MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by al_borland | 2025-09-30 11:46:45+00:00
How much of this is due to nearly all humans already having advanced knowledge of what they would expect out of a humanoid robot in the home?

With the gymnast example, as a non-gymnast, I don’t know the difference between a high and low scoring routine on the floor or beam. If a humanoid robot did a routine and didn’t fall, I would assume all is well. I don’t know the technical details of what is required for a gymnastics competition.

This seems like the same idea as an LLM writing a paper that looks correct to someone who doesn’t already know the answer.

In a home context, this could look like the robot not practicing proper food safety or storage around someone who doesn’t know the details about that kind of thing, which is a good number of people. What it’s doing might look correct enough, and it produces food you can eat… all is well, until you get sick and don’t know why.
by danaris | 2025-09-30 11:46:53+00:00
> thinking that their employer is their enemy and that they have to approach the workplace like they're going into battle with evil managers.

Given how many managers are strongly steeped in the mindset that every IC is an innately lazy bastard out to scam the company out of as much money as possible for doing as little work as possible, and explicitly design their policies that way (not to mention structuring their personal conduct that way), this is probably wise.

Hopefully it can galvanize more of them to form or join unions! Labor power is a vital tool in the current age to take back some of what we have lost over the past few decades to burgeoning corporate power.
by zbentley | 2025-09-30 11:46:54+00:00
When I wrote that, I was thinking about typed, compiled languages' documentation generated by the compiler at build time. Assuming that version drift ("D'oh, I was reading the docs for v1.2.3 but running v4.5.6") is user error and not a docs-trustworthiness issue, that'd qualify.

But now that I'm coming back to it, I think that this might be a larger category than I first envisioned, including projects whose build/release processes very reliably include the generation+validation+publication of updated docs. That doesn't imply a specific language or release automation, just a strong track record of doc-accuracy linked to releases.

In other words, if a user can validate/regenerate the docs for a project, that gets it 9/10 points. The remaining point is the squishier "the first party docs are always available and well-validated for accuracy" stuff.
by hoshank | 2025-09-30 11:47:10+00:00
I am doing a study investigating the impact of adoption of agentic protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol by Anthropic) and Agent2Agent Protocol by Google on Business Process Efficiency , focusing on multiple domains like Software Development, Business Operations, Supply Chain and Customer Service as part of a project for an MBA at Liverpool John Moores University.

I’d be grateful if you could complete this questionnaire (https://forms.office.com/e/DeWB3iXHWr), as it will provide valuable information on quantitatively measure changes in critical performance indicators - such as processing time, error rates, and resource utilization - before and after protocol adoption. The study will also capture and analyze qualitative perspectives from technology and operations leaders, detailing their perceived benefits, encountered challenges, return on investment expectations, and governance practices. Lastly, the research intends to develop comprehensive, actionable frameworks and guidelines that organizations can utilize for secure, effective, and scalable adoption of agent-to-agent communication protocols.The survey takes approximately 20-30 minutes to complete. Responding to the survey is voluntary and the survey is anonymous.

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by man8alexd | 2025-09-30 11:47:38+00:00
And his explanation about Chernobyl is half-bullshit. There was no less cooling, but excess. There was no rise of reactivity before the shutdown, there was no SCRAM button. The AZ-5 button was used for normal shutdown after the conclusion of the experiment. The energy spike happened 3 seconds after the AZ-5 button was pressed. There was no drama or feeling that anything was wrong in the control room before the shit blew up.
by Sesse__ | 2025-09-30 11:47:54+00:00
I never really got the part about the audio conversion; are you just rounding it from 16 to 7 bits, or are you doing dithering + noise shaping (as you definitely should at such low bit depths)? And similarly, how are you downsampling from 44 kHz to a time-varying sample rate; are you properly filtering, or are you getting tons of aliasing?
by aussieguy1234 | 2025-09-30 11:48:06+00:00
I always thought a layoff/redundancy meant that not only does the employee loose their position, but the very position itself is eliminated.

Which means if the company hires a replacement for the same position including through a sponsored visa, then it's not a genuine layoff.

Nonetheless, I'm of the opinion that no single software engineer has yet lost their job to AI. It's simply not there yet.
by sublimefire | 2025-09-30 11:48:50+00:00
I can confirm I was too smart for my age in my teens. And to make growing up even faster I smoked as well. Good times, kids these days have to vape as cigarettes are too expensive, not to mention cheap synth drugs.

