MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ealexhudson | 2025-10-18 20:55:49+00:00
I think they needed to be clearer about what the actual requirement was.

If the requirement is, "Show the balance _as it was_ at that point in time", this system doesn't fulfil it. They even say so in the article: if something is wrong, throw away the state and re-run the events. That's necessarily different behaviour. To do this requirement, you actually have to audit every enquiry and say what you thought the result was, including the various errors/miscalculations.

If the requirement is, "Show the balance as it should have been at that point in time", then it's fine.
by cortesoft | 2025-10-18 20:56:13+00:00
Well, “puts” is a method defined in the Kernel module, which is included in the Object class, which means it is available in all contexts (since every object is a subclass of the ‘Object’ class). So, to answer your question, the puts method belongs to the Kernel module object, and the Kernel module object is an instance of a Module object.
by geoctl | 2025-10-18 20:57:04+00:00
Is it? I honestly kinda believe that etcd is probably the weakest point in vanilla k8s. It is simply unsuitable for heavy write environments and causes lots of consistency problems under heavy write loads, it's generally slow, it has value size constraints, it offers very primitive querying, etc... Why not replace etcd altogether with something like Postgres + Redis/NATS?
by 5- | 2025-10-18 20:57:36+00:00
i had forgotten about this technique when i was at the excellent https://tnmoc.org recently, looking at their sgi irix exhibit featuring a webcam.

the latency of the camera feed on the crt screen was unbelievable even (especially?) by modern standards!

after a minute of pure wonder i remembered about overlays. still mighty impressive.
by andrewjf | 2025-10-18 20:57:37+00:00
You describe a world where human skill is required to prevent these class of bugs, time and time again we've proven that people are people and bugs happen.

Systems must be _structurally architected_ with security in mind.

Security is layered, using a random key with 128-bit space makes guessing UUIDs infeasible. But _also_ you should be doing AuthZ on the records, and also you should be doing rate limiting on API so they can't be brute forced, either.
by galangalalgol | 2025-10-18 20:58:05+00:00
Well, he heads a company devoted to creating AGI, so admitting success in research is inherently unpredictable is surprisingly honest. As to whether his estimate that we have the pieces and just need to assemble them correctly is itself correct, I can only say it is as likely to be correct as any other researcher in the field. Which is to say its random.
by collinvandyck76 | 2025-10-18 20:59:38+00:00
Always good to have a weed puller in your toolshed. A stand-up puller, specifically, that operates as a lever, allowing it to first grab deeply and then through a rotation of the handle it pulls out quite a bit of the root system. A lifesaver if you have a rain garden which is really just a synonym for weed garden.
by jancsika | 2025-10-18 20:59:39+00:00
I'll take a stab at it very quickly--

The subsidies for green energy in the Inflation Reduction Act targeted a lot of red/purple states. So you get a burgeoning battery industry going in Georgia, solar and wind in Arizona and Texas, and so forth.

A Harris presidency would have beefed up those programs for another 4 years. So if you got a Trumpism in 2028, that green energy sector of the economy would have an 8-year head start. Republicans would either have to battle a much more powerful green energy lobby or figure out how to do green Trumpism. Either would be a substantial hurdle. So if you're not in favor of having a random number generator in charge at the White House, you'd probably agree we'd be better off with the neoliberalism.

As to "much better off," I'm going to need to hear more substance from OP to believe that. Harris didn't have an anti-monopolist stance, and I see no reason to think that state/corporate surveillance-tech and cryptobros bullshit would have been curtailed in any meaningful sense. And someone who is currently relying on Klarna to pay for groceries now would not exactly be thriving at the end of a first Harris term.
by hansmayer | 2025-10-18 21:00:52+00:00
Well, personally I believe you don't have any ulterior motives here. But be warned - when you hype up stuff like that and aligns perfectly with the interests of Anthropic (or whatever other VC-propped GenAI company), it can certainly come across the wrong way. Take this feedback as an indicator to help you steer your writing, not as a personal attack.
by carlosjobim | 2025-10-18 21:01:44+00:00
How much free speech do you have in practice if you are not allowed to use the airwaves, the printing presses, or the recording equipment? You then have the free speech of the pre-industrial age, while others enjoy their free speech in the modern age.

