MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by paulryanrogers | 2025-09-23 21:24:23+00:00
Steelman argument is it's better to know what liars, bigots, and other naughty people are up to than push them entirely underground. And someday future moderators may think you're naughty/lying/a quack/etc.

IMO we should not let private platforms become near monopolies, and certainly not without regulation, since they become a defacto public square. But if we're going to let them eat the world, then hopefully they'll at least use good judgment and measures like de-ranking or even banning folks who encourage others to do harm. Making bans temporary is a safety valve in case of bad moderation.
by izacus | 2025-09-23 21:24:26+00:00
I actually accidentally walked into that protest while doing touristy stuff in London that weekend (yeah, great weekend to choose) and first it looked weird having all those people waving British and English flags walking around.... and then I noticed many wore shirts with "Make Britain White Again" (sic) slogans and unironically wearing "Make Britain Great Again" hats. Whatever that thing was, it was about as peaceful as "Truth Rallies" Milošević organized before the whole 1990s war in Balkans went down.

DHH seems outright delusional in that post.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-09-23 21:24:55+00:00
Train yourself, no. Evolve it? Yes. But you'll need an awful lot of generations. Put a robot gun where everything has to come to drink--but it's an air rifle, calibrated to the point of maybe causing injury. Every year you raise the pressure by a tiny bit.

The reason you can't evolve bulletproofness is that it's an overwhelming force. You get evolution when you subject your target to something that only gives a partial kill.
by tomxor | 2025-09-23 21:25:13+00:00
> And proprietary browser plugins, really? So you're not looking to reduce complexity after all, then?

Maybe they haven't lived through the world of pain that was Silverlight, Flash and Java Applets et al. I suppose from a more innocent position without any history it might seem like a good idea to break complexity out into little modules, but the reality was poor integration, more platform lockin, and a security nightmare.
by msteffen | 2025-09-23 21:25:44+00:00
Honestly the biggest reason I became a pro-density advocate is because low-density communities are almost always tax-revenue-negative[1], given that the cost of things like roads, water and sewer infrastructure scale with land area. What NIMBYs often seem to want are the amenities of city living (like a sewer instead of a septic tank in your yard) without the people, and that just doesn’t work.

[1]: https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI
Ask HN: Share a video-series of developing non-trivial things with AI?
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-09-23 21:26:47+00:00
I often see claims like "Ya, AI was rather bad at developing features ~6 months ago, but now it's _actually_ good!". Every once in a while I go and try using it for more significant development work, but thus far I've been disappointed. Thus far for me, it's been great for brainstorming or making initial prototypes, but generally not good enough to ship a finished artifact that has to interact with other pieces. I don't want to waste time doing this test again. And maybe I'm just doing it wrong. If there is a video series of somebody using AI to develop something rather complex, I think that would be much better evidence than the usual unsupported claim, and it could show me what I'm doing wrong. I'm imagining this would be like a "Let's play" series, but for software development.

If no such series exists but you are a believer, consider this a suggestion to make such a series :)
by t-3 | 2025-09-23 21:27:08+00:00
Does the BBC not employ an editor, or has NATO suddenly become something other than an acronym? Seeing "Nato" everywhere is very grating.

As for the article, I'll wait for the action. Trump is so unreliable it's better to just ignore everything he says. If we are now willing to help UA fight for victory I expect Congress to stop chickenfeeding the weapons and start dumping them wholesale. If there aren't enough, increase production or stop sending them elsewhere.
by topspin | 2025-09-23 21:27:32+00:00
All those words, and no mention of Section 230, which is what this is really all about. Google can see which way the wind is blowing and they know POTUS will -- for better or worse -- happily sign any anti-"Big Tech censorship" bill that gets to his desk. They hope to preempt this.

Yes, I know about the Charlie Kirk firings etc.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-09-23 21:28:08+00:00
> As for fishermen and safety, how do you explain that they still commonly use the bowline or the sheet bend?

