MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by the_af | 2025-10-10 18:55:41+00:00
I think only very obscure articles can survive for that long, merely because not enough people care about them to watch/review them. The reliability of Wikipedia is inversely proportional to the obscurity of the subject, i.e. you should be relatively safe if it's a dry but popular topic (e.g. science), wary if it's a hot topic (politics, but they tend to have lots of eyeballs so truly outrageous falsehoods are unlikely), and simply not consider it reliable for obscure topics. And there will be outliers and exceptions, because this is the real world.

In this regard, it's no different than a print encyclopedia, except revisions come sooner.

It's not perfect and it does have biases, but again this seems to reflect societal biases (of those who speak English, are literate and have fluency with computers, and are "extremely online" to spend time editing Wikipedia). I've come to accept English Wikipedia's biases are not my own, and I mentally adjust for this in any article I read.

I think this is markedly different to LLMs and their training datasets. There, obscurity and hidden, unpredictable mechanisms are the rule, not the exception.

Edit: to be clear, I'm not arguing there are no controversies about Wikipedia. I know there are cliques that police the wiki and enforce their points of view, and use their knowledge of in-rules and collude to drive away dissenters. Oh well, such is the nature of human groups.
by jaggederest | 2025-10-10 18:55:49+00:00
By analogy, I'm reminded of a skit that we did in school:

A man, on his hands and knees, searching diligently for something on the ground.

Another man, walking by, stops to help search. After a few moments he asks "what are we searching for?"

The first man replies "My contact lens"

After a minute or two the second man, frustrated, asks "Where did you lose it?"

The first man replies "Way over there, but the light is better under this streetlamp."

Coding interviews kinda feel like that to me. We can't measure what's important, so we'd better measure what we can measure extremely rigorously.
by bitwize | 2025-10-10 18:55:56+00:00
I'd say worked examples and comprehensive references are mutually reinforcing kinds of documentation, meaning you want both. I know I've gotten big mad at JavaScript library/framework documentation that had a few examples but when I actually wanted to learn the API in full, a reference was sorely missing. It was all cutesy "all you have to do is call wango.mumble() with your endpoints and pass the returned object into garthok.narfle() and it will autowire calls from the front end to back-end routes and you can use the time you saved to play with your doggo! :3" tutorial-y stuff. Good for standing up a simple app, but when I had to characterize the framework's behavior somehow I was staring at the source.

PLEASE provide examples and PLEASE provide documentation of every API call's inputs, outputs, and effects.
by mooglevich | 2025-10-10 18:56:08+00:00
As a longtime loyal subscriber to Stratechery... I kinda agree. But as the other commenters did point out, this does reflect how the market seems to feel about OpenAI, at least. (Meta - I'm less sure of; Thompson does fawn over Meta quite a bit, I personally think it's too much and seems to not fully reflect reality, but man do they really cane it when you see their usage numbers, so maybe he's right.)

I did think his GPT-5 commentary was good, insofar as picking up the nuance of why it's actually better than the immediate reactions I, at least, saw in the headlines.

Where I do agree with you is how Stratechery's getting a little oversaturated. I'm happy Ben Thompson is building a mini media empire, but I might have liked it more when it was just a simple newsletter that I got in my inbox, rather than pods, YouTube videos, and expanding to include other tech/news doyens. Maybe I'm just a tech media hipster lol.
by zahlman | 2025-10-10 18:56:09+00:00
> every single app that uses a lot of keybind sequences could benefit from it, especially if it becomes a bit smarter and only shows a popup if you don't finish the sequence right away

Counterpoint: the sequence should only have an opportunity to be "unfinished" if there's actually a choice to make. Showing too many choices at once can be overwhelming and in the Vim environment there are usually a ton of choices. Consider for example if I input `n10` in editing mode; that could be followed by all kinds of repeatable actions and it could be followed by another digit of the count.
by sacado2 | 2025-10-10 18:56:26+00:00
> When mathematical notation evolves, old proofs do not become obsolete! There is no analogy to a "breaking change" in math.

