MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by int_19h | 2025-10-01 00:30:21+00:00
The first two books can be treated largely as standalone works. They do technically take place in the same broad universe, but said universe is basically divided into FTL and non-FTL zones with vastly different societies in each (for obvious reasons), and the non-FTL societies aren't even aware of this boundary. "Fire upon the Deep" is set mostly in the FTL zone, with the boundary itself being a major plot point. "Deepness in the Sky" is set entirely in the non-FTL zone, and the lack of FTL is a major plot point there.

Chronologically, DitS takes place before FotD. But there is exactly one character in common between the two books, and while he is a major character in both, none of the events of DitS are relevant to the story in FotD (which makes sense since FotD was written first).

So it's really largely a matter of preference as to which one to read first. I would say that FotD has more action and, for the lack of better term, "weirdness" in the setting; while DitS is more slow-paced, with more character development and generally more fleshed-out characters, and explores its themes deeper. But both books have plenty for your mind to chew on.

All in all I think FotD is an easier read, and DitS is a more rewarding one, but this is all very subjective.

One upside to the books being decoupled as much as they are is that whichever one you start with, you get a complete story, so even if you're a completionist you can disregard the other book if you don't like the first one.
by manofmanysmiles | 2025-10-01 00:32:34+00:00
This is the question though isn't it?

With sufficient structure and supervision, will a "team" of agents out-perform a team of humans?

Military, automotive and other industries have developed rigorous standards consisting of among other things detailed processes for developing software.

Can there be an AI waterfall? With sufficiently unambiguous, testable requirements, and a nice scaffolding of process, is it possible to achieve the dream of managers, and eliminate software engineers? My intuition is evenly split.
by 12_throw_away | 2025-10-01 00:33:07+00:00
My god this is badly written and confusing. At least an actual person signed it this time?

I'm not sure if this was LLM-written because I don't think an LLM would write a missive almost entirely in bullet points - but it has many of the hallmarks. Like, these sentences almost sound reasonable, but don't actually make sense or represent a coherent train of thought:

A recent access review had revealed that many systems were under the control of a single individual, which we determined presented a risk to the security and operational sustainability of those systems. We had intended to resolve this over time. However, the departure of key maintainers and contribution data showing that some maintainers had long periods of inactivity (Least Privileged Access), changed the timeline.
by throwaway240403 | 2025-10-01 00:33:42+00:00
There are very real reasons to use ZFS instead of the oldschool Linux block device sandwich. mdadm+luks+lvm still do not quite provide the same set of features that ZFS alone does even without encryption. Namely in-line compression, and data checksumming, not to mention free snapshots.

ZFS is quite mature, the feature discussed in the article is not. As others have pointed out this could have been avoided by running ZFS on top of luks and would have hardly sacrificed any functionality.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-10-01 00:33:42+00:00
The price on most betting exchanges is unbeatable without significant resources (it is set based on Asian books, they will open lines to sharps before betting exchanges list the market).

The price on parlays, with the huge spread, is far more vulnerable because there is no large market for these events. Prices for large events are mostly gathered from third parties, parlays will tend to be priced in-house.

This is part of the reason why bookmakers control who can bet on what on their site. If they opened parlay line with $100k limit to anyone, they would be bankrupted by the end of the day. The purpose of these bets is to create a product that is exciting for customers and is economic for them to provide...but that requires there to be limit on how much customers can bet.

The most profitable product are the handicap markets and point spreads even though the margin for these is usually low single digits. Asian books usually only provide these markets...but the problem is that customers don't like these as much as parlays. The product is entertainment.
by gerdesj | 2025-10-01 00:34:10+00:00
If we all spoke the same language - say French (lingua Franca) - then we might all think the same way too and the (human) world would soon become beige. I'm not knocking French but English is often known as a lingua franca - a description of English, in Latin about the language of the Franks - or as we now describe it: French!

