MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by visarga | 2025-09-28 09:58:33+00:00
Discovery comes from search for both humans and AI agents. There is no magic in the brain or LLM except learning along the way and persistence. The search space itself is externalized.

So the AI agents are "good enough" but environment access is insufficient for collecting the required experience, this is the current bottleneck.

For example even a simple model like AlphaZero (just a CNN) was good enough to beat the best humans and rediscover game play from scratch, but it had the extensive access to the environment.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-28 09:59:01+00:00
>Warner Bros lawyer David Yohai argues that this kind of convenience simply cannot be allowed:

“The passes fundamentally disrupt this industry-standard model by allowing customers to purchase access to the most sought-after programming, such as major sports events, essentially a la carte for a fraction of the cost that the consumer would have had to pay to watch the event on a pay-per-view basis. For example, a sports fan could simply purchase a day pass and watch select programming, such as a highly popular sports game, without purchasing a month-long subscription or paying a higher pay-per-view fee.”

Some of these "businessmen" are such weak performers that anything which could result in the customer getting a better deal is now unfair competition.

With extreme legal consequences in store for anybody who even tries to give a customer their money's worth.

God forbid, that could make so many people embarrassed across-the-board.

It could bring down whole business schools left and right ;)
by mcdeltat | 2025-09-28 10:02:17+00:00
Interesting that for you typing makes the code harder to read. What context do you use Python for? And who is writing it?

In my experience I have seen far too much Python code like

`def func(data, args, *kwargs)`

with no documentation and I have no clue wtf it's doing. Now I am basically all in on type hints (except cases where it's impossible like pandas).
by crabbone | 2025-09-28 10:03:16+00:00
Same nonsense repeated over and over again... There aren't dynamic languages. It's not a thing. The static types aren't what you think they are... You just don't know what you are saying and your conclusion is just a word salad.

What happened to Python is that it used to be a "cool" language, whose community liked to make fun of Java for their obsession with red-taping, which included the love for specifying unnecessary restrictions everywhere. Well, just like you'd expect from a poorly functioning government office.

But then everyone wanted to be cool, and Python was adopted by the programming analogue of the government bureaucrats: large corporations which treat programming as a bureaucratic mill. They don't want fun or creativity or one-of bespoke solutions. They want an industrial process that works on as large a scale as possible, to employ thousands of worst quality programmers, but still reliably produce slop.

And incrementally, Python was made into Java. Because, really, Java is great for producing slop on an industrial scale. But the "cool" factor was important to attract talent because there used to be a shortage, so, now you have Python that was remade to be a Java. People who didn't enjoy Java left Python over a decade ago. So that Python today has nothing in common with what it was when it was "cool". It's still a worse Java than Java, but people don't like to admit defeat, and... well, there's also the sunk cost fallacy: so much effort was already spent at making Python into a Java, that it seems like a good idea to waste even more effort to try to make it a better Java.
by thesz | 2025-09-28 10:03:17+00:00
> Without AMD64, I firmly believe eventually Itanium would have been the new world no matter what.

VLIW is not binary forward- or cross-implementation-compatible. If MODEL1 has 2 instruction per block and its successor MODEL2 has 4, the code for MODEL1 will be run on MODEL2, but it will underperform due to underutilization. If execution latencies differ between two versions of the same VLIW ISA implementation, the code for one may not be executed optimally on another. Even different memory controllers and cache hierarchies can change optimal VLIW code.

This precludes any VLIW from having multiple differently constrained implementations. You cannot segment VLIW implementations you can do with as x86, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, etc, where same code will be executed as optimal as possible on the concrete implementation of ISA.

So - no, Itanium (or any other VLIW for that matter) would not be the new world.
by westonmyers | 2025-09-28 10:03:20+00:00
I've been running an Ergo Pro since 2015. Ordered like 40 extra key switches and have had to resolder in about a dozen as replacements so far. Annoying, but I'm keeping it going!

