MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alsetmusic | 2025-09-01 01:20:17+00:00
Why would I want to expose myself to the ideas of 4chan users? Am I wrong in thinking that the site is a sinkhole of terrible people? That’s all I’ve ever read or heard about it. It birthed a horrible conspiracy theory that destroyed politics primarily in the USA but also in other countries. I have no need of said opinions.

I’m asking a genuine question, not being snarky. I don’t understand what would motivate someone to post this here and expect a positive reception.
by capitainenemo | 2025-09-01 01:22:15+00:00
Yeah, I'm excited by the mercurial-style features as a mercurial user looking for something to transition to in a world where git has, sadly, become the standard. The revsets were definitely a joy to discover. The main thing I'm hoping they add is mercurial's diff format which, according to the jujutsu dev discussions, is considerably better than git's, and allows for cleaner "absorb" and, apparently, the clearness of mercurial's "hg fa --deleted".

And, well, it's silly, but I do like revnums. It's a compact way to compare changes over time, even if it's only useful for the local repo. Would be nice to have those too.
by PretzelPirate | 2025-09-01 01:22:56+00:00
> Microsoft reintroduced stack ranking over the last year or so

Microsoft has forced differentiation, not stack ranking. They aren't the same and differentiation is much better for employees.

> The individual in question was definitely under pressure. I worked rather closely with them, and this is well documented in the source article as well

I'm sure you're feeling a lot of options due to your proximity, and I'm sorry for what you're going through.

The article says he was under pressure, but it didn't say the source of that pressure. Perhaps it was due to a series of "lower than expected" reviews, or the constant worry about losing their job and their visa. It didn't say that the pressure was caused by internal policies.

I've known many people who put pressure on themselves and burnt out because of it, despite no one expected them to do so. I suffered through that in my own career and nearly quit software engineering because of it.

If you have real details about the situation and that it was internal Microsoft policy or the pressure put in them by their manager which may not have aligned with Microsoft policy, that woukd be very useful information to share with the public.

Microsoft operates like many big companies vs a single company, and some teams go beyond standard Microsoft policy and have unrealistic expectations of their employees. Those departments and managers should be called out and shamed.
by sesky | 2025-09-01 01:23:32+00:00
This is not true. A walled garden only works well when it applies universally.

When app developers have the ability to bypass the walled garden, they have many incentives to do so ranging from financial to wishing to circumvent scrutiny. This will include an increasing amount of popular and useful apps, decreasing the options available to those who want to stay in the walled garden. For less technical users they will blindly follow instructions to leave the walled garden.

You are removing the choice of users who want a walled garden by supporting legislation forcing these ecosystems open.
by invariantjason | 2025-09-01 01:26:36+00:00
I've built a physics-based neural engine achieving: - Conservation: 5.27×10^-13 (machine precision) - Drift: 10^-17 (essentially zero) - Bit-exact reproducible replay - Live topology switching (chain→strong→ring→grid) - 336.6 samples/s on CPU

This enables century-scale simulations without drift accumulation. No CUDA. No tensor cores. Pure deterministic compute.

Implications: - Backtesting without numerical artifacts - Climate models that don't diverge - Provable AI behavior for regulatory compliance
by al_borland | 2025-09-01 01:27:31+00:00
I’m not sure I understand the RSU one. I just went back and did the math on my RSUs from last year and my company deducted over 22% on federal, as well as taxes for social security, Medicare, and state tax.

Assuming there isn’t a 2nd income drastically raising your income, why wouldn’t the company withhold the right percentage, considering they know what you make? Choosing a flat 22% seems odd.
by wkat4242 | 2025-09-01 01:28:15+00:00
> I can acknowledge my own interests here (having control over how exactly the device I own runs), but I can also see the interests of phone manufacturers — protecting revenue streams, managing liability and regulatory risks, optimizing hardware–software integration, and so on. I don't see how my own interests here outweigh collective interests here.