The times were simpler, it’ll be much harder to do a similar study in the future due to the proliferation of new carcinogenic substances in food, drugs, drinks, etc. All in all we are healthier anyway.
by NoNameHaveI | 2025-09-30 11:49:46+00:00
If you are looking for offshore proof employment it is worth noting that defense contractors are scrambling to find qualified help. 3 conditions: 1. Work on site typically 100% because classified systems are not 'net connected. 2. No drug use. Not even THC, even if your state "legalized" it. Still illegal at the federal level. 3. No criminal history, at least in the last 10 years. 4. Must pass a FBI background check and clearance interview.
by kibwen | 2025-09-30 11:49:48+00:00
A Rust closure "has" a lifetime in the sense that the anonymous underlying struct that Rust creates to hold the closed-over values has a lifetime, but that's not a requirement to have closures without a GC. Like C++, Odin doesn't care about being memory-safe, so you can just say "be careful doing anything that involves pointers" (which is how the language already works), or if you wanted to be a little safer you could just forbid closing over anything that contained a pointer.
by mtorpey | 2025-09-30 11:50:52+00:00
OPDS is a syndication format for electronic publications based on Atom and HTTP. It's a bit like a podcast feed, but for ebooks. Various ebook apps and devices support it, making it a quick way to access ebooks without tedious on-device file management. Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg offer OPDS feeds, for example.

This little script statically creates an OPDS feed for a directory containing ebooks, in the form of a single file called index.xml. No configuration is needed, and results are ready for hosting on a web server. A human-readable web version is also generated for free via an XSL stylesheet.

quickopds is not full-featured or customisable, but it's a quick way to get a self-hosted OPDS feed that works straightaway. I made it for personal use, but thought I'd share it in case anyone's interested.
by matips | 2025-09-30 11:52:09+00:00
I doubt we will see IPv6-only ISPs. Such provider will have to face complaints that some part of Internet is not working correctly. It can be written it in the offer, but for not technical people some services will be broken by ISP.

It is core of problem with IPv6 adoption - from ISP perspective it do not solve any problem because they still needs solution for connecting to IPv4. Opposite way it works - if you have IPv4 there are bridges to IPv6.
by danaris | 2025-09-30 11:52:37+00:00
> If someone is behaving poorly, first of all, a CoC will not deter them.

I'm sorry, but that's just not true.

You're treating humanity as if it's divided into two distinct sections: Those Who Behave Well, and Those Who Behave Poorly.

In reality, different humans have different ranges of ways they prefer to act, and most are quite amenable to reasonable, clearly-stated codes of conduct for interaction in a particular space.

There is a small subset of people who are either deliberately antisocial for the sake of it (trolls/griefers/etc), and another subset that are genuinely just assholes who will, if given the leeway to do so, cause endless problems in a community.

But there are many, many more who would cause friction with others in such a community without a code of conduct not because they actively want to, but because their unstated assumptions about how people should interact clash with the unstated assumptions of other people there. Having the code of conduct lets everyone coming in in good faith align their expectations and avoid these unnecessary conflicts. They're like a Session 0 in a TTRPG in that sense.
by dbuxton | 2025-09-30 11:52:49+00:00
I think this is a relative succinct summary of the downside case for LLM code generation. I hear a lot of this and as someone who enjoys a well-structured codebase, I have a lot of instinctive sympathy.

However I think we should be thinking harder about how coding will change as LLMs change the economics of writing code: - If the cost of delivering a feature is ~0, what's the point in spending weeks prioritizing it? Maybe Product becomes more like an iterative QA function? - What are the risks that we currently manage through good software engineering practices and what's the actual impact of those risks materializing? For instance, if we expose customer data that's probably pretty existential, but most companies can tolerate a little unplanned downtime (even if they don't enjoy it!). As the economics change, how sustainable is the current cost/benefit equilibrium of high-quality code?

We might not like it but my guess is that in ≤ 5 years actual code is more akin to assembler where sure we might jump in and optimize but we are really just monitoring the test suites and coverage and risks rather than tuning whether or not the same library function is being evolved in a way which gives leverage across the code base.
by mrkeen | 2025-09-30 11:53:07+00:00
This was a pre-existing problem, even if reliance on LLMs is making it worse.

Naur (https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf) called it "theory building":

> The death of a program happens when the programmer team possessing its theory is dissolved. A dead program may continue to be used for execution in a computer and to produce useful results. The actual state of death becomes visible when demands for modifications of the program cannot be intelligently answered. Revival of a program is the rebuilding of its theory by a new programmer team.

