MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tzs | 2025-10-09 15:59:44+00:00
Just the other day I hit something that I hadn't realized could happen. It was not code related in my case, but could happen with code or code-related things (and did to a coworker).

In a discussion here on HN about why a regulation passed 15 years ago was not as general as it could have been, I speculated [1] that it could be that the technology at the time was not up to handling the general case and so they regulated what was feasible at the time.

A couple hours later I checked the discussion again and a couple people had posted that the technology was up to the general case back then and cheap.

I asked an LLM to see if it could dig up anything on this. It told me it was due to technological limits.

I then checked the sources it cites to get some details. Only one source it cited actually said anything about technology limits. That source was my HN comment.

I mentioned this at work, and a coworker mentioned that he had made a Github comment explaining how he thought something worked on Windows. Later he did a Google search about how that thing worked and the LLM thingy that Google puts at the top of search results said that the thing worked the way he thought it did but checking the cites he found that was based on his Github comment.

I'm half tempted to stop asking LLMs questions of the form "How does X work?" and instead tell them "Give me a list of all the links you would cite if someone asked you how X works?".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45500763
by jasode | 2025-10-09 15:59:47+00:00
>... but I still worry about backups.

For me, it's not just off-site backups, it's also the operational risks if I'm not around which I wrote about previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39526863

In addition to changing my mind about self-hosting email, my most recent adventure was self-hosting Bitwarden/Vaultwarden for passwords management. I got everything to work (SSL certificates, re-startable container scripts to survive server reboots, etc) ... but I didn't like the resultant complexity. There was also the random unreliability because a new iOS client would break Vaultwarden and you'd have to go to github and download the latest bugfix. There's no way for my friend to manage that setup. She didn't want to pay for a 1Passord subscription so we switched to KeePass.

I'm still personally ok with self-hosting some low-stakes software like a media server where outages don't really matter. But I'm now more risk-averse with self-hosting critical email and passwords.

EDIT to reply: >Bitwarden client works fine if server goes down, you just can't edit data

I wasn't talking about the scenario of a self-hosted Vaultwarden being temporarily down. (Although I also didn't like that the smartphone clients will only work for 30-days offline[1] which was another decision factor to not stay on it.)

Instead, the issue is Bitwarden will make some changes to both their iOS client and their own "official" Bitwarden servers which is incompatible with Vaultwarden. This happens because they have no reason to test it on an "unofficial" implementation such as Vaultwarden. That's when you go to the Vaultwarden Github "Issues" tab and look for a new git commit with whatever new Rust code makes it work with the latest iOS client again. It doesn't happen very frequently, but it happened often enough that it makes it only usable for a techie (like me) to babysit. I can't inflict that type of random broken setup on the rest of my family. Vaultwarden is not set-and-forget. (I'm also not complaining about Bitwarden or Vaultwarden and those projects are fine. I'm just being realistic about how the self-hosted setup can't work without my IT support.)

[1] Offline access in Bitwarden client only works for 30 days. : https://bitwarden.com/blog/configuring-bitwarden-clients-for...
by gosub100 | 2025-10-09 15:59:59+00:00
You can code a failsafe, or what they call in other industries, an interlock. If an order exceeds some sane limit, or a loss is incurred that exceeds a limit, or the limit-checker fails to proactively ping the interlock, then an independent mechanism shuts it down.

This is how, say, a modern x-ray machine prevents itself from failing in a way that radiation gets stuck on.
by pornel | 2025-10-09 16:00:29+00:00
reserve() reallocates by at least doubling the capacity.

reserve_exact() reallocates by exactly what you ask for.

If you reserve() space for 1 more element a 1000 times, you will get ~30 reallocations, not 1000.

This inexact nature is useful when the total size is unknown, but you append in batches. You could implement your own amortised growth strategy, but having one built-in makes it simple for different functions to cooperate.
by bluGill | 2025-10-09 16:00:33+00:00
A small business should onlyself host if they are a hosting company. everyone else should pay their local small business self hosting company to host for them.

