MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mapt | 2025-10-27 20:56:06+00:00
The vast majority of people in business and science are using spreadsheets for complex algorithmic things they weren't really designed for, and we find a metric fuckton of errors in the sheets when you actually bother looking auditing them, mistakes which are not at all obvious without troubleshooting by... manually checking each and every cell & cell relation, peering through parentheses, following references. It's a nightmare to troubleshoot.

LLMs specialize in making up plausible things with a minimum of human effort, but their downside is that they're very good at making up plausible things which are covertly erroneous. It's a nightmare to troubleshoot.

There is already an abject inability to provision the labor to verify Excel reasoning when it's composed by humans.

I'm dead certain that Claude will be able to produce plausibly correct spreadsheets. How important is accuracy to you? How life-critical is the end result? What are your odds, with the current auditing workflow?

Okay! Now! Half of the users just got laid off because management thinks Claude is Good Enough. How about now?
by txrx0000 | 2025-10-27 20:56:10+00:00
The problem isn't connectivity provided by the Internet or the average number of friends. Those things are good on their own. The problem is centralized moderation in an infinitely connective environment (aka the Internet), which will create intellectually and ideologically homogenous groups that increase in size without limit.

For details see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45515980

The solution is to ban all server-side ranking, moderation, and filtering mechanisms and replace them with client-side-only solutions, at least for large platforms above a certain user count like X and YouTube. Same thing for search engines and chatbots.

Each person should be able to control what they can post and view online, but not what anyone else posts or views. The norms that we use to moderate physical public spaces must not be applied to online public spaces. Until we discard those norms, people will continue to become increasingly polarized, democracy will continue to decline worldwide, and violent conflicts will continue to increase in frequency and scale.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-10-27 20:56:13+00:00
A very long time ago I worked in an office building that had several suites of offices. One of them was a biotechnics company that did things like genetic analysis of farmed fish for selective breeding, massively commercially sensitive stuff. They had a "secure document store" built within their suite, with a thick door made of 19mm ply layers either side of a 6mm steel plate, welded to a full-length hinge, which was in turn welded to a 25mm steel tubing frame, with big long brackets bolted into the brick work of the exterior wall on one side and a steel beam on the other. One key in the possession of the CIO, one in the possession of the CEO. CEO was at a fish farm in Norway. CIO was in the office, getting paperwork out of the safe in the secure room, got a phone call, stepped out of the room to get a better signal, slam <CLICK> <KACHUNK> as six spring-loaded bolts about as thick as your thumb pegged the door shut.

Rude words.

Can't get a locksmith that can pick that particular Ingersoll lock. Can't get a replacement key because the certificate is in the room, and you'd have to drive down to England to get it. Can't jemmy the door open, it's too strong.

Wait.

There's a guy who parks an old Citroën in the car park, I bet he has tools, doesn't he work for that video company downstairs? Let's ask him.

So yeah it took about ten seconds to get in to the secure room. I cut a hatch through the plasterboard with a Stanley knife, recovered the keys, taped the plasterboard back in place, and - the time-consuming bit - positioned their office fridge so no-one could see it.

A swift appointment with an interior decorator was made by a certain C-level exec, and a day or two later there was a cooler with about 25kg of assorted kinds of salmon and a bottle of whisky left in my edit suite.
by cluckindan | 2025-10-27 20:56:32+00:00
”Each screen reader does things a bit differently, so testing real behavior is important.”

Correction: each screen reader + os + browser combo does things a bit differently, especially on multilanguage React sites. It is a full time job to test web sites on screen readers.

If only there was a tool that would comprehensively test all combos on all navigation styles (mouse, touch, tabbing, screen reader controls, sip and puff joysticks, chin joysticks, eye trackers, Braille terminals, etc)… but there isn’t one.
by consumer451 | 2025-10-27 20:56:40+00:00
I would do it for free, just to answer the question of what does a genius of his caliber have in his garage? Probably the same stuff most people do, but it would still be interesting.