Lamport calls it "programming ≠ coding", where programming is "what you want to achieve and how" and coding is telling the computer how to do it.

I strongly agree with all of this. Even if your dev team skipped any kind of theory-building or modelling phase, they'd still passively absorb some of the model while typing the code into the computer. I think that it's this last resort of incidental model building that the LLM replaces.

I suspect that there is a strong correlation between programmers who don't think that there needs to be a model/theory, and those who are reporting that LLMs are speeding them up.
by iggldiggl | 2025-09-30 11:53:16+00:00
> The main benefits is that Google is able to optimize downloads for individual devices.

I don't think Google does the more invasive bit of stripping out non-applicable code protected by API level checks (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT), and otherwise, the simple splitting up of native libraries by ABI, graphics resources by display density and string resources by language (plus any additionally defined code modules for on-demand download of optional features) could have been done wholly locally, too, including signing.
by fractalwrench | 2025-09-30 11:54:13+00:00
A Kotlin Multiplatform implementation of OpenTelemetry: https://github.com/embrace-io/opentelemetry-kotlin

It's been really fun writing this from scratch and trying to design a mobile-friendly API that fits the OTel spec. There's still work to do on OTLP export and various other features - if this project interests you, please do get in touch!
by grandfugue | 2025-09-30 11:54:25+00:00
ORM often produces horrible queries that are impossible for humans to digest. I think there are two factors. First, queries are constructed incrementally and mechanically. There is no an overview for the generator to understand what developers want to compute, or no channel for developers to specify the intention. I anticipant this will change w/ AI in the near future. Second, ORM models data following the dogmatic data normalization, on which queries are destined to be horrible. I believe that people should take a moment to view their data, think what computations they want to do on top, estimate how expensive they may be, and finally settle on a reasonable model overall. Ask ORM (or maybe AI) to help with constructing and sending queries and assembling results. But do not delegate data modeling out. With right data modeling that fits computations, queries cann't be that bad.
by pwillia7 | 2025-09-30 11:55:06+00:00
I was so hopeful for Cactus.chat built on matrix, but like all products built on the matrix protocol, you have to follow their mantra of being unusable and undiscoverable. The main page for cactus chat even quit hosting the JS file and none of the maintainers think that's a problem lol.

Still a cool comments product and I still use it on my blog.

https://cactus.chat/
by grafmax | 2025-09-30 11:55:58+00:00
Land values have risen faster than wages due to growing wealth inequality - whereas as land value tax does not pass, empirically speaking, through to renters - because there is a fixed amount of land. In other words higher land value taxes could have helped mitigate or even cancel the the disconnect between wage and housing costs that we have become afflicted by in this upward transfer of wealth.
by jollyllama | 2025-09-30 11:56:09+00:00
Indeed. GP isn't making the point they think they're making.

"It's writes like us, it must think like us, and will be able to think anything we can think!"

"It's embodied like us, it must be be like us, and will be able to do anything we can do!"

Flawed thinking layered upon flawed perceptions, but get enough decision makers to buy into it and heaven and earth are moved to further it.
by kace91 | 2025-09-30 11:56:13+00:00
The problem is similar to that of journalism vs social media hoaxes.

An llm-assisted engineer writes code faster than a careful person can review.

Eventually the careful engineers get ran over by the sheer amount of work to check, and code starts passing reviews when it shouldn’t.

It sounds obvious, that careless work is faster than careful one, but there are psychological issues in play - expectation by management of ai as a speed multiplier, personal interest in being perceived as someone who delivers fast, concerns of engineers of being seen as a bottleneck for others…
by agentcoops | 2025-09-30 11:56:20+00:00
I don't disagree, but this has been the trend since the 1990s. This was the whole question of "globalization" and all the debates about NAFTA etc. The only anomaly was that people came to believe (in 2020? maybe even 2016...) that "globalization was over" and that now we saw the reverse trend. That seems to be leading people to now believe that this offshoring is something new, when the most likely interpretation is that it never went away.