However the interests you mention aren't collective at all but very singularly the ones of the manufacturer only
Ask HN: Self-coding coding agent? (a la self-compiling compiler)
by whycombinetor | 2025-09-01 01:28:50+00:00
Just wondering if it's been done. Since the models are pure functions at temperature zero, it should be hypothetically possible to find/create a model M, agent code A, and prompt P such that A is a fixed point of the function RunPrompt_{M,p}: AgentCode -> AgentCode.
by fastball | 2025-09-01 01:29:35+00:00
Much harder to make a secure device that is resistant to getting pwn'd if you can run any code you want. I personally prefer my iPhone to be more secure than to be more open.

Buy a more open phone if you want one, but stop trying to use legal means to force the software on my phone to be worse for my use-case just because you want to have your cake and eat it too.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-09-01 01:30:00+00:00
This is one of the real canaries I watch on "real AI" for programming.

It should be able to make an OS. It should be able to write drivers. It should be able to port code to new platforms. It should be able to transpile compiled binaries (which are just languages of a different language) across architectures.

Sure seems we are very far from that, but really these are breadth-based knowledge with extensive examples / training sources. It SHOULD be something LLMs are good at, not new/novel/deep/difficult problems. What I described are labor-intensive and complicated, but not "difficult".

And would any corporate AI allow that?

We should be pretty paranoid about centralized control attempts, especially in tech. This is a ... fragile ... time.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-09-01 01:30:09+00:00
But that work is directly related and highly relevant to his work as a government employee now. If you were right, any politician could silence anyone from speaking about his former transgressions, affairs or whatever.

In fact, a state Rep in California (R) tried that after his bragging was caught by an open mic, he graphically bragged to a colleague about having sex with a lobbyist and then claimed copyright on that "work" and his own name.

That went nowhere, of course.
by sunshowers | 2025-09-01 01:30:20+00:00
In Mercurial you'd do hg commit -i and squash further changes down incrementally via hg amend -i, similar to Jujutsu.

(The first thing about Jujutsu that was earth-shattering for me was learning that jj amend is an alias for jj squash. I swore aloud for several minutes when I first learned that.)
by capitainenemo | 2025-09-01 01:30:35+00:00
I feel a citation is needed for that, since it seems in direct conflict with the given history of the word which was that Cartier heard the local indian youths at the village of Stadacona call their village "kanata" (village) and believed that it was the word for the entire area. There was no "invader's village" to even refer to at the time.
by sudosysgen | 2025-09-01 01:30:43+00:00
There is already open source software for UWB, computational photography, various depth cameras, direct link WiFi, etc...

Will it be as good as the iOS implementation? Probably not. But it's hardly an impossible fact and not one that has to be done entirely over and over for every device. The Asahi folks showed it could be done despite hostile conditions.
by zenmac | 2025-09-01 01:31:41+00:00
The pictures of Queen/King is on the money, and not to mention this little fiasco in the 70's [1] is when the rub meets the road, and we figure out who is really wearing the pants in this geopolitical relationship.

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/queen-s-secret-letters-re...
by ibraheemdev | 2025-09-01 01:31:51+00:00
I did not claim that x86 provides sequential consistency in general, I made that claim only for RMW operations. Sequentially consistent stores are typically lowered to an XCHG instruction on x86 without an explicit barrier.

From the Intel SDM:

> Synchronization mechanisms in multiple-processor systems may depend upon a strong memory-ordering model. Here, a program can use a locking instruction such as the XCHG instruction or the LOCK prefix to ensure that a read-modify-write operation on memory is carried out atomically. Locking operations typically operate like I/O operations in that they wait for all previous instructions to complete and for all buffered writes to drain to memory (see Section 8.1.2, “Bus Locking”).
by wisty | 2025-09-01 01:32:33+00:00
Remember, the law provides patent, copyright, trade mark, and NDA protection.

While it would be a burden to require a degree of openness, it's not like companies are all rugged individualists who would never want to see legal restrictions in the field.

It's just a question of what is overall best and fairest.

