MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jasode | 2025-10-12 09:47:10+00:00
>- XHTML. [...] Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly?

XHTML appeals to the intuition that there should be a Strict Right Way To Do Things ... but you can't use that unforgiving framework for web documents that are widely shared.

The "real world" has 2 types of file formats:

(1) file types where consumers cannot contact/control/punish the authors (open-loop) : HTML, pdf, zip, csv, etc. The common theme is that the data itself is more important that the file format. That's why Adobe Reader will read malformed pdf files written by buggy PDF libraries. And both 7-Zip and Winrar can read malformed zip files with broken headers (because some old buggy Java libraries wrote bad zip files). MS Excel can import malformed csv files. E.g. the Citi bank export to csv wrote a malformed file and it was desirable that MS Excel imported it anyway because the raw data of dollar amounts was more important than the incorrect commas in the csv file -- and -- I have no way of contacting the programmer at Citi to tell them to fix their buggy code that created the bad csv file.

(2) file types where the consumer can control the author (closed-loop): programming language source code like .c, .java, etc or business interchange documents like EDI. There's no need to have a "lenient forgiving" gcc/clang compiler to parse ".c" source code because the "consumer-and-author" will be the same person. I.e. the developer sees the compiler stop at a syntax error so they edit and fix it and try to re-compile. For business interchange formats like EDI, a company like Walmart can tell the vendor to fix their broken EDI files.

XHTML wants to be in group (2) but web surfers can't control all the authors of .html so that's why lenient parsing of HTML "wins". XHTML would work better in a "closed-loop" environment such as a company writing internal documentation for its employees. E.g. an employee handbook can be written in strict XHTML because both the consumers and authors work at the same company. E.g. can't see the vacation policy because the XHTML syntax is wrong?!? Get on the Slack channel and tell the programmer or content author to fix it.
by vbezhenar | 2025-10-12 09:48:17+00:00
> A lot of code that throws checked exceptions is simply dangerous to use with Java streams because the execution order of stream operation is not obvious and possibly non-deterministic.

From the type system PoV, they could have just written something like `interface Runnable<X> { void run() throws X; }` and now `forEach` would have been written like `<X> void forEach(Runnable<X> r) throws X`. And repeat that for all stream operations, promoting `X` everywhere, so if your mapper function throws SQLException, the whole pipeline will throw it.

It even works today with some limitation (there's no way for `X` to get value of `SQLException|IOException` union type), but with some generic improvements it could work.

But they decided to not touch this issue at all. So now people will fool compiler with their tricks to throw checked exceptions like unchecked (or just wrap them with UncheckedXxxException everywhere, I prefer that approach).
by GistNoesis | 2025-10-12 09:49:26+00:00
The answer is adaptability.

In both cases for "Question Answering" it's about similarity search but there are two main orthogonal differences between RAG and Non-RAG :

-Knowing the question at the time of index building

-Higher order features : the ability to compare fetched documents with one another and refine the question

Non-RAG, aka multi-layer (non-causal) transformer with infinite context, is the more generic version, fully differentiable meaning you can use machine learning to learn how to Non-RAG better. Each layer of the transformer can use the previous layer to reason and refine the similarity search. (A causal transformer know the question at the time when it is feed the question, and can choose to focus it's attention on different part of the previously computed features of the provided documents but may benefit from having some reflection token, or better : be given the question before being presented the documents (provided you've trained it to answer it like that).)

RAG is an approximation of the generic case to make it faster and cheaper. Usually it breaks end-to-end differentiability by using external tools, so this mean that if you want to use machine learning to learn how to RAG better you will need to use some variant of Reinforcement Learning which is slower to learn things. RAG usually don't know the question at the time of index building, and documents are treated independently of each other, so no (automatic) higher order features (embeddings are fixed).

A third usual approximation, is to feed the output of RAG into Non-RAG, to hopefully get the best of both world. You can learn the Non-RAG given RAG with machine learning (if you train it with some conversations where it used RAG), but the RAG part won't improve by itself.

