MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by impossiblefork | 2025-09-28 20:05:40+00:00
No, I don't believe that it's tactically sensible to send troops where Russian troops are already entrenched or ready for war.

I believe that war should be conducted to exploit the enemy, not go at him in some idiot maneuver.

Our actions in Ukraine should be limited to stand-off weapons and glide bombs, mirror the Russian manner of aerial attack. We should also attack gas pipelines, ammonia plants, electrical infrastructure, etc. in Russia and generally shut the place down. We should of course also seize all Russian-flagged ships.

Exploits its dependence on transport and cheap energy, exploit Russia's size by seizing weak or undefended regions to force troop movements, attacking the troops with stand-off weapons while their being transported to the front etc.

Basically, we're playing tennis, and they're playing with both corridors in addition to the singles court. We should of course let them run.

I am absolutely opposed to sending ground troops against Russian positions or any region with sufficient defence, or capacity to resist. This risks the lives of soldiers needlessly and is not what war is about.
by mhh__ | 2025-09-28 20:06:16+00:00
The immigration angle is a total fraud. If they wanted to do any of the things being implied they could have done so ages ago, they don't care. it's true that the ease of accessing the grey economy is a pull to the country but you can just... not let them in.

edit: an interesting example of this that I find quite fascinating is that the amount of automation in things like car washing is declining because the automatic ones are being undercut by quasi unregulated alternatives that don't clean up the chemicals properly and so on
by jacquesm | 2025-09-28 20:06:20+00:00
Yes, we do actually know this. And anybody that pretends that we do not is either very naive, does not understand any of the technology or has not made even a cursory effort to find out.

Proof points:

- the drones that made it into Poland did not have warheads

- they flew over Belarus before entering Polish airspace

- they were under continuous control from the moment of launch

- they were prepped with longer range tanks than they would have had if they had been aimed at Ukraine

- quite a few of them were equipped with ways of sending back telemetry

So no, these were not strays. The best explanation is that they were an intel gathering mission with respect to the kind of response generated and the speed with which they were detected. Other possible uses for russia are to misdirect attention from wherever they might want to attack for real (say, the Baltics) and a way to reduce the flow of defensive measures to Ukraine by instilling fear in the population further West.
by ArcHound | 2025-09-28 20:06:22+00:00
I'll take the bait and answer. There are indeed actors for whom the threat from the East is AN existential factor. That's because they remember how the life under Soviet rule looked like and they don't want to repeat it.

Whether there's a mood for a big war, I am not sure. But there are states that are ready for it. And yes, it is within EU interests to let the fighting happen in Ukraine rather than EU.

Also, it's a nice collection of the subtler Russian points you have here, B+ for effort.
by coldtea | 2025-09-28 20:06:40+00:00
>September is the equivalent of 9, October of 10. Which comes first for natural sorting? Remember, the file modify date may not be useful here since you may have wrapped up the September budget on October 1st while the prior edit to the October budget may have been on September 20th. The problem is that there is no such thing as natural

Yeah, but there is such a thing as "give a predictable and consistent way I can name the files so that they sort as I want everywhere" which (if different OSes don't try to be "smart") would have been to prefix them with the numeric date zero padded.
by pbasista | 2025-09-28 20:07:09+00:00
> The rational reason is to avoid getting their content "stolen"

Rational? From what point of view?

What is "rational" about thinking that the content of a website should not be copied?

> having the user leave the site to do something else with the saved content.

And what is controversial about user leaving a website on their own terms, i.e. when they want?
by armchairhacker | 2025-09-28 20:07:20+00:00
But the alternative would be a surprise to people who assume "by name" will order numbers, including those who are new to technology (and I think most non-technical people who sort things manually unknowingly order numbers).

We want to minimize surprises and mysteries, but computers have so much hidden complexity it's impossible to eliminate them. If users were shown a full description of how every feature on their computer worked before using it, they'd quickly start ignoring the descriptions. There should probably be a tooltip or "manual entry" for "by name" for those who are curious, and it should never be labeled "alphabetical" because it's not. But cases like the author's, where he assumes a feature works differently than most people (including the designers) assume, can't be helped.
by mhh__ | 2025-09-28 20:07:24+00:00
Tweets - prison

Assaulting and trying to stab a man burning a Quran - Suspended sentence

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8xr12yx5l4o watch the video and tell me this man should be A) not in prison and B) in the country after said prison sentence
by kjkjadksj | 2025-09-28 20:08:41+00:00
I think it comes from separating domain experts from writing software themselves. There was a lot of great software for different niche things that were written by people who were some what experts in these niche things that happened to write code as well. They knew what calculations people in this field would be doing, and simply wrote the function and wrapped it in some tool. Immediately useful software.