I think diversity is always indicated as a positive force in all walks of life. It might not be the easiest path. I might have some issues with monotheism vs polytheism or even theism entirely as a counter arguement 8)

Christianity has a Biblically documented myth about a Tower of Babel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel. Well, that bit of Genesis has a slightly different axe to grind to mine.
by DimmieMan | 2025-10-01 00:34:32+00:00
> Returns a `String` instead of a type which disallows the formulation of the problematic `assertEquals` to begin with.

I'm not sure what the best attribution would be but "Make illegal states unrepresentable" would be a fantastic addition to this list pairing well with "parse, don't validate".

A stricter type would force you to parse the URL and would either fix the error (because cleaning trailing/leading slashes might make sense here) or throw a clear error from the parser.

It can be slightly more verbose when you just want to write a string in your test for convenience but can (and does) save a lot of debugging pain for less trivial cases.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-01 00:35:17+00:00
> The US has always claimed jurisdiction on foreign-hosted but US-accessible content.

Committing crimes remotely from another country was never a loophole to escape the laws of that country.

When a country requests extradition they’re not claiming jurisdiction over another country. They’re saying that a crime was committed in their country by the person and they’re asking the foreign country for cooperation in prosecuting that person.

The MegaUpload case is not equivalent to what the UK is doing. MegaUpload was operating as a business, taking payments, and exchanging money. Once you start doing explicit paid business in a country you can’t claim you’re not involved with that country.

If a country starts claiming that merely making content accessible globally is a crime in their country, that’s an entirely different issue. Not equivalent to the MegaUpload case.

> Do people forget the owner of Megaupload being extradited? In many ways this is just catching up to the current US state.

Again, false equivalence. MegaUpload was operating as a business with US customers. They also had some hosting in the United States if I recall correctly.

Once you start doing business in a country and have customers there, you’re involved with their laws.
by twelvechairs | 2025-10-01 00:36:13+00:00
The process is interesting but just to make the point - I often see Americans obsessing over the implementability of land valuation processes as if its entirely new and needs to be invented when other states and countries have established systems that have been working for in many cases over a century.

For instance below from Australia

https://www.nsw.gov.au/housing-and-construction/land-values-...
by aidenn0 | 2025-10-01 00:36:21+00:00
I just haven't seen CoCs effectively reduce the bigots in a community; they either are toothless, or have teeth and lead to a j'accuse breakdown.

It is a tiny fraction of the people I know and have interacted with over an extended period of time who has not made a remark that could be construed as bigoted.

I have seen moderators called bigots for suspending (instead of banning) someone who made an inappropriate remark.

My wife and I have been accused (behind our back) of misgendering someone when we were using the pronouns that we had privately confirmed she preferred.

If you create a CoC with real teeth, then instead of the BDFL or core team or whatever controlling who is in the community, it's the people in the community who are most interested in accusing people of violating the CoC that have control over who is in the community.
by cogman10 | 2025-10-01 00:36:49+00:00
I agree. But also I'd add that I'd be impressed and wowed if what you showed is "Actually, now the dog is playing piano at 5th grade level" or "Now the same dog can play the drums!".

Getting a "WTF are you talking about, it's a dog playing the piano, why aren't you impressed!" doesn't help the case. I've already seen a dog play the piano and this doesn't appear to be any better than the last time I saw it.

I'm not seeing comparisons of this to other video generation that already exists. That's what I want to see. Is this faster, more crisp, better at continuity? Why is this impressive vs competition?
by hollerith | 2025-10-01 00:38:14+00:00
There are some who hold those beliefs, but they give only extremely weak arguments. It's hard to imagine that the benefits of learning and thinking in one language rather than another outweigh the benefits of learning a language like English that gives a person access to a vast literature and vast economic and social opportunities.

