MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FireBeyond | 2025-09-24 15:26:34+00:00
> Also, nothing is worse than the folks who didn’t pay up ahead of time who bug one, ‘may we switch seats so we can sit together?’ So perhaps free family seating makes life easier for everyone.

This is my absolute pet hate. Most of the airlines I fly frequently with specifically throw up a dialog box making you acknowledge "I have no seat selection options with this fare", yet every flight, I'll see people doing this stupid seat dance. No, I chose the seat I wanted for a reason.
by swasheck | 2025-09-24 15:26:38+00:00
i’m hard-pressed to think of an industry whose financial principles i’m more skeptical of than the airline industry. post-9/11 the industry cratered and they said they needed to add fees to keep from going bankrupt. united created ted, their own low-cost no-frills carrier which was actually decent. once air travel recovered, they (airlines, in general) kept the fees and have been turning record profits ever since. united dumped ted so that they could return to focus on squeezing customers there.

i love travel but i hate dealing with airlines. their executives rank up there with health insurance as some of my least favorite personalities.

and one last thing, other than (eventually) telecom way back in the 80s, has there ever been an industry whose deregulation has been a net win for consumers? i’m genuinely curious and not asking sarcastically
by wry_discontent | 2025-09-24 15:26:40+00:00
Think of others and write more. Going into new stuff is hard, and if there's docs written down, that helps keep everybody working.

Write more in your PRs, write more in notion, write more in Google Docs; just write more. If things are unclear at your company, take it upon yourself to start writing and add documentation. If you come across a weakly filled out Jira ticket you know something about, write about it. If you know code conventions that aren't linter enforce, write them down.
by n4r9 | 2025-09-24 15:26:50+00:00
> “Jewish donors have a lot of explaining to do. A lot of decoupling to do,” he said. “Because Jewish donors have been the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical, open border neoliberal quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions and nonprofits. This is a beast created by secular Jews. And now it’s coming for Jews, and they’re like, ‘What on Earth happened?’ And it’s not just the colleges. It’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.”

> About two weeks later, Kirk again made a similar argument.

> “Jews have been some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas and supporters of those ideas over the last 30 or 40 years. Stop supporting causes that hate you,” he said on his podcast. “Until you cleanse that ideology from the hierarchy in the academic elite of the West, there will not be a safe future. I’m not going to say Israel won’t exist, but Israel will be in jeopardy as long as the Western children, children of the West, are being taught, with primarily Jewish dollars, subsidizing it, to view everything through oppressor/ oppressed dynamic. Until you shed that ideology, you will not be able to build the case for Israel, because they view Israel as an oppressor.”

https://www.factcheck.org/2025/09/viral-claims-about-charlie...

I leave others to decide whether they think that's anti-semitic or sounds like a conspiracy theory.
by hackingonempty | 2025-09-24 15:27:25+00:00
First you spend money to create something people really want and build a big user base.

Then you open it up to third party businesses and get them tied to your platform, making money off your users.

Once locked in you turn the screws on the businesses to extract as much money from them as possible.

Finally you turn the screws on the users to extract every last bit of value from the platform before it withers and fades into irrelevance.
by ethbr1 | 2025-09-24 15:27:53+00:00
Perhaps a better analogy from recent HN discussion would be auto-lock-on-drive doors.

Some people die (often children) by opening doors while a vehicle is moving or before it is safe to do so.

However, this also impedes the ability of rescuers to extract people from crashed vehicles (especially with fail-dangerous electric car locks).

Is it safer to protect citizens from themselves or empower them to protect themselves?

In my perfect US, both would be done:

"Dealing with disinformation" as a semester-long required high-school level course and federally mandating the types of tools that citizens could use to better (read: requiring all the transparency data X and Meta stopped reporting, from any democracy-critical large platform).

