MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andriamanitra | 2025-09-28 19:48:27+00:00
The so-called "natural" sort makes sense for version numbers and enumeration (without zero-padding) but I'm more often dealing with file names with a datetime (like in the article), a hexadecimal hash, or just randomized string of characters that includes numbers. In those cases "natural" sort makes it harder to find the file you're looking for.

Even when files are enumerated it's pretty rare to have more than 9 parts and no zero-padding, whereas there are almost always multiple consecutive digits in the use cases for which "natural" sort is not a good fit for. It just feels like a bad default, at least for a programmer's workload.
by lblume | 2025-09-28 19:48:30+00:00
It appears that the cost of referral is much higher than it used to be. Fifty years ago, you might have looked in a phone book for companies that offer the service you are looking for, or gotten a recommendation from a friend. Everything was local, basically. I am not stating that this was necessarily better or game-theoretically optimal, but when the alternative is paying a large share to a big corporation for suggesting an option not based on merit, but the highest bid in a micro-auction, something tells me things have been going in the wrong direction in this case.
by indiantinker | 2025-09-28 19:48:50+00:00
It is an interesting take. I teach programming to designers as a part of a course called "Emerging technologies". Although, it is fun to see what students create, but it is not fun to solve doubts. When you are teaching basics, the students would quickly fire up ChatGPT and make some slop up. In the end, I have to fix their codes. I think, the learning output is reduced as they have not written any code. I am genuinely concerned as an educator. One thing that is missing is differentiating AI output and understanding what to keep and what to ignore. The sheer "aesthetic" of it. I feel, many do not take time to develop this very "human" skill and become very output oriented from the very start. This, IMO, affects learning. These tools are also quite addictive due to the sense of 'manufactured' certainty they offer, which is something that hinders learning. What is the point of learning how to add when you have the cheatsheet next to you?
by Vegenoid | 2025-09-28 19:49:42+00:00
I'm not sure if you are insinuating that the article is an anti-AI take, but in case it wasn't clear, it's not. It is about doing just what you suggested:

> Just as tech leads don't just write code but set practices for the team, engineers now need to set practices for AI agents. That means bringing AI into every stage of the lifecycle

The technology doesn't force people to be careless, but it does make it very easy to be careless, without having to pay the costs of that carelessness until later.
by ewoodrich | 2025-09-28 19:49:53+00:00
Hah today I discovered Claude Code has been copy/pasting gigantic blocks of conditions and styling every time I ask it to add a "--new" flag or whatever in a once tiny now gigantic script I've been adding features to.

It worked fine until recently where I will ask it to tweak some behavior of a command with a flag and it does a diff with like hundreds of lines. So now it's struggling to catch every place it needs to change some hardcoded duplicate values it decided to copy/paste into two dozen random places in the code.

To be fair it is doing a decent job unfucking it now that I noticed and started explicitly showing it how ridiculously cumbersome and unmaintainable it made things with specific examples and refactoring. But if I hadn't bothered to finally sit down and read through it thoroughly it would have just become more broken and inconsistent as it grew exponentially.
by keeda | 2025-09-28 19:50:09+00:00
I don't think that is a problem with AI, it is a problem with the idea that pure vibe-coding will replace knowledgeable engineers. While there is a loud contingent that hypes up this idea, it will not survive contact with reality.

Purely vibe-coded projects will soon break in unexplainable ways as they grow beyond trivial levels. Once that happens their devs will either need to adapt and learn coding for real or be PIP'd. I can't imagine any such devs lasting long in the current layoff-happy environment. So it seems like a self-correcting problem no?

(Maybe AGI, whatever that is, will change things, but I'm not holding my breath.)

The real problem we should be discussing is, how do we convince students and apprentices to abstain from AI until they learn the ropes for real.
by kianN | 2025-09-28 19:50:10+00:00
This is my favorite book on statistics. Full stop. The author Andrew Gelman created a whole new branch of Bayesian statistics with both his theoretical work on hierarchical modeling while also publishing Stan to enable practical applications of hierarchical models.

