(educed)ISC ISA. It has to be weighted with extreme care. Compressed instructions went thru for the sake of code density (marketing vs arm thumb instructions).

In the end, programs will want probably to stay conservative and will implement only the core ISA, at best giving some love to some instruction fusion patterns and that's it, unless being built knowingly for a specific risc-v hardware implementation.
by withinboredom | 2025-09-29 13:08:56+00:00
Some optimization problems require an entire PHD dissertation and research budget to actually optimize, so some algorithms require far more effort applied to this than is reasonable for most products. As mentioned, sometimes you can combine these all into one step -- when you know the domains well.

Sometimes, it might even be completely separate people working on each step... separated by time and space.

In any case, most software generally stops at (2) simply due to the fact that any effort towards (3) isn't worth the effort -- for example, there's very little point in spending two weeks optimizing a report generation that runs in the middle of the night, once a month. At some point, there may be, but usually not anytime soon.
by mothballed | 2025-09-29 13:09:16+00:00
I'm no ITAR expert either, but IDK how wearing a T-shirt could possibly be an export. My lay understanding of export is that the information would somehow have to leave the country; if someone looks at the T-shirt and transmits it out the country they'd be the exporter, not the person wearing the T-shirt. If someone records the t-shirt and transmits it, they'd be the exporter.
by t-3 | 2025-09-29 13:09:18+00:00
There's a world of difference. I know the people in my local community and they know me. We speak the same dialects and use the same slang. Nobody is going to take some off-color idiom the wrong way or judge me for poor grammar or enunciation.

I know who the whackjobs are and don't need to interact with them or watch my speech to avoid triggering them and dealing with ensuing harassment, threats, violence.
by dijit | 2025-09-29 13:10:04+00:00
As Richard Restak postulates in his book “The Naked Brain”[0]: the limbic system provides a gut feeling (usually from comfort) and we rationalise our way backwards from that without being able to really pinpoint “why”; usually the “why” is secondary and only added as justification for the feeling post-decision.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Naked-Brain-Emerging-Neurosociety-Cha...
Show HN: Hacker News with AI-Powered "Why It Matters" & Categorization
by WarLord81 | 2025-09-29 13:10:32+00:00
I built an AI-powered interface for Hacker News that goes beyond just collecting headlines - it actually explains why each story matters and provides intelligent categorization.

What it does: - Takes Hacker News stories and processes them through AI to add context and analysis - Each article gets a "Why It Matters" analysis that explains the broader impact and significance - Intelligent categorization with 3-level hierarchy (AI, Policy & Governance, Security, Programming, Healthcare, Society & Culture) - Regional filtering and smart tagging - Multiple layout options (newspaper, magazine, masonry, etc.) that rotate automatically - Real-time updates with engagement metrics (points, comments) from the original HN posts - NY Times inspired Home Page to give a fresh reading experience of Hacker News

The backstory: I was frustrated with how Hacker News just shows headlines without context. As someone who follows tech news daily, I wanted something that would help me understand not just what happened, but why it actually matters. So I built an AI system that acts as "The News Curator" - it takes the HN stories you already know and love, but adds the missing context about their broader implications and connects them to trends.

What makes it different: - Context, not just content: Every HN article includes analysis of why it matters, not just what happened - Smart categorization: Uses AI to properly categorize HN stories across tech domains - Multiple viewing modes: Automatically rotates between newspaper, magazine, and other layouts to keep browsing interesting - Real-time processing: Uses n8n workflows to continuously process and enrich HN stories as they come in - Preserves HN engagement: Shows original points, comments, and links back to HN discussions

Technical details: - Built with Next.js 15, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS - Uses Neon database with complex relational schema for categories - AI processing via n8n automation workflows - Image fetching and optimization - Real-time webhook processing for live updates

The site is live and you can try it out immediately - no signup required. The AI processing happens in the background, so you'll see HN articles with the "Why It Matters" analysis and proper categorization.