Gel wrist pads?... Not a great implementation. I either need to work up a 3d printed DIY replacement via covering TPU (or something of the like) or order a first party replacement.
by KronisLV | 2025-09-28 10:04:02+00:00
For the fun of it, Qwen 3 Coder 480B (in Jan.ai, the model is on Cerebras):

This sounds like a riddle combining elements from different classic puzzles and stories. Let me think through it: The answer is likely: "Because the child is the surgeon's own child!" This is a variation of the classic riddle where a father and son are in a car accident, the father dies, and the surviving son needs surgery. When the surgeon sees the child, they say "I can't operate on this child - he's my son!" The twist relies on the assumption that surgeons are male, but of course the surgeon could be the child's mother. However, I'm a bit confused by the "nine dots" and "boat" elements in your version - those don't typically appear in this riddle. Could you clarify if there's a specific version you're thinking of, or if you meant this to be a different puzzle entirely?
by age123456gpg | 2025-09-28 10:04:08+00:00
// hashItem computes the slot an item hashes to, given a total number of slots. func hashItem(item string, nslots uint64) uint64 { digest := md5.Sum([]byte(item)) digestHigh := binary.BigEndian.Uint64(digest[8:16]) digestLow := binary.BigEndian.Uint64(digest[:8]) return (digestHigh | digestLow) % nslots }

Should be using XOR: (digestHigh ^ digestLow) % nslots
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-09-28 10:04:17+00:00
To add color to your opinion: this piece was written by one of the financial editors

https://www.ft.com/tabby-kinder

No "unified opinion" but an editorial stance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Times#Editorial_stan...

you want to open a wikipedia debate on that :)?

If I were you I'd point to the FT [Weekend] Magazine marquee instead
by whizzter | 2025-09-28 10:05:11+00:00
That's because many do small things that don't really need it, sure there are some people doing larger stuff and are happy to be the sole maintainer of a codebase or replace the language types with unit-test type checks.

And I think they can be correct for rejecting it, banging out a small useful project (preferably below 1000 loc) flows much faster if you just build code doing things rather than start annotating (that quickly can be come a mind-sinkhole of naming decisions that interrupts a building flow).

However, even less complex 500 loc+ programs without typing can become a pita to read after the fact and approaching 1kloc it can become a major headache to pick up again.

Basically, can't beat speed of going nude, but size+complexity is always an exponential factor in how hard continuing and/or resuming a project is.
by rollcat | 2025-09-28 10:06:36+00:00
That is my main objection as well, but perhaps it's time to also revisit TOFU.

Remember when Github had to rotate its host keys? It was hitting the news far and wide, and likely broke pretty close to every single CI pipeline out there. There was little heads up because it's the friggin host key, you have to act now.

It's also pretty annoying when you have to deal with that in your own infra. Even if you have a pretty good network/service map, you'll probably have silent breakage somewhere.

I'm not saying CAs should be the future of SSH, but TOFU is certainly a problem at scale.
by rs186 | 2025-09-28 10:06:46+00:00
I use the local public library from time to time (physical/via Libby) while reading on my kindle otherwise. Libby is something else, but for the physical books, I just see zero difference between going to the library in person, checking it out and returning it later vs just pirating it online. It's not like the publisher does not get any more money. OK there is a difference where there is a limit to the number of copies available, so some people have to wait, just typical of public resources. But I noticed that most books I borrow are always available, especially with interlibrary borrowing. So what difference does it make?

In the end I pirated more often. I am not proud of that, but I also don't see how any of this makes any difference. It's not like I'll ever buy the book with my own money.
by rwmj | 2025-09-28 10:06:51+00:00
Here in the real world companies have 3 choices: (1) comply with local laws, (2) don't operate at all in the country, or (3) operate in the country but ensure they have no staff there and never visit. Anything else is going to involve fines and/or prison for your executives and employees.