I am not distressed by the thought of an adult's deciding to learn Welsh as a hobby just as I'm not distressed by an adult's spending time on any hobby, but it is painful for me to image a child's being taught an obscure language like Welsh out of some almost-certainly-false belief that it will give him or her access to powerful modes of thought that are unavailable to speakers of other languages. It strikes me as almost mistreating the child to restrict his intellectual, social and economic opportunities in this way (unless the child can pick up second and third languages easily, which is not most children).

I'm not saying that I understand how a language interacts with a developing child's brain well enough to say with confidence that Welsh cannot grant anyone the ability to think in ways that are not possible in other languages. I am open to having my mind changed. But nothing I've ever read over many conversations even begins to change my mind. It's all very simplistic argumentation, e.g., "Society teaches us that diversity is good; so clearly linguistic diversity must be good", e.g., "<<Sapir-Whorf hypothesis>> sure is an impressive term probably coined by super-smart professors, so it is probably true".
by Tryk | 2025-10-01 00:38:57+00:00
One analogy is to liken tiktok (and shortform content) as exploring the shallows. Walking around, close to the shoreline, you explore pieces of flotsam that the sea washes your way. You might spend a lifetime on this shore, walking up and down, but most would argue that you've actually never gone anywhere.

On the other hand, reading a book is like getting on a boat. You've made certain preparations for acquiring the vessel and set course through unknown territory. A journey away from the shore and away from what's immediately at hand, which can also turn out to be a journey towards self-discovery.
by froober | 2025-10-01 00:39:05+00:00
I really like rust's pattern matching and it's the feature I miss the most in other languages. However, I feel like its easy to encode too much control flow in one match statement and make a garbled mess. The first example in the article uses all the features (destructuring, @ sigil, inline if, etc.) which I think makes it unreadable.

Overall good article, but those large match statements are difficult to read.
by _heimdall | 2025-10-01 00:40:36+00:00
I'd agree that seems more likely. Though I can only make that expectation with public knowledge of what these AI companies say they're working on. I don't know what research projects or yet-to-be-released architectures may currently exist - my confidence in that assumption of likelihood isn't very high.

More importantly, I think we agree a sudden run away is possible, we don't have safeguards in place, and the risks are extremely high should that happen.
by sandy_coyote | 2025-10-01 00:41:18+00:00
This is funny if you read it in Batman's voice.

And finally, if you can't reach me on Zoom, you flash a beacon in the sky. With a bat on it. This is yet another way of disrespecting my time.

Ok, jokes aside, this post resonated with me, more personally than professionally (because no one wants to meet with me, professionally). Every other week or so, my elderly dad asks me if I want to go to lunch. Inevitably, if I say yes, he says "great. Why don't you pick a place?" For years, this seemed to me like he was expressing deference for my tastes, but now it just seems like he's lazy and wants to me to do the work of picking a new place.
by mtlynch | 2025-10-01 00:41:58+00:00
Thanks for sharing! I hadn't read that one, but I read Code Complete early in my career and loved it. It's been on my bookshelf forever, but I've only gone back to it a few times. But every time I do, I think, "This is really good! I should re-read this."

I was wondering whatever happened to him because the guys that were popular around his time (Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, Ward Cunningham) all continued writing, even if their popularity waned after the 2000s. But I just never saw anything from McConnell again.

It turns out he quit software to be a financial advisor, which is quite surprising.[0]

[0] https://raindogllc.com/steve-mcconnell-investment-advisor/
by pdonis | 2025-10-01 00:42:00+00:00
> There's no restriction in Python's type system that says `+` has to "make sense".

There's no restriction in any language that all code has to make sense. You can write nonsense in any language. Sure, particular types of nonsense might be easier to write in Python than in some other languages, but nonsense is still nonsense.

And it's also nonsense to argue that an API designer has to support whatever nonsense a coder can dream up just because it's valid code in that language. The GP post was not talking about algebraic fields or mathematical definitions or what nonsense the language permits, but about API design. The basic issue is that Python's extremely dynamic nature makes some reasonable API designs basically inexpressible. That's just a tradeoff one has to accept when using Python. Every language has tradeoffs.
by _heimdall | 2025-10-01 00:42:17+00:00
Sore, totally agree. I'm not saying I expect a corporation to care about externalized costs.

