MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tialaramex | 2025-09-18 00:21:14+00:00
At least so far, my instinct is that we should turn this off/ ensure it is never turned on, as it seems likely to be a foot gun.

I couldn't imagine what a "Null-Conditional Assignment" would do, and now I see but I don't want this.

Less seriously, I think there's plenty of April Fools opportunity in this space. "Null-Conditional Function Parameters" for example. Suppose we call foo(bar?, baz?) we can now decide that because bar was null, this is actually executing foo(baz) even though that's a completely unrelated overload. Hilarity ensues!

Or what about "Null-Conditional Syntax". If I write ???? inside a namespace block, C# just assumes that when we need stuff which doesn't exist from this namespace it's probably just null anyway, don't stress. Instead of actual work I can just open up a file, paste in ???? and by the time anybody realises none of my new "classes" actually exist or work I've collected my salary anyway.
by raspasov | 2025-09-18 00:21:25+00:00
This. Dealing with the problems of a real-world legacy code base is the exact opposite of a perfectly constrained problem, verified for internal consistency probably by computers and humans, of all things, and presented neatly in a single PDF. There are dozens, if not 100s, of assumptions that humans are going to make while solving a problem (i.e., make sure you don't crash the website on your first day at work!) that an LLM is not going to. Similar to why, despite all its hype, Waymo cars are still being supervised by human drivers nearly 100% of the time and can't even park themselves regularly without stalling with no explanation.
by deepsquirrelnet | 2025-09-18 00:21:25+00:00
The term has been so abused that it’s no surprise the current administration was going to push in that direction themselves.

All it takes is a minor rebranding and half the country or more would immediately sign up for it. For all intents and purposes, socialism just means “the people we don’t like”. As long as people feel like they’ll get theirs, I seriously doubt they care what economic system they’re living under.
by ggm | 2025-09-18 00:21:52+00:00
> “If you’ve got to go through all those contortions to make your story work, you’re not doing science anymore,”

Adam Frank, quoted in the article.

Whats the deal? The deal is "I want to believe" embedded in the system, grifters, and politics.

You have to distinguish between a view on possibilities and the acts and evidence presented. Drake equation aside alien life has a basis in reasoning about scale in the universe, no UFO evidence is either compelling or even tending to suggest we've been visited, as the Occam's razor choice.
by kazinator | 2025-09-18 00:22:01+00:00
False dichotomy. The problem is that the syntax implements a solution that is likely wrong in many situations and pairs with a bad program design. Maybe when we have this:

what?.could?.possibly.go?.wrong = important_value()

Maybe we want code like this:

if (!what) what = new typeof(what); // default-construct representative instance if (!what.could) what.could = new typeof(what.could); if (!what.could.possibly.go) what.could.possibly.go = new typeof(what.could.posssibly.go) // now assignment can take place and actually retain the stored value // since we may have allocated what, we have to be sure // we propagate it out of here. what.could.possibly.go.wrong = important_value();

and not code which throws away the value (and possibly its calculation).

Why would you ever write an assignment, but not expect that it "sticks"? Assignments are pretty important.

What if someone doesn't notice the question marks and proceeds to read the rest of the code thinking that the assignment always takes effect? Is that still readable?
by john_the_writer | 2025-09-18 00:22:19+00:00
I mean. I have a little book on my desk with password hints. "2nd grade best friends phone number", "birthday of first dog". It also has a grid of random numbers/letters on the front page, so I can write "first_crush_b4*5". You'd have to have physical access to the book, and know what the hint leads to. It's un-hackable. I mean aside from social, or physically breaking into my house.
by foopod | 2025-09-18 00:22:20+00:00
IMO not significantly. Prior to AI the bulk were tutorial based to-do apps or simple crud things anyway, its still easy to tell the difference between those and something more complex (where AI is less useful - or at least requires more skill to use successfully).