It took me about a year to work through this book on the side (including the exercises) and it provided the foundation for years of fruitful research into hierarchical Bayesian models. It’s a definitely not an introductory read, but for any looking to advance their statistical toolkit, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

As a starting point, I’d strongly suggest the first 5 chapters for an excellent introduction to Gelman’s modeling philosophy, and then jumping around the table of contents to any topics that look interesting.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-09-28 19:50:30+00:00
Perhaps. Then again, most people aren't working in fields where racing to the finish is a requirement. Corporate work I've found is really slow moving for a lot of reasons. Things getting backburnered and pushed back is pretty standard. It takes time for all the stakeholders to digest information and make feedback. There is also the phenomenon where no one really appreciably works after thanksgiving so for most american corporate workers it is like they are on a 10.5 month year as it is. All this to say that even with diminished feedback cycle wait time and lightened communication workload, I don't think the product is getting out any faster.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-28 19:50:33+00:00
I think there are some who want war. But for Europe and America it is much better for Russia to be a friend again (like part of the G8). The alternative is that they become a servant of China, and this will end with them making a deal to give China land in the northeast of Russia. All of this is a huge strategic problem for NATO countries, and democracies in general, especially with India out of such a coalition due to nonsensical tariffs over Russian oil (when Europe buys Russian gas) or Nobel peace prizes (Trump falsely claiming he helped resolve conflicts between India and Pakistan) or whatever.

Now are European leaders smart enough to play geopolitics properly? That I doubt. To be honest, I doubt if the democratic processes will result in leaders that are competent enough and mature enough to deal with all this. More likely for countries to keep electing unhinged populists from either side.
by microtonal | 2025-09-28 19:50:44+00:00
I don’t think any European country wants a direct war with Russia. What is there to gain? It’s bad for Europe and it’s bad for Russia.

Russia has gotten more offensive and attacking more frequently in the hybrid war, including a murder plots against Rheinmetall CEO [1], putting explosives in packages [2], etc.

It’s not some sinister conspiracy. Most likely has two aims (1) testing Trumps commitment to NATO; (2) their invasion of Ukraine is not going well. The front barely moves annd Ukraine is starting to mass produce their own long-range cruise missiles and they are hitting oil refineries in Russia. Most likely he wants to instill fear in Europeans to support the narrative that Europe should keep weapons/money for their own defense, hoping that Ukraine will lose support.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/threat-plot-murder-rhei...

[2] https://amp.dw.com/en/russia-linked-group-planned-parcel-bom...
by uyzstvqs | 2025-09-28 19:50:47+00:00
We need to clearly define some stuff around Digital ID, since people seem to be using the term for distinctly different things.

There's (1) eGovernment platforms, where you can handle government-related business online using a login. There's (2) Digital ID cards, where you can use your phone in place of a physical ID or drivers license in real life. And then there's (3) full EU-proposed-style Digital ID, where government wants to act as a SSO provider for private online services, like social media.

Yet someone can be rightfully criticizing (3), as it would pose a major risk to online privacy, and someone else barges in with "here in [place] we have a great eGovernment platform which is very useful for filing your taxes online, I don't see why you'd oppose that". Not specifically in this thread, it's been noticeable over almost all Digital ID-related discussions in the past. Please be considerate of that.

This appears to be about (2), with the catch of it being made mandatory for anyone who wants to be employed in the UK.
by bee_rider | 2025-09-28 19:50:53+00:00
For vacation rentals, I have had the owner give me their card afterwards.

For food delivery (at least takeout) and ride share, the app actually provides a real value; it handles matching drivers and customers who want to make a deal now, for a service that is not really super differentiated. It makes sense to stay in their ecosystem and it seems fair that they would be continuing to make a profit.
by Duanemclemore | 2025-09-28 19:51:27+00:00
Hello sir! I found out about esoteric.codes from FOC a while ago, have read most of what's on there since. Honestly surprised Steve (or early days with Ivan) never had you as a guest / interviewee. So I'll definitely check this one out. Congrats on what looks like an amazing book, can't wait until I get to read it.

