MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tremon | 2025-10-17 15:30:57+00:00
This isn't a new insight. It's been well-documented for years that repeating known falsehoods is about declaring tribal allegiance, it's not about the content of the claims themselves.

A quick web search on fake news and tribalism reveals these earlier articles:

2017: https://fortune.com/2017/01/13/fake-news-tribalism/

2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/upshot/the-real-story-abo...

2023: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-xge0001374.pd...
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-17 15:31:28+00:00
I've definitely figured some things out about nuclear weapons and proliferation that I've never told anyone because of that doctrine. I met a real nuclear engineer at a conference and had dinner and he told me about how he was concerned that people would nick Np237 from a fuel reprocessing system to make nuclear weapons and I pointed out that it was OK to talk about that because I'd seen it in the literature.
by jmdeon | 2025-10-17 15:31:50+00:00
It sounds like you're conflating legal arguments with moral ones. You're saying animals lack rights so it's morally okay to enslave/make use of them?

I'd argue it's much baser than that. Animals have feelings and often feel very bad when kept in enslaved conditions. Since humans can understand the pain they inflict on enslaved animals, then it's wrong of us to continue enslaving them when we have alternatives that are just as healthy for us, if not more healthy.

I would also say your assumption that pigs do not comprehend their actions and cannot choose between alternatives is false.
by professorseth | 2025-10-17 15:32:45+00:00
You ask great questions.

I definitely have regrets about my time working at Amazon. Specifically, I wish that I had pushed back more about doing certain things.

Honestly, DRM wasn't even the worst. All the unnecessary user tracking was way worse, in my opinion.

Its impossible to know for sure, because I didn't push back as much as I should have, but I really think that "well if I hadn't, the next person would've" was absolutely true in this case (knowing what I know about all the other engineers that were in the department at the same time as me). I'm not saying the other engineers were bad people, a lot of them were lovely but they definitely had different convictions than I have.
by mjr00 | 2025-10-17 15:32:51+00:00
"It's actually really easy to set up Postgres with high availability and multi-region backups and pump logs to a central log source (which is also self-hosted)" is more or less equivalent to "it's actually really easy to set up Linux and use it as a desktop"

In fact I'd wager a lot more people have used Linux than set up a proper redundant SQL database
by belZaah | 2025-10-17 15:32:59+00:00
Back in 2000ish, a singular dude built a full-blown bank teller workplace app using IE4.0 proprietary features and client-side JS. Server communication was done by posting a form into a single-pixel frame and then looking for objects in the DOM of the returned html. It was fast, robust and scalable.

You have been conditioned to think frameworks are necessary. That’s not true. You can build anything without them and it would probably be better in many ways. Would you spend a ton of time? Yes. Would your code be harder to maintain? Yes. But it is absolutely doable and not as hard as you’d think
by dfxm12 | 2025-10-17 15:33:21+00:00
You need to be curious to fact check. Anyone can be curious. This is different from "being tall".

OK, if you're reading an (alleged) interview with an actress where she, a nonagenarian talks about her 40s, but it turns out she was in her 30s, gasp.

However, if someone in the news section, keeps calling several US cities a warzone, over and over again, with no evidence, ehh, the hardest part about fact checking this is overcoming any personal biases or prejudices you might have.
by undecisive | 2025-10-17 15:33:23+00:00
No, I agree. That said, I think a lot of that particular shift is down to a) increased individualism b) an emphasis on the healing power of personal boundaries and c) the rejection of unity as an overriding good.

People are far more happy to cling to the tribe they choose, and the tribe that has their back, over the tribe they were born to. Then, there are those who see that trend as dangerous to society (where, in many cases, society is really just a proxy for their own power or social status - ironically as viewed through their own chosen tribes more than the tribe they were born to)

That is to say, I don't think it's the political views that are splitting the families. Individuals have decided that care for each other should come secondary to those political views. I feel like there used to be a certain amount of care in the "sweeping under the rug" - it was the tribe against the world, it was protecting the family image as much as it was protecting the individual from society. These days, being a thing "in private" means being a thing alone, and that's no longer a compelling thought when external tribes are willing to embrace you.

Which probably applies to software tribes just as much as family ones.
by blehn | 2025-10-17 15:33:40+00:00
> There's no air traffic after all

No air traffic until their are drone deliveries. What will the sky look like when you take every _individual_ package from Door Dash, Uber Eats, Postmates, Instacart, Amazon, UPS, Fedex, DHL, etc etc etc and put them on _individual_ drones? Even if the logistics could be sorted out, I worry about the quality of life issues it poses for communities, especially with the amount of noise drones make.

NYC handles 3,000 flights a day; it handles 2,300,000 package deliveries a day.
by kqr | 2025-10-17 15:33:43+00:00
I forgot to say why it's a problem LLMs invent details: which details are implemented and which are left out is an important part of how the implementer of a text adventure communicates to the player what sort of interaction they should pay attention to and not. Text adventures are incredibly open games so the players need subtle hints on what they should focus exploration on.