While also mandating measures to limit disinformation where technically possible and ethically appropriate (read: not making hamfisted government regulations, when mandating data + allowing journalists / citizens to act is a better solution).
by Silphendio | 2025-09-24 15:28:22+00:00
JSON 5 is pretty good. It just needs to make the top-level brace and all commas optional, and add proper support for multi-line strings (writing '/n/' at the end of every line doesn't count).

Allowing only valid JavaScript identifiers to be unescaped keys is also a bit quirky (You have to quote reserved keywords).

But they will never change any of that because it would break JavaScript compatibility.
by pmdr | 2025-09-24 15:28:24+00:00
> Days of just getting data off the web are coming to an end

All thanks to great ideas like downloading the whole internet and feeding it into slop-producing machines fueling global warming in an attempt to make said internet obsolete and prop up an industry bubble.

The future of the internet is, at best, bleak. Forget about openness. Paywalls, authwalls, captchas and verification cans are here to stay.
by procaryote | 2025-09-24 15:28:24+00:00
> But stuff like tab headers, buttons, or even text-sparse tiles - things meant for the user to click on - can, and usually should, prevent text selection. It is super annoying to be clicking back and forth through tabs only to have some text erroneously highlight and then stay that way.

No.

Outlook mail for example is full of your principle, which means copying a mail address becomes a «hover over the not-selectable mail address to pop up a contact card, scroll down the contact card to where the mail address shows up again, but is again unselectable, click the "copy to clipboard" icon»

Just make text selectable.
by keepamovin | 2025-09-24 15:29:18+00:00
I also have an app that does this fully locally and offline on the macOS app store; Wisprnote - using the openai whispr models. Works good.

What people are talking about, avoiding hallucinations through VAD based chunking, etc, are all things I pioneered with Wisprnote, which has been on the App Store for 2 years. Hasn't been updated recently - backlog of other work - but still works just as fine. Paid app. But good quality.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wisprnote/id1671480366?l=en-GB...
by jdiff | 2025-09-24 15:29:33+00:00
Accelerationism is a dead-end theory with major holes in its core. Or I should say, "their" core, because there's a million distant and mutually-incompatible varieties. Everyone likes to say "gosh, things are awful, it MUST end in collapse, and after the collapse everyone will see things MY way." They can't all be right. And yet, all of them with their varied ideas still think it'll be a good idea to actively push to make things worse in order to bring on the collapse more quickly.

It doesn't work. There aren't any collapses like that to be had. Big change happens incrementally, a bit of refactoring and a few band-aids at a time, and pushing to make things worse doesn't help.
by sbuttgereit | 2025-09-24 15:29:54+00:00
A case can be made for graphic like elements like buttons, but for text: treat it like text even if it's clickable.

In the Web version of Outlook, there are regularly times where the location of an appointment is a street address. That text is typically clickable. But the click action doesn't correspond to the choice of mapping service I might want to use in any one instance or to the fact that I might have other actions, like copying the address into another email/sms/etc. Outlook followed your philosophy. You can't select and copy that text, save for going through several auxiliary clicks just to get to a spot where you can. It's the most annoying behavior I can imagine.

That you think that you sitting in a meeting room talking it over with colleagues, or perhaps I'm a meeting in your own mind can assign legitimate uses and not, when something other than say security might be at stake, is just wrongheaded.

And by the way, that address being the link that it is is great 60%, 70% of the time. But when it's not it's clearly a design mistake.
by motakuk | 2025-09-24 15:30:25+00:00
To some extent, but not 100%. We're working on several ideas in this direction, which we plan to include in the upcoming release. This includes the dual-LLM pattern and providing manual reviews for pinned versions of the open-source MCP servers.

For now, Archestra is categorizing tools and preventing the execution of tools that could leak data to the outside world without consent. Asking for permission for all tool calls may lead to fatigue; not asking for consent will expose the agent to the attack, so we're trying to strike a balance.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-24 15:30:43+00:00
This is a lesson I learned the hard way. When I was a first time manager I had the naive idea that I was going to build consensus for everything and get everyone to come to an agreement naturally.

