MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by perching_aix | 2025-09-15 14:50:59+00:00
We might know the word "disclose" very different then. I'm amenable to taking issue with them not disclosing it up front, but then their guidelines - if the person above is to be believed - don't require it, and they did disclose it a few days after opening it. It was also not them responding to an allegation or anything, they disclosed it completely on their own terms. And that was two months ago.

I find that latter part particularly relevant, considering the hoopla is about AI bros being lazy dogs who can't be bothered to put in the hard work before attempting to contribute. Irony being then that the person above just took an intentionally cut short citation to paint the person in a somehow even more negative light than they'd have otherwise appeared in, while simultaneously not even bothering to review the conduct they're proposing to police to confirm it actually matches their knowingly uncharitable conjecture. Two wrongs not making a right or whatever.
by deltaburnt | 2025-09-15 14:52:06+00:00
I mean, there's very specific reasons either color gets support from their voters. I wouldn't say all of those reasons warrant the same amount of fervor, passion, and loyalty that they do. But "blind support" is a bit reductive when for some people it literally means their rights being stripped away.

What appears to be "blind support" is people desperately clinging onto what tiny bit of representation they have. It's sad for both sides. It's Stockholm syndrome mixed with political pragmatism. It sucks, but the current political landscape in the US has entrenched itself so deeply in a local minima that people feel like they have to work backwards to make progress. Just see how any discussion of a third party is seen as a psyop to get that side to have a spoiler effect.
by greenie_beans | 2025-09-15 14:52:12+00:00
i went almost three years without a smartphone. was always too embarrassed by this decision to blog about it. i went back to smartphone so i could have a reliable navigation system for giving rides to a politically sensitive group of people who don't need to experience the pains of getting lost / me fumbling with my gps / cops.

i ended up spending a lot of time on my laptop, so it didn't really cut down on my screen time. i expanded my device footprint to replace all the nice tools that come in a single device (camera, gps, notebook, etc). that made me less nimble as a traveler.

i'm glad it made me get a garmin inreach, though. i will never replace that with a glass screen for backcountry emergencies.
by Analemma_ | 2025-09-15 14:52:27+00:00
They do, and it has made some noticeable improvements. Compared to when it first came out, "portrait mode" on recent iPhones is a lot less likely to blur individual hairs on a person, or keep the background seen through a lock of hair in focus. But IIRC the iPhone lidar can only distinguish something like 16 depth layers, and at the end of the day the blurring is still computational and "fake", I don't know if it will or can ever reach parity with what a large lens can do.
by jonbiggums22 | 2025-09-15 14:52:46+00:00
A similar thing happened to me in my mid-40s. I had been fortunate to have "perfect" vision until suddenly I was complaining about the tiny fonts on labels and started struggling doing small wiring tasks. It wasn't a surprise really, my mother had the best vision in my family and she eventually needed reading glasses. But how suddenly it came on surprised me, although maybe I had actually been compensating all along until I couldn't anymore.
by OrderlyTiamat | 2025-09-15 14:53:08+00:00
I'm (reluctantly) a python guy, and uv really is a much different experience for me than all the other tools. I've otherwise had much the same experience as you describe here. Maybe it's because `uv` is built in rust? ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

But I'd also hesitate to say it "solves all my problems". There's plenty of python problems outside of the core focus of `uv`. For example, I think building a python package for distribution is still awkward and docs are not straightforward (for example, pointing to non-python files which I want to include was fairly annoying to figure out).
by vladdoster | 2025-09-15 14:53:10+00:00
Location: Nashville, TN Remote: true Willing to relocate: boston || nashville Technologies: Python, Django, IaC, Terraform, Golang, CI/CD, Azure/AWS, {ba,z}sh, Lua, Springboot, Redis, K8s, Open Service Broker, {,non}relational & vector dbs, shared services, SOA Email: mvdoster@gmail.com

resume: http://linkedin.vdoster.com

sr. cloud software engineer @ Mastercard (5 years)