No matter what, YouTube and social media enables more people to express themselves to an audience than ever before.

In practice, social media brings free speech to the modern mass society, in a way that was very lacking before.
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-10-18 21:02:32+00:00
Whereas rendering Chinese names with Chinese characters would make the names entirely unintelligible to an audience of English speakers, the nice thing about the diacritical marks in Vietnamese is that they can simply be ignored by those familiar with the Roman alphabet but not Vietnamese. I would similarly expect an article about Spain or Spaniards to include the accents and the ñ character and an article about France or the French to include accents and the ç. (I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to writing out Chinese names in Chinese, then putting the pinyin in a parenthetical, either. Obviously there would be no point to this with Vietnamese, Spanish, or French.)
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-18 21:02:33+00:00
If you just measure genes and IQ, then assortative mating screws up that statistic very badly.

When researchers do studies specifically designed to isolate different factors, it's different. Please stop ignoring this part of my argument!!

Assume the most extreme case of assortative mating possible. Every child inherits two genes that list the exact IQ of its parents.

Do those genes correlate with the IQ of the child? If they do, there's only a few ways for that to happen. The causal factor could be how they're parented, or the environment, or the genes themselves. If you correct for the first two across a statistically large sample, and still see an effect, then it must be the last one.

> not a measure of any single person

I know. I'm saying each data point inside the statistic is arrived at in a specific way. Cause and effect only go via certain paths. It's easy to make mistakes about cause and effect by forgetting about paths, but you can categorize them and only some paths are possible. Any statistically resilient correlation has a cause somewhere.
by dzink | 2025-10-18 21:03:52+00:00
I know an average farmer who is using ChatGPT all the time to look up illnesses and treatments for his crop, or optimal production techniques, taxes etc. The speed of looking up and getting better information has never been greater. The average person is a gross overstatement when everyone has interests that vary and strives to improve. In fact the whole point of AI is to help provide much faster cycles of improvement to anyone trying to improve in anything. Thus not white collar specific. Especially when it provides window to people with other skills to do more white collar work for themselves or add those skills.
by zero-ground-445 | 2025-10-18 21:04:18+00:00
Prompt engineering itself doesn’t evolve rapidly - but the models it depends on change all the time. Every new generation of large language models comes with new reasoning layers, expanded context windows, modified decoding defaults, and new forms of safety alignment. These shifts alter how models interpret, prioritize, and execute instructions. A prompt that produces clean, reliable output one week might start producing verbose or inconsistent results after a silent update. The role of a prompt engineer is therefore not just to write good prompts, but to detect, analyze, and adapt to these changes. Successful practitioners treat prompt design as an ongoing process of experimentation rather than a fixed discipline.
by TZubiri | 2025-10-18 21:04:24+00:00
That would be what root is.

I think a more appropriate question would be, if the key fits, couldn't you change the lock?

Maybe, that would give you 3 abilities.

1 Lock yourself out if you please? Not terrible

2 Provide access to others, which makes sense since you already have access to the file, you could theoretically share it through other channels, you naturally cannot prevent this.

3. Lock others out. This one is less of a security risk and more of a nuisance risk.

I think the unix model is simple, maybe selinux offers more sophistication. That said the unix chown behaviour could have gone either way in terms of security, but in terms of design it makes sense as is.
by Towaway69 | 2025-10-18 21:04:31+00:00
I had tinnitus before I knew it was tinnitus - I thought it was normal. I literally thought that everyone had a constant sound in their ears.

It was not until someone explained that they had tinnitus and told me their symptons that I suddenly realised that I too had tinnitus.

Since then it's become harder to ignore it but on the other hard, its nice to know that it's not normal and that others can truly hear nothing - something I do wish I could do: hear nothing. I did recently discovered that head under water helps to reduced the sound.