I am saying that I care about them, and individually we all should pay attention to them. In this case, I will continue to push for juniors even if my higher-ups push for us to hire seniors only and augment our workforce with LLMs for more junior-level work.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-01 00:43:07+00:00
> And if I recall he did alledge he followed the DMCA,

They didn’t even completely follow the DMCA, though. They had active features to detect duplicate uploads via file hash and link them together via deduplication, but a DMCA takedown request would only remove one link to the file rather than actually remove the content.

They claimed a lot of things and tried to ride a wave of internet populism, but their case wasn’t really as controversial as they tried to make it.
by int_19h | 2025-10-01 00:43:33+00:00
There are constructed languages that preserve the expressivity of natural human languages but without the implicit ambiguity, though; most notably, Loglan and its successor Lojban. If you read Golden Age sci-fi, Loglan sometimes shows up there specifically in this role - e.g. "Moon is a Harsh Mistress":

> By then Mike had voder-vocoder circuits supplementing his read-outs, print-outs, and decision-action boxes, and could understand not only classic programming but also Loglan and English, and could accept other languages and was doing technical translating—and reading endlessly. But in giving him instructions was safer to use Loglan. If you spoke English, results might be whimsical; multi-valued nature of English gave option circuits too much leeway.

For those unfamiliar with it, it's not that Lojban is perfectly unambiguous. It's that its design strives to ensure that ambiguity is always deliberate by making it explicit.

The obvious problem with all this is that Lojban is a very niche language with a fairly small corpus, so training AI on it is a challenge (although it's interesting to note that existing SOTA models can read and write it even so, better than many obscure human languages). However, Lojban has the nice property of being fully machine parseable - it has a PEG grammar. And, once you parse it, you can use dictionaries to construct a semantic tree of any Lojban snippet.

When it comes to LLMs, this property can be used in two ways. First, you can use structured output driven by the grammar to constrain the model to output only syntactically valid Lojban at any point. Second, you can parse the fully constructed text once it has been generated, add semantic annotations, and feed the tree back into the model to have it double-check that what it ended up writing means exactly what it wanted to mean.

With SOTA models, in fact, you don't even need the structured output - you can just give them parser as a tool and have them iterate. I did that with Claude and had it produce Lojban translations that, while not perfect, were very good. So I think that it might be possible, in principle, to generate Lojban training data out of other languages, and I can't help but wonder what would happen if you trained a model primarily on that; I suspect it would reduce hallucinations and generally improve metrics, but this is just a gut feel. Unfortunately this is a hypothesis that requires a lot of $$$ to properly test...
by hollerith | 2025-10-01 00:43:34+00:00
Old English descended from some other language (the name of which does not matter for the purpose of this comment).

Just because some accident caused the name "Brythonic" to be applied to languages older than the oldest language with the name "English" says nothing about the importance or value of Brythonic relative to English. The assigning of names to no-longer-spoken languages is arbitrary enough that you cannot use the names to prove anything about reality.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-01 00:43:36+00:00
This taxation rant misses the point. What prevents development isn't the prospective taxes. It's all the other regulations that limit what you can do and make what you can more expensive pushing the payoff time out into the realm of "f this I'll buy stocks instead".

I think it speaks volumes about the LVT crowd (kind of hard to fault the author personally when he exists in that filter bubble) that the author's entire section on land use restrictions speaks only to deed restrictions and not government imposed ones.
by griffzhowl | 2025-10-01 00:43:59+00:00
I agree in general but

> Euclid's Elements is 2300 years old and is presented in a completely abstract way.

depends on what you mean by completely abstract. Euclid relies in a logically essential way on the diagrams. Even the first theorem doesn't follow from the postulates as explicitly stated, but relies on the diagram for us to conclude that two circles sharing a radius intersect.