I've not seen a lot of fisherman use them myself. But if they are indeed common as you say, then it must mean most fisherman are beginners.

Fisherman are nice people. They help each other out, and they learn fast. For example when a fish falls off the line a beginner will often loudly proclaim it bit through the line. Someone with experience often takes that opportunity to look for the telltale curls in the nylon line indicating the knot had slipped, rather than being cut. If they see them, they will often congratulate the beginner on nearly catching the biggest fish of the day - it's a shame they don't know how to tie a fishing knot.

> I specifically did not include knots that are commonly recommended even though they untie easily e.g. under intermittent loads, such as the sheet bend or the bowline,

Ahh, sorry. Reading comprehension fail on my part. I confused your post with others that mentioned the bowline. It's a wonderful knot, but it must be kept under tension.

> alpine butterfly is commonly used in safety critical applications as you mention, so I'm curious to learn what you would rather use in that situation.

As I said as the start, I was thinking you were recommending knots for casual use. I'd use the Alpine Butterfly when I want something that won't slip in that situation, however I quietly curse under my breath while tying it because if it gets tight I've created a lot of work, particularly if I don't have a marlin spike handy. I haven't owned one for years now, so I go out of my way to not use the butterfly.
by dayvster | 2025-09-23 21:28:32+00:00
Making a broad statement like there has never been a memory safe C program is a bit of a dickish thing to say.

especially when you phrase it as

> Can you provide examples for it? Because it honestly doesn't seem like it has ever been done.

it comes off as pedantic and arrogant.

It obviously is possible to write memory safe software in C and obviously it has been done before otherwise we would not be currently communicating over the goddamn internet.

Asking for evidence of something this obvious is akin to asking for a source on if water is in fact wet.
by apercu | 2025-09-23 21:28:53+00:00
If it's working for you I have to assume that you are an expert in the domain, know the stack inside and out and have built out non-AI automated testing in your deployment pipeline.

And yes Step 3 is what no one does. And that's not limited to AI. I built a 20+ year career mostly around step 3 (after being biomed UNIX/Network tech support, sysadmin and programmer for 6 years).
by simne | 2025-09-23 21:28:56+00:00
Your opinion is really interest and important, but it lack evidence.

What I mean, last years, I constantly gather information, on how countries grown their hackers community and programming industry, and at first I seen obvious things, but now with more info, things looking more complicated.

As example, I seen Eastern Europe and exUSSR, grown their hc and IT, mostly with cheap unlicensed local clones of PDP and IBM machines, and as I see, we in exUSSR know about Commodore/Atari and about consoles (I mean pre xBox), and we somewhere lack their taste, but we are already mature and even more or less competitive.

From other side, Japan have rich history of consoles and machines with extended graphic and sound capabilities (MSX, PC-98), and they have good achievements in enterprise machines and in hardware, but I don't see Japanese google, or Japanese facebook, or Japanese Oracle (databases). And I have not answer, how this happen.

What impress me even more - few years ago I got info, GDP in Asia/Africa and accessibility of compute devices grown very fast after Android appearance (I'm not sure if GDP connected, but smartphone became universal computing device with Android), so I see grow of games sales to Asia/Africa, why I notice - because their very specific culture, so gamedev have to made significant changes to game to enter their market. And this shocked me, as I release, Japanese just avoid to enter these markets, stay focused on their internal market and on West.

And BTW other side - East Europe and exUSSR was so poor, so having moderate access to really good Western computers, huge share of economy made accounting with pen and paper and abacus, some entities in middle 2000s. As I know, Japan have access to computers nearly as Americans, from at least middle 1980s, but looks like they lost something when most people switched from manuscript to keyboard.
by vorpalhex | 2025-09-23 21:29:30+00:00
Ah yes, The Daily Express, well known and very solid source.

Here's CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/21/middleeast/israeli-strike-leb...

Also from The Daily Express:

Cinnamon cures Alzheimers: https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/common-kitchen-spice-...