Thank you for bringing an underappreciated corner of computing to people's attention!
by danielser | 2025-09-28 19:51:30+00:00
Is this not just GraphQL for MCP/Tools?

In which case your likely wrong, people do want it, and AI will be very good at orchestrating simple patterns.

CF definitely has a vested interest.. The problem for them now that I see is that THEY DIDN"T ACTUALLY LAUNCH IT... but did describe what it is/does in complete detail.

Now there are gonna be dozens of non CF locked clones, just like the one OP linked.
by wtallis | 2025-09-28 19:51:46+00:00
> maybe there is an issue and you return it, so you are still more likely than a random person in purchasing one again soon

I find it hard to believe that return rates are high enough for this to be worth the trouble. It's much easier to believe that the advertisers are simply reacting to any signal for personalization, even if they received that signal too late.

> Maybe all that matters is that you might click the ad out of curiosity as you were recently looking into them

That serves the interests of Google or any other ad network; they don't really care about whether you eventually complete the purchase, as long as they get paid for your click. But the company actually selling vacuum cleaners should care.
by throwaway31131 | 2025-09-28 19:51:50+00:00
> no more engineering for engineering’s sake

I'm not sure many successful engineering orgs did much of that but also the environment our creations live in is much different now.

It was a huge task just to get our programs to run at all not very long ago. When I first started coding I was working on some code for a VLSI problem and I spent like a month just figuring out how to get the problem to fit on disk (not main memory, but on disk!). Now there are similar things that run on a laptop [0]. And it's not like I'm unique in having to come up with crazy solutions to problems tangent to the primary problem in this space. [1]

Now the infrastructure for our code is amazing and the machines that execute them abound in resources, especially in the cloud. Now that the yoke has been cast off it makes sense more time is spent on the solution the actual problem you set out to solve in the first place.

[0] https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project/OpenLane [1] How Prince of Persia Defeated Apple II's Memory Limitations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw0VfmXKq54
by mshockwave | 2025-09-28 19:52:16+00:00
yes, it has been done for at least a decade if not more

> Even more of a wild idea is to pair up two cores and have them work together this way

I don't think that'll be profitable, because...

> When you have a core that would have been idle anyway

...you'll just schedule in another process. Modern OS rarely runs short on available tasks to run
by hitekker | 2025-09-28 19:52:49+00:00
It's an opinion piece by a trusted member of the community. He doesn't need to act unbiased but be credible and informative. As he wrote in his disclosure:

> People whose livelihood depends on the health of the Ruby ecosystem deserve more information than they're getting, especially now that its operational stability has come under threat.

On this count, Searls' article has done the work. I didn't know that Andre Arko baselessly threatened Google with lawyers, or that Andre played fast-and-loose with people's donations. That information was excluded from "unbiased" analyses and fact-checks which seem to largely target Andre's enemies.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-09-28 19:53:02+00:00
Yeah, we get it el Reg, Verge et al, it's coming.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45368167

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45370465

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45361697
by raesene9 | 2025-09-28 19:53:16+00:00
TBH the mobile duopoly isn't a problem specific to the UK gov, and plenty of the systems already in use which have a mobile component already have that dependency, so I don't think it really gets any worse if you had a digital ID.

Indeed if done with physical smart card + reader, it would reduce the requirement for mobile devices, allowing for people unhappy with their presence to avoid them :)
by GZGavinZhao | 2025-09-28 19:53:18+00:00
I could be wrong, but I recall in many developing countries phones there are many teenagers who code on their phone because laptops (even tablets) are prohibitively costly.

They might be wiring their phones up to some cheap keyboards, which is technically possible but I don't know if they're doing that.

A friend of mine from a SEA country learned/did all of his coding on a 10-inch Android tablet using the touch-screen keyboard since age 11 until his parents bought him a proper laptop as a gift for going to college.