None of the above, however, begins to touch the question of whether AI has, is or will introduce an entirely new dynamic into the equation. I'm not sure myself of the answer to this question, but I believe it's a very important one and shouldn't be dismissed too quickly -- certainly not by the continued presence of an undeniable tendency of labor markets that has long been observed.
Show HN: Fastest HTTP Cache and Reverse Proxy (Open Source)
by sanchez_c137 | 2025-09-30 11:56:44+00:00
Why advCache? Throughput: 160–170k RPS locally; ~250k RPS sustained on 24‑core bare‑metal with a 50GB cache. Memory safety: 1.5–3GB overhead at 50GB (no traces); ~7GB at 100% OTEL sampling. Hot path discipline: zero allocations, sharded counters, per‑shard LRU, TinyLFU admission. Control plane: runtime API for toggles (admission, eviction, refresh, compression, observability). Observability: Prometheus/VictoriaMetrics metrics + OpenTelemetry tracing. Kubernetes‑friendly: health probes, config via ConfigMap, Docker image.
by xg15 | 2025-09-30 11:58:08+00:00
Yeah, my understanding was also that the (remaining) hard part of self-driving cars is guessing the intentions of other traffic participants. There are a lot of assumptions human drivers can make about pedestrians, e.g. whether a pedestrian has seen the car or not, whether they will wait for it, have no intention of crossing at all - or will just run across the street.

A model might potentially be able to understand those situations, but it would need a lot of highly task specific training data and it would never be clear if the training really covered all possible situations.

The other problem I see is that a lot of situations in traffic are really two-way communication, even if it is nonverbal and sometimes so implicit we don't realize it. But usually pedestrians will also try to infer what the driver is thinking whether he saw them, etc. In those situations, a self-driving car is simply a fundamentally different kind of traffic participant and pedestrians will interact with it differently than they would with a normal car. That problem is independent of machine learning and seems much harder to solve to me.
by carlosjobim | 2025-09-30 11:59:41+00:00
> If you don’t want to abide by the rules

It's really not about this. Many (most?) people don't want to go to events where the hosts are acting weird against their guests. When it comes to weddings, it's not unusual that you haven't seen the people for several years. And in that time people change.

> Deciding to attend a social gathering where you intentionally ignore the rules that you don’t like is narcissistic and rude behavior.

That's why I've said now about fourteen times here now, that people are going to decline an invite to events with strange "rules". For an adult the normal thing is that events you are invited to do not have any rules at all, because everybody already knows exactly what is appropriate. So real people have a low tolerance for those kind of things. If you're looking for "narcissistic", then maybe look at those people inventing strange rules for what is supposed to be their friends and family?

Maybe it is because HN is a forum for people who work in very corporate settings and are accustomed to having to follow a lot of silly rules without the option to decline?
by nis0s | 2025-09-30 11:59:50+00:00
Countries where most white collar jobs are being offshored to expect on average 10-12% social security contribution from employers. In some of these countries, less than 50% qualify to be on social security. Collectively, the U.S. employer and employee pay 12% towards it, but higher cost of living requires setting salaries higher to compensate, and all US workers except illegal immigrants qualify for social security.
by AznHisoka | 2025-09-30 12:00:09+00:00
>> lower growth of headcount and stock price remaining constant or rising would be more suggestive of (not causal proof of course) of an AI-related effect.

Since stock prices are basically future expectations, wouldnt it probably be because investors expect the company to be more efficient cashflow wise? (Earn more per employee)

Not necessarily because they already are more cashflow efficient?
by edent | 2025-09-30 12:01:08+00:00
> Hey, when somebody sends you an email asking for personal data, how do you verify that the person making the request is the same as the person who uses the email.

You send a message to the email address listed on the account. You don't reply to the initial email.

To clarify what happened to me. I emailed them from an account which was not the same as the one used to sign up. (I emailed from admin@example, but the BSky address was 1234@example.com)

They replied saying that they required me to email from the address associated with the account.

I logged into BSky, changed the email address (to admin@), then replied to their message.

They then replied to the account's email. I had successfully demonstrated that I was the person in control of the account.

> Is it legal to assume that the controller of an email address is the same as the person who created the account using the email address?

The law is about proportionality. Would a reasonable person / process assume that only the user controls their email? For a social network, probably. If this were a medical service, it might require passing 2FA.

> If a users inbox has been compromised, can somebody just use GDPR to get all the DMs and data from every other service despite not having passwords to those services?

Yes. But they could also do a password reset. Having MFA helps here.
Ask HN: What startup operations did you wish you'd automated earlier?
by sarathcp | 2025-09-30 12:02:18+00:00
I work in B2B SaaS and I'm always curious what founders wish they'd systematized sooner - especially the 'boring' operational stuff that becomes a mess later.

What did you manually handle too long? At what point did you realize 'we need actual software for this'?