I disagree. The development of non-euclidean geometry broke a lot of theorems that were used for centuries but failed to generalize. All of a sudden, parallels could reach each other.

> Can we write a family of nested programming languages where core features are guaranteed not to change in breaking ways, and you take on progressively more risk as you use features more to the "outside" of the language?

We could, the problem is everyone disagrees on what that core should be. Should it be memory-efficient? Fast? Secure? Simple? Easy to formally prove? Easy for beginners? Work on old architecture? Work on embedded architecture? Depending on who you ask and what your goals are, you'll pick a different set of core features, and thus a different notation for your core language.

That's the difference between math & programming languages. Everyone agrees on math's overall purpose. It's a tool to understand, formalise and reason about abstractions. And mathematical notation should make that easier.

That being said, the most serious candidate for your "core language guaranteed not to change and that you can build onto" would be ANSI C. It's been there more more than 35 years, is a standard, is virtually everywhere, you can even write a conforming compiler for a brand new architecture, even an embedded microchip very easily, and most of not all the popular languages nowadays are build on it (C++ of course, but also C#, java, javascript, python, go, php, perl, haskell, rust, all have a C base), and they all use a C FFI. I'm not sure ANSI C was the best thing that ever happened to our industry, though.
by tikhonj | 2025-10-10 18:56:35+00:00
It's used here as a specific term from Seeing like a State[1][2], which is one of those books that got popular with a specific set of online tech folks. "Legibitility" in that particular sense is a very useful concept with no other convenient word, so I'm not too surprised it caught on.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

[2]: available free to read online: https://files.libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-...
by 0x457 | 2025-10-10 18:56:40+00:00
Tutorial hell...if I had a dollar for every "Anyone has a tutorial on how to build X" where X is some very specific business idea.

I feel the same about "what books do you recommend reading to learn Y" Have you tried looking at the online documentation?

Usually see it from people that have formal CS education. They learned one way to learn things and refuse to adapt to real life.
by nosianu | 2025-10-10 18:57:02+00:00
The reason I have ignored all attempts from MS to get me to click on something Copilot related, or not click it away, is that I have no idea why I should click. I don't know what it will actually do for me.

I'm using AI for some coding here and there, and I'm using it replacing certain kinds of questions I would previously have googled. So I'm certainly not against using AI at all. (We have a ChatGPT subscription.)

But, as a MS 365 Global Admin for a small business (ca. 50 people), I know what most of the many part of the MS eco system do. I use at least a dozen of their various service sites and tools throughout the week. I know what Entra is and does, Exchange (Admin), Teams, Defender (security website, not the installed tool), I'm not even going to mention the well-known Office apps, Azure, SharePoint, etc.

But when they try to get me to use Copilot, I never know what it is supposed to do for me? It just says "Copilot", and? Yes I could read and check and test what it is about. Maybe I will, some day. For now, every one of the services that I as Unix person had to discover for myself over the last year I had a clear goal before I went there, and I knew why I wanted to use a particular service. That's not true for Copilot, and my general AI background knowledge even as at least daily casual AI user I have no idea what to expect. I'm just not motivated to go there and do all the work of motivating myself myself.

For me, the problem is they market "Copilot" and not a function I want. That is too broad and too vague. If they just used it as part of the regular workflows, like Google did when they introduced AI answers, I would already be using it.

Instead of relying on users desire to use specific functionality, they seem to think users want "AI", what for exactly is secondary. But I want functions first, and don't care how they implement it, as long as it works.

PS: Oh and of course I'm afraid that if I start using any Copilot related stuff I may accidentally add something to our company's monthly bill. Which I only do when I actually need something, e.g. a new Office 365 Business Standard license. I don't want to pay for something I don't feel any need for, since the existing tools are already far more than enough.
by notahacker | 2025-10-10 18:57:03+00:00
yeah, you're not interfering with anything flying the plane through the IFE system, and it won't be the same bandwidth they use for comms either (there might be some semi-sensitive passenger information stored on the in-flight server, but entirely different techniques would be needed to bypass whatever security that's wrapped in).

