MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skeledrew | 2025-10-28 03:53:58+00:00
Whether solution or not, fact is AI* is the most available entity for anyone who has sensitive issues they'd like to share. It's (relatively) cheap, doesn't judge, is always there when wanted/needed and can continue a conversation exactly where left off at any point.

* LLM would of course be technically more correct, but that term doesn't appeal to people seeking some level of intelligent interaction.
by edbaskerville | 2025-10-28 03:54:30+00:00
> One thing to keep in mind when using the connection pool: the connection pool needs the ability to track which connections are currently being used. To do this, the connection pool does not return Connection but ConnectionRef, a struct that derefs to Connection but contains some additional lifetime tracking.

> But Connection is Clone, so in principle there is nothing stopping you from cloning the wrapped connection and losing the lifetime tracking. Don't do this. If you work with connections from the pool, you should pass around either a ConnectionRef or a &Connection to make sure the underlying ConnectionRef stays alive.

Hmmm...

I'd like to see the incovenient API. Or maybe there's a bit more work that could be done to make it convenient? Is there an insurmountable problem that prevents completely hiding the underlying Connection?
by TheDong | 2025-10-28 03:56:11+00:00
"human communication is easy, just have an AI say 'buzz off' and the conversation partner and other strangers will always respond respectfully, I don't know why so many people complain about lack of spoons or other social issues".

Thanks doctor, you just solved my anxiety.

I broadly agree that having templates does lower the amount of human effort and emotional labor required, but trust me, it's not a silver bullet, even hitting someone with a template takes spoons.

I don't really care that CVEs in theory are apparently entirely without meaning and created for nonexistent bugs, we're talking about the reality of how they're perceived and used.

Like, I'm saying "Issuing garbage such that 100 people have to read it and then figure out what to do is bad, we should instead have a higher bar for the initial issuing part so 1 or 2 people have to actually read it, and 100 people can save some time. We should call out issuing garbage as bad behavior to hopefully reduce it in the future".

You're apparently disagreeing with that and saying "But reading is easy, and the thing is meaningless anyway so this real harm that actually happens is totally fine. We should keep issuing as much garbage as we can, the numbers don't mean anything. It's better to make a pile of garbage and stress the entire system such that no one values or trusts it than to add any amount of vetting or criticism over creating garbage"

idk, I guess we're probably actually on the same page and you're just arguing for arguing's sake because you think you can be a pedant and be technically correct about CVEs. Tell me if I got a wrong read there and you have a more concrete point I'm missing?
by grogenaut | 2025-10-28 03:56:34+00:00
if a cop has to have a specific piece of equipment to get the cars to move then it's always going to be a problem. The cops can move every other vehicile with a standard issue piece of equipment, aka their hands, and well yelling at people. If they have to get some magic QR gloves or placards to get waymos to move then that's going to be an issue.
Show HN: Big-AGI 2 – Spent a year obsessing over AI for thinking
by enricoros | 2025-10-28 03:57:53+00:00
Hey HN, Enrico here. Some of you might remember Big-AGI from early chat days. The response here pushed me to quit my job and go all-in. Spent the last year rebuilding it properly (mostly hand-written) instead of shipping fast.

This is the tool I couldn't find: the AI you use to decide what to build, and why, before going to Claude Code or Cursor.

Even though the hype is on AI that 'does' things through heavy prompted experiences, I believe there's a strong need for AI that helps you "think" broader. How? with multiple models in parallel so you can spot hallucinations and lies, and so you can explore the solution space faster. And also with human bandwidth optimization: UI/UX is way underdeveloped for the "wall of text" phenomenon and hardly optimized for your I/O bandwidth besides voice input. And designed to short the generation/verification loop.

So Big-AGI 2 is now out, to be the fastest chat with a madly optimized UI, be local-first (app soon) because we don't like to wait 150ms/click. With Personas support because memories and data shall be with a relatable entity. If the cost of mistakes is very high for your work - wrong arch decisions, debt-inducing bad tech choices, bling spots - do yourself a favor, and try it.

