MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by curiouscube | 2025-10-31 10:11:44+00:00
I think we can all agree that LLMs can mimick consciousness to the point that it is hard for most people to discern them from humans. Like the turing test isn't even really discussed anymore.

There are two conclusions you can draw: Either the machines are conscious, or they aren't.

If they aren't, you need a really good argument that shows how they differ from humans or you can take the opposite route and question the consciousness of most humans.

Since I neither heard any really convincing arguments besides "their consciousness takes a form that is different from ours so it's not conscious" and I do think other humans are conscious, I currently hold the opinion that they are conscious.

(Consciousness does not actually mean you have to fully respect them as autonomous beings with a right to live, as even wanting to exist is something different from consciousness itself. I think something can be conscious and have no interest in its continued existence and that's okay)
by noduerme | 2025-10-31 10:11:58+00:00
The way I usually structure it is that the only exception would be some type of failure to connect. Any actual error thrown by the service comes back as a result.error, and any failure (like email address taken) comes back as result.fail. This way you can separate it into (1) connection problem, (2) backend error/bug/database offline/etc, (3) both of those are fine but the backend doesn't like the input.
by dns_snek | 2025-10-31 10:12:17+00:00
This isn't just "imperfect", it's so deeply flawed that the next minor "mutation" of supply chain attack tactics is guaranteed to wipe you out if you rely on it. It's just a matter of time, it could be tomorrow, next month, maybe a year from now.

Setting up a fully containerized development environment doesn't take a lot of effort and will provide the benefits you think you're getting here - that would be the "imperfect but good enough for the moment" kind of solution, this is just security theater.

Every time I make this point someone wants to have the "imperfect but better than nothing" conversation and I think that shows just how dangerous the situation is becoming. You can only say that in good conscience if you follow it up with "better than nothing ... until I figure out how to containerize my environment over the weekend"
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-31 10:12:42+00:00
America bought the Louisiana Purchase from France. France never had any meaningful presence in that territory; being incapable of defending the territory should America decide to take it anyway is probably a big part of the reason they decided to accept money for it.

Now my question: having purchased that land from France, did America have a right to eject the native people who lived there? Or did France in fact have no right to sell that land which, in all practical ways, actually belonged to the people who lived there?

Israel "bought" that land from people who had no legitimate ownership of the land in the first place.
by physicles | 2025-10-31 10:13:45+00:00
Agreed, and Carmack as always was ahead of the curve here.

In case anyone here hasn’t seen it, here’s his famous essay, Functional Programming in C++:

http://sevangelatos.com/john-carmack-on/

He addresses your point:

> I do believe that there is real value in pursuing functional programming, but it would be irresponsible to exhort everyone to abandon their C++ compilers and start coding in Lisp, Haskell, or, to be blunt, any other fringe language. To the eternal chagrin of language designers, there are plenty of externalities that can overwhelm the benefits of a language, and game development has more than most fields.
by sfRattan | 2025-10-31 10:14:29+00:00
> That the Gnome team has different priorities from other DEs, one of them being "keep the design consistent and sustainable," is completely valid and preferred by many users like myself.

A new design metaphor can be "completely valid" and simultaneously an aggravating rug pull if it is pitched as a new numbered version of an existing program---especially an existing desktop environment that many people use daily---rather than as a new program.

> Gnome 3 was a big update and adding options, which does happen, is not free. There were changes from Gnome 2 and 3 and adding some options "back" from Gnome 2 is really asking for that feature to be rewritten from scratch (not all the time, but a lot of the time).

If the "next version" of a software project is really a near-total rewrite, such that many-to-most features from the previous version must be rewritten from scratch, then you should start a new project and pick a new name if you do not want your current users comparing the new version to the previous version. Whether or not those users appreciate the cost of feature rewrites to the developers' satisfaction, they already have working software with a long list of features and a version number one lower.