This is not a job for the big guys. You want someone local who will take care of you. They also come when a computer fails, ensuring updates are applied to them. Not by come I mean physically sending a human to you. This will cost some money but you should be running your business not trying to learn computers.
by xp84 | 2025-10-09 16:01:07+00:00
Now you’ve got me wondering which is worse: signing with the briefest 15-second skim, or signing based on a cheap AI summary. Setting aside tinfoil hat ideas (Prompt: “Downplay any possible causes for concern…”) I’m not actually sure the AI option is worse. I mean, I’ll fully admit I don’t read everything I sign. When you buy a house it’s like 1,000 pages of stuff. Apple or Google’s mandatory TOS is what, 100 pages single-spaced?

What I’d be more interested in is an AI paralegal that works for me, not for the signing tool or the counterparty, where I control its prompt so I can try to focus it on possible ways I can be screwed with this contract, and what recourses I will or won’t have.
by skilled | 2025-10-09 16:01:08+00:00
You wrote what I wanted to write but I couldn't find such words.

Indeed, all the videos/examples are marketing pieces.

I would love to see a video like this "Logistics"[0] one, that shows this new iteration doing some household tasks. There is no way that it's not clunky and prone to all kinds of accidents and failures. Not that it's a bad thing - it would simply be nice to see.

Maybe they will do another video? Would love that.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-09 16:01:11+00:00
Yeah. I remember my mother asking me "If inflation is here, why isn't gold going up?"

But I think that the answer is "pricing in". When there's a month of inflation after 15 years of none, you price in a one-month blip of inflation. When you look at a year or two of inflation, plus the deficit with no end in sight, you price in inflation forever. Those lead to two very different prices.
by tylerjl | 2025-10-09 16:01:19+00:00
Another sort-of-recent development in the space has made self-hosting dramatically more accessible: even though hardware costs were reasonable before, they're now _very_ reasonable and also resource-efficient.

Repurposing an old tower would offer you enough compute to self-host services back in the day, but now an Intel NUC has plenty of resources in a very small footprint and branching out into the Raspberry Pi-adjacent family of hardware also offers even smaller power draw on aarch64 SBCs.

One experiment in my own lab has been to deploy glusterfs across a fleet of ODroid HC4 devices to operate a distributed storage network. The devices sip small amounts of power, are easy to expand, and last week a disk died completely but I swapped the hardware out while never losing access to the data thanks to separate networked peers staying online while the downed host got new hardware.

Relying on container deployments rather than fat VMs also helps to compress resource requirements when operating lots of self-hosted services. I've got about ~20 nomad-operated services spread across various small, cheap aarch64 hosts that can go down without worrying about it because nomad will just pick a new one.
by miki123211 | 2025-10-09 16:01:32+00:00
IMO, Reddit's main problem (and this certainly isn't unique to Reddit) is that it is a registry of names.

There can be only one subreddit named r/politics, so whoever gets that name essentially decides how you can talk about politics on Reddit. Same applies to any other subject.

R/fishing will always sound more credible than r/fishing2 or r/2wqy4f. If there's some kind of fishing controversy, and the mods of r/fishing only allow one side to speak, that side gains a lot more credibility. The other side can move somewhere else, but that place won't have the credibility associated with r/fishing.

Reddit can try to fight this, but as long as subreddits have unique and memorable names instead of IDs, this is going to be a problem and require them to get their hands dirty.
by arielcostas | 2025-10-09 16:02:23+00:00
Failing to diversify is the fund managers' problem. Pension funds shouldn't have all their investment in a single countries' stock market (doesn't matter that most, if not all, of those companies operate worldwide, they are still from the US), not even in equity markets. A wiser investment manager (or individual investor) would put a chunk in different kind of equities, and diversify into fixed rate, precious metals, perhaps real estate... Not bet it all to the volatile S&P 500. "Past performance does not guarantee future results.".
by refulgentis | 2025-10-09 16:02:28+00:00
I do, I think.

