MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by accrual | 2025-09-28 15:47:19+00:00
> All the marketing budget is doing is funneling people who want cleaning to one cleaning company over another.

Yes, and anecdotally I've heard of better experiences using services that do not appear on the top search results. The reason being that the top results have already captured the local market and so are less incentivized to respond quickly, accept the job or task, or offer a better rate. They already have their business and may not need yours.
by jmclnx | 2025-09-28 15:47:49+00:00
Really, I do not know how I missed that :) I read it a couple of times to and I still thought he wanted it the other way.

So my original comment kind of stands but in a opposite way.

I have never see file_9.txt sorted before file_10.txt, I just tested it on OpenBSD and I got this, which I have always seen:

$ ls|sort

file_1.txt

file_10.txt

file_12.txt

file_2.txt

file_20.txt

file_3.txt

file_9.txt
by BeetleB | 2025-09-28 15:47:53+00:00
From https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2022/Jul/the-trouble-with-many-...

> Back when I was at university, a friend mentioned to me that he wanted to read The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan. I had been a fan of Sagan since my teenage years, but had put off reading that book. Asking him if he’d read any of Sagan’s works, he said “No, but this book is often present in skeptic reading lists.”

> Many years later, I finally read the book. I’m surprised with it being recommended by skeptics, as it has a lengthy criticism of skeptics.

...

Quotes taken straight from the book:

"And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is in its polarization: Us vs. Them—the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you’re sensible, you’ll listen to us; and if not, you’re beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the skeptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted."

...

"In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped."

It is indeed a great book. I would caution folks here that it is not particularly representative of Carl Sagan's books. If you loved/hated this book, it doesn't mean you'll love/hate his other books.
by dangus | 2025-09-28 15:48:35+00:00
Basically what you’re saying is that other people (including all major browsers) have solved the problem rather than spitting out the underlying punycode which is human-unreadable and is at the expense of domains in languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet.

I imagine this issue is easily solved by everyone else but it’s just kind of accepted on one of the most popular tech industry message boards run by one of the most successful incubators/investment firms of all time who certainly has the money to make the experience less ancient.
by Canada | 2025-09-28 15:48:43+00:00
Yeah, I agree with your characterization of what I'm suggesting.

Right now, we are like a school of fish who are already living inside the nets of a handful of hyperscalers who don't have much reason to treat us well.

We might as well take our chances in the open ocean.

With the exception of DDoS attacks we can protect ourselves through continuous improvement of our software and protocols. The sooner we take responsibility for doing that the better off we will be.

And even the DDoS attacks we can mitigate with replication and secret backend links via second ISP/mobile.
by Sammi | 2025-09-28 15:48:46+00:00
It's because of the First Past The Post voting system that is used in the US, which means winner takes all.

If you want to understand why the US seems so uniquely politically divided, then you will understand once you understand how FPTP voting works and how it inevitably leads to binary politics. Most countries have a voting system that leads to broader representation. US politics will always be black and white and divided so long as FPTP voting is used.

There's a great video by cpg grey explaining FPTP: https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
by wqaatwt | 2025-09-28 15:49:04+00:00
Another thing is that I’m not sure he really ignored the will of the people. “The people” were severely oppressed and the policies they supported ignored and rejected for the past 80+ years by the tightly knit oligarchy at the top. The overwhelming majority of its citizens probably had no real reasons to do anything to “protect” the republic.

Also it’s not like Caesar was the first to do what he did. He followed in the steps of a much more brutal and oppressive conservative/reactionary tyrant who almost had him executed a few decades ago.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-09-28 15:49:31+00:00
Sagan (like Dawkins) was way out of his depth where philosophy and theology are concerned. I don’t know if he was just lazy or presumptuous or had an agenda or somehow managed to pass through life criticizing things he didn’t understand without ever thinking to himself “gee, maybe I should actually familiarize myself with these views I keep criticizing”, but he seemed to be completely unaware of the actual work in this space. He was incredibly amateurish, the sort of person unintellectual people think is “an intellectual”. He was sort of a watered-down logical positivist/advocate of scientism mired in misconceptions and stereotypes who wasted his time jousting with straw men.

Talk about hubris, and a comically unsophisticated sort. There are much more intellectually interesting atheists out there (in recent history in the Anglosphere, someone like Thomas Nagel, for example; Nietzsche, of the historically most famous ones). Sagan, Dawkins, the New Atheists are lightweights.
by hedora | 2025-09-28 15:49:57+00:00
Craigslist briefly filled this role.