Anyone can Free/unlimited at big-agi.com, or self-host from github.com/enricoros/big-agi (sync is Pro only, $11/mo).

Worth building a thinking tool while everyone builds doing tools? Worth bootstrapping rather than VC-lubing? Genuinely curious.
by Retric | 2025-10-28 03:58:42+00:00
The intended workflow of TDD is to write a set of tests before some code. The only reason that makes sense conceptually is to prevent possible future bugs from going undetected.

Put another way if your TDD always pass then there’s no point in writing them, and there’s no known bugs before you have any code. So discovering future bugs that didn’t exist when you’re writing those tests is the point.
by ggm | 2025-10-28 03:59:07+00:00
Ideation (as I understand it) crosses the barrier from a hypothetical to the possibility being entertained.

I have also been told by people in the mental health sector that an awful lot of suicide is impulse. It's why they say the element of human connection which is behind the homily of asking "RU ok" is effective: it breaks the moment. It's hokey, and it's massively oversold but for people in isolation, simply being engaged with can be enough to prevent a tendency to act, which was on the brink.
by blindriver | 2025-10-28 03:59:10+00:00
On a side note, I think once we start to deal with global scale, we need to change what “rare” actually means.

0.15% is not rare when we are talking about global scale. 1 million people talking about suicide a week is not rare. It is common. We have to stop thinking about common being a number on the scale of 100%. We need to start thinking in terms of P99995 not P99 especially when it comes to people and illnesses or afflictions both physical and mental.
by Demiurge | 2025-10-28 03:59:29+00:00
Is it better or worse than alternatives? Where else would a suicidal person turn, a forum with other suicidal people? Dry Wikipedia stats on suicide? Perhaps friends? Knowing how ChatGPT replies to me, I’d have a lot of trouble getting negativity influenced by it, any more than by yellow pages. Yeah, it used to try more to be your friend but GPT5 seems pretty neutral and distant.
by sarchertech | 2025-10-28 03:59:38+00:00
AI has a hard time working with code that humans would consider hard to maintain and hard to extend.

If you give AI a set of tests to pass and turn it loose with no oversight, it will happily spit out 500k LOC when 500 would do. And then it will have a very hard time when you ask it to add some functionality.

AI routinely writes code that is beyond its ability to maintain and extend. It can’t just one shot large code bases either, so any attempt to “regenerate the code” is going to run into these same issues.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-28 04:00:23+00:00
The DOI links aren't working so I can't read the study but I think there's a simple explanation, that also belies the headline. It may be that the typical number of close friends is now 0. But as people no longer even have any concept of close friendships, they're considering 'lesser' relationships as close friendships, because it's all they know.

This is made even more likely if they didn't define the term and allowed 'online friends' to be counted as 'close friends.' And I strongly suspect this may be the case since the graph shows a major inflection point in the increase of friends being 2007, the exact year when Facebook started becoming massive.
by ggm | 2025-10-28 04:01:13+00:00
I think VAD needs to be considered outside suicide. Not that the concepts don't overlap, but one is about a considered legal process, the other (as I have said in another comment) is often an impulsive act and usually wouldn't have been countenanced under VAD. Feeling suicidal isn't a thing which makes VAD more likely, because feeling suicidal doesn't mean the same thing as "want to consider euthanasia" much as manslaughter and murder don't mean the same thing, even though somebody winds up dead.
by Yhippa | 2025-10-28 04:02:10+00:00
This is random, but if you're ever in the Corning area, do check out the Corning Museum of Glass. They did a really great job of blending an experience of history, art, creation, and science in there. The history of glass areas in particular made me really emotional seeing art expressed in this way. The fact that something so old was made it this far through time.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-10-28 04:02:58+00:00
I attended DEF-CON during the early 2010s, and watched General Alexander (then-director of a three-letter agency) redefine definitions of words and phrases, in a still-then pre-Snowden world.

The most memorable thing from that talk was the given definition of "intercepted communication," which to their definition simply meant that a HUMAN agent had catalogued some piece of information.