It worked at first with a good team. Then later I inherited a fragment of another team with some older know-it-all engineers who thought everything modern was garbage and we should be doing everything like they did 25 years ago. I wasted too much time letting them stonewall everything while thinking we’d eventually reach a consensus.

Then at some point you realize you have to put your foot down and pick a direction after they’ve had a chance to state their position.
by dombama | 2025-09-24 15:30:56+00:00
Framingham is a Boston suburb. Boston is maybe a #4-5 tech hub in the US, so there are a fair number of Massachusetts folks on here for whom it'll be a local story. I've seen non-tech Boston area stories on the front page once in a while.

Also when I first saw the headline, I (incorrectly) assumed it was an auto-posted obituary and clicked to see the tech. I could see in this scary political climate, with US morality on the rise, and a few prominent new "DeathTech" startups, this audience might be curious about tech for EOL planning. Long time HNers (the ones who are more likely to vote on articles) are aging and that cohort are now in their 40s–50s and increasingly aware of their mortality as they themselves, family and friends confront challenging medical issues.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-09-24 15:31:03+00:00
I had another friend that simply recorded YouTube videos from their smartphone. As a zealous law abiding citizen, I immediately smacked the phone out of his hand and lectured on how copyright law is the foundation of the Information Age, which is the future, and disregarding it is an affront to modern life and civilization. I made him delete all his videos, and even made him hand write letters of apologies to the YouTube creators. These creators don't reveal their home addresses, but I'm sure they appreciated the emails containing the scan of the handwritten letters.

We have an old SCSI scanner, so it took about as long to scan it as it did to write it.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-24 15:31:49+00:00
I like that.

This looks like some creative effort, are you building lots of prototypes?

When I can, I tend to use the guitar as my equipment so I can get creative with my instrument; the amplifier.

And of course the soldering iron.

It took years but within a certain range of audio circuits including the relatively high-voltage vacuum tubes and associated components I worked with since childhood, I trained myself to design with the soldering iron until satisfaction has been achieved, then document later if at all.

Using surplus or scrap components which I might have unsoldered by hand before being able to recycle them, in advance of taking the risk with relatively expensive new components :)

You come up with all kinds of things when you concentrate on getting the most out of what you have an abundance of, even if it is far from perfect.

More complex things, I'll study drawings or make my own crude schematics for more than one session before accumulating specific parts and plugging in the soldering iron.

I had a lot of math & theory as a kid, which I've forgotten most of, but came out pretty good when you look at it and apply it like "tin/lead sculpture" ;)

No PCB lots of times so with point-to-point, more than one prototype per day was common, or for pedals I would make a PCB in the wet lab because it was more of a chem lab anyway.

I had scopes and test gear and it was all mainly needed for troubleshooting & repair, not design. A huge milestone was to go from components to defect-free operation, consistently the first time you plugged one in, using only a minimal DVM along the way. You can't expect connoisseur sound the first time at all, but as long as it works and nothing smokes you can go from there.

I have said before that you can't start building proficiency early enough, and it's never too late, especially for detailed traditional discrete analog component work.
by greg7mdp | 2025-09-24 15:31:55+00:00
> All of this is packaged up into a single zero-dependency C API (it doesn't even rely on libc), allowing it to be easily embedded into any popular language ecosystem.

@mitchellh That's super exciting. I'm wondering how easy it would be to integrate in the debugger frontend I'm working on. Do you already know what the C API will look like?
by FireBeyond | 2025-09-24 15:31:58+00:00
> Even if it’s a couple, it’s probably the airline’s fault.

Citation needed. These things happen, and the airline has some responsibility. But there's plenty of "playing dumb". Cabin crew: "You have a basic economy seat, which means you didn't get seat selection". "I didn't know!" "There's a big blue warning that pops up when you do this with a child passenger, making you acknowledge it..." "..."
by adolph | 2025-09-24 15:32:06+00:00
It isn't bizarre that rules and practice vary widely in different cultural contexts. Even your claim is caveated as "most of EU," recognizing that it might not be the same in all places.