Try it here: https://news.jypi.org

I'm particularly interested in feedback on the categorization system and whether the "Why It Matters" analysis actually helps with understanding HN stories better. The AI sometimes gets it wrong, but when it's on point, it really changes how you consume the news you already follow.

What do you think? Does this approach to HN content make sense, or am I overthinking it?
by AlecSchueler | 2025-09-29 13:10:38+00:00
Yeah, it just happened to a woman I know recently. She took part in some naked protests like 20 years ago and photographs of them went up on various sites like Flickr from a host of different photographers and no one ever thought about it. Recently she was targeted in a revenge porn incident by someone who had used facial recognition search engines to gather dozens of nude photographs of her before distributing them by name on porn sites.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-09-29 13:10:54+00:00
You say this like someone was talking about their own data, not someone else's. The OP is talking about a Google dataset of money spent on Google ads over time, not one the OP created or produced in any way. Do we even call it a "backup" when we're talking about preserving a third-party's data (possibly without their consent, possibly in a way they would consider a violation of their ToS)?

Still, certainly it's true as observable that we cannot trust Google to preserve anything. One reason some people don't realize this is because Google has spent years marketing itself as a trustworthy steward with an interest in doing things for the good of society. Another reason people don't do something about it, about every single Google dataset or media corpus that they might regret disappearing -- is because it's expensive and sometimes challenging to do so, Google sometimes tries to prevent it as a ToS violation, and nobody is funding it (or at least there is certainly not enough funding to preserve all of Google's datasets).

There are ways to address these things, but blaming people noticing it as a problem as idiots is probably not one that will lead to addressing them.
by libridev | 2025-09-29 13:11:01+00:00
I think both of those stories are interesting.

For the low trust issue, I think it is becoming more clear with the rise of blatantly fake content online. I think a good lesson could be learned in what formalities you should get in place when working with others to prevent getting screwed over. I myself have been screwed over before by business partners and learned that you really need everything in writing and often lawyers.

For the windows app, did you just not have the time to fix all the issues? Or was it the weight of responsibility in what the app did?
by user3939382 | 2025-09-29 13:11:04+00:00
> different to the experience you get from prompting

In my experience no. The agents get trapped by the exact programming pitfalls a junior would. The LLM is basically a 16 year old who read a given languages For Dummies book cover to cover 3-4x and has the syntax down but understands little about actually programming especially once you run into any real complexity. However 100% of those limitations can be overcome by proper architecture, testing, specification / requirements analysis (which is a lost art in the time of Agile but which I am a master of), and a sprinkle of technical strategic guidance. Especially the agent doesn’t understand its limitations so you need to have an eye for when it’s working on a problem that’s outside the competency its token window can produce. I could go on for 2 hours but bottom line is IMHO there’s more to it than this simple claim.
by dominicrose | 2025-09-29 13:11:28+00:00
In the context of airsoft I guess you could cover yourself completely and why not shoot yellow plastic bullets at the cameraman.

The cost of filming is very low. Even people who aren't interested in taking pictures or filming now have a camera with them at all times.

I remember a village in Africa about 20 years ago where people thought cameras stole their soul.

Technology steals everything it can. I mean think of all the data that went into google maps or chatgpt, to only name a couple of apps.
by Beretta_Vexee | 2025-09-29 13:11:34+00:00
This is just one element among many others. They probably have many available and others in reserve in case one becomes obsolete.

I recently discovered that audio codecs, frequencies, resolution, mix volume, etc. are accessible via JS in the browser and that this allows fingerprinting. Since we are talking about YouTube, the same type of technique should be possible with video codecs.
by Simulacra | 2025-09-29 13:12:00+00:00
I think there's also another element that the author is missing and that is likability. I've never experienced this, but I've heard about people being put through grueling interview processes merely to weed them out because they were deemed "not a good culture fit".

I think at least half of all interviews are a popularity contest, and the other half are your qualifications.
by epolanski | 2025-09-29 13:12:04+00:00
Jm2c but interviews tell you absolutely none, nothing, about what kind of a professional the candidate is.