The official story I was told, still pre-Snowden — while working a contract electrician gig for a state three-letter agency data center — was that it would simply be impossible to retain that much data [and I would then walk in to 100k-sqft+ floor with petabytes of storage].

In those days metadata was among the fancier data-gathering tools (ahh... simpler times!), and now we have machines which effectively think/schizoid-out on infinite amounts of data —— all non-human [so therefore non-intercepted] data.

Add me to this list, too, clanker.

Happy surfing.
by scuff3d | 2025-10-28 04:04:00+00:00
It's been a while since I read it, but I remember him saying something about the more natural (my word not his) approach being a single data structure that you would pass through both components, but he didn't want to do that because Java doesnt really encourage that kind of design, and you have a bunch of boilerplate for each class. It just struck me as an odd choice since the book was more about compiler/interpreter fundamentals, and I feel like the visitor pattern is a bit in the weeds in terms of OOP design.

I wonder if he wrote today if he would have used a Record and done the more straightforward implementation.
by normie3000 | 2025-10-28 04:04:12+00:00
How do CVEs get issued? Where do I apply, who makes decisions, and what software is covered by them?

I know these questions are technically answered out there on the internet. But I looked into it a couple of years ago after finding a horrible bug in a popular npm package and the answers weren't clear to me.

Can a CVE be issued in retrospect?
by ggm | 2025-10-28 04:04:20+00:00
I have long believed that if you are the editor of a blog, you incur obligations by right of publishing other people's statements. You may not like this, but it's what I believe. In some economies, the law even said it. You can incur legal obligations.

I now begin to believe if you put a ChatGPT online, and observe people are using it like this, you have incurred obligations. And, in due course the law will clarify what they are. If (for instance) your GPT can construct a statistically valid position the respondent is engaged in CSAM or acts of violence, where are the limits to liability for the hoster, the software owner, the software authors, the people who constructed the model...
by jongjong | 2025-10-28 04:05:01+00:00
If I had the mental capacity and time to write it in assembly, then that would be better. But then probably still not worth it due to added maintenance challenges. I guess it's really about mental capacity and time.

The difference in the amount of value provided by a JS engine abstracting away from binary code vs TS transpiling to JavaScript is massive. The TS transpiler's value is extremely marginal by comparison, especially when considering the amount of trouble it brings.

Also, I'm familiar enough with the V8 engine and other ECMAScript-compliant engines that I have a good sense of how my code is being executed on there. I don't have to worry about TypeScript dropping support for a specific configuration setting in tsconfig and then having to spend hours trying to figure out why my code isn't working anymore.
by elevation | 2025-10-28 04:05:04+00:00
I always assumed Signal favored AWS because AWS is valuable to a lot of foreign entities that might just as well block all signal.org and any IP network advertised by its ASN.

The advantage of bundling your service in a hyper scaler is in persuading censors that they’d rather tolerate Signal than lose AWS. This doesn’t work in China which has sophisticated alternatives, but it can help Signal hold on in other countries.
by Yhippa | 2025-10-28 04:05:51+00:00
I remember talking about this with a friend a long time ago. Basically, you'd write up tests and there was a magic engine that would generate code that would self-assemble and pass tests. There was no guarantee that the code would look good or be efficient--just that it passed the tests.

We had no clue that this could actually happen one day in the form of gen AI. I want to agree with you just to prove that I was right!

This is going to bring up a huge issue though: nailing requirements. Because of the nature of this, you're going to have to spec out everything in great detail to avoid edge cases. At that point, will the juice be worth the squeeze? Maybe. It feels like good businesses are thorough with those kinds of requirements.
by btilly | 2025-10-28 04:07:21+00:00
I think that you will find a lot of strong opinions, and not a lot of hard data. Certainly any approach can work out poorly. For example antidepressants come with warnings about suicide risk. The reason is that they can enable people to take action on their suicidal feelings, before their suicidal feelings are fixed by the treatment.

I know that many teens turn to social media. My strong opinions against that show up in other comments...
by funkaster | 2025-10-28 04:09:11+00:00
I just shipped Schematra 0.4 with some updates based on some usage and feedback.