In many places in the US, there is a culture of legibility, whereby informational affordances are relevantly and generously provisioned. This allows for more certainty for both facility users and rule enforcers. On the flip side, there are a lot of signs all over the place.
by judge2020 | 2025-09-24 15:32:11+00:00
Mainly the theory that, if you can’t use downloaders to download videos, then people will no longer see YT as the go-to platform for any video hosting and will consider alternatives.

And I call that a theory for a reason. Creators can still download their videos from YT Studio, I'm not sure how much importance there is on being able to download any video ever (and worst case scenario people could screen recording videos)
by starky | 2025-09-24 15:32:22+00:00
>They are fully aware that all of it is propaganda and just go about their life.

In my experience with people I've interacted with in China is that there is quite a range of belief in the propaganda. I've had people say some truly wild things that were clearly the result of how news and history have been presented to them. Its also important to consider that we are interacting with people that are more engaged with the West and aren't seeing the perspective of a lot of the country.
by garettmd | 2025-09-24 15:32:48+00:00
I'd argue this is an issue not just with "non-tech" folks, but even engineers who don't have experience with Prometheus and other time-series databases. Learning promql always seemed like a hard thing to ask of other engineers. Grafana has made it easier to explore and build queries over time, but there are still quirks and nuances that can be difficult to explain to people whose role doesn't typically involve scouring through metrics.
by bradley13 | 2025-09-24 15:33:01+00:00
I agree that transparency is important. All charges known up front.

That said, I think a fundamental problem is that sir travel is too cheap. That's the motivation behind all the nutty fees.

Surely there would be a market for an airline (or a class of seating) where you get a decent seat, with no gimmicks and up-charges? And not for triple the price like business class?
by zahlman | 2025-09-24 15:33:04+00:00
Aside from the fact that the point of the announcement is that they're dropping it entirely, this "interpreter" is a hack that definitely is nowhere near capable of interpreting arbitrary JS. For example, the only use of `new` it handles is for Date objects, which it does by balancing parens to deduce the arguments for the call, then treating the entire group of arguments as a string and applying regexes to that.
by nerdponx | 2025-09-24 15:33:15+00:00
I don't think it follows at all that social media is the cause. It's clearly an enabling factor, especially in places that didn't already have a healthy right wing media like the USA. The common cause is long-standing discontent over economic issues, unaddressed by liberal or center-left institutions, and a right wing eager to regain power by fomenting culture war.
by thisisit | 2025-09-24 15:34:00+00:00
Loudest voice in the room wins. Crying baby gets the milk. Always.

You can pick any opinion you got from media. Whether it is the whole discussion around autism or the push for DEI. Everything comes down to someone speaking or maybe even shouting.

The unfortunate fact is that people try to see everything through a conspiracy lens and hence miss out voices are still heard - loud and clear.
by gwbas1c | 2025-09-24 15:34:05+00:00
In this case, we're discussing a case where mark-and-sweep is used to collect cyclic references, and it's implied that there are no generations. (Because otherwise, purely relying on reference counting means that cyclic references end up leaking unless things like weak references are used.)

IE, the critical difference is that reference counting frees memory immediately; albeit at a higher CPU cost and needing to still perform a mark-and-sweep to clear out cyclic references.
by catapart | 2025-09-24 15:34:13+00:00
I don't even understand it; I just can recognize a character and type it in. The only time I have to do so is in looking at poorly designed firmware sites and stuff like that, but I manage when the developers do not accomodate for me.