I once interviewed at a UK gambling company that was doing option #3, and during the interview it was made clear that I'd never be able to visit the US because they were operating there illegally. (I declined the offer.) Some time later, it was in the news that one of their executives had been arrested and imprisoned in the US when he visited on holiday. (https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/another-uk-bettin...)
by londons_explore | 2025-09-28 10:06:56+00:00
Rice isn't a very profitable crop unless you either have super cheap labour (not in the UK) or massive fields and lots of automation.

The UK has small fields and complex land ownership arrangements which mean the 100,000 acre farms of the USA won't happen there.

Overall, I think that unless the UK wants to subsidize rice production or use big Japan-like rice import tariffs, the rice industry is dead-in-the-water.

Maybe there's a little market for restaurants and high value products which want to advertise 'under 100 food miles' or similar. But such things tend to be very economically inefficient, so the government would be wise to discourage such production.
by corwinxpro | 2025-09-28 10:07:35+00:00
Indeed, I almost can't read untyped python code these days. It just feels like "what the hell is going on here?" and "what is this object?" ever so often. Sorry to say that but most people who write python just aren't good API designers, or software engineers in general, and type hints can at least help others get a vague idea of what the intent was.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-28 10:07:37+00:00
The solution is just not to use Excel and Office at all. I've been free of Microsoft's crap for multiple decades now and I interface with companies that are my customers so technically they get to dictate terms. The military is in the opposite position: they get to dictate terms to their suppliers. So they arguably have an easier time of it.

As for 'more complex calculations': yes, Excel can do some nifty tricks. So what, in the end, calculations get done, in a spreadsheet or in some other way, the military is mostly logistics, there isn't a problem there that can't be solved with regular tools. The .doc file format should simply be abandoned completely.

So indeed, it is not because it is better. It is just a little different, which is a small price to pay for the inconvenience of not enabling a country that has with some regularity threatened EU countries and other allies. Or did you think that companies like Microsoft are immune to the fall-out of such antics?
by Anamon | 2025-09-28 10:08:11+00:00
That's under the assumption of framing it as a problem. Personally, I think naturally declining birth rates are a corrective measure for an already wildly overpopulated planet. And that we can be damn glad that this is the way things seem to be heading, because the alternative would be an ever accelerating freight train heading for one of several much more devastating scenarios of population reduction.

Even with sub-replacement birth rates I don't see humanity at a threat of extinction (from natural population decline!) in the next tens of thousands of years. And even if -- what's the issue? It's only humans who think humanity is this great gift to the universe that needs to be protected and spread.
by nativeit | 2025-09-28 10:09:30+00:00
Just for the record, I don’t love being outraged, and yet I frequently employ active effort to maintain my composure. Society is being looted from the top; in both scope and scale, it’s only getting worse. I can appreciate that many find Zitron’s angry energy grating, but I don’t think it’s disingenuous and he’s clearly tapping into a widely shared sense of a degraded society.

Anyone who sincerely believes they’re witnessing 2000’s-levels of greed, economic malfeasance, and oversight failures would be appropriate in behaving frantically. Zitron’s core arguments describe a deeply troubling scenario, and as this article mentions he is not terribly concise—his articles contain a great deal of details and explanations for his positions, and I have largely seen only ad-hoc complaints of his bedside manner, or else vague gestures towards as-yet unrealized prosperity, in response to them.
by crabbone | 2025-09-28 10:09:34+00:00
The way I understand parent is that such a type would be too broad.

The bigger problem is that the type system expressed through hints in Python is not the type system Python is actually using. It's not even an approximation. You can express in the hint type system things that are nonsense in Python and write Python that is nonsense in the type system implied by hints.

The type system introduced through typing package and the hints is a tribute to the stupid fashion. But, also, there is no syntax and no formal definitions to describe Python's actual type system. Nor do I think it's a very good system, not to the point that it would be useful to formalize and study.