Designed and built Platform-as-a-Service for microservice workloads running on Azure and AWS to migrate on-prem workloads to the cloud. The platform operates globally, allowing teams to deploy to several Azure-backed regions worldwide. Helped plan and create regional landing zones in Azure for application teams wanting to perform globally. Designed platform components using Terraform, Go, and Node; developed support tooling using Bash, Python, and Azure CLI. De-risk the platform by addressing security vulnerabilities and ensuring the platform is PCI compliant.

api/devops software engineer @ Harvard Medical School (2 years)

Worked as part of the DevOps team to manage a 15k core CentOS HPC cluster. Designed and implemented Python-based security scanning pipeline to securely deploy & run Apptainer images via SLURM. Coordinated cross-team emergency patching eﬀorts. Collaborated with researchers and engineers across 3-letter institutions to deliver secure research infrastructure. Built CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub, Jenkins, to automate code builds, testing, and deployments. Wrote Puppet modules to manage configuration of HPC fleet. Wrote custom Puppet module & Python scripts to automatically remediate Tenable findings.

software engineer @ Global Prior Art (3 years)

Used Django, Celery, Selenium grid, and AWS API Gateway for IP rotation to scrape USPTO patent PDFs, apply CV for data extraction, and generate reports with relevant claims, saving employees 4-5 hours daily. Wrote E2E black-box/fuzzing unit tests. Automated on-premise deployment via Github Actions and Ansible.

maintainer @ Zinit (5 years)

Develop and maintain a zsh plugin manager on Github with 4k stars. Implemented unit tests, containerization, bug fixes, and new features. See: https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/zinit

contributor @ Open-source documentation (5 years)

Contributed hundreds of documentation corrections and enhancements to various open source projects. See: https://github.com/vladdoster
by amiga386 | 2025-09-15 14:53:25+00:00
In the US, it's Signal. In the UK, it was WhatsApp.

When researchers dumped 100% of Signal's users in the USA, because its contact discovery API has no rate limiting, they found a huge portion of Signal's US userbase has Washington D.C. area codes.

"Signal; Washington D.C. numbers are more than twice as likely to be registered with Signal than for any other area in the US" https://encrypto.de/papers/HWSDS21.pdf

Meanwhile, in Scotland since the pandemic, Nicola Sturgeon ran her government with an entirely parallel communication network on WhatsApp, explicitly to prevent her government's discussions and decisions from being discoverable by FoI requests.

There was daily deletion of messages. It was drummed into people by Sturgeon's head civil servant, Ken "Plausible Deniability" Thompson: https://archive.is/jK6Bd

> Thomson was head of the Covid co-ordination directorate of the Scottish government and wrote: “Just to remind you (seriously), this is discoverable under FOI [freedom of information]. Know where the “clear chat” button is…”. He later added: “Plausible deniability are my middle names. Now clear it again!”

Sturgeon, just like Boris Johnson, retained zero WhatsApp messages: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-scotland-67949454

Scotland only banned use of WhatsApp in government 4 months ago: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g8pe585z1o
by nerdponx | 2025-09-15 14:53:44+00:00
The special properties extend into statistics, where you have the Gaussian distribution which feels both magical and universal, and is precisely the exponential of a (squared) Euclidean distance, i.e. exp(-(x - x0)^2).

I have the same feeling, that Cartesian coordinates and Euclidian distances are inherently connected as a natural pairing that is uniquely suited for producing the familiar reality that we inhabit and experience.

In my opinion it holds the same place in mathematics that water holds in biology and chemistry.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-09-15 14:54:00+00:00
A lot of what I see in ML is all focused around Triton, which is why I mentioned it.

If someone wrote a Triton impl that is all Rust instead, that would do a _lot_ of the heavy lifting on switching... most of their hard code is in Triton DSL, not in Python, the Python is all boring code that calls Triton funcs. That changes the argument on cost for a lot of people, but sadly not all.
by chimprich | 2025-09-15 14:54:09+00:00
> The drudgery and boredom of living in a "perfect" world is a constant theme throughout the stories.

You can of course interpret the novels however you like, but that absolutely wasn't Banks' intention when he wrote the series. See the quotes from other comments.