It is breaking news if there is a $40K robot that had a 12:1 efficiency ratio.*

Because production is so nascent and small, cost doesn't mean too much, no ones scaled yet.

At only $40K capital investment, even a guaranteed 12:1 efficiency ratio would be an absolute no-brainer financially for many, many, wealthy people and certainly businesses. I do 1-2 hours of chores a day if I'm lucky. If I had the equivalent of a robot vacuum working 24/7 it'd do a much better job than me.

* The whole thing is written up and shown in a way that makes you think we're on the second refining release of a breakthrough**. I don't think they've gotten to the breakthrough yet - we would have seen > 0 videos from outside the company by v3.

** Really, the whole thing has an audience of one: Musk. (c.f. focus on fingers which was recently reported as the major pain point for whatever he calls their robot not making it to production; aping of Musk-y things like the factory itself a product)
by rolph | 2025-10-09 16:02:44+00:00
im thinking about the properties of Tonkotsu [broth], in comparison/contrast to Tonkotsu [app] such as traditional, frugal, ubiquitous, vital, etc.

its one of the first things i consider when i see a duet like this.

i get a visual of a barren dev cubicle, with a young dev sitting at the terminal, slouched over a bowl of ramen, while coding.

-----------------------------------------------------

on the technical side you may find this interesting. you are creating a CAS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system
by recursive | 2025-10-09 16:02:57+00:00
> Writing UI as pure functions of state feels far more natural

That makes sense, but that's not what react does. Components are functions of their "prop"s. The rest of the state comes from a memoized cache in a fiber. Which fiber? That's determined from a reconciliation algorithm. Does it do the right thing? Usually.

You can tell if it's "a function of state" by whether the state is in the parameter list.
by dizhn | 2025-10-09 16:03:27+00:00
Self hosting involves 3 steps in my life.

1) Find the docker compose file. 2) Change the expose line to make it specific 10.0.10.1:9000 instead of the default 0.0.0.0:9000 . 3) Connect via wireguard.

(Answers the "security" point a sister comment brought up too)
by bntyhntr | 2025-10-09 16:03:38+00:00
And then you need to add another server to the infra / netops / tools team's maintenance burden and then they take it down for an upgrade and it doesn't come back up etc etc. I don't think outages/downtime are necessarily a good reason to switch to self-hosting. I worked at a company that self-hosted the repo and code review tool and it was great, but it still had the same issues.
by dilap | 2025-10-09 16:03:40+00:00
Nah, I don't think so -- it really was a big deal to have a bug back then, and software quality used to be a lot higher. We could go back and run some VMs to try to objectively quantify this (and it would be interesting to do so), but I'm personally confident my memory isn't being tinted by nostalgia.

The main reason is the ability to do constant updates now -- it changes the competitive calculus. Ship fast and fix bugs constantly wins out vs. going slower and having fewer bugs (both in the market & w/in a company "who ships faster?").

When you were shipping software on physical media having a critical bug was a very big deal. Not so anymore.
by bitwize | 2025-10-09 16:03:54+00:00
I remember getting into a debate with a professor, who firmly told me human programmers would soon be obsolete because all code would be generated by tools. I told him it wouldn't be very good code and he said, "Who cares? Hardware is cheap!"

This was 2002. At the time it was code generation from UML, not AI, but let's face facts: people have failed to give sufficient fucks about software quality for a long time now. We're just at a new low point in a very long, very steep drop; the only significance of this low point is that it means we're still falling.

Recently, I saw a video[0] about the game Sonic Racing CrossWorlds. The creator seemed impressed that Sega managed to put out a decently optimized Unreal Engine 5 game, that could hit 60fps without relying on generated-frame fuckery-duckery, and which provided a lot of content in less than 20 GiB. It used to be that optimization to obtain a decent frame rate and avoid bloat was table stakes for game dev. But it's 2025, and this is where we are now. Because video games are enterprise software, the tooling for gamedev itself is optimized around the path of "get the slop out quickly then fix later (maybe)".