Acceptance has been my treatment for years, I hear it when there is mental downtime. So it does keep me busy (mentally) so that I don't hear it - ironically tinnitus motivates me to do stuff!
by itsnowandnever | 2025-10-18 21:05:05+00:00
that's fair but that 99% of all apiserver deployments in the world have the same standard boilerplate footprint is a large part of why it became so ubiquitous. that people running it locally don't have to make any decisions about how to deploy which database or why to use this one over that one... and that's also the same situation in production so people doing stuff in dev aren't punched in the face by an exponentially more complex system in production is huge.
by babl-yc | 2025-10-18 21:06:20+00:00
Will be interested to see what their developer kit looks like when (and if) they release it.

I've been experimenting with the BeagleY-AI to build a little edge AI gizmo with a camera (Texas Insturments SoC + 4 TOPS NPU in RPi 5 form factor)

https://docs.beagleboard.org/boards/beagley/ai/demos/using-e...
by ceejayoz | 2025-10-18 21:06:26+00:00
My cellular network (Google Fi / T-Mobile), as far as I can tell, has zero content blocking. Hotels used to officially put porn on the TVs via pay per view. I'm very skeptical that they widely block it.

I have high-school aged kids; they all trade techniques for getting precisely that "free access to a wild internet". It's a game of whack a mole, and school IT administrators are on the losing side.
by TZubiri | 2025-10-18 21:07:48+00:00
Yes. Note how I didn't say impossible to recover, just impossible to continue.

The execution couldn't continue in one path due to an error it needed to be caught in another path.

The difference with standard conditional mechanisms like if loops is mostly semantical. Exceptions are unforeseen errors, (technically they are sets of errors, which can have size 1, but the syntax is designed for catching groups of errors, if you want to react to a single error case you could also just use a condition with a return value and it ceases being an exception. )
by FloorEgg | 2025-10-18 21:08:10+00:00
From what I understand about history (which is just enough to know there's a lot I don't know), it seems that collective victim mentality leads to a rise in authoritarianism.

Also yes a hallmark of a victim mentality is a lack of empathy for others. One believes that no one else cares about them, so why should they care about anyone else?

It's tragic, but it keeps happening, so maybe it has some bigger picture purpose that's hard to see from an individual's perspective. Doesn't feel great to live through though, and it can get really dark...
by WJW | 2025-10-18 21:09:03+00:00
`puts` is just a method of the Kernel module: https://ruby-doc.org/3.4.1/Kernel.html#method-i-puts, just like `p` and many others. Kernel is included in the Object class that is the root of the class hierarchy, so its methods are available in every ruby object.

Mixins are just modules, which are objects, which you can call methods on. (Or rather, send messages to) You can easily verify this in irb calling a method on (for example) the Enumerable module:

irb(main):001> Enumerable.class => Module

You are right that a module is not a class, and it is not possible to call `.new` on it. But the module itself is very much an object.
by jjk166 | 2025-10-18 21:09:19+00:00
When was the last time your phone stopped working due mechanical PCB damage?

Typically the limiting factor on your phone is the screen breaking, your battery life getting too short, wear and tear on components like buttons or the charging port, and factory defects. Epoxy isn't going to help with any of those. The only thing it would help with is exposure to water, but if other parts of your phone like your screen aren't water proof, what's the point?

Epoxy adds weight and manufacturing cost. It introduces design challenges as you need to balance the thermal expansion of the various parts. It's an extra step that can go wrong, and makes repair of other defects far more difficult. What benefit is there for the typical consumer that outweighs these costs?
by godelski | 2025-10-18 21:10:46+00:00
> Understanding is not something that any machine or person does.

Yet I can write down many equations necessary to build and design that plane.

I can model the wind and air flow across the surface and design airfoils.

I can interpret the mathematical symbols into real physical meaning.

I can adapt these equations to novel settings or even fictitious ones.