A lot of "academic" code that is pilloried by "real" software engineers is actually a great example of this. Is it the most performant? No. Could a random person off the street make use of this? No. But for those in the field, they know exactly what this tool is conceptually doing even if they don't know how it is made exactly. It is like a very specialized tool for a very specialized tradesman.

What is interesting about the shift away from utilitarian programming is that these "thought leaders" and other middlemen now find themselves in positions to set the narrative essentially thanks to monopolizing the space, change the very meaning of work to suit the software they happen to peddle rather than the other way around. We saw this with enterprise software and now we see this with AI tooling shoehorned into that enterprise software.
by rolph | 2025-09-28 20:08:46+00:00
point mutation, or nucleotide polymorphisms.

the technique is whole genome scan for matching variations of single nucleotides.

with a few snippets, this wont work, with a large "input string" the variations at scale become increasingly exclusive.

this is akin to "late model ford" vs "1994 red ford explorer, with a dent on front left bumper, a deep scratch on the trunk, with one dim tailight."

or similarily, pixel variations baked into printer output, as identifiers linking a particular document to a particular printer.

more matching polymorphisms exclude similar individuals,until identical individual becomes apparent.
by mhh__ | 2025-09-28 20:08:58+00:00
There are (almost) no fascists in reform. You think the fascists will join a party whose second in command is "Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf"? They're all in Homeland or other serious nationalist parties if at all.

Reform are basically a joke amongst the "real" right (by which I don't mean neo-nazis but anyone with any actual beliefs)
by twisteriffic | 2025-09-28 20:09:09+00:00
> Sagan fails to identify any of these and instead dunks on harmless folk superstitions. Show me where the Fed rate or IBM's quarterly earnings or a Fox News chyron were determined by a horoscope.

It's in the same paragraph...

> I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority
by Animats | 2025-09-28 20:09:29+00:00
> and before Russian media was blocked here

Where? Not blocked in the US. Russia Today is accessible.[1] Old-school Pravda is reachable.[2] The video stream from Russia Today is working.[3]

[1] https://www.rt.com/

[2] https://www.pravda.ru/

[3] https://www.rt.com/on-air/
by lstamour | 2025-09-28 20:09:46+00:00
I might be wrong on this, but I vaguely recall that on macOS back when you could commonly option-click to reveal advanced options, if you held option when clicking a sort it would change how it sorted from alphabetical to lexical or vice versa. I’m not a thousand percent sure of it, though, I think when I needed it I was able to set a directory preference via terminal to change how a specific directory was sorted and it was an option there. MacOS had (or has) a lot of buried options which I presume date back to its origins as a Unix as well as a convenience to its developers. A lot of the command line utilities were hacked calls to graphical settings code though, so it wasn’t very stable version to version as the UI calls changed and nobody prioritized non-UI bug fixes or breaking changes. These days CLI is nearly forgotten or assumed to be an exploit vector - see Screen Time data for example.
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2025-09-28 20:09:52+00:00
Yes, it's been looked at. If you wanna skim the research use "Eager Execution" and "Disjoint Eager Execution" as jumping off points.

It doesn't require duplicating everything. You just need to add some additional bookkeeping of dependencies and what to retire vs kill at the end of the pipeline.

In practice branch predictors are so good that speculating off the "spine" of most likely path just isn't worth it.

In fact there were a lot of interesting microarchitectural ideas from the late 90s to early 00s that just ended up being moot because the combination of OoO speculation, branch predictors, and big caches proved so effective.
by thisisit | 2025-09-28 20:10:12+00:00
> Separate from AI, as your role becomes more tech lead / team lead / architect you're also not really "doing" as much and still get involved in a lot of thinking by helping people get unstuck

True. But the roles as such require you to do a lot of thinking by helping a LOT of people. You end up shuffling between multiple projects/deliverables. Here we are talking about probably a developer working on a single project/deliverable and then equating it to AI. Not to mention the easy to forget part is that by the time you are a tech lead / team lead / architect you have so many hours that you know some stuff like back of your hand.
by leakycap | 2025-09-28 20:10:27+00:00
None of this seems rooted in the reality I've been working in.

> What's Actually Happening: Students learn Figma, not Illustrator.

Figma is currently an excellent competitor for approximately 1/3 or so of Illustrator's capabilities. In some industries, knowing Figma is like saying you know Microsoft Publisher.

> What's Actually Happening: Indie developers run Omarchy on Framework laptops.