What time is Rapture today: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/what-time-is-rapture-...

and no less than eight stories about the Presley family: https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/celebrity/priscilla-presley-rev...

If you believe the AI slop news shop over government agencies, please make sure your psychiatrist is aware so they can dose your meds as appropriate.
by bgwalter | 2025-09-23 21:29:47+00:00
From a neural networks professor:

https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/ag-ki/rojas_home/documents...

"However, we should be careful with the metaphors and paradigms commonly introduced when dealing with the nervous system. It seems to be a constant in the history of science that the brain has always been compared to the most complicated contemporary artifact produced by human industry [297]. In ancient times the brain was compared to a pneumatic machine, in the Renaissance to a clockwork, and at the end of the last century to the telephone network. There are some today who consider computers the paradigm par excellence of a nervous system. It is rather paradoxical that when John von Neumann wrote his classical description of future universal computers, he tried to choose terms that would describe computers in terms of brains, not brains in terms of computers."

I have no idea what the submitted MIT article is trying to say. Does the MIT article try to make the point that neural networks can be used for computation given ridiculous amounts of memory? They can, but that still does not explain real intelligence. Otherwise, the article makes the same mistakes as pointed out in the above quote.
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-23 21:30:21+00:00
Oof. I'm sad to see this happen.

I got off the Ruby and Rails trains ages ago (around the time that Rails changed the package management solution it used; that convinced me the whole project was not in its "adults in the room" phase yet and I couldn't be bothered to keep up with a project that would require me to pay attention to it every quarter instead of putting a project down for a year and having it mostly work when I picked it up again). Sad to say this kerfluffle hasn't exactly shifted my opinion of the ecosystem.
by progmetaldev | 2025-09-23 21:30:46+00:00
I have been using the Umbraco CMS since 2013, and they moved from AngularJS 1.x to Lit for the backend technology. While it was frustrating at first, due to a lack of documentation around the specific CMS APIs, I can see that it was a great choice to move towards a more "standard" technology that is somewhat agnostic of a full library. Working with web components makes so much more sense to me than the way AngularJS works, as well as the React and Vue tutorials I've followed. If I found a killer feature implemented in React or Vue, I could still make use of my Lit web components without having to toss out everything and rebuild.
by fluoridation | 2025-09-23 21:30:53+00:00
Let's keep it simple and say that the procedure of an LLM is

state: list[n]; while (true){ new_token = llm(state); state.pop_front(); state.push_back(new_token); }

Any given time that llm() is called, it is blind to previous invocations. The state may contain evidence of them, or it may not. It's a free-form data structure that is sometimes filled with user input and sometimes contains previous llm() outputs, but llm() doesn't care.
by massung | 2025-09-23 21:31:00+00:00
> Seasoned Rust coders don’t spend time fighting the borrow checker...

Experienced Rust coders aren't going to find themselves in various borrow checker (and lifetime) pitfalls that newbies do, sure.

That said, the borrow checker and lifetime do cause problems for even experienced Rust programmers. Not because they don't understand memory management, lifetimes, etc. But because they don't - yet - fully understand the problem being solved.

All programs are an evolutionary process of developing a solution to a problem (or many problems). You think one thing, code it up, realize you missed something or didn't fully grok the issue, pivot, etc.

Rust does a great job in the compiler of letting the user know if they've borked something. But often times a refactor/fix in C/D/Zig due to learned (or new) requirements is just a tweak, while in Rust it becomes a major overhaul because now something needs to be `mut` or have a lifetime added to it. I - personally - consider that "fighting" the borrow checker, regardless of how helpful (or correct) it also is.
by spankalee | 2025-09-23 21:31:04+00:00
I would much, much rather have the rules changed to reflect what we actually want them to be than to have bad rules that we only tolerate because we don't enforce them.

But on that note, I absolutely do think that people should pay to store their private property on public land, and that they shouldn't block bus lanes, bike lanes or cross walks, or run red lights, so I fully support those rules and automated enforcement of them.