Non-RAG need to learn so it needs a big training dataset, but fortunately it can pick-up question answer pair in an unsupervised fashion when you feed it the whole web, and you only need a small instruction training and preference optimization dataset to shape it to your need. If performance isn't what you expect in a specific case, you can provide more specific examples and retrain the model until it gets it and you get better performance for the case you were interested in. You can improve the best case but it's hard to improve the worst case.

RAG has more control on what you feed it but content should be in a more structured way. You can prevent worst cases more easily but it's hard to improve good case.
by watwut | 2025-10-12 09:49:32+00:00
That proposal is meant to punish the parents and make it easier to take kids off non-addicts that dont conform to this and that. It would just be a question of time till they try to extend it to weed or whatever they associate with hated groups.

It is not like republicans would care what happens with kids themselves. If they get harmed by foster system (which they will) that will just allow them to cut fundings to foster system.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-10-12 09:51:39+00:00
It's not that simple. Students don't really choose colleges based 100% on their outcomes. They choose based on cost, curricula offerings, luxury factors, brand recognition, and so on. Many of the colleges that close in the future will probably be perfectly good ones with good value that just become increasingly less attractive as they are forced to take less students and cut staff over time. Less choices is not good for the US as a whole. It means that the average American will have to travel farther from home to go to college to study what they want to study.
by vlovich123 | 2025-10-12 09:52:21+00:00
I’m pretty sure the reasoning and conclusion is way off on explaining the speed up:

> The network is better utilized because successive queries can be grouped in the same network packets, resulting in less packets overall.

> the network packets are like 50 seater buses that ride with only one passenger.

The performance improvement is not likely to be because you’re sending larger packets, since most queries transfer very little data and the benchmark the conclusion is drawn from definitely is transferring near 0 data. The speed up comes from removing waiting on a round trip ack of a batch from executing subsequent queries; the number of network packets is irrelevant.
by Eisenstein | 2025-10-12 09:53:36+00:00
I view Goodhart's law more as a lesson for why we can never achieve a goal by offering specific incentives if we are measuring success by the outcome of the incentives and not by the achievement of the goal.

This is of course inevitable if the goal cannot be directly measured but is composed of many constantly moving variables such as education or public health.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't bother having such goals, it just means we have to be diligent at pivoting the incentives when it becomes evident that secondary effects are being produced at the expense of the desired effect.
by lawgimenez | 2025-10-12 09:54:26+00:00
Next year May I will be 20 years sober, quit drinking and smoking cold turkey.

All I can remember was that smoking was the most difficult habit to quit because I was a chain smoker and the withdrawals are no joke. So yeah if you want to start on this sober journey, just be ready.

This is a cool app, will download.
by Incipient | 2025-10-12 09:55:06+00:00
It's not just the actual element itself. You need: - the ore - the ability to refine it, safely (if not in China) and economically to various extents - the supply chain to produce the end product (eg a magnet)

Then you need this for all the various REEs for the final goods.

You don't just build a mine and off you go. The US gave up a lot of strategic supply chains a long time ago.
by 9dev | 2025-10-12 09:56:15+00:00
But that’s just as wrong. Apple products are definitely opinionated, but using a product that’s meant to be used a specific way doesn’t have anything to do with worship? If your personal preferences overlap with Apples design choices, good for you; personally, I prefer to not having lots of ways to tinker with irrelevant details, because I’m very susceptible for that kind of busywork that keeps me from focusing on actual work. But if you feel otherwise, there’s a wide range of alternative products to choose from.

The insistence of some people that Apple products are the devils work because they don’t fit their personal preferences is bogus to me. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.
by satisfice | 2025-10-12 09:57:33+00:00
With humans we don’t need guarantees, because we have something called accountability and reputation. We also understand a lot about how and why humans make errors, and so human errors make sense to us.