Before that, there were classified ads in papers. Those were lightly vetted by the local newspaper. Also, with a warrant, the police could generally track down the person that placed the ad, which broke a lot of bullshit scams. (Like house sitters that don’t exist, but are instead getting lists of people that will be out of town.)
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-28 15:50:18+00:00
Lots of gasoline cars have alcohol content running through their fuel lines right at the legal limit :)

Just sayin', not to mention the drivers :\

Any software should be so good that these never can be confused though, it may be a tough bar but they do need to be able to fool a seasoned investigator.

Actual drunk drivers get away with it more often than people think.

You want to settle for lesser software than that?
by JimDabell | 2025-09-28 15:50:29+00:00
> The research is unimpressive, the bubble is dangerous, the product is stupid, and the tech doesn't matter as much as it is claimed to.

No. Why are you sane-washing him? That’s not what he said.

> everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous

> I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters.

He is very clearly saying two mutually exclusive things in the same article. He wants you to believe that AI is pathetic and useless, and he wants you to believe it’s unfathomably dangerous.

This is not the writing of somebody who has taken a cold, hard look at the facts and is trying to inform people. This is the writing of somebody who wants to make as many people despise AI as possible and is stringing together as many anti-AI positions as he can even though they cannot form a coherent, rational position together.
by mothballed | 2025-09-28 15:50:32+00:00
Honestly I will just thank my lucky stars most people believe this fiction you present, because it's keeping the more libertarian areas cheap and without too many busybodies. It seems you've not heard of public access private easements or private trash service, and you haven't learned how to shoot a bear.

I pay like $50/month in property taxes and that's basically exclusively for public school and college, which while I'm not thrilled to be paying anything above $0 at least basic education has a massively positive ROI.

We don't have any sort of effective police/fire presence, public roads, any public utilities, or really any government services besides grade school education and it's been that way for 50+ years without any sort of apocalypse or us all being eaten by bears. Which is amazing because I don't have to worry about some asshole coming along to choke me out on the pavement were it I would have the bad judgement to sell a loose untaxed cigarette.

So far the place hasn't turned into a trash heap, and I've gotten the services I used to get by public services in other areas for 1/3-1/2 of what I was paying before.

I'm happy to have it as my little secret, but I hate to see y'all suffering.
by meindnoch | 2025-09-28 15:51:56+00:00
I thought this was pretty well known. E.g. the macOS Foundation library even exposes NSString.localizedStandardCompare() [1] which implements the sorting algorithm used by Finder, and should be used by any well-behaved macOS application. Windows uses StrCompareLogical [2].

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsstrin...:)

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/shlwapi/...
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-28 15:52:23+00:00
> For computational intelligence, we have one clear example of an upper limit in a biological human brain. It only consumes about 25W and has much more intelligence than today’s LLMs in important ways. Maybe that’s the wrong limit?

It's a good reference point, but I see no reason for it to be an upper limit - by the very nature of how biological evolution works, human brains are close to the worst possible brains advanced enough to start a technological revolution. We're the first brain on Earth that crossed that threshold, and in evolutionary timescales, all that followed - all human history - happened in an instant. Evolution didn't have time yet to iterate on our brain design.
by stopbulying | 2025-09-28 15:53:06+00:00
This isn't about me. It's a generic moral question:

A verbed B

C suggested the Law of Reciprocity: that D should verb A (because A verbed B without due process, and A is sponsoring verbing of thousands of people)

C was banned by A for discussing such offense. I.e. A is bullying C about discussing A's verbing of B with intent to censor obstructively.

If just discussing verbing is wrong, isn't actually verbing wrong and furthermore more wrong than suggesting the Golden Rule at cruel and unusual punishment without due process?
by vintagedave | 2025-09-28 15:53:47+00:00
My permanent instructions to Claude are:

* Always strongly type, for local variables, method parameters, and return types

* Avoid Any unless absolutely required

* hasattr() and get() are often code smells; if the type can be known, use that type

* Use beartype for all methods.

I _love_ beartype and want to plug it to everyone on HN: https://github.com/beartype/beartype

I'm building my own coding agent, like Claude, and it is built with opinionated style. Strongly typing Python and using beartype are what it will try to do unless the user specifies otherwise.
by dragontamer | 2025-09-28 15:53:59+00:00
> Before that, beginners really need to understand how to „move“ their stones, how to defend and connect their groups and how to cut and capture

Agreed. Now check the tutorial series.

There's no movement. There's no connecting of groups. It is ENTIRELY cutting and capture, and life-and-death puzzles.

-----------

https://online-go.com/learn-to-play-go/bl1-stretch/2

Look at this puzzle. WTF is this?

The "stretch" ("correct move" according to this tutorial) seems wholly inappropriate compared to 1-point jump, horse-move, diagonal move .... or hell just running in the other direction (to the right, escaping towards the center).

To know the appropriate move requires knowing what is going on around the whole board (and not just what's going on locally).