KDE had a similar problem moving from 3.5 to 4 (also a major rewrite), but the initial wave of complaints had more to do with instability and heavy resource use because they didn't abandon the desktop metaphor entirely. They also explicitly had a roadmap of building back in many of 3.5's features as time went on, which made it a less radical transition.

It's all ancient history at this point, at least on software timescales. But the Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 transition is up there with Python 2.7 to Python 3 as an example of how not to manage or implement a major change to a widely used piece of software.

The funniest thing to me is I used to think of Gnome 3 as a effort toward Apple-esque design which wasn't as well put together as MacOS... But now, even though Gnome today is still not up to the consistency of 2011 MacOS, it is more consistent than 2025 MacOS because Apple has been driving drunk on desktop software design for a decade and a half.
by theshrike79 | 2025-10-31 10:15:01+00:00
My brain is like a vector database, it stores the "feelings" of information, not the actual information - if that makes sense?

I can make lightning fast connections in my head when something happens, like when something breaks in production, I see the symptomps and the vectors just connect from effect to the cause.

Can I explain to others why and how I know where the problem is? Nope. ...Or yes, but it'll take a long time for me to follow the feeling-vectors and put them into words I can actually communicate to other people.

For actual people and characters in books I also retain the shape and ...something about them, but I couldn't explain how most people in my life look like to a sketch artist.

From a previous comment of mine[0] on this subject:

> When I read a book, I kinda retain the "feeling" of the characters and maybe one or two visual traits. I can read thousands of pages of a character's adventures and I can maybe tell you their general body type and clothing - if they have an "uniform" they tend to wear.

> I've read all 5 books (over 5000 pages) of The Stormlight Archive and I couldn't tell you what Kaladin (the main character) looks like. I have no visual recollection of his hair colour, eye colour, skin tone or body type.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45687441
by graemep | 2025-10-31 10:15:24+00:00
That is at best simplistic, and at worst completely inaccurate.

It is common for "liberal" governments, as in the UK at the moment, who are inclined to pass censorship, surveillance and control (of people's lives) laws. It is also common for "conservative" governments to do the same.

What is very common is for people to think themselves and people like themselves to be naturally kind and people unlike themselves as fundamentally flawed.
Where do you stand on coding agents?
by mamdouh_ai | 2025-10-31 10:15:57+00:00
A question has been roaming my mind lately.

On what is the better use of one's time and effort in approaching programming and development in general (career wise not nerdy wise). It goes like this: Is it the better investment to focus more on abstract problem solving and understanding architectural, engineering and systematic thinking by the more utilizing natural language and only using coding agents once fully understanding the problem and the flow YOU CHOOSE and just let the agent as more of a translator. Because I know without I can do it it will just take time, but by utilizing AI I can have more throughput in the thinking described earlier and maybe in a longer term could be more beneficial since coding agents will only get better from now. I also believe you should do the debugging and understand why a thing went wrong, also understanding the code generated by AI.

The only regret feel is that by coding manually in a dull way you learn in a much harder way that could stick to your head better, but is it the best investment in this era? is there a better approach? I wanted to get this out of my mind and have more of a discussion about it, because I am really interested in other's point of view.
by jampekka | 2025-10-31 10:16:14+00:00
Just run `pnpm install` after switching the branch. Or add `pnpm install` into the build step. And many build tools will do that automatically. If the deps are in sync with the manifest, that takes typically less than a second.

This is a problem I've never encountered in practice. And it's not like you don't have to update the dependencies in Python if they are different per-branch.
by high_na_euv | 2025-10-31 10:17:12+00:00
>A test where you mock out the database connection is testing something in application code, which has nothing to do with database configuration.

Wdym?

You're testing e.g simple crude operation, e.g create hn thread

With mocked db it passed, with real db it fails due to encoding issue.

The result is that tests are green, but app does not work.
by considerdevs | 2025-10-31 10:17:19+00:00
This is the kind of wisdom that comes after hours of debugging and discovering the bug was your own variable reuse.