But LLMs routinely make errors that if made by a human would cause us to believe that human is utterly incompetent, acting in bad faith, or dangerously delusional. So we should never just shrug and say nobody’s perfect. I have to be responsible for what my product does.

Thanks for the link!
by notapenny | 2025-10-12 09:57:47+00:00
Just flat counter fields are terrible in audio software interfaces. Sliders and knobs give you visual feedback of where you are along a line and an easy way to quickly increase/decrease speed when adjusting.

Most software I use does still show some numeric value somewhere, either around the element when changing it, or in some other panel. This way you get some more information than in the hardware equivalent if you need more granular control. Its particularly nice if they allow you to click/double-click for editing values.

From my perspective as a user, knobs convey exactly what I need. Mostly I don't care about the exact number, just about what position something is in. Knobs behaving like sliders is fine. I'm not physically moving a knob, I might be moving it with a mouse or touchpad. You can't stray with a physical control the way you can with a digital one. And they allow interface designers to put a lot more information on screen where space is at a premium.

Honestly, just go download a trial version of something like Reaper or Reason and go make some music. You'll get a better feel.
by donatj | 2025-10-12 09:57:50+00:00
Quartz Composer - Apple's "patch-based" visual programming environment. Drag out a bunch of nodes, wire them together, build a neat little GUI.

10+ years ago I'd regularly build all sorts of little utilities with it. It was surprisingly easy to use it to tap into things that are otherwise a lot more work. For instance I used it to monitor the data coming from a USB device. Like 3 nodes and 3 patches to make all of that work. Working little GUI app in seconds.

Apple hasn't touched it since 2016, I kind of hope it makes a comeback given Blender and more so Unreal Engine giving people a taste of the node based visual programming life.

You can still download it from Apple, and it still technically works but a lot of the most powerful nodes are broken in the newer OS's. I'd love to see the whole thing revitalized.
by watwut | 2025-10-12 09:59:23+00:00
> gambling as in games of skill,

These are pure gamblimg, the skill part is thinly weiled excuse having little to do with the reality. Even if it was skilled, it would still be gambling, but for the most part it is not skilled.

> or gambling as in trading?

Yeah many small investors treat it as a pure gambling. But investing has more regulations and somewhat saner culture. The companies are not intentionally trying to identify and hook addicts deeper and deeper.

Which "sports" literally do.
by pbasista | 2025-10-12 10:00:05+00:00
> whitelist/blacklist phones depending on extensions available

That would be, I believe, fine. Those are capabilities-based restrictions.

From my point of view, the issue would be if the same phone worked with the same technology over the same mobile network when connected via a carrier A but the same phone on the same network refused to work with the same technology when connected via a carrier B.
by vbezhenar | 2025-10-12 10:02:35+00:00
> Checked exceptions are for errors that are not possible to prevent. How else should the caller know which exceptions are really likely to happen?

The same way, caller can know which exceptions are really likely to happen in TypeScript, C++, Python. Or in modern Java which avoids checked exceptions anyway. By reading documentation or source code. That's perfectly fine and works for everyone.

And you highlighted one big issue with checked exceptions. You've claimed that those exceptions are "really likely to happen".

When I'm writing reading data from resource stream, the data that's located next to my class files, IO Exceptions are really unlikely to happen.

Another ridiculous example of this checked exception madness:

var inputStream = new ByteArrayInputStream(bytes); var outputStream = new ByteArrayOutputStream(); inputStream.transferTo(outputStream); // throws IOException? wtf???

This code can throw OutOfMemoryError, StackoverflowError, but never IOException. Yet you're forced to handle IOException which doesn't happen. And that's the issue with checked exceptions.

There's no correspondence between checked exceptions and likelihood of their occurence. NullPointerException probably happens more than any checked exception. The division between checked exceptions and unchecked exceptions is absolutely arbitrary and makes sense only at caller place, never in called function signature.