I don’t think the point was about having a clean space, it was in response to a question along the lines of: when do you think we will achieve AGI?
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-10-27 20:56:47+00:00
I've been playing around with local LLMs in Ollama, just for fun. I have an RTX 4080 Super, a Ryzen 5950X with 32 threads, and 64 GB of system memory. A very good computer, but decidedly consumer-level hardware.

I have primarily been using the 120b gpt-oss model. It's definitely worse than Claude and GPT-5, but not by, like, an order of magnitude or anything. It's also clearly better than ChatGPT was when it first came out. Text generates a bit slowly, but it's perfectly usable.

So it doesn't seem so unreasonable to me that costs could come down in a few years?
by zkmon | 2025-10-27 20:57:25+00:00
I think it's just your way of looking at things.

What if a FCF (functional core function) calls another FCF which calls another FCF? Or do we do we rule out such calls?

Object Orientation is only a skin-deep thing and it boils down to functions with call stack. The functions, in turn, boil down to a sequenced list of statements with IF and GOTO here and there. All that boils boils down to machine instructions.

So, at function level, it's all a tree of calls all the way down. Not just two layers of crust and core.
by lawlessone | 2025-10-27 20:57:43+00:00
my poor understanding of it is that it's like a split tally stick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick#Split_tally

So what if you put each half of split tally stick in a box hidden from view then move them a light year apart and then open your box? You immediately know what's on other stick but you can't change it anyway.

and also the act of viewing the stick destroys it.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-27 20:57:49+00:00
>Who do you think is picking most of that food?

Your mistake is in believing that even if I answered this question with the answer you consider correct, that this would change my position.

>And if the wages for those jobs went up to an American living wage, what do you think would happen to the price of food even with a bit lower demand?

"I like to exploit immigrants and underpay them, because my out-of-season fruit will be too high for my smoothy frappucinos!" Silly things leftists say, haha.

>I know it's all too easy and comforting to throw out knee-jerk comments cheerleading for government power,

I'm not especially a big fan of government power. But I live in a country being held hostage by lunatic ideologues who think non-citizens should have the absolute right to live here, but only because they hope to stack the vote against their political opponents. So there's not really that many options left. Things will have to get far worse before they can get any better.
by throwaway106382 | 2025-10-27 20:57:58+00:00
> Canada announced Monday it is launching a 100% tariff on imports of Chinese-made electric vehicles, matching U.S. tariffs imposed over what Western governments say are China’s subsidies that give its industry an unfair advantage.

> The announcement came after encouragement by U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan during a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Cabinet ministers Sunday.

- AP News, August 26, 2024

https://apnews.com/article/canada-china-evs-tariffs-0cd68ba7...
by wonderwonder | 2025-10-27 20:58:25+00:00
Been working with Claude Code lately and been pretty impressed. If this works as well could be a nice add on. Its probably a smart market to enter as Excel is essentially everywhere.

Just like Claude Code allows 1 dev to potentially do the work of 2 or 3, I could see this allowing 1 accountant or operations person to do the work of 2 or 3. Financial savings but human cost
by tsumnia | 2025-10-27 20:58:41+00:00
"An information flow model for conflict and fission in small groups (1977)" by Wayne W. Zachary [https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3629752.pdf]

I know this paper isn't about social networks, but we know this, we knew it in the 70s. The only difference is that we continue to ignore and forget it.
by godelski | 2025-10-27 20:58:51+00:00
Exactly! Thanks for summing it up.

There needs to be some responsible entity that can discuss the decisions behind the code. Those decisions have tremendous business value[0]

[0] I stress because it's not just about "good coding". Maybe in a startup it only matters that "things work". But if you're running a stable business you care if your machine might break down at any moment. You don't want the MVP. The MVP is a program that doesn't want to be alive but you've forced into existence and it is barely hanging on
by atleastoptimal | 2025-10-27 20:59:01+00:00
>Study from 2016

Waymo hit 100 million driven miles in July so far without a death (in the US the death rate per 100 million miles in cars is 1.26). Likewise the crash rate is lower across the board

https://www.theavindustry.org/blog/waymo-reduces-crash-rates...

