MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pqtyw | 2025-09-13 18:52:03+00:00
> What if some people should have more or less say in something.

Yes, I certainly agree.

The problem (which IMHO outweighs all the benefits by quite a bit) is that when you allow drawing these artificial lines the ones in charge of them will inevitably design the system in such a way that benefits them (maybe even without ill intentions).

It's similar to geographical gerrymandering just openly based on social/education/etc. class.

Also... balancing interests of diverse social and economic groups is not exactly straightforward, its certainly not basic math.
by NalNezumi | 2025-09-13 18:52:04+00:00
I don't disagree, but to add I think the retirement culture probably helps a lot for longevity too.

The Japanese retirement attitude is "I've worked my ass off all my life. Contributing to the society all my life. Finally I have some time to spend on my hobbies! I should be active!" and they pick up quite active hobbies: if you go hiking mountains you'll see many old retired people with serious gears. Also still trains.

Contrast it to ime, western retirement which is more "finally I can relax" and people become sedentary. Hanging around in parks, cafe, or focus more on socializing and diet. And starts to rely more on cars and other senior services.
by evanelias | 2025-09-13 18:53:47+00:00
No, that's tangential to what's being discussed in this subthread. You're talking "free as in beer" (gratis), but open source purists ostensibly care about "free as in freedom" (libre).

The key point here is that "source available" software is still gratis, and yet the open source purists shun it -- often quite vocally, even if the software doesn't claim to be "open source".

This means if you're launching an independent software business, and you choose licensing terms that protect your own interests (such as Fair Source), the vocal ill-will from open source purists could be very harmful to the viability of your business. But if you choose FOSS instead, then larger companies will eat your lunch. I believe this is what was meant upthread regarding "open source purism only benefits the leeches".

And lately some purists have been moving the goalposts even more. Just a few days ago, I saw a comment on here where someone claimed AGPL is "open-washing" if a CLA is required for contributions. That's especially ridiculous, since there's literally no other way to sustainably develop AGPL software directly supported by business revenue. (Without a CLA or CAA on external code contributions, a creator of AGPL software cannot legally host their own SaaS.)

This status quo only helps big tech incumbents. And given how ageist tech companies can be, it's depressing to see so many programmers espouse this type of licensing puritanism. This will only serve to prevent them from launching their own businesses in the future, once they're too old to be hired by the big layoff-happy tech companies benefiting from this licensing in the first place.
Show HN: I built an open source drag and drop editor for Genkit AI flows
by mfolaron | 2025-09-13 18:54:01+00:00
Hi,

I have been building small AI Agents for quite some time now using various frameworks and one thing that always bugged me was that iterating on small things like prompts, flows, tools etc always took a code change + deployment of the app. While the prompt part can be solved with Langfuse I haven't found a good way to keep the flow management remote (and open source).

Lately I have been working with Genkit (https://github.com/firebase/genkit) and love how modular it is. So I thought why not build a UI builder on top of that that can handle simple flows, prompts and basic tracing.

And here we are with a first early version: https://flowshapr.ai Repo: https://github.com/flowshapr/flowshapr

This first release can - Manage and execute simple flows remotely - Works with GoogleAI, Anthropic or OpenAi - Integrate with remote MCP tools - API Endpoint to execute flows remotely - Flows and flow urls are compatible with the genkit client sdk

Upcoming - Support for Ollama - Support for various vector stores - More complex multi agent flows - Session management

Any feedback and suggestions are welcome!
by martin-t | 2025-09-13 18:54:07+00:00
Nobody said it's a conspiracy. It's simple specialization. Some people are good at productive positive-sum work, others are good at office politics, manipulation and scams. The latter are good at accumulating power to extract value from the former.

Imagine a world where workers decided how much to pay their assistant ("manager") according to how much tangential effort and overhead he saves them so they can focus on their core competency.
by M95D | 2025-09-13 18:55:42+00:00
> Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book.

Link?

> We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.

Open up a git for the book and let the people do PRs and bug reports. One file per article.
by dotnet00 | 2025-09-13 18:57:10+00:00
I think that's a somewhat unfair framing of the issue, since it isn't a lack of effort from teachers, but rather the pressures from higher levels towards increasing test scores. LLMs don't really change that.

There's also the fact that kids are being taught the very basics, the sorts of things increasingly intelligent models are most likely to be able to solve first. I don't think there's any level of effort that can be put into designing assignments to get around this.

Similar to how teachers haven't really been able to do anything to stop kids from sticking their algebra problems into wolframalpha or other tools besides just making them do the work in class (which then cuts into teaching time).

Beyond a certain point, all that can be done is for teachers to try to instill the importance of practice into students, and for parents to be more proactive in monitoring how their kid is doing their homework.