Restrictions can both help and hinder innovation, and it's innovation that in the ling run makes things improve IMO.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-09-01 01:34:58+00:00
Again, this is an incredibly naive and uninformed take. Yes. You can spend hundreds of dollars to make one attempt at malicious activity, and yeah, that could also be fixed by tweaking EV requirements. (More than likely by putting a country flag on the EV banner.) One person as an example managing to get a problematic EV cert is not a sign of a broken system, it's a sign of a working system that only a few edge case examples exist.

Cybercriminals work at scale. The opinion you shared here is why Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are so easy to use for cybercrime. It's incredibly easy to hide bad behavior in cheap, disposable attempts on free accounts.

Cost virtually eliminates abuse. Bad actors are fronting effort and ideally small amounts of money to effectively bet on a high return. You make the cost to attempt high, it isn't worth it. Apart from some high profile blogs demonstrating the risk, EV certs have to my knowledge never been used maliciously, and hiding them from the browser bar just makes useful, high quality data about the trustworthiness of a site buried behind hidden menus.
by gkanai | 2025-09-01 01:38:50+00:00
I remember reading about Gutta Percha in Neal Stephenson's Mother Earth Mother Board.

"Wildman Whitehouse predicted that sending bits down long undersea cables was going to be easy (the degradation of the signal would be proportional to the length of the cable) and William Thomson predicted that it was going to be hard (proportional to the length of the cable squared).... The two men got into a public argument, which became extremely important in 1858 when the Atlantic Telegraph Company laid such a cable from Ireland to Newfoundland: a copper core sheathed in gutta-percha and wrapped in iron wires."

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2005/07/neal_stephenson.html
by throwup238 | 2025-09-01 01:39:15+00:00
You’re thinking of a hydrological thalweg.

In international law (w.r.t. borders) thalwegs are not dependent on coastlines but on navigable channels with a finite precision. The boundary monuments are often kilometers apart which creates a straight line regardless of the shifting coastline (which is a much bigger problem than the coastline paradox, since rivers can change on a dime).
by tehjoker | 2025-09-01 01:39:46+00:00
That's right, though I don't want to undersell the massive levels of suffering and trickery played by the British. Their stock in trade was to sow ethnic division and steal whatever they could. For example, the million+ that died in the partition of India was a result of their sowing of tensions between Hindus and Muslims. They also did a lot of looting in Africa.

Going back in time, if you read about the Duchess of Sutherland, the UK created their own internal Nakba where they internally displaced peasants to make way to "Sheepe Walks" and forced them to the sea to benefit the textile industry. Then they later wanted that land and attacked them again. The West is very familiar with creating Gaza-like situations.
by stevage | 2025-09-01 01:39:49+00:00
In case the author is reading, can I suggest reformatting this kind of thing:

>The command jj log shows you a visual representation of your version history. If you run it, you should see something like this:

> @ mkmqlnox alice@local 2025-07-22 20:15:56 f6feaadf

To:

> The command jj log shows you a visual representation of your version history.

> $ jj log

> @ mkmqlnox alice@local 2025-07-22 20:15:56 f6feaadf

Much better for learning when the command itself is part included in the output.
by kaishiro | 2025-09-01 01:41:11+00:00
Jesus, that's a staggering figure to me coming from senior developers. I guess I'm the odd one out here, but ChatGPT is nothing more than an index of Stack Overflow (and friends) for me. It's essentially replaced Googling, but once I get the answer I need I'm still just slinging code like an asshole. Copying the output wholesale from any of these LLMs just seems crazy to me.
by Spooky23 | 2025-09-01 01:42:19+00:00
Microsoft will absolutely go down this path, they just have longer commitments and product cycles.

I’d guess in 5 years you’ll start getting friction for using AD, and heavy push towards cloud services first. You’ll probably have to subscribe to legacy features or migrate to Azure to use them.

Their legacy systems management tool is a zombie product, and the replacement is Intune, which and an MDM solution which locks you out of your computer similar to Android or iOS.