> Modules absolutely achieved their primary goal: stopping libraries from accessing JDK internals without the application's knowledge. The ecosystem is slow on the uptake since split packages and access to internal APIs is endemic, but it is happening ever so slowly. I wish libraries could opt into not being part of the unnamed module.

"Slow" is an understatement. I don't see this happening at all. Last time I tried to write very simple application with modules, I spent so many hours banging my head over various walls, that I probably will not do another attempt in a foreseeable future.
by tarruda | 2025-10-12 10:03:23+00:00
I have implemented a simple asyncio compatible micro event loop library in python.

The goal was to understand the underlying mechanisms behind python's async/await and to help coworkers understand how event loops work under the hoods.

The end result is somewhat interesting, as unlike traditional event loop libraries, it doesn't use callbacks as the scheduling primitive: https://gist.github.com/tarruda/5b8c19779c8ff4e8100f0b37eb59...
by eterm | 2025-10-12 10:04:17+00:00
Let's say you forget to close a <b></b> element.

What happens?

Even today, after years of better error messages, the strict validator at https://validator.w3.org/check says:

Error Line 22, Column 4: end tag for "b" omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified

What is line 22?

</p>

It's up to you to go hunting back through the document, to find the un-closed 'b' tag.

Back in the day, the error messages were even more misleading than this, often talking about "Extra content at end of document" or similar.

Compare that to the very visual feedback of putting this exact document into a browser.

You get more bold text than you were expecting, the bold just runs into the next text.

That's a world of difference, especially for people who prefer visual feedback to reading and understanding errors in text form.

Try it for yourself, save this document to a .html file and put it through the XHTML validator.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <?xml-stylesheet href="http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/TR/W3C-WD.css" type="text/css"?> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en"> <head> <title>test XHTML 1.0 Strict document</title> <link rev="made" href="mailto:gerald@w3.org" /> </head> <body> <p> This is a test XHTML 1.0 Strict document. </p> <p> See: <a href="./">W3C Markup Validation Service: Tests</a> <b>huh Well, isn't that good </p> <hr /> <address> <a href="https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=referer">valid HTML</a><br /> <a href="../../feedback.html">Gerald Oskoboiny</a> </address> </body> </html>
by vkou | 2025-10-12 10:04:43+00:00
> I see the war against "nonbinary" sex codes as a war against sophisticated thinking.

It's not. It's a war against people who don't confirm to traditional gender roles, regardless of whether they are trans, gay, or just a square peg that doesn't fit in the round hole.

Think for a moment about what happens when a visibly trans person uses a washroom that matches their assigned-at-birth gender.

The exact same people who freak out over trans people using a bathroom that matches their transitioned-to gender, and who got those laws passed, lose their shit when they see a female-to-male trans person with a 5-o'clock shadow walking into the ladies' washroom.
by vasco | 2025-10-12 10:06:46+00:00
Exactly, that's the definition. It doesn't apply to timing a 100m race. There's many such situations that are simple enough and with perfect information available where this doesn’t break down and a metric is just a metric and it works great.

Which is not to the detriment of the observation being true in other contexts, all I did was provide a counter example. But the example requires the metric AND the context.
by shevy-java | 2025-10-12 10:07:52+00:00
Basically Trump and Project2025 enforcing their agenda.

I think the "gender" field is weird though. It reads "M" or "F". Why can't I say I don't care about this field? I feel as if the government is spying on me. They can autofill that field on their own. It's weird that passports specify that after all are already required to fingerprint here.
by masihyeganeh | 2025-10-12 10:08:07+00:00
If you ask me, this will cause more distraction than being productive. In your example, would Slack be needed all the time, so it would worth keeping a quarter of the screen? Then IDEs for example have a lot of menus, panes, buttons and everything. You would have much less space for the actual code if you not have it in full screen mode. It might be personal style, but I find having 3 full screen windows and swtiching between them (with the most used, browser, in the middle) with a quick swipe is the most productive.
by cpach | 2025-10-12 10:08:38+00:00
IMHO it’s better to bake this information into the price of the resource and then include the externalities for polluting by using a Pigou tax, or as in the EU, with a cap and trade system (EU ETS).