Maybe we'll see an increase in after-school classes for kids to do homework in, under teacher supervision.
by obbie3 | 2025-09-13 18:57:10+00:00
I think the learning science itself offers solutions to this. Intrinsic motivation is apart of learning theory, specifically in the affective domain.

In practice, the problem you run into, even with intrinsically motivated learners, is that they will not use the active learning techniques they are studying. Often times they will revert back to rote memorization, highlighting, re-reading, copying notes, cramming, etc rather than use the things they are learning about learning to learn the subject of learning itself.

I think you have to start with:

1) Teaching learning in the first place. No one teaches learning how to learn, so we should just start there. We already have captive audiences in the form of schools, we just put the cart before the horse and teach subjects and hope the skill of learning emerges. This is poor pedagogy.

2) Work with the students and ensure that they are actually using the learning techniques they are being taught on the subject of learning itself. This is the only way I've seen it work.

If you try to learn how to learn using passive learning techniques, you won't learn the subject of learning, which is what I think OP was referring to. People who do not know how to learn use passive learning techniques which results in rapid forgetting. They have to use the active learning techniques they are learning on the subject of learning itself.
by bubblethink | 2025-09-13 18:58:18+00:00
>That's just, like, your opinion, dude.

That's the official opinion of the government, the judiciary, and the defendants. A settlement is not admission of guilt - the opposite actually. What are we even debating here ?

> "good lawyers" cannot help here

A settlement for a pittance, as you said, is the mark of a good lawyer.
by nixosbestos | 2025-09-13 18:59:16+00:00
I'm a bit impressed. It's a bit... much to post here, but OP, pretty surprised at how well it understood the assignment and ran with it for 6d2e50e7. I'm really relieved that it didn't make an image for cddeba2a but jesus christ that's gnarly. And exactly what I prompted so... that's on me.
by idoubtit | 2025-09-13 18:59:42+00:00
The README is quite ahead of reality: it never mention that Mago is still beta software. A roadmap to a first release was created 5 days ago, https://github.com/carthage-software/mago/issues/405.

I've just tried to apply it to a medium-sized project, and it spitted tens of thousands of errors where phpstan and psalm don't see any. At first glance, it's because Mago does not parse phpdoc. In its current beta state, Mago is meaningless for all the big PHP projects, which are its main target.

Mago might succeed, but I wouldn't bet on it. Its main selling point is that it promises to be faster than the usual static analysers-linters (phpstan and psalm). But if it does not reach feature parity with them, the speed gain probably won't convince PHP projects to drop the standard tools. Since phpstan and Co keep evolving, keeping feature parity will require constant work. And PHP is more niche than Python or JS, so contributors mastering Rust and PHP will be fewer, compared to phpstan/psalm which are written in PHP.
by Lwerewolf | 2025-09-13 19:00:55+00:00
Be careful with that feeling and don't underfuel, or at least keep it at "sane" levels. I feel pretty amazing and full after 62km/2700mD+ XCMs as well, as an extreme example... which is at least partially due to the immune system (and resp. inflammation/etc) being suppressed. Long, light/moderate efforts without adequate food intake and rest can lead to the same thing.
by syncsynchalt | 2025-09-13 19:04:00+00:00
I've written some Unicode transcoders; UTF-8 decoding devolves to a quartet of switch statements and each of the issues you've mentioned end up being a case statement where the solution is to replace the offending sequence with U+FFFD.

UTF-16 is simple as well but you still need code to absorb BOMs, perform endian detection heuristically if there's no BOM, and check surrogate ordering (and emit a U+FFFD when an illegal pair is found).

I don't think there's an argument for either being complex, the UTFs are meant to be as simple and algorithmic as possible. -8 has to deal with invalid sequences, -16 has to deal with byte ordering, other than that it's bit shifting akin to base64. Normalization is much worse by comparison.

My preference for UTF-8 isn't one of code complexity, I just like that all my 70's-era text processing tools continue working without too many surprises. The features like self-synchronization are nice too compared to what we _could_ have gotten as UTF-8.
by miohtama | 2025-09-13 19:04:12+00:00
Some analysis and discussion here:

https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/519

> After its founding in 2018, one of Geedge's first clients was the government of Kazakhstan, to whom the company sold its flagship Tiangou Secure Gateway (TSG), which provides functions similar to China's own Great Firewall, monitoring and filtering all web traffic that passes through it, as well as attempts to bypass such censorship.

> The same tool has been rolled out in Ethiopia and Myanmar, where it has been instrumental in enabling that country's military junta to enforce a ban on VPNs. In many cases, Geedge works with other private companies, including internet service providers (ISPs) such as Safaricom in Ethiopia, or Frontiir and Ooredoo in Myanmar, to enact government censorship, the documents show. No ISPs that have partnered with Geedge responded to a request for comment.