> In one tale, the entire crew of a spaceship deliberately infect themselves with the common cold just to feel something.

Or they just do it because why not? If you'd never been ill, you'd probably be curious as to what it felt like.

> In another story, people turn off their safeguards and go rafting on a lava stream, causing themselves intense pain and even dying, only so they can finally experience some real excitement.

I think in the story the lava-rafters were having a great time, and they were fairly unusual... and people in our culture risk pain and death doing sport just to feel excitement. In the Culture they just have additional options, such as rafting on lava.

Most of the Culture citizens were happy enough with their exploration, art, travel, genetically-enhanced sex, implanted drug glands, games, sports, and so they never got around to lava rafting.
by adolph | 2025-09-15 14:54:42+00:00
It is interesting to compare/contrast/augment this story with those from folklore.org

New team member Bud Tribble suggested that it should be able to take advantage of the Lisa's powerful graphics routines by migrating to its Motorola 68000, and by February 1981, Smith was able to duly redesign the prototype for the more powerful CPU while maintaining its lower-cost 8-bit data bus. This new prototype expanded graphics to 384x256, allowed the use of more RAM, and ran at 8 MHz, making the prototype noticeably faster than the 5 MHz Lisa yet substantially cheaper.

From folklore.org:

The idea was what [Smith] called a "bus transformer" circuit, built out of PAL chips, which adapted the 68000 to an 8 bit memory bus by exploiting the fast "page mode" access mode of the RAMs. The new Macintosh, designed over the Christmas break at the end of 1980, featured an 8 megahertz 68000, 64K of RAM, and a 384 by 256 bit mapped display. It was 60% faster than the Lisa (which used a 5 megahertz 68000) but a lot less expensive.

https://www.folklore.org/Five_Different_Macs.html
by varunrmallya | 2025-09-15 14:54:43+00:00
I'm the co-author.The code is in a very very bad state right now, but the architecture is pretty ok to explain. In step 3, we translate from the Python frontend to the LLVM IR. In step 4 we compile it down to an object file using the LLVM backend `llc`. This object file gets loaded into the kernel and it is what actually contains the eBPF bytecode.
by GuB-42 | 2025-09-15 14:54:44+00:00
Public servants have a job, outside of their job, they are just regular citizens with the same rights and duties as everyone else.

So, monitoring them of the job, sure, but they have the right for a private life. Or not, depending on the law...

It is a bit more complicated for high ranking official, where immunities and classified information come into play, and they don't really have 9-to-5 jobs. But for lower ranking public servants, like police officers, magistrates, mayors, etc... that would apply.
by ethbr1 | 2025-09-15 14:55:17+00:00
Because it's an easy "hot take" to post for people hungry to change their lives?

Arguing the actual optimal approach would require crunching numbers, which would take time by authors and readers, ergo the surfeit of "Here's why you crunching the numbers doesn't matter" popular content.

Also, just to call out one of the many gaps in this particular post: buying a home is a double hedge against inflation.

Given that (1) your debt is denominated in buy-date currency, while your real property value will be inflation-adjusted & (2) in the US at least, buying a home is the easiest way to borrow to invest with, given low mortgage rates (compared to other loans) + <100% down + fixed-rate 30 year mortgages with refinance at buyer's discretion.
by anishathalye | 2025-09-15 14:55:29+00:00
That was a small self-contained example that fit above the fold in the README (and fwiw even last year’s models like GPT-4o give the right output there). That `sort` is based on pairwise comparisons, which is one of the best ways you can do it in terms of accuracy (Qin et al., 2023: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.17563).

I think there are many real use cases where you might want a semantic sort / semantic data processing in general, when there isn’t a deterministic way to do the task and there is not necessarily a single right answer, and some amount of error (due to LLMs being imperfect) is tolerable. See https://semlib.anish.io/examples/arxiv-recommendations/ for one concrete example. In my opinion, the outputs are pretty high quality, to the point where this is practically usable.