I assume that study based its assumptions on the limited testing performed so far on the extant self-driving cars of the day, which of course if you have only 10 test cars would take many decades, but at scale that isn't relevant anymore given Waymo's success.
by tptacek | 2025-10-27 20:59:30+00:00
This (2) case is, I think, mostly (maybe entirely) false. In every case I've read where this was claimed, the actual fact pattern was that the "victim" farmer wound up with unlicensed herbicide/pesticide-resistant crops that they then sprayed with herbicide or pesticide. If you plant unlicensed Roundup-Ready seeds and then spray the crop with Roundup, you know what you were doing.
by kstrauser | 2025-10-27 20:59:32+00:00
And that's fair and reasonable. Of course you can cut a hole in a door. Everyone capable of forming thoughts on the subject has seen someone use a saw at some point in their life. However, locks greatly exaggerate their abilities, to the point you can forgive someone for believing that they actually mean them.

I just now went to masterlock.com, clicked HOME & PERSONAL > View All Products, and picked the very first product[0]. It says:

> The 4-pin cylinder prevents picking and the dual locking levers provide resistance against prying and hammering.

The very first thing it says is that it prevents picking. To someone who isn't familiar with LPL, and who doesn't want to have someone pick their lock, this seems like a great product. It prevents picking! And it must, because otherwise it would be illegal to say that, right? But alas, it does not, in fact, prevent picking.

Compare that to a random product page for a household front door[1] that says "Steel security plate in the frame helps to resist forced entry" and "Reinforced lock area provides strength and security for door hardware", which indicates that this might be a strong door, but doesn't claim that it "prevents someone kicking it in". It helps to resist forced entry, but doesn't say that it prevents it.

[0]https://www.masterlock.com/products/product/130D

[1]https://www.homedepot.com/p/Masonite-36-in-x-80-in-Premium-6...
by SixFeetUp | 2025-10-27 21:00:05+00:00
Join IndyPy on Tues, Nov 4 at 7pm ET for a hybrid meetup on how Python turns chaos into clarity. From powerful data validation with Pydantic to building real-world AI agents that interact with internal systems, you’ll learn patterns to wrangle messy inputs, streamline logic, and build smarter, more resilient apps. Attend in person at SEP (16080 Westfield Blvd., Carmel, IN) or join remotely via Zoom. Free and open to all.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-10-27 21:00:14+00:00
You can pick up a wholly self-contained plasma cutter in Lidl or Hofer in their "cool tools week" for about £100 these days.

It wouldn't be beyond the wit of man to hook that up to a biggish inverter and 24V worth of deep cycle batteries on a small trolley, maybe a wheelie suitcase.

Always be red-teaming.
by tooltalk | 2025-10-27 21:00:22+00:00
It's really just China and these countries:

Republic of Armenia, Republic of Azerbaijan Republic of Belarus Georgia Kyrgyz Republic Republic of Moldova Russian Federation Republic of Tajikistan Turkmenistan Republic of Uzbekistan Socialist Republic of Vietnam

The term NME is a specific legal designation for anti-dumping cases. The list isn't static -- unlike China, Vietnam has made a lot of reforms and many speculate they will be removed before 2030.

No need to pretend that Chinese EV/battery companies can compete on their own without the gov't protection or "illegal" subsidies.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-27 21:00:23+00:00
I picked up and started practicing with Lishi lock tools, and I cannot recommend them enough. Pocket Tool Warehouse out of Texas has been good in my experience for sourcing them, no affiliation. Like an automatic transmission for lock picking.

https://www.classiclishi.com/about/lishi-history

https://www.originallishi.com/what-are-lishi-tools
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-27 21:01:04+00:00
>When someone is allegedly an il_legal_ immigrant, they are present but allegedly violating immigration _laws_.

That's ok. They can be pardoned for that crime, I do not with to see them prosecuted or incarcerated. Sending them home is enough.

>That is to say, such a person has been accused of a crime.