I’ll be retired, so IDNGAF, but in 15 years, Microsoft will be capturing all of the value they give you for free in windows. The future will look like a 1980s mainframe.
by modeless | 2025-09-01 01:44:04+00:00
Both zapcc and Fil-C could benefit from the involvement of the standards committee. While both are very compatible, there are certain things that they can't fully support and it would be useful to standardize small language changes for their benefit (and for the benefit of other implementations of the same ideas). Certainly more useful than anything else the standards committees have done in the past 10 years. They would also benefit from the increased exposure that standardization would bring, and the languages would benefit from actual solutions to the problems of security and compile time that C/C++ developers face every day.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-01 01:44:16+00:00
AI kicks ass at a lot of "routine reverse engineering" tasks already.

You can feed it assembly listings, or bytecode that the decompiler couldn't handle, and get back solid results.

And corporate AIs don't really have a fuck to give, at least not yet. You can sic Claude on obvious decompiler outputs, or a repo of questionable sources with a "VERY BIG CORPO - PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL" in every single file, and it'll sift through it - no complaints, no questions asked. And if that data somehow circles back into the training eventually, then all the funnier.
by zenmac | 2025-09-01 01:44:44+00:00
Yeah but AWS SRE are what making the big bucks! Soooo what can you do? It is nice to see many people here on HN are supporting open network and platform and making very drastic comments as to encouraging google engineers to quite their jobs.

I totally also understand why some people with family to support mortgage to pay they can't just walk way from a job at FAANG or MAMAA type place.

Looking at your comparison, this point it just seems like a scam.
by tharmas | 2025-09-01 01:45:09+00:00
≥The Democrats did not compel them to vote for Trump.

Perhaps i didn't make my point clear. Indeed ur statement is true. I was referring to those who hated Trump but also hated Harris and so DIDNT VOTE. My point being that if the Democrats had fielded a compelling candidate many of those who didn't vote may have voted for them. Enough to win. The Democrats learned nothing when they fielded Hilary Clinton and lost. Joe Biden barely won. And only because they were sick of Trump and also how he handled Covid. Also don't forget the Democrats tried to run with Joe for a second term when he was clearly unfit. Huge turn off.

So yes, my argument is the Democrat Party is partly at fault for Trump 2.0. They did not field a worthy candidate.

"Vote Blue no matter who" is a failed strategy. And rightly so.
by mdaniel | 2025-09-01 01:46:00+00:00
How would anyone possibly know that? https://mercurial-scm.org/help/commands/commit says no such thing but I also recognize that I am obviously a fool for thinking that one should add the whole file but only commit part of it

I guess that also places the burden upon the user to .. I dunno, go through that whole TUI dance again?, if one wishes to amend one more line in the file

In some sense, I do recognize it's like showing up to an emacs meeting and bitching about how it doesn't do things the vim way, but seriously, who came up with that mental model for committing only part of the working directory?
by anonu | 2025-09-01 01:46:53+00:00
> THESE PILLS WERE the pride and joy of Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the Founding Fathers and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Later, a descendent of Dr Rush would go down in infamy for a foolhardy escapade to the Titanic in a carbon-fiber submersible called Titan.

> Dr. Rush’s style of “heroic medicine” had caused his star to fall quite a bit by this time — especially after the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793, when his patients died at a noticeably higher rate than untreated sufferers.

Seems familiar...
by tzury | 2025-09-01 01:47:00+00:00
We need both options to coexist:

1. Open, hackable hardware for those who want full control and for driving innovation

2. Locked-down, managed devices for vulnerable users who benefit from protection

This concept of "I should run any code on hardware I own" is completely wrong as a universal principle. Yes, we absolutely should be able to run any code we want on open hardware we own - that option must exist. But we should not expect manufacturers of phones and tablets to allow anyone to run any code on every device, since this will cause harm to many users.

There should be more open and hackable products available in the market. The DIY mindset at the junction of hardware and software is crucial for tech innovation - we wouldn't be where we are today without it. However, I also want regulations and restrictions on the phones I buy for my kids and grandparents. They need protection from themselves and from bad actors.