[0] https://m.youtube.com/shorts/RRToQRmzCDI
by rapind | 2025-10-09 16:04:13+00:00
Incorrect data is a hard one to catch, even with automated tests (even in your tests, you're probably only checking the first link, if you're event doing that).

Luckily I've grown a preference for statically typed, compiled, functional languages over the years, which eliminates an entire class of bugs AND hallucinations by catching them at compile time. Using a language that doesn't support null helps too. The quality of the code produced by agents (claude clode and codex) is insanely better than when I need to fix some legacy code written in a dynamic language. You'll sometimes catch the agent hallucinating and continuously banging it's head against the wall trying to get it's bad code to compile. It seems to get more desperate and may eventually figure out a way to insert some garbage to get it to compile or just delete a bunch of code and paper over it... but it's generally very obvious when it does this as long as you're reviewing. Combine this with git branches and a policy of frequent commits for greatest effect.

You can probably get most of the way there with linters and automated tests with less strict dynamic languages, but... I don't see the point for new projects.

I've even found Codex likes to occasionally make subtle improvements to code located in the same files but completely unrelated to the current task. It's like some form of AI OCD. Reviewing diffs is kind of essential, so using a foundation that reduces the size of those diffs and increases readability is IMO super important.
by rhines | 2025-10-09 16:04:22+00:00
I'm not sure I agree. If I go to a photography forum, there will be one thread for photos taken with a specific camera. Those threads are easily found and I can browse them to get huge amounts of relevant info if I'm interested in that camera. If I want to find that on Reddit or Discord, god help me. At best I can hope for a specific subreddit or server dedicated to that. But mostly I'll find hundreds of posts or comments mentioning or asking about that camera, all by people I don't know and have no way of judging if they know their stuff.

Discord and Reddit have so much repetition and fragmentation because there's no real organization of content, and people with no expertise often weigh in and even get upvoted because the average user is not particularly knowledgeable and the experts aren't on 24/7 looking for new posts to contribute to. On forums topics are stickier and get bumped when there's activity so experts more often find relevant threads and it's easier to judge reputations on forums.

Granted, badly managed forums are bad. If question threads from new users are mixed in with everything else they can quickly dominate search results. You need to be able to filter, but IME most forums do have pretty decent filters.
by MountDoom | 2025-10-09 16:04:23+00:00
> At least it's not Musk's forever "next year".

The problem with the principled approach to high-uncertainty projects is that if you slowly execute on a sequential multi-year plan, you will almost certainly find out in year 9 that multiple of the late-stage tasks are much harder than you thought.

You just don't know ahead of the time. Just look at how many corporations and research labs had decades-long strategies to build human-like AI that went nowhere. And then some guys came up with a novel architecture and all of sudden, you can ask your computer to write an essay about penguins.

Musk's approach is that if you have an infinite supply of fresh grads who really believe in you and are willing to work crazy hours, giving them a "next year" deadline is more likely to give you what you want than telling them "here's your slow-paced project you're gonna be working on for the next decade". And I guess he thinks to himself that some of them are going to burn out, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to make.
by imiric | 2025-10-09 16:04:31+00:00
The article is spot-on. This should be a direct concern for anyone in the software industry, and given that software is eating the world, to society and governments at large.

The key phrase is this: "choose carefully".

Software developers have the responsibility to carefully choose their software stacks, the software they depend on, and how their own software is built. And the onus is on people using software to carefully choose software they trust, and software that doesn't restrict their freedoms or exploit their data.

Simplicity plays a big role in this choice. The less software we write and depend on, the lower the chances for it to do the wrong thing. We can't guarantee this, of course, given the insane complexity and layers of abstraction we must depend on, but making an effort is all that matters. Sometimes this choice requires trading convenience, time, effort, or money—but the sacrifice is very much worth it.
by The_SamminAter | 2025-10-09 16:05:04+00:00
Thanks for taking the time to respond! I’ve tried refreshing a couple of times and I’m afraid it made no difference. Chrome and Firefox all use the same embedded WebKit, so I’m afraid it still happens on them. I have XCode with an iOS 14 (as well as some similarly-old) Simulators if you’d like me to see if I can isolate and upload that, but according to Apple documentation[0] you should be able to download older simulators from Settings->Components->Add Platforms.