----------

https://online-go.com/learn-to-play-go/bl1-stretch/6

Or this one is perhaps more egregious. This is simply the wrong direction of play entirely. 20+ point mistake to play the "correct" move here. The correct move is a 2-point jump (or greater) along the 3rd or 4th row northbound.
by schwentkerr | 2025-09-28 15:54:37+00:00
Clear signals in this update:

November 25 release, with RC on Nov 11—important that they’ve built in a 14-day validation window.

Working Groups & Interest Groups formalized, governance distributed.

MCP Registry now live as discovery backbone.

Async ops (SEP-1391) broaden use cases beyond quick tasks.

Statelessness & scalability addressed by Transport WG.

Server identity via .well-known makes discovery more intuitive.

Most popular protocol extensions being codified.

Tiering system for SDKs adds transparency on compliance & support.

Curious tension: MCP is positioning as both a protocol and an ecosystem backbone. Worth questioning whether tiered SDK support accelerates adoption or risks fragmentation.

Emergence suggests MCP is moving from “experimental” into “production AI plumbing.” If async, registry, & identity land cleanly, integration patterns could stabilize quickly.
by theptip | 2025-09-28 15:55:02+00:00
> Why predict that the (absolute) growth rate is going to keep accelerating past exactly now?

By following this logic you should have predicted Moore’s law would halt every year for the last five decades. I hope you see why this is a flawed argument. You prove too much.

But I will answer your “why”: plenty of exponential curves exist in reality, and empirically, they can last for a long time. This is just how technology works; some exponential process kicks off, then eventually is rate-limited, then if we are lucky another S-curve stacks on top of it, and the process repeats for a while.

Reality has inertia. My hunch is you should apply some heuristic like “the longer a curve has existed, the longer you should bet it will persist”. So I wouldn’t bet on exponential growth in AI capabilities for the next 10 years, but I would consider it very foolish to use pure induction to bet on growth stopping within 1 year.

And to be clear, I think these heuristics are weak and should be trumped by actual physical models of rate-limiters where available.
by mindslight | 2025-09-28 15:55:42+00:00
Every modern motherboard comes pre-installed with unremoveable malware. Vulnerabilities just let different actors try to be king of the hill. The real answer is that all these persistent storage areas (eg flash chips) need to be documented and writable by the user. Any boot integrity needs to be done on top of an open environment, rather than continuing to rely on security through obscurity.
by msl | 2025-09-28 15:56:15+00:00
You keep on asserting that, but what are you basing it on?

According to Wikipedia[1], "In 1990, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) defined (software) reverse engineering (SRE) as "the process of analyzing a subject system to identify the system's components and their interrelationships and to create representations of the system in another form or at a higher level of abstraction" in which the "subject system" is the end product of software development." It goes on to clarify that "Reverse engineering can be performed from any stage of the product cycle, not necessarily from the functional end product."

Further, "There are two components in reverse engineering: redocumentation and design recovery."

Are you arguing that the work here does not fit the definition or that the definition is wrong? In the latter case, could you please share your definition, and maybe even explain why it is superior to IEEE's?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#Software
by tptacek | 2025-09-28 15:56:23+00:00
It's a fine post, but two canards in here:

First, skilled engineers using LLMs to code also think and discuss and stare off into space before the source code starts getting laid down. In fact: I do a lot, lot more thinking and balancing different designs and getting a macro sense of where I'm going, because that's usually what it takes to get an LLM agent to build something decent. But now that pondering and planning gets recorded and distilled into a design document, something I definitely didn't have the discipline to deliver dependably before LLM agents.

Most of my initial prompts to agents start with "DO NOT WRITE ANY CODE YET."

Second, this idea that LLMs are like junior developers that can't learn anything. First, no they're not. Early-career developers are human beings. LLMs are tools. But the more general argument here is that there's compounding value to working with an early-career developer and there isn't with an LLM. That seems false: the LLM may not be learning anything, but I am. I use these tools much more effectively now than I did 3 months ago. I think we're in the very early stages of figuring how to get good product out of them. That's obvious compounding value.
by xerox13ster | 2025-09-28 15:56:50+00:00
this is an ID-10T PEBKAC ERR.

Not this keyboard not this chair, but the problem is with idiots between keyboards and chairs.

The author is not the ID10T it’s the other general users.

The author is intelligent enough to recognize that this is not alphabetical sort, but the term that they are looking for to describe the sort that they see in dolphin windows, google etc. is *lexical* sort, not alphabetical.

The engineering problem is ID10Tic not technical. How do you educate an illiterate public on what the difference between alphabetical and lexical sort is in practice?

You can’t, so you engineer around it and call lexical sort alphabetical.
by card_zero | 2025-09-28 15:56:55+00:00
You say "logical positivist/advocate of scientism", but what I'm hearing is "he liked science, and I don't". I'm mischaracterizing your viewpoint, I hope? What do you specifically mean, how were his arguments scientistic?