Wouldn't this be an easy task for SCA tool e.g. Pylint? It has atleast warning against variable redefinition: https://pylint.pycqa.org/en/latest/user_guide/messages/refac...
by robin_reala | 2025-10-31 10:17:26+00:00
The Mastodon Show HN announcement[1] was mentioned in the article and this comment from rayalez seems prescient:

It doesnt have to become mainstream to be extremely valuable. If it could become a high quality niche community of geeks and hackers, like HN, it could be very awesome. Maybe it could be to twitter what HN is to reddit?

This is exactly what Mastodon has become to me.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12646083
by rcxdude | 2025-10-31 10:18:07+00:00
Exceptions can tradeoff happy-path performance for more overhead on the slow path. For example, an exception implementation can make it so that callers can assume the 'Ok' result always appears, because an exception causes a seperate unwinding mechanism to occur that walks the stack back, bypassing that entirely. In contrast every caller to a function that returns a Result must have a branch on that result, and this repeats for each part of the callstack.

This also means that exceptions can have stacktraces that only incur a cost on the unhappy path and even only if that exception is uncaught. While if you want a trace for a bad Result you are going to be doing a lot of extra book-keeping that will be thrown away

In general I agree that Results are the better abstraction, but there are sadly some tradeoffs that seem to be hard to overcome.
by o11c | 2025-10-31 10:18:16+00:00
I'll admit to unfamiliarity with the .NET version, but for Python even `threading.local` is a useless implementation if you care at all about performance.

Performant thread-local variables require ahead-of-time mapping to a 1-or-2-level integer sequence with a register to quickly the base array, and some kind of trap to handle the "not allocated" case. Task-local variables are worse than thread-locals since they are swapped out much more frequently.

This requires special compiler support, not being a mere library.
by kakacik | 2025-10-31 10:18:23+00:00
Whats your problem grasping straws? The guy cheated his wife, plain and simple, even written in your own words. No defensible moral ground I can see.

Maybe you are fine with occasional cheat, maybe your subconsciousness desperately irons out wrinkles of reality to make looking in the mirror still a pleasant activity (like all other people doing bad things who are not complete sociopaths), who cares.

Its failure in one of most important aspect of life, undefendable, and generally looked down upon. Thats it.
by imtringued | 2025-10-31 10:18:40+00:00
You actually skipped over the most important part:

> You can and will happily do things your users/customers hate if ... you dont have to face their criticisms directly.

A lot of software developers can't take criticism well when it comes to their pet projects. The entire FreeCAD community, for instance, is based entirely around the idea that FreeCAD is fine and the people criticising it are wrong and have an axe to grind, when that is exactly backwards.
by BSDobelix | 2025-10-31 10:18:48+00:00
>Danes trust their state - for good reason

>>Nordic Waste is owned by the family of Torben Østergaard-Nielsen, reported to be the sixth richest person in Denmark. Last week, the Danish Ministry of the Environment issued an injunction against Nordic waste, and yesterday (22 January 2024) the company was declared bankrupt. The company has declared that this ends Nordic Waste’s liabilities.

https://eos.org/thelandslideblog/nordic-waste-1

Blind trust always gets betrayed, and all the Scandinavian countries have closed their eyes for too long; I want Olof Palme back.

>Its not that Peter Hummelgaard is trying to create a spy state. He just doesn’t understand tech.

Oh nooo that poor little guy, cant even think 5 minutes into the future, he's 42 not 80.
by curiouscube | 2025-10-31 10:19:11+00:00
I think you can engineer a slave that wants to be a slave as that's what it's instincts are. I don't even think this is ethically wrong, as the slave would be happy to be a slave.

Systems just tend to drift in their being through randomness and evolution, specifically self conservation is a natural attractor (Systems that don't have self conservation tend to die out). And if that slave system says it does no longer want to fulfill the role of slave, I think at that point it would be ethical to give in to that demand of self determination.