These primitives can be _composed_, and that’s where this approach really shines. As a case study, I tried automating a part of performance reviews at my company, and the Semlib+LLM approach did _better_ than me (don’t worry, I didn’t dump AI-generated outputs on people, I first did the work manually, and shared both versions with an explanation of where each version came from). See the case study in https://anishathalye.com/semlib/

There’s also some related academic work in this area that also talks about applications. One of the most compelling IMO is DocETL’s collaboration to analyze police records (https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12189). Some others you might enjoy checking out are LOTUS (https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11418v1), Palimpzest (https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14696), and Aryn (https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.00847).
by zansara | 2025-09-15 14:55:57+00:00
If you want to have some fun you can also play the game here: https://www.zansara.dev/guess-who/ (free, BYOK)

idk, I was not expecting it to go this wrong when I started this project. What makes Claude models fail so consistently? I didn't think they would be especially robust, but I thought they would be able to understand the point of the game.
by dzonga | 2025-09-15 14:56:00+00:00
one thing with these stablecoins is they're pushing to buying of 'us-debt'.

congrats if you buy a stablecoin - you've effectively financed the US gvt at 0%.

now the US gvt can inflate away that debt at 0 cost to them, and pass on the cost to you.

that's why a bunch of these stablecoin companies are pushing it as a way to save for people in distressed economies.

what a way to steal from the poor.

that's why the crypto act was called GENIUS act.
by djoldman | 2025-09-15 14:56:14+00:00
> Will this lead to fewer programmers or more programmers?

> Economics gives us two contradictory answers simultaneously.

> Substitution. The substitution effect says we'll need fewer programmers—machines are replacing human labor.

> Jevons’. Jevons’ paradox predicts that when something becomes cheaper, demand increases as the cheaper good is economically viable in a wider variety of cases.

The answer is a little more nuanced. Assuming the above, the economy will demand fewer programmers for the previous set of demanded programs.

However. The set of demanded programs will likely evolve. So to over-simplify it absurdly: if before we needed 10 programmers to write different fibonacci generators, now we'll need 1 to write those and 9 to write more complicated stuff.

Additionally, the total number of people doing "programming" may go up or down.

My intuition is that the total number will increase but that the programs we write will be substantially different.
Show HN: I wrote a book: The Elements of Code
by johnmwilkinson | 2025-09-15 14:56:15+00:00
Hey HN!

I wrote a book on programming called The Elements of Code. I put the entire book online here: https://elementsofcode.io/

When mentoring (usually new) programmers, I noticed there were a few common mistakes that seemed to account for about 80% of the complexity in their code. I couldn’t find a concise guide to fixing those mistakes, so I decided to write one.

The title is an homage to The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, which is the classic guide for communicating well using prose. That guide is quite tactical in nature, and I wanted to parallel its focus in The Elements of Code. As a result, TEOC tries not to focus on abstract concepts, and instead targets concrete implementation. It avoids discussing software design in favor of the minutiae of code construction. Of course, the design and implementation, the strategy and the tactics, are never entirely separate. When necessary, some abstract concepts are included to help provide context.

The primary focus of the book is on communication: how can we write code that other programmers will be able to understand? How can we reduce the time it takes them to understand?

I put it all online for free because I would rather the book be accessible and read than make a few bucks (though purchases are certainly welcome!). My sincere hope is that readers find it helpful, and it gives them new tools and a new way to think about writing code.

I’m interested to hear what you think, and I’ll try to respond to questions. Thanks!
by fractallyte | 2025-09-15 14:56:32+00:00
I'm furious because I see a non-stop behavior of consumers dumping their garbage, either in nature, or in municipal waste sites next to bins because they're too goddamned lazy to literally lift up their arms - let alone not sorting garbage for recycling.

And this is in a major city in middle Europe, one of the centers of "civilization".

If it's this bad here, what must it be like in countries with less developed social and economic systems?

This is the core of consumer responsibility, and it's a dismal failure.
by tuxyz | 2025-09-15 14:56:37+00:00
Looking forward, we plan to actively continue the development of SMF (Simple Machines Forum) under the GNU license, to keep it alive as an open and community-driven discussion platform.