I have no clue whether he'll care and help or pretend to work and drag everybody else down.

There's a huge number of incredibly capable developers who could pass any interview but then spend days playing video games and sabotaging projects and teams.

I really don't believe in technical interviews, I'd rather base the relationship on trust, if you tell me you're good/experienced at X I trust you to be. If it was bs you'll be shown the door with ease.

Instead many companies make it insanely hard to get you hired, but also incredibly hard to cut you out even if you're impact is a very net negative.
by bhouston | 2025-09-29 13:12:20+00:00
Larry Ellison is ultra-pro Israel if you didn't know.

He and others are pushing for Bari Weiss take a key role at CBS to better "defend Israel":

https://nypost.com/2025/09/19/media/shari-redstone-says-bari...

And many people are worried about a similar type of agenda setting at TikTok now:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/will-tiktoks-new-own...

Netanyahu, for his part, believes it is super consequential for Ellison to takeover TikTok:

https://x.com/TheTNHoller/status/1972326967983923636 (Video)

https://jewishinsider.com/2025/09/tiktok-sale-netanyahu-amer... (Summary)

(And if that wasn't enough, Ellison has his eyes set on Warner Brothers next, which includes CNN: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/business/media/paramount-... )
by TrackerFF | 2025-09-29 13:12:21+00:00
Cargo culting, and the fear of bad hires. Everyone wants "the best engineers". Probably 1% of tech firms work with deep tech, where boundaries are pushed, and every percentage of improvement or degradation can result in non-trivial gains or losses. The rest can do just fine with normal engineers, and do interviews like the rest of the professional world.
by xpil | 2025-09-29 13:12:23+00:00
My preferred approach in similar situations is to ask an LLM for an initial solution or code snippet, then take over manually - no endless prompt tweaking, just stop prompting and start coding. Finally (optionally), I let the LLM do a final pass to review my completed solution for bugs, optimizations, etc.

The key win is skipping the prompt refinement loop, which is (A) tedious and time-consuming, and (B) debilitating in the long run.
by jedimastert | 2025-09-29 13:12:25+00:00
I would also push back against the whole "this is just being perceived in public" thing, because you're not consenting to being perceived by the entire planet, you were consenting to being perceived by the people present and in the community. Like if there's a bully in the community, the community can do something about it or you can at least avoid them. Like you are consenting to interacting with a culture of like-minded people, and you know they're like-minded because they all showed up to the same event to do the same thing. That is not true of the open internet.
by nromiun | 2025-09-29 13:12:53+00:00
The article explains this:

> The default is io_method = worker. We did consider defaulting both to sync or io_uring, but I think worker is the right choice. It’s actually “asynchronous”, and it’s available everywhere (because it’s our implementation).

I think a pool of workers is a sensible default. Many environments disable io_uring for security reasons anyway.
by agedclock | 2025-09-29 13:12:53+00:00
If you are going to mock conspiracy theorists can you at least articulate the conspiracy theory correctly.

People are worried that it would be made difficult for you to travel outside 15 minute city via a combination of mandated digital payment system for all transactions that are tied to you identity and removal of personal vehicles (e.g. cars).

e.g. Person A is allowed by authorities to buy a train ticket, while Person B is not due to <arbitrary criteria>.

I've been told this has been done in China to stop people travelling to protests, but I don't actually know if that is true.

Do I think this is the intention behind 15 minute cities? No. I do however think that what they are describing is possible since I've had problems making transactions electronically for legal purchases because my transaction was flagged by the bank for being fraudulent.

Also in the UK the bank can refuse to give you your money.
by merelysounds | 2025-09-29 13:12:53+00:00
Spoiler warning, this comment contains a solution, this is your chance to stop reading, especially if you didn’t have a chance to play yet.

With 8 moves and rows only: 2->1, 1->2, 2->1, 3->2, 2->3, 4->3, 4->1, 1->4.

A more efficient solution should be possible; did anyone find any?