> The leaks show employees at the company working to reverse-engineer many popular tools and find means of blocking them. One set of documents lists nine commercial VPNs as "resolved," and provides various means of identifying and filtering traffic to them. Similar capabilities have long been demonstrated by the Great Firewall, with most commercial VPNs inaccessible from within China and many dedicated anti-censorship tools also hard to access.

> At least one Jira support ticket shows evidence of plaintext capture of email
by hn92726819 | 2025-09-13 19:04:14+00:00
Probably for a higher-level crate, (like the one the author wrote), but it adds computational complexity, and you don't want that by default with a low level crate like `image`.

For example, if you wanted to blur or grayscale an image, do you really want to rotate it? When you re-save it, you'll have to remove the exif rotation metadata too.
by chickensong | 2025-09-13 19:04:51+00:00
I too am skeptical about the personas, but I still use them to organize context and instructions for different types of work. I use a top-level .agents dir, with commands, roles, and rules, sub-dirs.

CLAUDE.md is kept somewhat lean, with pointers to individual files in ./docs/ and .claude/commands is a symlink to .agents/commands.

After starting Claude, I use /commands to load a role and context, which pulls in only the necessary docs and avoids, say, loading UI design or test architecture docs, when adding a backend feature.

I don't want to have to do any of this, but it helps me try and keep the agents on the rails and minimize context rot.
by zahlman | 2025-09-13 19:05:05+00:00
This is a talking point I have seen repeated constantly throughout the discussion. It does not accurately represent the point being made, as explained in the sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45234349 .

I actually have witnessed the concept of empathy used on many occasions for a sort of rhetorical abuse, by alternately demanding it of people and then denying that they are fundamentally capable of it in a given situation due to identity differences. In the literal sense, empathy requires (https://www.simplypsychology.org/sympathy-empathy-compassion...) a deeper understanding of negative emotions based in "putting oneself in another's shoes"; but many will argue that this simply can't be properly done.

A simple example is that men are accused of lacking "empathy" for women who feel endangered in social/dating circumstances where the man might feel empowered. But we simply cannot spontaneously change our perspective on a given circumstance. (And, of course, it is treated as offensive to turn the example around; but that's another discussion.)

Indeed, your empathy is not being expected here by anyone. But your sympathy is. You are being expected to treat murder as a crime and the loss of a healthy adult life as a tragedy. Kirk had many ideas about how people should go about their lives that you might strongly disagree with, or even consider unconscionable. He also had many ideas about the reality of how businesses and other institutions operate, or about what is fair in that context, similarly.

But from what I can tell, nothing he ever said rose to the level of supposing that ending someone's life is an appropriate response to that person having the wrong ideas. (And the bit you're quoting is so incredibly far from that, that it's hard to assume good faith when people make this argument.)

His killer apparently disagreed. And many people on social media also seem to disagree, although they haven't taken action on it.
by freefaler | 2025-09-13 19:05:19+00:00
The best practical book I found that is way better than overly generic books on "deep work" is Jason Skycak's "Advice on Upskilling"

https://www.justinmath.com/books/ (scroll for the second one)

He is a math guy, who worked in Wall Street and then left and now works on math academy buidling models to improve learning.

It's great, well researched and practical book. However, it's not easy at all. Go check it out. It's free and he has published google docs version.
by danielodievich | 2025-09-13 19:06:12+00:00
My wife is a professional photographer, amongst many other things. She's always had a camera since young age. I've been her equipment sherpa for couple of decades, hauling progressively larger bags full of lenses and stuff around. Our children have learned from her and have now taken over this. This last summer one of them asked for a gigantic sports lens (something can't remember ###70?-400mm) as a birthday present for themselves. My wife and him went halfsies at the end. That thing is a monster, has its own handle so you can hold the darn thing without wrenching the lens mount out of alignment. all 3 of them took amazing pictures with it, of birds, animals, Blue Angels, faraway mountains, and some nice candids of people faraway. The only downside I see is that it is impossible to carry that lens and all the others and the camera in a bag, we need even a larger one. Super cool to see children doing neato stuff like that
by dinfinity | 2025-09-13 19:07:02+00:00
Yes. Yes, it is a tragic event. Apart from it being simply morally utterly reprehensible, it is an extremely primitive and counter-productive way to fight against ideas and the messengers of those ideas.

Again, morally reprehensible and it doesn't fucking work. It only shows 'the other side is just as bad/worse', turns the messenger into a martyr, and galvanizes support.
by pqtyw | 2025-09-13 19:07:24+00:00
> but only because the population has increased a lot

Swedish wolf population is extremely small relative to its geographical size.

There are less than 400 wolves in Sweden. For example there are 1500 wolves in Poland, possibly twice that in Italy. How many times more farmers livestock those countries have? Let alone people. The Baltic states have more than twice as many wolves as Sweden and Norway put together...