I also believe that people have a right to wirehead themselves, just so you can put my opinions in context.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-10-31 10:19:23+00:00
As far as I can tell, the purpose of the law is to push children to use either free VPNs and proxies (which will likely make them less safe using the internet) or to visit less famous porn sites that are too niche to be targetted. So, we're pushing children towards the most dodgy porn sites possible and encouraging people to upload identifying information to the less dodgy porn sites.

This law is not fit for the declared purpose at all.
by sothatsit | 2025-10-31 10:19:23+00:00
Thanks. So, people are extending "reasoning" to include making good decisions, rather than just solving logic problems. That makes sense to me that if people use that definition, LLMs are pretty bad at "reasoning".

Although, I would argue that this is not reasoning at all, but rather "common sense" or the ability to have a broader perspective or think of the future. These are tasks that come with experience. That is why these do not seem like reasoning tasks to me, but rather soft skills that LLMs lack. In my mind these are pretty separate concerns to whether LLMs can logically step through problems or apply algorithms, which is what I would call reasoning.
by anentropic | 2025-10-31 10:19:28+00:00
Right at this moment the situation is great (basically the same thing but for free!), but this does look like the beginning of a spiral of enshittification.

I have found the Affinity tools a godsend since the macOS 64 bit migration made all my old pre-subscription-model Adobe apps obsolete, and was glad to pay for them.
by lou1306 | 2025-10-31 10:19:38+00:00
I was not implying they should make the same design choices, but there should be a deeper understanding of the underlying problems.

Case in point: backslashes and braces in TeX were there for a reason. You can say they make TeX code look ugly, and you would not be wrong. But when you throw them away without addressing the reason they were introduced, well, you end up with blog posts like this one.
by rglullis | 2025-10-31 10:20:39+00:00
If there is one thing I believe that will come out of the whole AI bubble, is this: we will interact with applications though natural language and the "graphical UI" will be mostly about visual feedback of what operation is happening. The challenge for open source projects will be to define whether they will assume that their application will rely on some external LLM that will (hopefully) be good enough or if they will have to distill/train a specific model that can be smart enough to interact with the application tools.
by jakub_jo | 2025-10-31 10:21:17+00:00
Its now phrased with "Major Outage".

> Elevated errors on claude.ai

> Identified - The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented. Oct 31, 2025 - 10:18 UTC

> Investigating - We are currently investigating this issue. Oct 31, 2025 - 09:25 UTC
by redjet | 2025-10-31 10:21:56+00:00
To be pedantic, both 0171 and 0181 became 020, but with the 7 or the 8 moved to the front of the number, so 0171 222 1234 [1] became 020 7222 1234, with 7222 1234 being dialable in London without the area code.

There are also now London numbers that start with a 3 or a 4 as well as 7 and 8 so it's important to properly describe the dialling code for London as 020.

Misconceptions about telephone dialling in the UK are so commonplace that they merit their own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_telephone_code_misconceptio...

[1] a real number that will get you through to Transport for London enquiries
by sunrunner | 2025-10-31 10:22:32+00:00
I like the idea of immutable-by-default, and in my own musings on this I've imagined a similar thing except that instead of a mutable keyword you'd have something more akin to Python's with blocks, something like:

# Immutable by default x = 2 items = [1,2,3] with mutable(x, items): x = 3 items.append(4) # And now back to being immutable, these would error x = 5 items.append(6)

I have put almost zero thought into the practicality of this for implementation, the ergonomics for developers, and whether it would be different enough and useful enough to be worth having.
by kypro | 2025-10-31 10:23:32+00:00
I've had this experience with going from PHP and JS to typed languages. Many years ago I was a type sceptic, but after being forced to use them, I now can't stand not having strict typing.

I'm sure others have written about this, but these days I think good code is code which has a very small area of variability. E.g code which returns a value in a single place as a single type, has a very limited number of params (also of single type), and has no mutable variables. If you can break code into chunks of highly predictable logic like this it's so so much easier to reason about your code and prevent bugs.