(For bystanders who don't know the term, scientism is like when an advert says our shampoo contains hilyironic acid which nourishes the growing hair or some similar sciency-sounding nonsense, maybe with 3D graphics of molecules, to sell you on a thing just by association with science.)
by DamonHD | 2025-09-28 15:56:57+00:00
I used LaTeX extensively at uni for my BSc/MSc then took a 30Y+ break to earn a living, now I am back using LaTeX for journal papers for my PhD.

I didn't stop caring about good typography and typesetting, eg I edited a supercomputing trade rag for a while.

And I don't like flaky WYSIWYG editors, so have preferred (say) HTML over Word for most of my text output.

But I just didn't have cause to use LaTeX or maintain that toolchain for decades away from academia, so I didn't.
by armchairhacker | 2025-09-28 15:57:25+00:00
I agree with Microsoft/Google/KDE's order. The author's situation is extremely rare, and the situation where someone wants "10" to be before "9" is far more common. Moreover, desktops don't label this sorting "alphabetical" (E: and it would really be "lexicographic"*), they label it "by name" (an informal criteria), so technically they're not lying.

> I miss the time when computers did what you told them to, instead of trying to read your mind.

You may be looking at that time through rose-tinted glasses. I don't like when computers lie to me either, but "mind-reading" is really helpful in ways we take for granted, like autosave. Desktops can have an option to sort files truly alphabetically, but the more common case should always be the default; that's the definition of "intuitive".

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45404022#45405279
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-09-28 15:58:02+00:00
>Plugging in four 400w solar panels in series is similar to filling your gasoline powered car with diesel and wondering why the car manufacturer isn't replacing your new car.

Ok, that is a very bad answer. Diesel fuel contains more amounts of energy per drop as gasoline, but that doesn't mean engine damage will result. Diesel fuel will not damage an engine if you were stupid enough to get it wrong at the pump. It will simply refuse to cycle until the diesel fuel is pumped out and the correct fuel is pumped in.
by ModernMech | 2025-09-28 15:58:24+00:00
Yeah, this is the lens through which I view it. It's a sort of colonization that happens, when corporations realize a language is fit for plunder. They start funding it, then they want their people on the standards boards, then suddenly the direction of the language is matched very nicely to their product roadmap. Meanwhile, all the people who used to make the language what it was are bought or pushed out, and the community becomes something else entirely.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-28 15:58:49+00:00
> Stacks of paper are used because it's not possible to put several pages worth of text onto a single page of paper while maintaining a legible font size.

Right. And trying to replace a stack of paper with one paper sheet-sized screen is a significant downgrade. Which is why tablets are used primarily for entertainment, not for work.

Having lots of sheets of paper you can spread out around you is an advantage, not a limitation, of the paper-based workflow.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-28 15:58:56+00:00
Funny, I have an android phone because I need it for one particular project but otherwise my Nokia N-800 serves me very well. It is entirely distraction free, has insane battery life (easily more than a week even when used intensively) and it can serve as a WiFi access point for my laptop in case I need to use the internet while on the go. It is also indestructible, and that's one reason why I don't buy a new phone every year or two, the one I have 'just works' and has done so for years. I got it just before COVID hit so it's probably close to 6 years old now.
Show HN: Engineering Offer Breakdown
by JoeCortopassi | 2025-09-28 15:59:06+00:00
It's always a bit confusing trying to understand what each companies offer actually means for your total comp each year. I made a simple tool that lets you input the relevant info and gives you a visual breakdown of your total comp over the years. Static site, no backend slurping up data

Best part is the url updates in real time, so you can copy the url (or "Share this offer" button) to show someone else what an offer represents.

- If you're a recruiter, this is an easy tool to help a candidate understand your offer

- If you're asking a friend/mentor/spouse for advice, this is an easy way to give them context

Hope it's helpful!
by superkuh | 2025-09-28 15:59:25+00:00
Some day very soon everyone is going to get some uncomfortable lived experience showing just how dangerous and damaging putting all of our communications eggs in a handful of easily controlled corporate baskets is. It's now calvinball out there and distributed, not centralized, solutions are going to be required to route around the damage. The people who lived through it last time made the internet. And now that they're mostly retired or dead we're removing all the robustness they built in just to better align with employers' profit-motive use cases.

But we don't have to do that. Not on our own time. Don't use QUIC unless you're getting paid to do it.
by physarum_salad | 2025-09-28 15:59:38+00:00
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002228362...

Bacteriophages might be an interesting approach to treating Lyme disease in future. Pretty speculative at this stage though and how do you even know the bacteria are there (as this article points out). Once detected how do you avoid the bacteriophage causing an immune reaction, etc.