The market should serve both groups: those who want to tinker and innovate, and those who need a safe, managed experience. The problem isn't that locked-down devices exist - it's that we don't have enough truly open alternatives for those who want them.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-01 01:48:43+00:00
Fascinating, I wasn't aware, thank you.

But when I look at Google Maps, the Oyapock river is extremely meandering. Major 180° bends within just 500 ft, e.g.:

https://www.google.com/maps/@2.3210582,-52.7667375,16z/data=...

Are you sure there's an official survey of every twist and turn, composed of "boundary monuments"? Is there a link to these things or something? It's not really clear to me there's any official "navigable channel" at all.

Is there anything you can link to that shows the actual legal boundary if it's made of vector segments? Or do we know if that's what Google Maps uses directly, or if that's what's being used for the length calculation?
by hedora | 2025-09-01 01:49:05+00:00
I think fighting for the ability to write a custom OS for a phone misses the point.

It should be possible to participate in the modern economy using standard technology.

To this end, I think there should be a mandate that all govt and commercial infrastructure apps offer a progressive web app with at least feature parity with proprietary phone apps.

Want me to use a phone to pay for lunch, EV charging, parking or a toll? Great. It needs to be doable with anything running firefox, safari or chrome.
by kulahan | 2025-09-01 01:49:27+00:00
>If that were true, then why are they not administered to every child?

We've never had a good understanding of what intelligence is, let alone a good test for it. We didn't even realize that until recently.

>I highly doubt adults at a company have hidden potential that is unknown

I think you'd be surprised how economic status can take a brilliant mind and squash it, or a rigid society can take a uniquely thoughtful mind and squash it

>Do you really believe we should be awarding scholarships for meritless human attributes?

You should see how easy it is to get a basketball scholarship if you're over 7 feet tall. And for good reason.

>it's like eye color, skin color, etc.. There isn't a damn thing one can do to change it (positively)

Can't make tall people grow more either. 7' people still have a much easier time with the sport than anyone else.

I guess I don't understand why you think we shouldn't be able to discriminate based on the brain? Should we just waste this wonderful natural gift in the name of fairness? Sounds like more of that "it's more important to do no harm than to do good" garbage.
by mikewarot | 2025-09-01 01:49:42+00:00
A gentle reminder to the readers here at HN that it doesn't have to be this way. Computer Security is a solved problem[1], and has been so since the 1980s[2]. It's my strong opinion that the only methods you've seen to this point[3-7] were deliberately chosen to be ones that don't work, and make things worse in the long run.

There's no reason we shouldn't be able to run what we want on our hardware, without having to trust anything other than the microkernel inside the operating systems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_operating_sys...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppArmor

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_permissions

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module
by EthanHeilman | 2025-09-01 01:50:21+00:00
> What Godel actually proved is that given a consistent formal system capable of representing arithmetic, there are statements in the language of that system such that neither the statement nor its negation can be proved in the system.

It goes what step further, there are statements that are true but can not be proved.

> Godel's theorems are notoriously liable to misinterpretation, and to be honest this sounds like one.

What do you think was Godel's philosophical motivation for investigating incompleteness?

"Many philosophers and logicians have explored the significance of these theorems. However, they would often find a reason to distance themselves from the interpretation their author, Kurt Gödel, ascribed them. Gödel believed that his results provide a strong argument for the objective existence of a rationally organized world of concepts, which can be to some extent described by a deductive system but cannot be changed or manipulated (cf. [12], p. 320)." [0]

You can argue that Godel misinterpreted incompleteness and There is a case to be made for that. Godel probably did not misinterpret his own philosophy about incompleteness.

> Godel's proof itself can be formalized, so I don't see how it places a limitation on formalism in general

It uses formalism to show that formalism is limited and that the positivist notion of truth does not include things which are true but can not shown to be true (within a axiomatic system capable of expressing arithmetic).

[0]: Kurt Gödel and the Logic of Concepts (2024) https://arxiv.org/html/2406.05442v2#bib.bib12