In Russian, there's an expression "like a saddle on a cow", I'm not sure what the equivalent in English would be. This describes a situation where someone is desperately trying to add a desirable feature to an exiting product that ultimately is not compatible with such a feature. This, in my mind, is the best description of the relationship between Python's actual type system and the one from typing package.
by sherr | 2025-09-28 10:10:37+00:00
Given that Police Scotland recently found that MS cannot give any guarantees about where sensitive information ends up if it is ever uploaded to their cloud, I would expect any government or military to be evaluating their use of their software (or at least how it is used).

See the Computer Weekly article [2], discussed on HN here [2].

[1] https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366629871/Microsoft-refu...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45062344
by whizzter | 2025-09-28 10:11:12+00:00
Yep, depends on your memory context capacity.

For me I often don't feel any pain-points when working before about 1kloc (when doing JS), however if a project is above 500loc it's often a tad painful to resume it months later when I've started to forget why I used certain data-structures that aren't directly visible (adding types at that point is usually the best choice since it gives a refresher of the code at the same time as doing a soundness check).
by rorylaitila | 2025-09-28 10:12:10+00:00
I've accepted that all the progress for me happens in tight bursts. I simply cannot do 'thought work' when I'm disinterested. I sometimes envy people who are interested in one particular project for years or decades at a time and make plodding, continual progress. However that's not me. I make inspired, unbelievable progress, and then nothing. I try to constrain the scope so that it at least remains useful, in between the bursts.
by derriz | 2025-09-28 10:12:24+00:00
> It probably has a lot less to do with air temperature and more to do with amount of precipitation and humidity. You also don't have bamboo growing in Europe or the Mediterranean.

No idea what the point here is? Was it to demonstrate that the BBC‘s grasp of botany is poor?

Bamboo grows just fine in Europe. In the UK, some even argue it should be considered an invasive species.
by JackSlateur | 2025-09-28 10:14:46+00:00
Yes

I guess it would work with the ongoing jit work, which (as far as I understood..) run the code "as usual", then notice that a specific variable is always a dict (or whatever). Then it patches the code to run the dict-optimized code by default (and fallback to the generic code if, somehow, the variable is no longer a dict).

With typing, the generic code could be avoided altogether. The algorithm would be:

- notice that some variable can be processed by a dict-optimized code (because its typing is a dict, or something that looks like a dict etc) - when processing, check that the variable is indeed a "dict", raise an exception if not - run the optimized code - if the typing information changes (because the class has been redefined and the variable is no longer a "dict"), then go to step 1 and either stick with the current optimized code, use another one, or use the generic one

This would:

- enforce types (you said that variable is a Thing but a Thing was not given: exception) - improve the jit by removing the bootstrap phase (where the jit watches and then try to guess what could be improved)

(or perhaps this is a stupid idea that cannot work :) )
by johnisgood | 2025-09-28 10:14:54+00:00
That is actually wild and I wonder about the practical consequences as well.

So you get into a stressful situation or get a flee or flight response, and your heart is not affected by it, or at least the heart rate, but your cardiovascular system may be needed because in that case the rest of your body is, and presumably you may need much more blood to be pumped out to your organs among other things.

It is a cool food for thought.
by kketch | 2025-09-28 10:16:35+00:00
They don’t violate the spirit of the language. They are optional. They don’t change the behaviour at runtime.

Type annotations can seem pointless indeed if you are unwilling to learn how to use them properly. Using a giant union to type your (generic) function is indeed silly, you just have to make that function generic as explained in another comment or I guess remove the type hints
by maccard | 2025-09-28 10:17:11+00:00
> Why isn't there code/regulations for tbis. Why do you need blog advice.

On pretty much every other device (domestic for sure, I don't actually know abount commercial) there is.

> It is like using too thin wiring to your oven or something. Because you based it off how you typically use the oven not is max draw plus decent margin.