Edit: for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45286044, there are other cases that I've definitely seen on GitHub but I can't find them at this moment.
by dundarious | 2025-09-28 19:53:23+00:00
You can make this app yourself in an hour if you're on Linux and can do some scripting. Mockup below for illustration, but this is the beating heart of a real script:

# whisper-live.sh: run once and it listens (blocking), run again and it stops listening. if ! test -f whisper.quit ; then touch whisper.quit notify-send -a whisper "listening" m="/usr/share/whisper.cpp-model-tiny.en-q5_1/ggml-tiny.en-q5_1.bin" txt="$(ffmpeg -hide_banner -loglevel -8 -f pulse -i default -f wav pipe:1 < whisper.quit \ | whisper-cli -np -m "$m" -f - -otxt -sns 2>/dev/null \ | tr \\n " " | sed -e 's/^\s*//' -e 's/\s\s*$//')" rm -f whisper.quit notify-send -a whisper "done listening" printf %s "$txt" | wtype - else printf %s q > whisper.quit fi

You can trivially modify it to use wl-copy to copy to clipboard instead, if you prefer that over immediately sending the text to the current window. I set up sway to run a script like this on $mod+Shift+w so it can be done one-handed -- not push to listen, but the script itself toggles listen state on each invocation, so push once to start, again to stop.
by JHonaker | 2025-09-28 19:53:36+00:00
My go to for teaching statistics is Statistical Rethinking. It’s basically a course in how to actually thing about modeling: what you’re really looking for is analyzing a hypothesis, and a model may be consistent with a number of hypotheses, figuring out what hypotheses any given model implies is the hard/fun part, and this book teaches you that. The only drawback is that it’s not free. (Although there are excellent lectures by the author available for free on YouTube. These are worth watching even if you don’t get the book.)

I also recommend Gelman’s (one of the authors of the linked book) Regression and Other Stories as a more approachable text for this content.

Think Bayes and Bayesian Methods for Hackers are introductory books from a beginner coming from a programming background.

If you want something more from the ML world that heavily emphasizes the benefits of probabilistic (Bayesian) methods, I highly recommend Kevin Murphy’s Probabilistic Machine Learning. I have only read the first edition before he split it into two volumes and expanded it, but I’ve only heard good things about the new volumes too.
by anthonj | 2025-09-28 19:53:40+00:00
I think you might be misunderstanding. Tox is p2p end-to-end encrypted, you still expose your ip when you connect to the p2p network. This is inevitable but nobody will know you message:

https://tox.chat/faq.html#tox-leak-ip

This project uses the retroshare protocol. It's also p2p by the only nodes you can connect to are from a "white list". So you expose your ip only to people you know.
by danielser | 2025-09-28 19:53:43+00:00
Think of GraphQL, this gives the AI all the structure via Typescript of the MCP / API / Tools, lets it orchestrate its own response.

So once it has the API shape in memory, it could make dozens of tool calls in a single call.

It isn't about token saving, its about time/efficiency of tool usage/response time accumulation.

Instead of 20 separate tool calls one after the other, you get one larger, orchestrated one that only returns exactly what it needed.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-28 19:53:45+00:00
I've said this before which emphasizes how hard it can be to accept, and how cautious it would be with medical efforts, but when all recommended approaches have been tried for all they're "worth" and further progress is needed, the real successful solution may very likely be something not recommended.

Not easy to account for medically, and it can be a matter of life and death.

OTOH with plain money you can account for it to the penny.

If the most widely recognized solution to an historically costly problem, like AI, is to infuse more money until the cost can be overcome, most people would not be able to afford that, but if it works it works as long as somebody can afford it.

However if an alternative solution were to appear, so extremely non-recommended that it doesn't call for more money to be infused, or maybe even not any money at all, for measurable progress to be made, a lot of people are going to get out their business calculators and see a difference in leverage that will make their jaw drop.

A slide rule could probably tell you that a lot faster than AGI.

While using slightly less energy.

But it's not the use that's the biggest problem, it's the waste over & above the minimum that could get the job done, if people weren't in such a unidirectional hurry.

Either running in the same direction toward a near-materializing goal beyond the horizon, or running away from a bunch of different places in the direction of the strongest "current".

Lots of big bucks being vaporized without waiting for a crash to occur.