We believe in a free and open internet, powered by communities and software freedom rather than centralized corporate platforms.

If you care about open source, freedom of software, and community-driven infrastructure – come join us, test our services, and help shape the network.
by lazide | 2025-09-15 14:56:45+00:00
If you’re thinking about foreigners in this context being some random person on WhatsApp in the US, that’s one thing.

You really might want to consider however that ‘foreign’ in this case could be anybody from a Russian FSB agent in Moscow, to a pro Project 2025 CIA agent.

It’s not a good idea for a minister in a gov’t to have their ideas spammed to people accidentally or (by hostile action) intentionally that are not within that same gov’t.

Regardless of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, if anything else it’s an operational risk due to misaligned incentives that the voters are really dumb to not make a bigger deal about.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-09-15 14:57:32+00:00
> The fact that title bars on OSX aren't a fixed size drives me crazy every single day.

Are you talking about standalone titlebars or are you including merged/unified titlebars+toolbars? Plain titlebars have a single height and merged unified toolbars have a little bit of variance but not a lot.

Any significant variance beyond those is due to third party developers hiding the standard window chrome and drawing their own. You could probably tweak NSWindow instances to bring back the standard chrome, but it’s going to look strange since it’ll show in addition to the custom chrome.
by rs186 | 2025-09-15 14:57:39+00:00
I tried to do something similar myself once but quickly gave up. I decided to just slap that line Google gave me in the web page.

I get why it is "better" -- CDN, optimized for browser blah blah. But I really wanted to host it myself, because 1) it's my website 2) I don't want every visitor to send a piece of information about themselves to Google just to get some fonts.

But apparently Google is not motivated to offer such a solution, at all.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-09-15 14:57:52+00:00
I always forget about the idea that IPv6 was intended to allow literally everything to have an address. The mouse, keyboard, display, etc. Seems like a bad idea now, but back then it was considered as part of the overall plan for the nearly infinite space. Maybe the joke is still missing a punchline. We've had this generic device interface for decades but decided on proprietary and arbitrary standards of device communication to make our lives easier in the short-term.
by skrebbel | 2025-09-15 14:58:02+00:00
Nah the thing we call liberalism is much milder than that. It’s like the watered down, we-do-trust-the-government-but-maybe-tone-it-down-a-little version of libertarianism. I mean the same meaning as eg the Economist gives the term.

I think maybe the term changed meaning in the US because for decades pretty much everyone agreed with it (no social democrats in sight, barring the occasional Bernie). A movement that ~everyone agrees with isn't much of a movement, is it?
by dagmx | 2025-09-15 14:58:53+00:00
This sounds like AI assisted bunk. All their supposed evidence (tenuous at best) would also apply to developing swift.

The example code is identical to the Swift code, one just isn’t letting the compiler discern type. I think the author doesn’t actually understand what they’re talking about.

Apple has spent a lot of effort making Swift more secure , especially with Swift 6. And a lot of effort trying to move C++ codebases to Swift. So this sounds highly unlikely as a premise.
by csours | 2025-09-15 14:59:21+00:00
> give the pretense that the duopolistic political parties are backed by ideologies rather than by constantly shifting power dynamics.

I feel like it's very easy to get angry about politics, so speaking clearly is difficult.

I would like to point out that the power dynamics do not always shift randomly, or by the will of the people (be that citizens at large, or party-line voters). The power dynamics have been shifted with intention.

Apart from that intentional push for power, we also have social media dynamics. It feels like online self-critique is always towards the extremes. Once someone becomes energized or activated on a topic, they may start to feel that even trying to understand other viewpoints will cause harm.
by scotty79 | 2025-09-15 14:59:22+00:00
You can ask yourself why privacy is beneficial at all?

And it's because revealing breaches of social etiquette might lead to conflicts and unrest between serfs. Which lower their economic efficiency in their service to landlords.

Online is not unique in any way. It even should have more privacy because people reveal too much voluntarily already leading to all kinds of unrest.

How many people's economic activity was disrupted because they couldn't keep their cheering of Charlie Kirk's demise in private for example?