Omarchy was released by 1 divisive individual extremely recently. Framework is more expensive than most alternatives available and sadly have not taken over the market unless you mean the very niche and fractured high-end linux-laptop market, which is still debatable given the existence of system76, dell w/ linux, lenovo w/linux, tuxedo out of Germany, Star Labs in the UK...
by mothballed | 2025-09-28 20:11:47+00:00
It's an extremely strong indication you've no experience with the US ER system that you think the efficiency issues are checking insurance at the door of a MI patient vs the fact they're required to at least entertain the hordes of people coming in with self reported "STD" or "doctor note for flu" when that kind of stuff shouldn't be appearing at the ER unless a lower acuity clinic has suspicion it might actually require emergent care. But of course why go to a clinic that is much cheaper when you can just show up at the ER and claim the pseudonym Pedro Sanchez with no ID and let the clinic bill it to all the other patients (which you insanely claim makes our system 'private' despite the fact all this happens at the behest of government), whom of course won't show up unless they're about dead because they not only will have to pay for these abuses but actually having something to lose. [Oh and how would I know this, only working ~1 yr in an inner city ER and seeing all the cases]

And you can argue that it would be better if those patients could get free urgent care instead of free ER to do the same thing at way higher cost, and I would agree that would be better than what we have now. But either way we're at an entirely different starting point.

What you can't argue is we actually have a private system in the US (and somehow miss the elephant in the room that over 1/3 of healthcare spending in the US is public Medicare/Medicaid, then add VA on top that) and then allude it's no true Scotsman or a moved goalpost if I point this out. In fact every time I do point it out, you just go back to morally proselytizing about dead poor people because it's a great way to distract from the fact you've lied and knowingly lied.
by impossiblefork | 2025-09-28 20:12:12+00:00
I don't see nuclear attacks from Russia as probable.

They know well that any attacks by them will be matched by attacks by us, so any nuclear exchange is just miscalculation on their part. It will end quickly.

It's important to understand that threats are irrelevant. If somebody says 'Eat this horrible snail, or I'll you shoot you' you just say 'No, you can shoot me anyway'. Same thing here. If they nuke us, so what? They can do that today too.

It's not in our power to decide whether they nuke us, and therefore it can't be a reason to limit any action against them.

Upon this there is of course also our own capability to nuke them, and due to Russian attitudes and their view of their place in the world any nuclear exchange with them will be short. They can choose to erase us if they are willing to erase themselves. That's their power, but the Russians won't ever be willing to erase themselves. They believe that they are on par with the US and a cultural beacon that is critical to the balance of the world, something without which there's nothing that matters. They will never choose to erase themselves.

Because of this-- mutually assured destruction and the irrelevance of threats, nuclear weapons only matters when one power has them and the other does not. It doesn't make sense for the Russians to erase themselves even if I stand at outside Moscow with an army, even if I have taken Moscow. There's never a slice when it makes sense. Thus the balance between nuclear power is determined entirely by the balance of conventional forces.
by skydhash | 2025-09-28 20:12:42+00:00
The thing is, the domain is often more difficult than the actual implementation. And often only a subset matters (different for each task). So I’m wondering if teaching the AI the correct subdomain is indeed faster than just code the solution.

Also trivial work can benefit the coder. Like a light jog between full sprints for your brain. Reviewing code can be more taxing than writing it as you need to retieve the full context at once instead of incremental steps.
by jmux | 2025-09-28 20:13:06+00:00
The USB-C step is humongous, and hard to implement.

the complexity is high, but how else can you tell a cable that supports USB4 (40GBps) from one that’s only good for charging your phone (and everything in between)? users aren’t going to be able to tell the difference (using a cable with no data lines is already a super common issue with people getting into MCUs) so the device needs to be able to tell how much data and power the connected cable can distribute automatically.

this also why usb-c extension cables (M-F) aren’t spec complaint

it’s a real cool port, but the complexity demon is definitely present in the spec :)
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-28 20:13:13+00:00
I never claimed you can't use AI tools. I never claimed Digital art is not art. Don't imply I should feel shame for questioning the world around me. You can stop with the trying to silence your critics and position yourself as superior.

If I ask a comics guy their favorite comic artist they aren't giving me back editors names. They will have favorite editors, or even editor artist pairs, but the artist remains distinct from that.

I simply posited that commissioning a piece of work does not make you an artist. Having art generated for you to your taste is not 'making art'. Hiring an interior decorator to decorate my house does not mean I decorated. Ordering off a menu and requesting extra cheese does not make you part chef.

A better blurring for your argument would be the use of session musicians. If I say I love The Beach Boys, how much of what I love is session musicians work versus Brian Wilson's? Is he the artist that I enjoy? But that gets back to it, doesn't it. We as humans want to connect art with it's creator. Why? Because art is some reflection of something. Art is 'life is a shared experience'. AI 'art' is not part of that shared experience. I want to connect with Brian Wilson. But I don't connect with some music critic who writes about Brian Wilson's music even though we both connected with the same artistic work, even if I learned about the work though the critic making my relationship to them just as important (I wouldn't know it without them). There being an artist in the middle improves/transforms it/means something (what it means is what is up for discussion).