If the "market" corrects there'll still be plenty of AI out there and once it stabilizes it can probably resume growth at a more organic rate.

Whatever else goes with it, and how far, is anybody's guess.

For what it's worth.
by userbinator | 2025-09-28 19:53:48+00:00
This means there’s a small microcontroller inside the cable with information on the cable’s capabilities.

More evidence that USB-C is an insanely overengineered spec. Cables should be dumb pipes, not devices with their own active circuitry. IMHO Ethernet, while not perfect, got this part right.

The only reason the signals don’t exactly match the one above is just the orientation of the cable.

This is one of the more perplexing design decisions. Was simply mirroring the contacts too simple for them? Did someone imagine a use-case where they wanted to detect the orientation of the cable? WTF.
by leakycap | 2025-09-28 19:54:09+00:00
In my case, my spinning disks expanded approximately 4x each time I upgraded:

1.2 GB Hard Drive in a Performa from Sears

4 GB HD in a self-build AMD K2 tower

20 GB HD in a Dell laptop

80 GB HD in a PowerBook G4 that I upgraded to an SSD

For SSDs, the journey was not linear and my drive capacity did not expand every time:

256 GB SSD in the first retina MBP

512 GB SSD in 11" MBA

256 GB SSD in a 12" MacBook

1 TB SSD in a MacBook Pro

Even with the last 1 TB SSD upgrade, it doesn't add up to all the drives before (~1.13 TB)
by TuringTest | 2025-09-28 19:54:53+00:00
Lexicographic order is great when you need an unambiguous criterion that will work the same in every implementation; but you only need that for automated processing, i.e. for coding.

For user-facing presentation, having 5.9.xxx before 5.10.xxx is simpler; the corner case that baffles users is having 5.1 and 5.10 before 5.2.
by actinium226 | 2025-09-28 19:55:15+00:00
> If you have a cyclic reference between two files,

Don't have cyclic references between two files.

It makes testing very difficult, because in order to test something in one file, you need to import the other one, even though it has nothing to do with the test.

It makes the code more difficult to read, because you're importing these two files in places where you only need one of them, and it's not immediately clear why you're importing the second one. And it's not very satisfying to learn that you you're importing the second one not because you "need" it but because the circular import forces you to do so.

Every single time you have cyclic references, what you really have are two pieces of code that rely on a third piece of code, so take that third piece, separate it out, and have the first two pieces of code depend on the third piece.

Now things can be tested, imports can be made sanely, and life is much better.
by earthnail | 2025-09-28 19:55:32+00:00
I once had my bank close my account because of a mistake they made (I can provide the background but it’s just a facepalming story). That meant my Bank ID was closed down, too.

I asked for an appointment with the bank to resolve it but was told I can only get an appointment with Bank ID.

It was outrageous. Obviously none of the other services worked either. Luckily I still had a British and a German credit card that I used for payments (since I lived in both those countries before). In the end I opened an account with another bank and moved on. Although I did try, furiously, for two weeks to get my old bank to admit their mistake and rectify it. No chance. If they had admitted it it would’ve meant they would have broken financial regulation, and obviously you don’t admit to that if you don’t have to.

Bank ID is great when it works and brutal when it doesn’t.

I actually don’t have a better proposal for a system since it works quite well in most cases, but just wanted to share my bad experience on it too.
by consumer451 | 2025-09-28 19:55:36+00:00
> Using Plan mode in Cline or other agent based workflows is day and night in the outputs.

Agreed. My tool agnostic workflow is to work up a planning/spec doc in the docs/feature-plans folder. I use one chat thread to make that. First it creates the basic plan, then then we pick it apart together, I manually fix bad assumptions, then in a new chat, we implement.

Before and after implementation, I run my /gilfoyle command for a constructive roast, then my /sec command for a thorough security review. After implementing this, and a bit more, the final LLM output quality is much higher.

edit: adding "make sure we are applying known patterns used in our app for our solution, don't reinvent the wheel." helped a ton. I am on mobile atm, and that might not be the exact wording.