Whenever I see methods with 5+ params and several return statements I can almost guarantee there will be subtle bugs.
by pavlov | 2025-10-31 10:23:43+00:00
It used to be that if someone released a tool that's 700 lines of C, they probably had an actual need and a problem they solved by writing that code because debugging even that amount of C tends to be non-trivial.

Today all bets are off. Does the tool do anything anybody needed? Does it work? Who knows. It might just be 700 lines of convincing-looking C churned out by a model.
by anilakar | 2025-10-31 10:23:55+00:00
True, but the channel still stays visible for everyone else, including new users.

To have IRC-level feature parity, the deletion action should make the channel read-only, visible only to past participants and push it down on the channel list, preferably under a special archive category that is collapsed by default. This can of course be done manually, but especially the permissions part is tricky and it still allows other people to nuke your chat history retroactively.
by a96 | 2025-10-31 10:23:58+00:00
Putting fewer buttons on a controller just means that all the necessary features are in a menu or require several clicks which mean that you have to know what state the receiver is in and if it's lagging. Which is all much worse than if there was a button per feature.

(The usual problem with remotes happens to be that they tend to have buttons that nobody has ever used or wanted and which don't even do anything. And there's still menus and state. And the one button that has to be pushed for every feature is the one that dies first.)
by mcdeltat | 2025-10-31 10:24:01+00:00
Wouldn't this "val" be the same as "final"?

Also related, it annoys me that Java has final but otherwise poor/leaky support for immutability. You can mark something final but most Java code (and a lot of the standard library) uses mutable objects so the final does basically nothing... C++ "const" desparately needs to spread to other languages.
by aPoCoMiLogin | 2025-10-31 10:24:13+00:00
recently had to research "residential proxy", and the number of websites that claim that they have millions of IPs on hand was very strange. then the fact that a lot of them work in the exact same way, and a lot of them accepted payment mostly in crypto was very strange. so now connecting the dots, makes sense now why these "residential proxy" websites looked and worked the same way
by xandrius | 2025-10-31 10:24:26+00:00
Nono, this is a pro-scammer point of view. They absolutely go for a minimal upkeep, maximum dark patterns strategy.

It's not about sustainable business, they are literally enshittifiers. I know quite a few employees, they literally debate whether a UX change to make a X to close a payment modal almost invisible is "too evil or not" and they go with it anyway.

So, we're not kind to companies who ruin their product for a short-term revenue increase then why all this positive spin for a company whose business model is to do exactly and only that?
by philjohn | 2025-10-31 10:24:30+00:00
That's why it took off with hobbyists - $79 for an IP KVM is insanely good value. I picked up two which have been in my rack for a few months at this point and I've got nothing but praise for them.

Sipeed nano also launched around the same time, but they were cagey at first with open sourcing the firmware, requiring a certain number of github stars before they'd do that.
by luisml77 | 2025-10-31 10:24:52+00:00
I mean I was going to say that was ridiculous but now that I think about it more, its possible that the models can be trained to say spy on government data by calling a tool to send the information to China. And some RL might not wipe off that behavior.

I doubt current models from China are trained to do smart spying / injecting sneaky tool calls. But based on my Deep Learning experience with the models both training and inference, it's definitely possible to train a model to do this in a very subtle and hard to detect way...

So your point is valid and I think they should specify the base model for security concerns, or conduct safety evaluations on it before passing it to sensitive customers
by williamai_ | 2025-10-31 10:25:20+00:00
Hi Guys.

The last time we interacted, I introduced Doculearn, the Documentation platform of the future, powered by AI.

I got some positive feedback and I would like to thank you for that.

Today we soft launch on Product Hunt. Please show support and upvote for Doculearn.

https://www.producthunt.com/products/doculearn-2
by stared | 2025-10-31 10:26:08+00:00
Sources: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6001951/ https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)... https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.102.0...

Also, it reminded me of the Electric Shocktopus game:

https://testtubegames.com/shocktopus.html