Why do you think those rules are bad?
by dotnet00 | 2025-09-23 21:31:21+00:00
Admittedly, Google was very heavy handed with Covid censorship. Sure, there was a lot of genuine misinformation that maybe deserved it, but they also tended to catch a lot of actual qualified scientists engaging in scientific debate (say, arguing in favor of masks and the transmission through air theory in the early days) or even some discussion that wasn't opposing the official stances.

Somewhat related, it's pretty insane how even to this day YouTubers have to avoid referring to by name a global multi-year situation that everyone who existed at the time went through. It's due to advertisers rather than government pressure, but still, insane.
by Aloisius | 2025-09-23 21:31:50+00:00
I think you might have misinterpreted that rule?

It is for light rail/trolleys (not buses) and only when you're on a two-way road and there's room to pass on the right. It also applies when they're moving, not just when they're stopped.

Basically, if a trolley/light rail has tracks in one of the left lanes of a two-way road, you must pass on the right unless directed otherwise by a traffic cop.

The reason is that these vehicles obstruct vision and you're not allowed to overtake and pass on the left when you can't see oncoming traffic or when approaching an intersection/grade/curve/oncoming traffic or your view of a bridge/viaduct/tunnel within 100 feet is obstructed.

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/california-driver-han...

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
by slau | 2025-09-23 21:32:26+00:00
I was surprised when I couldn’t sign the petition because although I’ve been a resident for a decade, I don’t have the right to vote in the general election.

One of the more baffling systems in the EU. I’m still expected to vote in Belgium, a country I left 25 years ago, and only allowed to vote in local and European elections, not national ones, in Denmark.
by amanaplanacanal | 2025-09-23 21:32:28+00:00
Is unlimited immigration really popular among the far left? Sounds more like a libertarian position to me.

After some quick googling I can't find any groups that support that.

I did find a poll that shows 64% of Americans support creating some path for undocumented immigrants to get legal status. I'm not sure you could call 64% a far left position though.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-09-23 21:32:39+00:00
I want to be clear here because I think you might have read that as less precisely worded than I intended.

When I say "my program means what I say", that means the code that is written has some precise meaning that can be faithfully translated into execution (sans hardware/runtime/toolchain bugs).

This is different than "I said what I mean". If you write different code, that may violate expectations and create a bug, but it will still be faithfully translated as written.

Safe Rust attempts to guarantee this with the absence of UB. The definition rust uses still isn't a universal definition, which we agree on. That's why my comment didn't actually talk about Rust. The definition I used should be valid no matter what particular guarantees you choose.

Things being manually managed doesn't make them gibberish, and something being implicit, rather than explicit, doesn't mean its gibberish.

I completely agree. I like C, for what it's worth.

Where we disagree is that I'm saying this doesn't scale. A large enough program (for a surprisingly small definition of large) will always have gaps and mistakes that violate your chosen definition of safety, and those bits are the gibberish I'm talking about.
by moritonal | 2025-09-23 21:32:41+00:00
Contextually it might be relevant that Ruby Central said they wanted to have a Zoom call today to explain everything, then cancelled it. This was their message.

"Hello Ruby Community, We recognize that our originally scheduled Q&A session overlaps with the observance of Rosh Hashanah and may not have been the best timing for many in our community. We sincerely apologize for the short notice of this change, especially since the session was set to take place tomorrow. In response to the feedback we’ve received, we’ve made the decision to postpone the session. A new date and time will be shared with you in the coming days. In the meantime, we invite you to watch this statement from our Executive Director. This update is intended to ensure everyone receives the same information and can view it at a time that works best for them."
by noobermin | 2025-09-23 21:33:26+00:00
May be you learned all of these extremely recently before for decades I would definitely say C++ error messages were far worse than anything a fortran compiler has ever barked at me for. The bad days are definitely over but I still think C++ template errors can still be the thing of horrors even today. I know you compared matlab to fortran but you even said you took C++ just prior to this and I'm amazed that didn't harden you for anything gfortran/ifort would throw at you.
by braebo | 2025-09-23 21:33:30+00:00
LSP is the only thing that matters to me, regardless of the language I’m evaluating.