But "hacking" on an aircraft isn't going to be looked on particularly sympathetically by courts
by godelski | 2025-10-10 18:57:20+00:00
> people are irrational actors. We make incomprehensible choices all the time

Can you give an example?

I want to make it very clear to make sure we're on the same page. There is a difference between "incomprehensible" and "not understood." As an example of this difference, a neural network isn't a black box because we can't understand it, it is because we don't understand it. It's why in my examples I tried to make it very clear that the actions depended on what the actor thought would happen. Suicide cults like Wako are considered rational in this sense, even if from the outside it seems incomprehensible that someone thinking that killing themselves would beam them up into a spaceship disguised as a comet and the alien soul harvesters would reward them for doing so. The "rationality" is that __a__ logic exists, not that there is a good logic or even reasonable one.

> Even in keeping with your definition

Not *my* definition
by ericmcer | 2025-10-10 18:57:27+00:00
In the early 1900s a bunch of the big Russian works were translated to english. If you read about career translators competing to get the "best" ones you really get disenchanted with translated works.

As pieces on their own they are great, but how close are they to the original? Like some translations are garbage others are amazing so how much of the original spirit is intact.
by whitehexagon | 2025-10-10 18:57:41+00:00
I bought a decent 4k monitor to go with my 4k media box, and the required 4k cable, but wouldnt play because 'for your safety, blocked because not a TV' or some such nonsense, think it was HDCP? Annoying enough for me to cancel 4k paid tv, plus they were busy agressively reducing the broadcast bitrate. Also ended up with a load of bluray 4k discs I cant use, and they wonder why people download stuff.
by munk-a | 2025-10-10 18:57:42+00:00
> catching every exception and wrapping

Our company introduced Q into our review process and it is insane how aggressive Q is about introducing completely inane try catch blocks - often swallowing exceptions in a manner that prevents their proper logging. I can understand wanting to be explicit about exception bubbling and requiring patterns like `try { ... } catch (SpecificException e) { throw e; }` to force awareness of what exceptions may be bubbling up passed the current level but Q often just suggests catch blocks of `{ print e.message; }` which has never been a preferred approach anywhere I have worked.

Q in particular is pretty silly about exceptions in general - it's nice to hear this isn't just us experiencing that!
by stronglikedan | 2025-10-10 18:58:21+00:00
> Doesn't write a line of code when he comes home (at least according to him), basically severs himself from work as soon as he leaves work.

I'm truly curios what percentage of programmers do write code outside of work. I'd bet the actually percentage is pretty low, especially those who've been at it for five years or more. I don't know that I ever did, except when I first started.
by jstrieb | 2025-10-10 18:59:06+00:00
This project reminds me of Matt Might's work (predating LLMs) on using techniques from Precision Medicine to help his son, who had a rare disease.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt3XyeFHvt4 (poorly transcribed here: https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/algorithm-for-precisio...)

If I recall correctly, he used miniKanren along with formalized, structured data extracted from medical research. Unfortunately, his son has since passed away.
by sixo | 2025-10-10 18:59:24+00:00
Similar: for years I've been lugging around the idea of making a game like Civilization but where all of the different theories of history can be turned on/off as modules. Maybe going back to prehistory:

- did fire lead to cooking lead to big brains lead to tools lead to agriculture?

- or was it ice ages ending that lead to agriculture?

- or did oxygen levels change leading to more efficient brains?

- or were we Born to Run?

- or did women's hips change shapes to allow bigger brains?

- or perhaps 2001: A Space Odyssey occurred as written

- or Ancient Aliens...

Repeat for every other highly-debated period of history.

Somehow having all of these in the same modular system feels like it would metabolize them in a way that reading a bunch of separate theories can't really do. Same for OP's anatomy.
by exasperaited | 2025-10-10 18:59:52+00:00
It's almost certainly a) imaginary and b) performative. Like;

> After this, I know I will think twice about visiting the UK

Reallllyyy? Over a bit of porn blocking? Do we not think maybe this is just for show? What do they imagine is going to happen at the border -- their iPhone gets frisked for Page Three nudes?