And that’s probably one of the reasons that you need to pay for using the best version of ChatGPT and similar products.
by tonytamps | 2025-10-12 10:09:27+00:00
I won't speak to "needing" a tiling window manager but "just making the app full screen and switch between windows with 4 finger swipes does the job beautifully" - you you.

I have disabled most gestures, animations, and multiple desktops (spaces?) in macos. The swiping between each of these full screen apps is painfully slow to me. It's compounded by needing to pass through an app to get to one on the other side, meaning it could be 2 or 3 swipes before the app I need is the one on screen. When I see someone swipe the wrong direction and quickly swipe back it makes me cringe.

When I want an app on screen I don't want to perform mental calculation for how many steps away, nor do I ever want to have to pass through an app to get there.
by silcoon | 2025-10-12 10:10:15+00:00
I'm intrigued by Symbolics Genera too. It would have been interesting seeing further development of Lisp OS, especially when they would have had internet connection. Rewriting part of your OS and see the changes in real time? Maybe web apps could have been just software written in Lisp, downloaded on the machine and directly being executed in a safe environment on top of the Genera image. Big stuff.
by shevy-java | 2025-10-12 10:10:37+00:00
> why is gender even listed on a passport in the first place?

That is a very valid question. We already have face-scans and fingerprint IDs so we are all treated as criminals. There is indeed zero point to have a binary-toggle field where one has to identify as either male or female. I'd like to add here that I don't care about this field; or I would want to check that I am an epic supergender, the very best - 'A' for awesome. But they don't allow this, so I don't want to have to care about this weird grouping I disagree with.
by pflenker | 2025-10-12 10:10:48+00:00
10/GUI did some deep thinking about the limitations and potential of the (then-fairly new) multi touch input method. I wished something more had come out of it, instead it stayed a niche concept art video that is mostly forgotten now.

I’m not arguing the solutions it outlined are good, but I think some more discussion around how we interact with touch screens would be needed. Instead, we are still typing on a layout that was invented for mechanical typewriters - in 2025, on our touch screens.

https://youtu.be/zWz1KbknIZk?si=LWGsLQjFTWBOvzN-
by Ekaros | 2025-10-12 10:11:09+00:00
Because cutting edge chips are not. They are nice to have and sell for a lot. But for vast majority of things you can absolutely manage with chips they can produce. And in some cases those top end chip technologies are not even useful for those purposes.

We are so deep in AI and super computing or wasteful server side computing that we forget that lower end chips are in absolutely everything. And China can produce those just fine.
by netsharc | 2025-10-12 10:11:52+00:00
There's porn site (is it even porn if it's just nudity) which niche is women reading the news while taking off their clothes.

For papers, it doesn't have to go that far, but I imagine a polished AI girl (or guy) reading the summary would be more engaging.

Hah, "SteveGPT, present your PowerPoints like Steve Jobs did!"
by charcircuit | 2025-10-12 10:11:52+00:00
I would not be above the law if that's what you are asking.

>so devoid of empathy?

I'm using my empathy to improve the lives of the many people who have to deal with people dying or having their lives ruined by these drugs. Improving the lives of people who have to deal with dysfunctional people on drugs. There are also second order affects that many more people are suffering from.
by buran77 | 2025-10-12 10:13:06+00:00
This feels different though. Every time you turn it off and then on again it has a substantial processing cost for MS. If MS "accidentally" turns it on and then doesn't allow you to turn it off it raises the bar for them successfully defending these actions in court.

So to me it looks like MS tries to avoid that users ram MS's infrastructure with repeated expensive full scans of their library. I would have worded it differently and said "you can only turn ON this setting 4 times a year". But maybe they do want to leave the door open to "accidentally" pushing a wrong setting to the users.