Weeks of my life have been reclaimed thanks to TypeScripts LSP.

All configuration languages suck in Monaco, so much so that I would rather use C# or TS to generate a config with docs in the tooltips, red squiggles under my typos, and location-aware autocomplete.
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-23 21:33:31+00:00
If they can just consolidate control of the supply chain, they don't have to spend the eng-hours replacing their open source dependencies and/or forking them for internal maintenance.

It's the kind of thing that can be the net cheapest option in the long run (see also: Facebook creating and open-sourcing one of the most popular JavaScript interactive-UI frameworks, resulting in them having control of that ecosystem).
by erentz | 2025-09-23 21:33:38+00:00
> They’re finally acknowledging that they allowed Biden to censor Americans by calling their viewpoints “misinformation”.

No they aren’t. Your own quotes say they terminated for their own policies. Not because of pressure by the government. They say if anything they resisted pressure.

Like with Facebooks post Trump 2.0 turnabout. It would be interesting to see the actual emails or letters from the officials showing what this pressure supposedly was and about what cases. This is just another big tech company giving Jim Jordan another letter he wanted.
by cellis | 2025-09-23 21:33:44+00:00
Market rate is $4.10 per hour during peak hours. But it falls off precipitously per hour and ceases to be enforced around 6pm. For overstays those little white golf cart trucks have cameras that check license plates for permits. I recently got a parking permit for $200 or so after paying like $500 in tickets for various infractions including “Parking on Grades, wheels straight”. So I very much want anyone overstaying a 2hr parking spot to get tickets and or towed to make room. And I can speak from experience having just recently being towed, that the parking downtown is ruthlessly enforced. It will cost you about $700 if you’re towed.
by mothballed | 2025-09-23 21:33:57+00:00
It definitely takes skill to do operate excavator/front-end loader / backhoe etc with any amount of efficiency, but if you don't care how slow you are you can do pretty much any residential task anybody else can do almost right off the bat and it is definitely a blast.

I dug the footings for my house on my first day ever on a backhoe, the next day I removed a few trees and built a road, then I rented an excavator and did all my underground electric in one weekend and underground water main in another. All with no experience with any large machinery nor any electrical or plumbing experience, so the weekend comments can definitely be incredibly valid.
by kbolino | 2025-09-23 21:34:23+00:00
Most sublicing is just the 2-arg kind so it would not be safe to truncate the allocation even if the subslice is the only living slice because the capacity still allows indirect access to the trailing elements of the original slice. This optimization would only be truly safe for strings (which have no capacity) or the much less common 3-arg slicing (and Go would need to have a compacting GC).

Of course, the language could also be changed to make 2-arg slice operations trim the capacity by default, which might not be a bad idea anyway.
by electric_muse | 2025-09-23 21:35:19+00:00
Agreed. I think most can agree that the protocol itself leaves a lot to be desired.

But the idea itself is compelling: documentation + invocation in a bi-directional protocol. And enough real players have thrown their weight behind making this thing work that it probably some day will.

I don't understand fully the "it's immature so it's worthy or ridicule" rationale so much. Don't most good things start out really rough around the edges? Why does MCP get so much disdain?
by sgc | 2025-09-23 21:35:25+00:00
Can somebody explain to me how backdooring every app does not lead to the real risk of an entire population's bank accounts being emptied, or similar more hidden but widespread attacks that absolutely cripple any country doing this? Almost immediately, enemy State actors will have almost as complete access as the government passing the law; blackmail will become trivial; they could just subtly weaken adversaries nonstop over the years for a more patient return, etc? It just seems ridiculously dangerous. How is having a single point of failure (or handful of points of failure) for an entire country or continent defensible simply from the perspective of opsec?