A pretty crystal is just as pretty as a piece of art, but it is not a piece of art. AI art might be more like the crystal. It might contain beauty/interest/capture attention. But it's not connecting with someone's creation, with intention. I have a local museum and I love exhibits that a specific curator there has focused on more than ones they didn't touch. But that doesn't make them an artist. AI 'artists' fall into that category.
by AlienRobot | 2025-09-28 20:13:16+00:00
That's horrible. Nobody needs imperative metaprogramming for type hints. In fact, it would be absolute insanity for a typechecker to check this because it would mean opening a file in VS code = executing arbitrary python code. What stops me from deleting $HOME inside make_typed_dict?

TypeScript solves this with its own syntax that never gets executed by an interpreter because types are striped when TS is compiled to JS.
by kiitos | 2025-09-28 20:13:35+00:00
> do you not recognize that collectively, as a society, Nazis decided to attack Jews, trans, disabled, and others? ... in the end very few people think they themselves are evil.

yes, I agree with you, that society made some pretty bogus determinations, and they certainly didn't see themselves as evil. but in the fullness of time and history their position has been understood as wrong.

> I think you are oversimplifying the problem because you are relying far too much on the obviousness of Nazis being evil.

my point isn't about nazis or the obviousness of their evil. my point is that advancement as a species requires delegation of moral authority to collective government i.e. society. and transitively that the possibility of pathological negative outcomes doesn't somehow invalidate this idea outright. we don't throw away the concept of a judicial system because innocent people can be declared guilty. we work towards eliminating those failures in what is otherwise an essential component of government.

zoom out. think larger. be more empathetic. nazis and maga and all of this garbage are bugs in the system, which we're fully capable of stamping out, in the long term.
by motbus3 | 2025-09-28 20:13:41+00:00
For me it is funny to remember it differently from you because I used the www much before AOL. When I tried AOL I felt it was so closed and limited. I understood the idea but the WWW was at the same time less professional but also free. I was maybe around 12y or 13y when I tried AOL and by them I was using the www for maybe 3y already.

My family had zero technology knowledge and I only came to know about BBS and other stuff after was an adult and those things were not relevant or dead by then
by Vegenoid | 2025-09-28 20:13:48+00:00
This is pretty hyperbolic. Not noticing poor results does give some idea of the quality of the work done. Of course it's not a perfect system, of course more references would be better, of course the work being judged by a known expert would be better.

If I know someone who I think is sensible, and they hired someone to do some work on something that they know nothing about, and the thing was fixed and has kept working for a good amount of time, that is useful information.

What is your proposed solution to deal with this perceived problem? Hire another expert to judge the work (how do you know to trust that expert)? Be an expert in everything yourself?
by lxgr | 2025-09-28 20:13:54+00:00
So how’d you safely solve having cables of (widely) varying resistance?

I appreciate having the option to choose between a thin cable for charging only, and a pretty thick (and also heavy, inflexible, and relatively expensive) one for high-speed data transfer and charging.

The only alternative to that would seem to be having different ports per device, which is infeasible in many cases, and inflexible in most others.

> Was simply mirroring the contacts too simple for them?

That would require twice the number of contacts for the same number of physical wires, which would make the plugs even larger.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-09-28 20:13:58+00:00
I think if we (in our industry in general) had REAL agile, and not pseudo-waterfall "the designers design it, the engineers implement it, QA QA's it, and then we lay everyone off because they're no longer needed" (but, loophole alert! We did daily standups and used Jira, so it was "agile" the whole time!), then we'd have a snowball's chance in hell of actually having a reasonable solution to this. Off the top of my head, this seems like something that should be a setting in control panel. But, because everyone assumes (contra to agile) that the designers "got it right the first time", this kind of improvement can't happen.
by duskwuff | 2025-09-28 20:14:15+00:00
It's not the em dash, but the negative parallelism ("not X, but Y"). This is a pattern which some LLMs really like using. I've seen some LLM-generated texts which used it in literally every sentence.

(The irony of opening with this pattern is not lost on me.)

As an aside, Wikipedia has a fascinating document identifying common "tells" for LLM-generated content:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
by Arch-TK | 2025-09-28 20:14:40+00:00
I currently live in the UK, and I am not significantly restricted from anything (banking, ISAs, investments, healthcare, etc) for refusing to use a Google approved build of Android.

Moreover, I actually on principle refuse to make myself dependant on my phone for these things, which means that (at a small convenience cost) I don't have any banking apps, or investment apps, or healthcare apps, or whatever).

My phone is strictly a general computing device and I on principle only permit a technology into my life if it doesn't impose special restrictions on the hardware/software it works with.

So if the UK government creates a digital ID app which only runs on a phone and which potentially only runs on google/apple approved phone (this is e.g. the requirement imposed by google pay), then that would be unprecedented.