But that's not what the topic is. The topic is HOW developers should accomodate users. And I'm simply taking the stance that preventing user selectability is a lesser evil in specific cases than universal selectability, because the former can be mitigated with less scripting overhead than the latter.
by sombragris | 2025-09-24 15:34:35+00:00
If you had s/minimum/recommended I would agree. But no, we are talking about minimum requirements. I submit that a game should be playable even on 10-year old hardware. Of course, the devs can blow the ceiling in their highest settings. Do they need three RTX-7000 series in parallell cooled with liquid nitrogen and eating 3000W of electricity in order to run at the highest/ultra settings? Yeah, be my guest, more power to them. But we are, I insist, talking about minimum requirements. These should be as broad as possible in order to keep the entry barrier low.

In a game which doesn't even look especially good, I see the very demanding hardware requirements as just a contribution to planned/artificial obsolescence.

(and yeah, I got downvoted as expected. This is getting old...)
by jimbo808 | 2025-09-24 15:34:40+00:00
> It seems at least plausible (imo likely) that there are meaningful differences in how intelligence is implemented in LLMs and humans

Intelligence isn’t "implemented" in an LLM at all. The model doesn’t carry a reasoning engine or a mental model of the world. It generates tokens by mathematically matching patterns: each new token is chosen to best fit the statistical patterns it learned from its training data and the immediate context you give it. In effect, it’s producing a compressed, context-aware summary of the most relevant pieces of its training data, one token at a time.

The training data is where the intelligence happened, and that's because it was generated by human brains.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-09-24 15:34:49+00:00
You could learn from consent based decision making, a hallmark of sociocratic worker coops that is underrated and can be applied elsewhere.

Hierarchy and coercion isn't necessary for avoiding decision paralysis in organizations. It appears to be the practical route but has all sorts of harmful and counterproductive consequences.

https://www.sociocracyforall.org/consent-decision-making/
by StefanBatory | 2025-09-24 15:34:52+00:00
Ah, so like Russia. The ultimate dream of all authoritarians. A society that no longer even dreams of freedom, that becomes fully apathetic.

Do you know how many independent newspapers there are in China? Zero. Even ones with what we'd call liberal ones are controlled and will be dealt with if they go too far.

Just because things aren't working well does not mean we have to tear it all down
by tw04 | 2025-09-24 15:34:59+00:00
> That means every time the press says something about what Trump did, you have to find a direct quote or video of him saying it. Or read an actual executive order. The media abandons facts to criticize power they don't like.

You’re implying they don’t include a video of what they claim he said and any reputable news source pretty much always does.

Don’t get your news from Facebook and Twitter and you’ll be starting from a much better position.
by jwally | 2025-09-24 15:35:10+00:00
If I work for Aylo (pornhub, etc) I'm telling every fintech and click-and-mortar bank who wants more customers to do this yesterday!

"Hey third fifth of Oregon! Do you want to triple your customer base in Oregon for the cost of a small dev team and 1 month of work?!"

> f*cking app on my phone

I need another app on my phone like I need another hole in my head...
by saberience | 2025-09-24 15:35:12+00:00
This is a solution seeking a problem. Why would we want a single reliable agent to have access to 1000s of tools? When would this ACTUALLY be valuable or useful.

What IS useful and offers value is having an agent which accesses 1 or 2 tools but always uses those tools accurately and correctly 99.9+% of the time.

I've seen tons of MCP companies who are offering 1000s of wrapped HTTP APIs as MCP tools, which is note very easy to implement, but in reality, it's totally fucking useless for enterprise use-cases which need to work reliably, in a secure, repeatable fashion.

Any chump can rig an MCP client to 20 tools, but then watch your agent fail again and again and again.

Basically, this is a bad idea for a business and I'd personally suggest pivoting to something that focuses on ensuring a single agent works reliably, provides guardrails, evaluation, security etc. This is the real challenge to solve.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-09-24 15:35:37+00:00
Some of the UK's biggest industries are money laundering and offshore tax evasion schemes for the very rich. They're literally worth hundreds of billions a year.

It's not a pub bore talking point, it's an oligarch and non-dom talking point. A lot of rich people would be inconvenienced if beneficial owner information records had reliable links to real people.

The pub bores are collateral damage - people who post unironically about privacy on social media.