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/downloading-...
by wildzzz | 2025-10-09 16:05:22+00:00
It would work fine for sending small payloads short distances but unless you're in a hurry, it would be much easier to just send more mass by truck or train. One big benefit is having a truck or train being able to return to its origin without requiring another launch facility and also being able to travel in nearly all weather. There may be some use cases where drone gliders could airdrop payloads and return to their origin. But again, this requires very specific circumstances like good weather, a lack of roads, unavailability of av gas or jet fuel, and enough cleared space to launch a glider. I do see winches as a good way to launch lightweight fixed wing drones to reduce the amount of fuel and engine size required to deliver payloads. You'd only need to account for the fuel and power required to sustain cruise if you could winch a drone into the sky. You'd get even more distance if the drone was never intended to return like a kamikaze weapon. A small clearing in a field in Ukraine could launch cheap fixed wing kamikaze drones all day long.
by ktosobcy | 2025-10-09 16:05:29+00:00
That would be also nice, but given we can't make everyone to do the most basic interoperability I don't see it working…

As for: > Teens will easily bypass any method as many today watch porn

well, they do, but each obstacle discourage them to do that. It's like with chocolate while being on a diet - if you have it within reach next to you you are more likely to eat it; put it on a shelf which would require standing and walking - slighly less likely; put it in another room - even less; and if you don't have it in home and you would have dress up and take out the car and drive to the shop most likely you would just wave your hand at that :)

So no - it won't prevent it completely but I'd argue that it would significantly decrease the use :)
by kibwen | 2025-10-09 16:05:58+00:00
For LLMs, the input is text, and the output is text. By the time of GPT-2, the internet contained enough training data to make training an interesting LLM feasible (as judged by its ability to output convincing text).

We are nowhere near the same for autonomous robots, and it's not even funny. To continue to use the internet as an analogy for LLMs, we are pre-DARPANET, pre-ASCII, pre-transistor. We don't even have the sensors that would make safe household humanoid robots possible. Any theater from robot companies about trying to train a neural net based on motion capture is laughably foolish. At the current rate of progress, we are more than decades away.
by pydry | 2025-10-09 16:06:03+00:00
If it's the article im thinking of it proclaimed that all of Ukraine and all of Belarus were now part of a glorious "greater" Russia.

I think if they really wanted the latter they could have made it happen by now.

The leadership apparently werent saying anything at all to anyone in the first two weeks or so for opsec reasons, and that apparently led some of the state media propagandists to get a bit creative.
by taylodl | 2025-10-09 16:06:04+00:00
> Why shouldn't US respond in kind?

Because what the US is doing is against international law, and they know it. US sovereignty extends 12 nautical miles from its coastline. Within that boundary, the US has full authority to enforce its laws however it sees fit.

Beyond those 12 miles, you're in international waters, where maritime law applies - and maritime law, like U.S. law, requires due process. You can't simply claim someone is breaking the law, execute them without trial, and then destroy the evidence that could prove guilt or innocence.

That’s called an extrajudicial execution, and it exceeds the constitutional powers of the President of the United States.

Trump is claiming - without presenting evidence - that this is a matter of national defense and therefore falls under his authority as Commander in Chief. But Congress has not authorized war, and drug trafficking does not constitute an armed attack under international law.
by ubermonkey | 2025-10-09 16:06:40+00:00
I used NNW for a LONG LONG TIME. It's great software.

There was a period when it was not as useful, though, and I migrated away, but I still think of it very fondly.

My current RSS consumption toolchain uses Feedbin as the back end / syncing host, and their web app is good enough that I no longer use a native tool on my Mac. On my phone and iPad I use Reeder.