I can analyze them counterfactually; not just making predictions but also telling you why those predictions are accurate, what their inaccuracies are (such as which variables and measurements are more precise), and I can tell you what all those things mean.

I can describe and derive the limits of the equations and models, discussing where they do and don't work. Including in the fictional settings.

I can do this at an emergent macroscopic level and I can do it at a fine grain molecular or even atomic level. I can even derive the emergent macroscopic behavior from the more fine grain analysis and tell you the limits of each model.

I can also respond that Bernoulli's equation is not an accurate description of why an airfoil works, even when prompted with those words[0].

These are characteristics that lead people to believe I understand the physics of fluid mechanics and flight. They correlate strongly with the ability to recall information from textbooks, but the actions aren't strictly the ability to recall and search over a memory database. Do these things prove that I understand? No, but we deal with what we got even if it is imperfect.

It is not just the ability to perform a task, it includes the ability to explain it. The more depth I am able to the greater understanding people attribute. While this correlates with task performance it is not the same. Even Ramanujan had to work hard to understand even if he was somehow able to divine great equations without it.

You're right that these descriptions are not the thing itself either. No one is claiming the map is the territory here. That's not the argument being made. Understanding the map is a very different thing than conflating the map and the territory. It is also a different thing than just being able to read it.

[0] https://x.com/BethMayBarnes/status/1953504663531388985
by Groxx | 2025-10-18 21:12:50+00:00
mostly Go, because that's at work. for a variety of reasons, I have helped troubleshoot at least 100+ teams' projects, many of which have had concurrency issues either obvious in nearby code, or causing issues (which is why I was helping troubleshoot). same with several dozen "help us find a way to speed up [this activity]" teams' work.

this is not at all a sample of high-quality, well-educated-about-concurrency code, but it does roughly match a lot of Business™ code and also most less-mature open source code I encounter (which is most open source code). it's just not something most people are fluent with.

these same people using LLMs have generally produced much worse concurrent code, regardless of the model or their prompting-sophistication or thinking-time, unless it's extremely trivial (then it's slightly better, because it's at least tutorial-level correct) (and yes, they should have just used one of many pre-existing libraries in these cases). doing anything except like "5 workers on this queue plz" consistently ends up with major correctness flaws - often it works well enough while everything is running smoothly, but under pressure or in error cases it falls apart extremely badly... which is true for most "how to write x currently" blog posts I run across too - they're over-simplified to the point of being unusable in practice (e.g. by ignoring error handing) and far too inflexible to safely change for slightly different needs.

honestly I think it's mostly due to two things: a lack of quality training material (some obviously exists, but it's overwhelmed by flawed stuff), and an extreme sensitivity to subtle flaws (much more so than normal code). so it's both bad at generalizing (not enough transitional examples between targets), and its general lack of ability to actually think introducing flaws that look like normal code that humans are less likely to notice (due to their own lack of experience).

this is not to claim it's not possible to use them to write good concurrent code, there are many counter-examples that show it is. but it's a particularly error-prone area in practice, especially in languages without much safer patterns or built-in verification.
by fragmede | 2025-10-18 21:13:07+00:00
I recently got a comma.ai. I really like it. I tell everyone I know to get one. But I'm embarrassed to talk about it on the open Internet because I don't want to be accused of being paid to say good things about them.

I haven't been angling for an opportunity, but the world of marketing to developers isn't the same as for, say, a new face cream.

Paying for a good review on a site that features reviews, eg Amazon or Yelp is one thing. Paying people to troll the Internet at large and make random comments on random sites or discord/etc just seems a bit much.

Then again, the appearance of money make people doubt people are sincere about other things. Specifically, my employer is an AI tech company means that anything pro-AI, even for a different company that's competing with mine, or in a totally different area than my employer's, is suspect.