More to the point, are they banning Texas? Indiana? Oklahoma? Georgia? North Dakota? France?

Or are they just hyperventilating about the latest thing from Britain? Perhaps they think unless Tommy Robinson saves us no-one can.
by TZubiri | 2025-10-10 19:00:13+00:00
I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think splicing the cable is necessary, you can capture broadcast packets and advertise as having a local ip address and capture the packets, whether in a LAN (a residence connected to the same router as the target.) or a WAN (Reading your neighbour's packets).

At least from a blue team perspective that's what I assume can happen. The power lines outside my home have the network cables all spliced together anyways, it's not like you'd have to make a new connection.
by quirino | 2025-10-10 19:00:14+00:00
The best thing to have happened to nvim in recent history is mini.nvim. It's a collection of plugins by echasnovski which satisfies many of your needs in a very consistent, very well documented way.

With nvim 0.12 (nightly) I've switched to vim.pack (built in plugin manager) and the only plugins I had to install are mini.nvim and lspconfig.
by unsnap_biceps | 2025-10-10 19:00:25+00:00
Yes, it sends the url to webfuse.com for the proxy test and to a ws21.webfuse.com host for a session data that also contains the url. They also open a web socket to ws21.webfuse.com that also contains the url.

Ooh, and to example-org-p.webfuse.com to actually fetch the content for the proxy.

It's totally a lie that URLs are processed client-side only.
by johnea | 2025-10-10 19:00:41+00:00
Personally, as someone who is primarily vegetarian, I agree with this prohibition.

I've found it very annoying for years when a veggie food shop calls it's products "veggie chicken nuggets" and the like.

Not only is it annoying that they use meat product names to market veggie products, but more importantly it also obscures the actual ingredients of the product.
by dartharva | 2025-10-10 19:02:17+00:00
From MIT's financials (https://facts.mit.edu/operating-financials/):

Operating Revenue: $5.07B, out of which - Federal funding (sponsored support): $2.30B

Operating Costs: $4.78B, out of which - Sponsored research expenditure: $2.10B

Additionally, they seem to have $24.57B worth of endowed funds and get gifts and pledges of net ~$0.6B every year.

Looks like they can wane off their dependence on federal funding if only they tried. They don't have to deal with idiot politicians.
by pmyteh | 2025-10-10 19:02:48+00:00
Carlisle is small (and not currently licensed for public use) - not an ideal place to drop a 737 if there's a choice. It's also not that far from Prestwick so may have had similar weather. Newcastle and Teesside are both on the East coast and likely to be affected by similar weather to Edinburgh given the storm coming in from the North East. The next closest will be Manchester or Leeds/Bradford, with Manchester being larger, closer to where passengers want to go (Glasgow) and further away from the storm.

There's precedent for this kind of situation to generate quite extensive investigations. An incident in 2017 where a flight from the Isle of Man to Belfast was unable to land in a storm, diverted back to the IOM, then landed in unsafe weather conditions because of insufficient fuel to divert again got a 48 page report[0], safety recommendations, and the airline being banned from the UK.

[0]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a82ede440f0b...
by tarasyarema | 2025-10-10 19:03:05+00:00
One of the things we used is this algorithm with retries from meta: https://engineering.fb.com/2020/12/10/developer-tools/probab...

If your challenge is flakiness, this should help initially. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of work in our engine, and a custom system to handle operations that goes beyond vanilla Playwright so running it locally would be quite challenging.
by mulmen | 2025-10-10 19:03:05+00:00
40kg of fuel per minute is a lot but airplanes carry a lot of people.

Web searches suggest a 737-800 gets about 0.5mpg at cruise. With 189 passengers in a one-class layout that’s 95mpg per passenger. With 162 in a two-class layout that’s 81mpg per passenger.