But I don't think the projects themselves really mattered all that much anyway - its the conversations you can have about them. Understanding the driving factors, whether it was solving a problem they have or just working on something they are passionate about, the challenges they overcame in the development process and the considerations/decisions they made along the way.
by nathan_compton | 2025-09-18 00:23:23+00:00
> Real numbers have no stronger claim to truly representing physics than complex numbers, spinors, or Lie groups do.

Eh, call me when your detector gives you back a complex number. Measurements return real numbers. I've never known one to return a complex valued one. Probabilities are real numbers. I feel this puts real numbers in a privileged position. If you ever wrote a theory that suggested that you lay a ruler against an object and measure a complex value, you'd be in trouble.
by esbranson | 2025-09-18 00:24:14+00:00
So don't. Lol. What a naive blog post.

You know about America, you can see our big court cases live.[1] You have no idea what happens in Brazilian courts, your own country. (If your courts were open, there'd be a RECAP equivalent.) Same for European countries.

A law says "all evil is unlawful" and the naive think it's a utopia. A ignorância é uma bênção.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/
by seec | 2025-09-18 00:24:52+00:00
All the "hypothesis" or supposed "results" are so bonkers than it's an insult to intelligence itself that such things can be "proved" with psych "experiment".

Not that it matters, most of the psychology field is inherently bullshit, those are just the example of cases they went so far in the insult to intelligence, no amount of "studies" and rhetoric can save them.
by thegrim33 | 2025-09-18 00:28:36+00:00
I think you went too far with the "prefer it" conclusion. Just because lots of people do something doesn't mean it's proof that they prefer it. They may take the bus because that's what they can afford, whereas they'd prefer to walk or drive or something else if they had the means.

Also, the 25 million figure is number of rides per month, not a measure of people who ride transit. Somebody might ride the bus to work 5 days a week, and that counts as 20 rides. The count of "people" that ride those transit methods drops to well below 1MM, factoring that in.
by thot_experiment | 2025-09-18 00:28:47+00:00
I think the point I'm trying to make here is that my printer is bad and old and it works every time, and I attribute that to Prusa Slicer, a free open source piece of software. The Makerbot was a finnicky piece of shit before Prusa Slicer, and now it's excellent and makes dimensionally accurate parts every time, I don't even remember the last time I've had a print fail and I use it all the time, tens of hours of printing per week recently.

The upfront ont-time cost to get to something that works reliably with a non-Bambu printer is real, but I am perhaps naively assuming that if my ancient makerbot has been working reliably for years now the same one time cost can be paid with any modern printer and amortized over hundreds of hours of printing to be nearly negligible, and you still have a reliable printer AND you're voting with your wallet for a better future.

I am not claiming that what I've done is the same as "go to best buy, plug it in and hit print" but I do think the alternative is really really not bad at all.

This isn't "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially...". I'm saying "surely if my ancient makerbot is like this with really minimal tuning, a modern non-bambu printer is worth the cost of a bit of extra setup in order to fund people who are improving the space".
by FridayoLeary | 2025-09-18 00:29:25+00:00
But if you did that 95% of the anti israel propoganda machine would fall apart. You can't evacuate them or let them settle elsewhere because that's exactly what israel wants.

My idea is to buy the gaza strip from the residents and they can take their newfound wealth to another arab country and be prosperous happy and peaceful there.

But yeah, the fact that no one is taking them in proves they are all a bunch of anti semites or virtue signallers. They don't care about palestinians, it's just politically convenient to pretend that they do.
by YZF | 2025-09-18 00:29:56+00:00
If Israel went back to the borders of 1967 it would be continuously attacked from both Gaza and the West Bank. Israel already went part way. Fully in Gaza and partially in the West Bank where it handed over territory to the PA.

What would happen is exactly what did happen. Hamas would take over the entire territory. Arm to the teeth. Dig tunnels. And launch endless attacks against Israel.

I'm not a fan of the settlements but they are not the issue. The issue is Jewish presence in the middle east. When there were no settlements Israel was attacked. Pre-1967 it was still attacked. Pre-1948 Jews were still attacked. I don't think there should be any settlements and I would support dismantling them. I also condemn the settler violence against Palestinians. But again, this isn't really the issue, this is an outcome. Israel should have either annexed the west bank and given citizenship to all Palestinians or not allowed Israeli civilians to live there.