Sure, but with all other electrical labelling the numbers are correct. Imagine if Neff said "you only need an 13A rated socket" for their oven, and then when you want to bake bread it draws more. That's very different to Neff saying "you need 45A", and deciding to install it on a 13A socket yourself because you don't need to make bread. The former is what's happening in this case.
by whizzter | 2025-09-28 10:17:23+00:00
Yes, the sad part is that some people experienced early TypeScript that for some reason had the idea of forcing "class" constructs into a language where most people wasn't using or needing them (and still aren't).

Sometimes at about TypeScript 2.9 finally started adding constructs that made gradual typing of real-world JS code sane, but by then there was a stubborn perception of it being bad/bloated/Java-ish,etc despite maturing into something fairly great.
by xg15 | 2025-09-28 10:17:45+00:00
If you're ever in Germany and are interested in that stuff, pay a visit to the Arithmeum in Bonn. It's a museum dedicated to the evolution of calculating machines from simple mechanics to current-day computers and they have a vast collection of those machines on display.

https://www.arithmeum.uni-bonn.de/

https://www.arithmeum.uni-bonn.de/en/collection/calculating-...
by lolive | 2025-09-28 10:18:46+00:00
Exactly, I have never seen such codes [*].

Probably because the adoption of the generics has been absolutely massive in the last 20 years. And I expect the same thing to eventually happen with Typescript and [typed] Python.

[*]: nor have I seen EJB1 or even EJB2. Spring just stormed them, in the last 20 years.
by juliushuijnk | 2025-09-28 10:19:49+00:00
MAGA people wear hat's that say he's right about everything.

Clearly, they don't care about facts, but 'right' in the sense of fighting for their team. Whatever comes of his mistakes, he'll blame others.

The whole point of that hat is to annoy people who care about facts. 2+2=5 also plays part in that. If you're not willing to state he's right about everything, are you really on 'my team'?

My point is, it's a risky move to wait it out and hope for the best.
by man8alexd | 2025-09-28 10:20:08+00:00
In 1998, my hometown (>100K population) had an uplink of 2 bonded USR modems over a pair of dedicated phone lines to the regional capital about 100km away. This uplink fed two ISPs with 5 and 4 dial-up phone lines. The smaller one bought a DirecPC card to feed its dial-up clients and advertised it as "high-speed internet access".
by thyristan | 2025-09-28 10:21:59+00:00
> [1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is something of a mystery to me.

There is always the "it wasn't as bad as in Mad Max/Fallout/..." explanation. Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less severe than predicted back in the 60s, or nonexistent. Nuclear weapons will kill people and destroy cities, but if they aren't aimed at people or cities, but at military installations such as the US nuclear sponge[0], death toll and destruction will be far less severe. Things like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower might be left standing, as seen in a few Star Trek episodes. Which would also mean that humanity would be in less of a severe turmoil than other nuclear war SciFi might have imagined.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearwar/comments/18e01zh/would_t... https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/nuclear-sponge/
by watwut | 2025-09-28 10:22:14+00:00
They dont have tools, dont know what to do. But more importantly, someone who was in the same situation or did not studied it a lot is simply incapable to truly understand. They can nod, listen, validate, but wont be able to puzzle out half said things, badly expressed things. They won't be able to see logical consequences of what you talk about unless you point them out.

Meanwhile, someone with the same experience, even if not friend, will be able to understand much more and more easily.

It is not so much about some moral or relational failure on their side, it is simply that it is impossible to imagine feelings and situations you never had.
by contrarian1234 | 2025-09-28 10:22:51+00:00
> Was it to demonstrate that the BBC‘s grasp of botany is poor?

Sure, that's one way to put it. If you don't know the topic you're reporting on, then maybe don't report on it? I'm not a botanist, and I can smell the BS already.

To their credit, they do link a paper which I assume explains things better (though a cursory look seems to show it's not really about rice)

And furthermore.. if you're reporting on some science, and you're not an expert.. it helps to ask people not associate with the research for an outside assessment. Science reporting at the BBC is a disaster. Nothing is fact checked. They just ask the researchers and eat up whatever is said and add a layer of sensationalism on top. It's the same across all their writing and podcast/radio programs.