This is better than a single person in a car but four people in a Prius gets 50mpg * 4 = 200 mpg.
by tarasyarema | 2025-10-10 19:03:39+00:00
As I mentioned above, a playwright won’t make the cut for many of the serious test cases we’ve seen, you need a whole system that ensures your tests are run and improved immediately. We created this project in a way that supports on-premise deployments, but you’ll need to run the whole engine and eventually use some SLMs/LLMs at different stages.
by eikenberry | 2025-10-10 19:03:45+00:00
I switched from Neovim to Helix as my primary editor for around a year before switching back to Neovim. The way I'd describe the difference is that Helix is a text/code editor and Neovim is a toolkit to build a text/code editor. Helix is very simple and hits the 'just works' pretty well, but it's development is slow and w/o extensions it isn't flexible enough to handle every situation. Neovim can be a PITA to setup and maintain, but it's flexibility and power are very compelling. It also is semi-mainstream and gets a lot more support... eg. it has the only official, non-vscode, copilot plugin. I still use Helix as my backup editor (when I'm fixing issue with Neovim) and I look forward to it maturing a bit more and for the extension system to land and see where it goes after that.
by jvanderbot | 2025-10-10 19:04:00+00:00
Scrolling down the thread brings up statements about all environmental reviews, all satellite launches, and says that starlink is going to destroy humanity by ruining the atmosphere.

You're right that it's easy to mistake any statement like mine as being a blanket defense of Elon and dismissing valid criticisms, but this discussion as a whole has gone far afield of cement accelerators and chemical burns.
by alwa | 2025-10-10 19:04:07+00:00
James C Scott, a Yale political scientist with an interest in agrarian societies, wrote a book Seeing Like A State in 1998. He was interested in why state-scale, “scientific” and “rational” schemes often fail to improve the outcomes they nominally set out to address (and often make them worse).

The book traced a number of case studies supporting the notion that large enough systems of control require some degree of standardization to implement—for example, to tax stuff, you have to know how much stuff there is. Village life might tend to have advantages for human well-being, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get that result by sending out troops to force everybody out of their traditional structure and into village footprints.

If you’re tallying up a nation’s agricultural capacity, “Farmer John’s got a nice-sized patch that’s extra fertile but he’s lazy” doesn’t add as well as “corn, 5 acres, Grade B”.

In that way of thinking, complexity, nuance, or localized idiosyncrasies—where a lot of useful information lives, but outside of the standardized spec—essentially becomes invisible to the system. Even though it’s essential to the social phenomenon the system is setting out to regulate.

It’s illegible to the centralized governance mechanism, so it may as well not exist, as far as that mechanism is concerned. No National ID number? You’re not a person, go away.

Sean Goedecke recently wrote a blog [1] applying that idea to software companies, I imagine that’s where the resurgence is coming from in these parts :)

[0] https://files.libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-...

[1] https://www.seangoedecke.com/seeing-like-a-software-company/
by dleeftink | 2025-10-10 19:04:07+00:00
If you're looking for a 'click-through' experience, the JKU vis lab has long provided some awesome tools and visuals (ca. 2009) for interacting with the human genome[0][1].

[0]: https://jku-vds-lab.at/tools/

[1]: https://jku-vds-lab.at/publications/2009_bioinformatics_cale...
by CBLT | 2025-10-10 19:04:38+00:00
The former. I clone from file:// URIs.

I just have the file path to the inside of my LXC container. If you're using Docker you can just mount it. I only need the path twice (for clone, and for adding a git remote). After that I just use git to reference the remote for everything.

I probably don't have the perfect workflow here. Especially if you're spinning up/down Docker containers constantly. I'm basically performing a Torvalds role play, where I have lieutenant AI agents asking me to pull their trees.
by danslo | 2025-10-10 19:05:05+00:00
I tried to switch from neovim to helix for a couple weeks, but noted down the following things that were essential to me and not implemented yet:

- Code actions on save, for example adding Go imports: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/6486

- Fuzzy search with a filepicker like telescope+rg, seems to have been added earlier this year: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/11285

- Automatically updating buffers when the files on disk change (claude, templ, sqlc, etc): https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/1125

- File tree in browser, which has been rejected in favor of a plugin system which has not materialized yet: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/5768

There were a number of other things too, that I could have lived with. I guess I'll try again in a year or two.