Testing ergonomics: Went from 15+ lines of boilerplate to a one-liner by introducing structural testing. Routes can now return S-expressions (chiccup) instead of rendered HTML, so you test against data structures, not string parsing.

;; Assert against structure, not HTML strings (test "returns greeting" '(ccup [h1 "Hello"]) (test-route-body app 'GET "/hello"))

Structural middleware: Since routes return S-expressions and rendering happens at the framework boundary, middleware can inspect and transform the DOM structure before it becomes HTML. Want to inject CSRF tokens into every form? It's just an S-expression transform with sxml-transforms. No template engine plugins needed. (see the post for a complete example)

Performance notes: I benchmarked chiccup rendering at 145k ops/sec average (339k for simple elements, 2k for 50-row tables). Even worst case is 0.5ms - way below database/network latency, so no caching layer needed, at least not for now.

What's next: Besides the Redis-backed job queue and rqlite-based ORM mentioned in the full post, I'm working on improving route handling with automatic path parameter extraction:

(get "/posts/:id/comments" ;; :id automatically becomes a local variable (display id)) ; just works, no (alist-ref 'id params) needed

Schematra is a Sinatra-inspired web framework for CHICKEN Scheme. Still pre-1.0, API is evolving based on real-world use.

Full post: https://schematra.com/blog/whats-new-in-schematra-0-4

Source: https://github.com/schematra/schematra

Benchmarks: https://github.com/schematra/schematra/tree/main/benchmarks
by zeroq | 2025-10-28 04:11:40+00:00
When Karpathy wrote Software 2.0 I was super excited.

I naively believed that we'll start building black boxes based on requirements, sets of inputs and outputs, and sudden changes of heart from stakeholders that often happen on a daily basis for many of us and mandates almost complete reimagination of project architecture will simply need another pass of training with new parameters.

Instead the mainstream is pushing hard reality where we mass produce a ton of code until it starts to work within guard rails.

Does it really work? Is it maintainable? Get out of here. We're moving at 200mph.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-28 04:12:51+00:00
I think you left out the biggest one (though I suppose #3 indirectly hits on this). Social media, and increasingly even online media in general, tends to heavily misrepresent 'the other side.' In the past relationships were formed primarily in person so you actually got see what 'the other side' was like. Now a days people instead depend on completely inaccurate stereotypes that are far more like cartoon caricatures than real people. See: the perception gap. [1]

So people simply don't understand 'the other side', but ironically think they do - which is a rather toxic combination. For instance the more news somebody follows, the less accurate their assessments of 'the other side.'

[1] - https://perceptiongap.us/
by binary132 | 2025-10-28 04:14:11+00:00
Definitely also guilty of overworking and pushing myself as hard as possible until I suddenly hit a health wall and had to rethink my strategy. I count myself among the blessed to mostly be on the other side of it a couple of years later, but not everyone is so lucky. When you’re a little younger and you haven’t hit any walls yet, it feels like nothing can stop you, but in hindsight those are the years to be investing in fitness for the long haul, when so many of us are burning midnight oil that we don’t realize we’re running out of. Self-discipline has to include a holistic development and ongoing maintenance of health, not just squeezing every last drop of work from yourself. Health is wealth.
by golergka | 2025-10-28 04:15:24+00:00
ChatGPT/Claude can be absolutely brilliant in supportive, every day therapy, in my experience. BUT there are few caveats: I'm in therapy for a long time already (500+ hours), I don't trust it with important judgements or advice that goes counter to what I or my therapists think, and I also give Claude access to my diary with MCP, which makes it much better at figuring the context of what I'm talking about.

Also, please keep in mind "supportive, every day". It's talking through stuff that I already know about, not seeking some new insights and revelations. Just shooting the shit with an entity which is booted with well defined ideas from you, your real human therapist and can give you very predictable, just common sense reactions that can still help when it's 2am and you have nobody to talk to, and all of your friends have already heard this exact talk about these exact problems 10 times already.
by jchw | 2025-10-28 04:17:01+00:00
> Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a male manager to sexual harassment.