Sweden is 50% larger than Italy and six times less people, yet somehow several times less area available for wildlife?

Talking about farmers..

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

Sweden has only slightly more cultivated land than Lithuania (and Norway several times less than that), let alone Poland or Italy...
by Lerc | 2025-09-13 19:07:27+00:00
I have been playing around with my own design, initially inspired by the gigatron, but it seems to have diverged somewhat. ALU is the same, address unit enhanced, but a lot of the rest, program counter and instruction decode ending up completely different. Shuffling the Harvard architecture to be more like a instruction cache, only 16 bytes of instruction memory with long jumps triggering a full instruction memory load from RAM.

Going for transport triggered architecture for additional features seems like a fairly easy win. I kind of started designing one before I realised that's what the design was. The Gigatron has to do some unreasonably hard work for a few operations, like shift right, which is an operation that can fundamentally be done with just wires once you have a mechanism to provide the input and fetch the output.

Definitely not knocking the Gigatron though. Every limitation it has is because it saved a chip, when it comes something minimal to build upon It's pretty cool.
by torginus | 2025-09-13 19:08:15+00:00
I feel like Rust hasn't won yet - it needs to transition from the cool technology people because of the hype, novelty and the clout it affords them to the pragmatic boring technology people use because it's the best tool for the job.

In this stage, the unique standout features are given a lot of limelight, and people are a bit more forgiving with usability failings and library shortcomings, as that can be fixed later.

If they fail, they'll be relegated to the 'perpetually misunderstood' pile, like Haskell has.

Node/Ts has made the transition a while ago, Go's ride was a bit more bumpy (most ppl agree the language is good, but channels are a bit of an acquired taste).

I think Rust is in the process of making the jump. I think language devs and library maintainers are a bit more responsive to the borrow checker usability gripes (rather than the knee-jerk 'you just don't get it' reaction) and the ecosystem expands in both depth and breadth. Imo the question of Rust making it is more of a 'when' than 'if', but it's not there yet.
by sillyfluke | 2025-09-13 19:09:09+00:00
Anyone care to give a detailed argument for this position. Whenever I'm buying/renting a place in the city I always check its proximity to subway/train/bus stops and how frequently those vehicles stop by. That's even when I have a car. So the solution would seem to be build out inner suburb public transportation out at the same time or beforehand so there's less inner suburb real estate people fighting it? Yeah easier said than done, but it's still worth it to eliminate kneejerk opposition when you can.
by thbb123 | 2025-09-13 19:09:21+00:00
My numbers come from conversations I recall with René Amalberti, a notable specialist in the area, having advised, among others, Airbus. The conversations were around 1993-96, when I was doing my PhD, and thus may be a bit blurry by now. Also, it is perfectly possible the reference values and measurement units have evolved since then.

Still your projection shows that both reference indicators and actual values are in the ballpark of the estimates I cited.

My (and Amalberti's) main point is that safety assessment is not just about minimizing the raw number of accidents, but involves tradeoffs between various concerns, including psychological perception and revenue. Otherwise, the safest airline would be the one that does not fly anyone.
by evandale | 2025-09-13 19:09:54+00:00
Probably my favorite description so far

https://anycrap.shop/product/broken-clock-that-s-right-thric...

This Broken Clock boasts an unconventional timekeeping mechanism where hands randomly align at correct times thrice daily. It may seem broken, but somehow its fractured gears grant fleeting moments of accuracy amidst disarrayed hours. Its aesthetic appeal lies in the subtle ticking sounds between erratic movements.

Despite its unpredictable behavior, the clock has gained cult following among those seeking respite from precision schedules. For those willing to tolerate chaos, this peculiar timepiece offers three reassuring glances at reality within every 24-hour cycle.
by tomhow | 2025-09-13 19:10:37+00:00
Sure, but the HN guidelines apply to us all, no matter who or what you're commenting about. If someone else posts a comment that's against the guidelines, flag it and/or email us (hn@ycombinator.com ). If you disagree with it, respond in a way that is within the guidelines, or don't respond at all, please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by delichon | 2025-09-13 19:10:51+00:00
Yes, in general a private employer can legally fire an employee for their political views. There are exceptions in some states, including California, New York, Colorado, North Dakota, that have protections for firing by political affiliation or activities, but that's the exception to the rule. Another exception applies to any public employee, since the first amendment applies to their employer.

The default employment rule is at-will, meaning someone can be fired for any reason not explicitly prohibited. Political affiliation is not a federally protected category.
by tomhow | 2025-09-13 19:12:10+00:00
Please don't post flamebait or inflammatory rhetoric on HN. The guidelines are clear about this:

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45234112 and marked it off topic.