Tell me how the Jewish people murdered German civilians, broadcasted that to the world, committed hundreds of suicide bombing attacks in German cafes, supermarkets, malls and theaters, and fired 20,000 rockets at major German cities. Just so I can complete your analogy in my head. Also explain to me how what Israel is doing in Gaza to Palestinians is in any way comparable to the Nazis murdering six million Jews by rounding them up, loading them on trains to concentration camps, and then packing them in gas chambers. How does this compare with Israel targeting Hamas combatants, evacuating civilians population, and providing them with aid?
by toast0 | 2025-09-18 00:31:07+00:00
A vehicle setup without power steering is a lot different than a vehicle with inoperative power steering.

For one thing, they usually give you a bigger wheel, which helps with leverage. Power steering enables different steering geometries which likely wouldn't have been put together on a vehicle without power steering also.

Exclusive brake by wire and/or steer by wire seem like they will add confusion and delay, and perhaps increased risk of injury when dealing with disabled vehicles. At least in my life, it's been pretty handy to be able to get a non-responsive vehicle into neutral and push it to somewhere else in order to get it out of the way of traffic or to have better access to repair it. That often means using the vehicle steering to help direct it to a good spot, and the vehicle brakes to stop it when it gets there. Accelerator-by-wire is more acceptable, as vehicle without working electrics doesn't need a working accelerator pedal; I have driven one vehicle with what I assume was drive by wire with significant latency, it wasn't enjoyable, but it was usable.
Most referrals never turn into meetings. Why does this happen?
by kez_ | 2025-09-18 00:31:11+00:00
I noticed that while referrals are supposed to be the highest-converting channel, they often stall. People want to help, but the intro ends up vague, awkward, or never sent at all. Curious how others have solved this, especially at the early stage when every warm intro matters.
by in-silico | 2025-09-18 00:31:32+00:00
Cars going faster than humans or horses isn't very interesting these days, but it was 100+ years ago when cars were first coming on the scene.

We are at that point now with AI, so a more fitting headline analogy would be "In a world first, automobile finishes with gold-winning time in horse race".

Headlines like those were a sign that cars would eventually replace horses in most use-cases, so the fact that we could be in the the same place now with AI and humans is a big deal.
by yomismoaqui | 2025-09-18 00:31:51+00:00
This reminds me of the story [1] about Facebook intentionally breaking parts of its Android app for some users (including crashing or disabling functionality), to see how far it could degrade before users stopped using Facebook.

According to reports, users did not stop coming back even when the app was broken for hours.

A similar thing happened to me when playing some initial version of The Binding of Isaac on Linux, when it was made with Flash. Its performance wasn't the best but I couldn't stop playing.

So if people still returns maybe Anthropic has something great going on with Claude Code.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/05/facebook-...
by BrenBarn | 2025-09-18 00:31:59+00:00
I'll take your question in good faith.

What I want is for people to be free to immigrate to the US if they are a) not known to be dangerous; and b) prepared to commit to the US and support it. That means I am more in favor of permanent immigrants than of migrant workers. In general there should be a low bar to clear to have a path to citizenship in the US. I think it makes sense to have various requirements that must be met along that path; I'd be fine with, for instance, laws that require people who are in that process to register, meet periodically with some official, pay an extra tax, etc. I also would support requiring immigrants to formally and effectively renounce any other citizenship upon receiving US citizenship.

But the goal should be to get people to actually move here, permanently, not just be here. That is what improves the country: people committing their hearts and souls and investing their lives in the place where they live. So many of the great immigrant stories from the past took this form. I find it ironic that so much rhetoric focuses on ways to legalize migrant labor, because that seems like exactly what we don't want.
Show HN: Visual Prompts for Coding Agents
by adiasg | 2025-09-18 00:32:03+00:00
After back-and-forth chats with Cursor about frontend changes, I realized it's hard for me to describe a visual intent in text prompts. So I built a drop-in React component that lets you draw on your frontend & copy it as an image. Paste that in your coding agent for faster prompting :)
by rallyvite | 2025-09-18 00:32:04+00:00
Thank you for the input, definitely a delicate matter and so we actually advise against storing sensitive information (like passwords) and use dual authentication for everything (email and text). Open source is a very interesting take especially if he targets a more tech driven community.