Nope. Just accused of being a non-citizen, which if it turns out to be true, is de facto proof that they do not have the right to reside within the United States. Citizenship = right to live here. Not all rights are fundamental, voting and residence belong only to citizens.
by alyxya | 2025-10-27 21:01:20+00:00
I think of technology as offering a sliding scale for how much assistance it can provide. Your words could be literally the keys you press, or you could use some tool that fixes punctuation and spelling, or something that fixes the grammar in your sentence, or rewrites sentences to be more concise and flow more smoothly, etc. If I used AI to rewrite a paragraph to better express my idea, I still consider it fundamentally my thoughts. I agree that it can get to the point where using AI doesn’t constitute my thoughts, but it’s very much a gray area.
by bloomingeek | 2025-10-27 21:01:54+00:00
I think the fraud is against the one who put up the "free potatoes" post. The people picking up the potatoes were innocent, just reacting to a great deal.

Here in the states, IMO, the last thing you ever want to do is go to trial with a jury of your peers. Too many close cases are decided by people who, even though they have the law explained to them, don't grasp the gravity/concept of what the authors of the laws meant. Then, years later, if there's a break in the case, the state could take a very long time to release you, if they ever do. And God help you if you're a minority!
by arscan | 2025-10-27 21:02:16+00:00
I think an important thing to note is the MCP client is a distinct thing from the ‘LLM’ architecturally, though many LLM providers also have MCP client implementations (via their chat ui or desktop / cli implementations).

In general, I’d say it’s not a good idea to pass bearer tokens to the LLM provider and keep that to the MCP client. But your client has to be interoperable with the MCP server at the auth level, which is flakey at the moment across the ecosystem of generic MCP clients and servers as noted.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-10-27 21:02:32+00:00
Thinking about this again, what I was arguing is that I think artists focusing too much on (soon-ish) positive feedback can very easily fall into a trap and forget to explore their own possibilities because of that.

It's kind of similar to NN model collapse maybe? But I didn't want to switch to this topic. I deleted my original answer to your comment, because the philosophical (theological?) aspect invites very broad discussion and I tend to engage with things like this.

What I wanted to say might be along these lines:

Of course feedback with and the listener (or more general, the audience) is also required for art. In art itself, there is a spectrum between focusing on the self and focusing on the audience-or even, more generally, the "other".

And both halves of the spectrum harbour potential for good and bad art, respectively. It is a common topic in all kinds of art critique as well: idiosyncrasy vs kitsch for example are not synonyms for innovation vs stagnation, unpleasant vs. pleasant, complex vs. simple, etc etc.

It is especially interesting in this context to consider how the cultural consensus on appreciation of certain styles always has shifted. Yet, however inevitable this feels, cultural line of ideas and tastes at least used to be somewhat arbitrary until globalization slowly started to take hold: there are different languages, different standard forms and tropes, even different musical scales among the world.
by taeric | 2025-10-27 21:02:34+00:00
Right, but even in those, you typically have the more imperative operations as the lower levels, no? Especially when you have things where the life cycle of what you are starting is longer than the life cycle of the code that you use to do it?

Consider your basic point of sale terminal. They get a payment token from your provider using the chip, but they don't resolve the transaction with your card/chip still inserted. I don't know any monad trick that would let that general flow appear in a static piece of the code?
by evil-olive | 2025-10-27 21:02:35+00:00
> Everybody wants the job to run four hours before the work day starts

recurring events like this - ones that take place relative to humans in a given location - are the most common snag related to "just use UTC everywhere" advice. but they're not actually in conflict at all. they just require an extra layer of indirection.

let's say this is a factory that starts early in the morning, 06:30 local time, because then "four hours before" falls into the window affected by DST.