Obviously, it is not fair to discredit all DEI initiatives simply because some of them (possibly a small minority of them) have lead to illegal hiring practices, but it is nonetheless an issue that it happens. That's obviously still true even if it seems entirely antithetical to the point of said initiatives. How much of an issue it really is we can only really postulate, though.

Personally, I feel the existence of illegal discrimination in service of improving diversity numbers felt like it was treated as an open secret for almost as long as I've been working in tech. I honestly figured it was mostly an urban myth, but it does seem to be a recurring problem that needs addressing.

(I also was somewhat skeptical of police ticket quotas being prevalent, as they are routinely brought up in every day conversation despite being illegal in most jurisdictions I've been, but that also turned out to be largely accurate. Color me surprised.)
by yodelshady | 2025-10-28 04:17:36+00:00
They're absolutely dual use, which is why the greens have always been against them.

But that's like trying to prevent cow rearing by outlawing mince. You don't rear a cow for mince, you rear it for steak. The customer will pay for steak pretty much whatever.

My country just had ~180 GWh of lost load from wind, in winter. That's not even a 1-in-5 event, that's a multiple-times-per-year event, and it's billions in cost to the economy. Industry is dead, I've personally seen steel orders go to China because even if renewables were free we could't handle delivery estimates of "lol idk", and nor can anyone else. I just can't comprehend the levels of denial around this, as if my and literally everyone with industrial experience is irrelevant. Data centres want SMRs and that's the easiest, most trivial task to time-shift around I can imagine. Electricity that is not reliable is not the same product, it is not even a comparable product, in no other field would it be treated as such, and if you can't provide an actual monetary estimate for turning it into a reliable product, not just "iT's gEtTiNg cHeApEr BRO", you should not be in this conversation.
by lisbbb | 2025-10-28 04:19:00+00:00
Good God! My wife got cancer last year and I managed to stay on a very stressful contract gig until the end of the year, but after that I realized how burnt out I was and how much I needed to just focus on her recovery, which was going to take way longer than the FMLA-allotted 12 weeks and so I had to swallow a lot my pride and just quit and focus no caregiving. It's now almost a year since the stem cell transplant and there have been a lot of ups and downs, including 2-3 hospitalizations, but right now she's doing fairly decent. It's just that my career is wrecked. Part of me doesn't even care because I've been doing tech stuff for about 30 years, it's just hard to give it all up suddenly.

My advice to this gentleman is to just stop doing all that stuff, enjoy the family, keep jogging, and let the world turn. It's what I have have had to learn to do. I even went to a few therapy sessions recently, but it didn't help me that much even though I'm trying to give it a chance. It's because I was always all about the mission--the next project, the next all night troubleshooting session, whatever the challenge was, and sitting still doesn't suit me, but I'm learning.
by brainless | 2025-10-28 04:19:08+00:00
This is not suprising at all. Having gone through therapy a few years back, I would have had a chat with LLMs if I was in a poor mental health situation. There is no other system that is available at scale, 24x7 on my phone.

A chat like this is not a solution though, it is an indicator that our societies have issues is large parts of our population that we are unable to deal with. We are not helping enough people. Topics like mental health are still difficult to discuss in many places. Getting help is much harder.

I do not know what OpenAI and other companies will do about it and I do not expect them to jump in to solve such a complex social issue. But perhaps this inspires other founders who may want to build a company to tackle this at scale. Focusing on help, not profits. This is not easy, but some folks will take such challenges. I choose to believe that.
by nake13 | 2025-10-28 04:20:01+00:00
If you’ve tried OpenAI’s Deep Research or similar tools, you’ll know they pull far more info than Wikipedia. But if you’re an expert, you’ll quickly spot errors since the breadth is huge but the depth and accuracy are only so-so.

For non-experts just exploring new topics, it’s still perfectly useful. Grokipedia probably uses a similar search, verify, summarize workflow, so it naturally inherits mistakes from the internet, which isn’t really an LLM problem.

Grok is just the first to make it public, and other AI companies could easily build their own synthetic data Wikipedias, and some probably already have.