Just out of curiosity, do you relate to this problem and if so, how do you handle the transfer of important information to your loved ones in case something were to happen unexpectedly?
by helge5 | 2025-09-18 00:32:14+00:00
Yes, GRDB even w/ manual help is obviously not as fast raw SQLite. As much respect I have for the author "performance nearly identical as raw SQLite" is incorrect. Lighter also achieves some of the performance characteristics by avoiding allocations for bound parameters (such being statically generated). I didn't look into SharingGRDB yet, but it seems like those macros could accomplish similar performance, the other way around (Lighter works on the SQLite DB schema). What I'm not entirely sure of yet is why it even sits on top of GRDB in the first place, instead of just doing the SQLite parts itself. Marketing I suppose.
by autoexec | 2025-09-18 00:32:55+00:00
I don't think there was ever a time when critical thinking and fact checking wasn't needed. Nobody has the time to do deep dives into everything, but the more important something is to you, or the more likely it is to impact your life the more it's worth investing the time it takes to do a couple web searches.

Today CNN says that Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro has skin cancer. Is that true? Damned if I know. Will I spend the time trying to verify that? Nope.
by fuzztester | 2025-09-18 00:33:21+00:00
True.

And these guys sing whatever they want about Him, like it or not:

https://youtu.be/-aPnFTFrg5k

Barclay James Harvest - Hymn.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barclay_James_Harvest

The song was very popular in the peak rock music era, and among the youth.
by GoatInGrey | 2025-09-18 00:33:35+00:00
Counterpoint: in my consulting role, I've directly seen well over a billion dollars in failed AI deployments in enterprise environments. They're good at solving narrow problems, but fall apart in problem spaces exceeding roughly thirty concurrent decision points. Just today I got involved in a client's data migration where the agent (Claude) processed test data instead of the intended data identified in the prompt. It went so far as to rename the test files to match the actual source data files and proceed from there, signalling the all clear as it did. It wasn't caught until that customer, in a workshop said, and I quote "This isn't our fucking data".
by acdha | 2025-09-18 00:34:21+00:00
Here are the two specific criticisms in the article:

> Phishing emails from “@google.com” made it into Gmail.

> Google enabled Authenticator cloud sync by default.

Both of these seem like fair points where one could reasonably expect one of the largest companies in the world to spend a tiny amount of money on security improvements which would make it harder to attack their customers. Not following Apple’s lead on security for Authenticator is especially disappointing since they have no shortage of good security engineers.
by fragmede | 2025-09-18 00:34:36+00:00
I have one of those and all I can say is holy shit it works. It doesn't hook into GPS, so it's not totally self driving (at least mine isn't, there's a GitHub for their software), so I still gotta pay enough attention on the freeway to know when to exit, but after I get on the freeway, left right gas brake is all taken care of. Great for sitting in stop and go on the freeway.

It's also made me think that Waymo's a) don't need lidar, and b) don't actually need the extensive mapping that the public has been lead to believe they need. They're being overly cautious, because they know people's lives are on the line here.
by keernan | 2025-09-18 00:34:52+00:00
That saying is absolutely true so long as the consequence isn't imposed by the government which has zero right to become involved in what Americans think, like, or say.

And there is something seriously wrong when large corporations have to worry about kissing the government's ass because they are awaiting government approval for a business venture. Obviously that's always been a worry, but Trump has taken that to a sickening new level.
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-09-18 00:35:11+00:00
Its 10 times easier to find the clip immediately from the right-aligned youtube channels. The left will not even get the clip out.

Since you brought up something about Crowder being hated by a huge percentage of the population, which was a quip that had no relevance - I decided to give you a quip that had no relevance.