"run at 02:30 local time" is what you want to avoid, because on the "spring forward" day, 02:30 simply does not exist. the clocks jump from 01:59:59 to 03:00:00. [0]

likewise, "run at 01:30 local time" is to be avoided, because on the "fall back", that occurs twice.

ideally, you want to think of the recurrence as being associated with a given location, and that recurrence generates individual events, which happen in UTC time.

for example, if the factory is in San Francisco, the recurrence might specify "once a day, at 02:30 SF time", which would generate a series of daily events in UTC time. during the summer those events are at 09:30Z, during the winter they're at 10:30Z.

you also want the scheduler to be smart enough to understand the "once a day" constraint - so that a "once a day, at 01:30 local time" task generates only one daily event, rather than two, even though 01:30 local time happens twice in the same day.

and then, because the individual events are all in UTC, and the system clock is as well, there's no ambiguity in the actual execution time of the event. the complexity of the recurrence is handled at a higher level.

if you want an even harder version of this problem, imagine a team in SF and a team in London, that have a Zoom meeting every Monday at 8am (SF) / 4pm (London). it's necessary for one of those locations to "own" the recurrence, because the UK does their time changes 1-3 weeks offset from the US [1], creating weeks where it isn't a straightforward 8 hour time difference.

0: https://www.timeanddate.com/time/change/usa

1: https://www.timeanddate.com/time/change/uk
by gruez | 2025-10-27 21:02:49+00:00
>The solution is to ban all server-side ranking, moderation, and filtering mechanisms and replace them with client-side-only solutions, at least for large platforms above a certain user count like X and YouTube. Same thing for search engines and chatbots.

This is such a HN response. A HN reader might think it's fun to spend a weekend on writing/testing a ranking algorithm, but not the average person. They're just going to use whatever the platform recommends.
by michaelt | 2025-10-27 21:02:55+00:00
Imagine if hypothetically a supplier offered very competitive - maybe even loss-making - prices when they had 25% of the market; then once they had 90% of the market and most of their competitors had gone out of business, they planned to raise prices substantially, make back the loss, and produce a big profit.

Isn't each customer's decision to buy (or not buy) from the loss-making supplier a tragedy-of-the-commons situation?
by atleastoptimal | 2025-10-27 21:02:58+00:00
Those features are all still essentially making normal cars more like self-driving cars by removing the human factors that lead to accidents.

> And taxis haven’t replaced all human drivers or solved traffic accidents.

That comparison is irrelevant. The point is that Waymos are superior to human drivers with respect to safety, thus they would also be superior to taxis in that dimension and would be a justifiable replacement. Also self-driving tech, if deployed in all cars, would offer benefits beyond taxis since the car belongs to the user of the tech itself.
by throw310822 | 2025-10-27 21:03:29+00:00
> when the topic comes out it's as they're basically stuck in a time loop.

Fellow Italian here. The whole country is stuck in a time loop. Have you noticed that even the crime pages of the newspapers are filled with articles about investigations on murders of twenty or thirty or even forty years ago? And that on tv, people debate furiously terrorist acts that took place almost 50 years ago- when they also don't get updates from eternally ongoing investigations and trials? In politics, the same reforms that were proposed at the beginning of the '90s are brought up by each new government, generating new controversy and division, until they're forgotten or, sometimes, rolled back by Italy's supreme court. These days there's even a debate going on about the opportunity of introducing sexual education in schools for 6-8 graders, when I remember we had it already in the late '80s.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-27 21:04:01+00:00
>It seems like at your school they didn't mention habeas corpus

Habeas doesn't apply... no one's trying to prosecute them for a crime. The juvenile confusion you're experiencing, where you believe deportation to be some sort of punishment for a crime, rather than merely the immediate remedy for someone who doesn't belong where they are, well it's bizarre.

If someone breaks into your home tonight, do you think the police can't remove them from the house until after the trial?
Movycat – A terminal movie player written in Zig
by codethief | 2025-10-27 21:04:11+00:00
I saw Mario (the author) at Zigtoberfest in Munich last Saturday where he gave a presentation on a whole stack of related projects implemented in Zig: A graphics library for the terminal (movy), movycat (video playback in the terminal), zig64 & zigreSID (emulators for Commodore 64's CPU and sound chip), and a reimplementation of a C64 video game (which I don't think he has published on GitHub yet). Anyway, I found his work incredible and thought he deserved some attention.

Update: Since writing this, Mario has uploaded the game, too: https://github.com/M64GitHub/1st-shot . I misunderstood, though: It doesn't seem to be a port of an actual C64 game.