Human psychology is weird
by phendrenad2 | 2025-10-18 21:13:23+00:00
I don't think the psychology here is one of British world supremacy. I think it's one of moral supremacy where liberals in power think that laws must be subservient to the "greater good". This is pretty common in modern politics actually. People don't understand that government must operate on rule of law, and laws have tradeoffs. A law that is useful to take down mafia might also be misused to take down protesters. As such making laws is much more complex than taking a moral stand. But people would rather morally grandstand than wade into this complexity.
by FloorEgg | 2025-10-18 21:13:41+00:00
I agree.

There's a truth of what happened, which as individuals we can only ever know to a limited scope... And then there is truth as a prediction ability (formula of gravity predicts how things fall).

Science is a way to build a shared truth, but as an individual we just need to experience an environment.

One way I've heard it broken down is between functional truths and absolute truths. So maybe we can attain functional truths and transfer those to LLMs through language, but absolute truth can never be attained only approached. (The only absolute truth is the universe itself, and anything else is just an approximation)
by pessimist | 2025-10-18 21:13:54+00:00
Underrated even among physicists. Among the immediate post war generation his contributions are up there with Feynman and Schwinger.

To quote Freeman Dyson: "Professor Yang is, after Einstein and Dirac, the preeminent stylist of the 20th century physics. From his early days as a student in China to his later years as the sage of Stony Brook, he has always been guided in his thinking by a love of exact analysis and formal mathematical beauty. This love led him to his most profound and original contribution to physics, the discovery with Robert Mills of non-Abelian gauge fields. With the passage of time, his discovery of non-Abelian gauge fields is gradually emerging as a greater and more important event than the spectacular discovery of parity non-conservation which earned him the Nobel Prize."
by numpy-thagoras | 2025-10-18 21:14:06+00:00
"- moderation

- spam, which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl

- good faith verification

- posting transparency"

And we have to think about how to hit these targets while:

- respecting individual sovereignty

- respecting privacy

- meeting any other obligations or responsibilities within reason

and of course, it must be EASY and dead simple to use.

It's doable, we've done far more impossible-seeming things just in the last 30 years, so it's just a matter of willpower now.
by IshKebab | 2025-10-18 21:16:03+00:00
Sure but nobody ever writes tests that are as comprehensive at checking the basic types of stuff as simply adding static type hints (which is very easy if you start with them).

How many times have you seen a NoneType error or a KeyError? It's probably the most common class of bugs in Python and there's an easy way to eliminate it. And as a nice side effect your code is way easier to understand, navigate and edit.

I still sometimes have to give up and use Any in Python, partly because half the Python community haven't realised their mistake yet. But that's fine. It's still way better.
Ask HN: What would an ideal matchmaking platform look like today?
by grandimam | 2025-10-18 21:17:30+00:00
Most dating and matchmaking apps still use the same model — profiles, photos, swipes, filters but human relationships and expectations have evolved a lot in the last decade.

If you were to design a matchmaking platform from scratch today, what would it look like?

How would you handle:

- Trust, authenticity, and privacy in an age of AI and deepfakes? - Cultural and regional diversity without stereotyping? - Real compatibility beyond surface-level traits? - Balancing data-driven matching with human intuition? - Building something that encourages long-term relationships, not just short-term engagement?

Curious to hear from people who think about product design, social systems, ethics, and human connection.
by dotancohen | 2025-10-18 21:17:57+00:00
Yes, I was using Mysql exclusively at the time. I don't recall which version.

I also tested this once years later when doing a Python app with sqlite. Similar result, but admittedly that was not a very big table to begin with.

I am meticulous with my database schemas, and periodically review my indexes and covering indexes. I'm no DBA, but I believe that the database is the only real value a codebase has, other than maybe a novel method here and there. So I put care into designing it properly and testing my assumptions.
by Argonaut998 | 2025-10-18 21:18:37+00:00
I am Irish, we are not an ethnostate whatsoever. Truthfully I don’t know why we have citizenship by descent but Irish people roll their eyes at Americans with Irish ancestry.

It’s not about ethnicity though, it’s familial lineage. If your grandfather was Bangladeshi and moved to Ireland and was a citizen, then his descendants moved to the US, they would be entitled to Irish citizenship.