But the basic reason that he should be cancelled is the following:

If Congresswoman Omar was assassinated and it turns out to be a far-right maniac, then the right, far right and moderates will all tell you - he was a far right maniac and it has to stop.

The left is basically saying I hate Charlie Kirk he deserved to die, and by the way it was your own guy.

I get that Kimmel did not say the first thing, but he repeated an extremely dis-proven concept that the shooter was right wing.

He was dating a trans person, the bullets had markings bella ciao (that was also sung in disrespect at CK vigils by the way) and his dad and other family members have confirmed he was radicalized left.

If top-level people on the left refuse to acknowledge this, it's pure lies and fake news and needs to be cancelled.
by pogue | 2025-09-18 00:35:12+00:00
The 2nd part is the quote from Jimmy Kimmel that he said on air that caused the "controversy", that resulted in the FCC commissioner, Brendan Carr to go on a podcast and threaten ABC/Disney with retaliatory action if they refused to take Kimmel off the air.

CNN doesn't show a clip, but explains what was said & the events that caused this.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/17/business/video/abc-jimmy-kimm...

Never believe those who claim to be in favor of free speech, but then use threats of legal intervention against those who practice it.
by NortySpock | 2025-09-18 00:35:43+00:00
I mean, yeah, it's "a lot" because we've been starved for so long, but having run analytics aggregation workloads I now sometimes wonder if 1k or 10k cores with a lot of memory bandwidth could be useful for some ad-hoc queries, or just being able to serve an absurd number of website requests...

CPU on PCIe card seems like it matches with the Intel Xeon Phi... I've wondered if that could boost something like an Erlang mesh cluster...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi
by duckfan77 | 2025-09-18 00:35:47+00:00
The number of valid options is the sum of the valid option for each variant. This is also why product types are called product types.

If you have a struct (product type) containing an 8 bit integer and a boolean, the struct has 512 possible states. 256 for the integer, times 2 for each value of the boolean.

If you have a sum type where one variant is an 8 bit integer, and the other is a boolean, you have 258 possible states. 256 for when it's an integer, and 2 for when it's a boolean.

Sum types add the options of each variant, product types multiply the options for each item in it.
by JohnFen | 2025-09-18 00:35:53+00:00
We start by rejecting the cartoon labels of "left" and "right" as if all conservatives or all liberals believe the same things and think the same way. The left/right division is a longstanding technique intended to keep us divided.

The reality is that outside of the actual extremists, liberals and conservatives agree on 80% of everything. We can, and need to, start there. We are all Americans and have to realize that just because we may disagree about things (particularly a small percentage of things) doesn't have to mean we're enemies.

But, if history offers any lessons, then our path is likely set and we're going to have to push through some nightmarish times before we find a way to be better.
by YZF | 2025-09-18 00:36:47+00:00
I agree that today Hamas isn't a huge threat.

However it still has considerable weaponry and underground facilities and it is still holding Israeli hostages. The issue isn't Hamas tomorrow. The issue is the consequence of letting Hamas retake the entire Gaza strip and rebuild itself, and the loss of deterrence when Hamas is going to declare they won the war once it ends on their terms.

I can relate to your point though and many people would agree with you. Let's stop killing people and see where this takes us is not an unreasonable position. But Israel is still in PTSD from Oct 7th and the mood is that it can't afford to take a chance here and that any stop/pause will just result in a higher price for Israelis and Palestinians paid a little down the line. The truly totally "unreasonable" side here is Hamas and I see how you can't understand their calculus because it is so death-cult fanatical.
by jjfoooo4 | 2025-09-18 00:37:32+00:00
I expected Kimmel to have somehow criticized Kirk, a dubious enough reason to pull the show. But this isn’t even that. Comments quoted in stories assert that the shooter was MAGA - maybe that’s somewhat controversial, but it’s ludicrous to suggest it’s offensive. That paired with comments criticizing the Dear Leader were enough. This is a new low in corporate cowardice toward Trump bullying.

Terrible precedent aside, how could Disney think that capitulating here will result in anything other than more attempts to control their programming in the short term?