This is a thought-provoking paper on the issue by Viktor Blasjo, Operationalism: An Interpretation of the Philosophy of Ancient Greek Geometry https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10699-021-09791-4

which was recently the subject of a guest video on 3blue1brown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-MgQC6z3VU
by jgerrish | 2025-10-01 00:44:02+00:00
I found a really interesting potential dark pattern on a Smart Samsung washing machine the other day.

I had never connected the machine to the Internet since it was purchased. It always defaulted to Heavy Duty for the wash cycle. After connecting it to the SmartThings app and updating the firmware it now defaults to Normal for the wash cycle, which has a shorter run time and less energy usage I assume.

I can't prove it was intentional, but I know myself and what I might brainstorm in a product development or executive conference room. It's cynical, but I can see a company pushing online connectivity and using these kinds of "accidental" "post-manufacturing" issues as reason why. It's not quite Greenwashing but it is exploiting environmental stewardship.

I know this could bite me in the future, but I also want the knowledge out there regardless of who benefits or doesn't.
by bluGill | 2025-10-01 00:44:04+00:00
They have to compete with others. If the 'good' betters go with you that means you have worse odds that your competition and anyone else who knows goes elsewhere.

the real money is in pools where only a few people bet. however that works best if you get people to bet on the unlikely thing you want to take the other side as you can win more often. Often the unlikely thing is only possible because you take a side - so the savey better is taking away your bets.
by danaris | 2025-10-01 00:44:53+00:00
It's not about being "told to be nice".

It's about setting a shared understanding of norms.

It's about whether the kinds of jokes allowed among members are "as raunchy as you please", "polite jokes only," or "none".

It's about whether you're expected to work out differences in private chats, address them in public, or bring them to a moderator.

It's about whether your comments on a code review started by another member have to be addressed by the committer before the review can go forward.

Any time you think the way you do things in the open source project (or any other kind of community) you contribute to or run is The Natural, Obvious Way Everyone Does Things, you're probably wrong, and some other people or projects do things exactly the opposite way and think that's just as natural and obvious.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-01 00:45:27+00:00
Why?

You haven't made any argument.

And lots of industries ban unprofitable customers. All-you-can-eat restaurants will ban customers who eat/take absurd amounts of food, which is unprofitable. Landlords don't rent to prospective tenants who have a history of not paying rent, which is unprofitable. Every major retailer will ban you if you return too many items too often, which is unprofitable.

So why would betting be any different? Banning highly unprofitable customers is normal business practice across many industries.

There's a reason we call it the free market rather than the forced market. Businesses aren't forced to transact with individuals (unless they are discriminating against specific protected classes like race or gender).
by jefftk | 2025-10-01 00:46:34+00:00
(author)

That could actually be a lot of what I'm seeing! I live in Somerville (just outside Boston) with MWRA water, which is kept at a pH of 9.0 to 9.5 to reduce lead leeching from old pipes. Reading a bit, it seems like that could indeed cut a couple minutes off the cooking time.
by danaris | 2025-10-01 00:47:28+00:00
> Your guess that ~24/200 will be "good enough" is unfortunately wrong in my experience. In my last go, only 10/200 were able to demonstrate sufficient knowledge of the required skills to be hireable, and by that I mean fulfill the needs of the role in a way that justifies their salary, rather than be so inexperienced as to be a drain on resources rather than net gain.

I mean, this is fundamentally dependent on the specific position being hired for.
by k310 | 2025-10-01 00:47:51+00:00
There has been a rodent infestation in California's Central Valley (and the foothills, don't ask me how I know). The South Bay is far from the Central Valley, though. Maybe it's more widespread than we thought.

https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/california-almond-farms-...

p.s. paint pail traps work. Even a pacifist can use them without water, but where do you take your captives for release?