This is an important part of designing a text adventure that LLMs just do not care about.
Show HN: Open SWE-grep for fast, high-precision code context
by SafeDusk | 2025-10-17 15:33:51+00:00
Starting an exploratory version of SWE-Grep[0] since it doesn't look like they will do it.

It is now just a simple RNN model with synthetically generated datasets.

Have a look and follow the progress at https://github.com/aperoc/op-grep!

[0]: https://cognition.ai/blog/swe-grep
by danaris | 2025-10-17 15:33:57+00:00
Personally, I would say that his first horseman—competition, or lack thereof—is likely at the root of all four of the major problems.

With more competition—with dozens or hundreds of companies competing on an even footing in a given space, rather than the handful of behemoths and scattering of also-rans we have today,

- No one or small group of them would have the money and clout needed to engage in regulatory capture the way the current big players have; at best they'd have to form a sector-wide lobbying organization, and then they'd need to all agree on priorities for it.

- There would be much more of a need for interoperability than today; imagine if there were 10 different mobile operating systems at roughly equal levels of market penetration, but 6 of them all used a common binary format, so apps were cross-compatible for them. Those 6 would get many more developers interested in making apps for them, since you'd only have to build once. That would translate into more users interested in those phones, etc, etc. Similarly, if there were 20 competing social networks, but 2/3 of them were all using something like atproto—you'd be able to sign up to one of those services, and still subscribe to updates from people on all the others, while the people on the non-interoperable services would only get to see posts from people on the same service.

- A larger number of companies in the space means that workers have more options, too, even apart from the extra (relative) power offered by the lack of regulatory capture. They're much more likely to be able to vote with their feet, and with companies competing for the best workers, wages and benefits would be better and union suppression would be much less common.

Naturally, there are other factors that affect all of these, but I've come to the conclusion over the past few years that the single change that would make the most difference in the world of work in this country would be real, robust, aggressive antitrust, with a goal of returning the balance of corporate vs labor power to something much closer to what it was in the years following WWII. (Not, of course, most other aspects of society—just that balance of power!)
by rickydroll | 2025-10-17 15:34:11+00:00
Your warranty should cover the battery swap. I know my Chevy Volt's warranty is 150,000 miles or 10 years. It may only be 100,000. The length of the warranty depends on whether you live in a CARB state.

If a dealer charges you between $10K to $12K for a swap out, that's the "fuck you for not buying a car that makes the dealership more money" price. Several third-party vendors refurbish and sell EV batteries for much less.

I know what you mean by not having a heat pump sucking. The Volt has resistive heating for wintertime, and it definitely drains the battery. I dress warm and use the seat heaters when I'm driving by myself.
by morshu9001 | 2025-10-17 15:34:25+00:00
It's been this way forever, and consistently that's been my annoyance with Apple. If I weren't a coder or hobbyist musician or filmmaker, there's no way I would've wanted a Mac in the 2000s because it failed its main job of running software. If I were grown up back then with a desk job, it's probably involve a Windows PC.

Web partially fixed this, but only by accident, because Apple isn't for the web. And if I cared at all about video games or were doing certain fields of work (maybe creative tools now that Apple even lost that hegemony), that'd take me off the Mac. Somehow the Mac 3P software scene is even worse now than in the PPC era. And Microsoft is now testing just how annoying Windows can be without people leaving, answer is a lot.

Apple is limiting their reach so much, for reasons I still can't rationalize. Some basic level of backwards compatibility or at least more stable APIs should be possible without sacrificing the good things. I've done some iPhone and Mac dev too, it sucks in every possible way, and I get why people trust it so little that they'd rather shoehorn a web app into a native shell.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-10-17 15:34:32+00:00
The other interesting thing about the article is just that the entire nature of fact checking, references and cross references, especially over time, requires physical documents.

References to electronically stored documents are about as ephemeral as it gets. And certainly the wayback machine which I would guess is running on donations and largesse, isn't going to cut it for document archival purposes.

It's ironic that we're entering an era where we can store massive amounts of scanned media on a scale we can hardly fathom with modern hard drive density technologies, and yet linking and referencing of that data over a substantive time frame is effectively impossible currently.

Combined with the loss in a sea of what used to just be noise but now is increasingly mendacious/ manipulative/ weaponized noise... And it feels like history itself is being consumed by a cacophony of data noise from the internet

I had this idea of a document DNS at one point when I was working on some records management system at a company, so that various important control documents could reference each other without being system, dependent, vendor dependent etc.

I suppose that is just DNS at some level, although it's probably much too granular for actual DNS servers.

It would provide a mechanism to audit and validate that a document is still properly electronically linked.

I have no idea how you do that one. Even the core domain names shift constantly due to corporate acquisitions and the like.
by dspillett | 2025-10-17 15:35:27+00:00
> the difference in how we see cats and pigs

Even before we bred much larger pigs, there was far more meat on them, and they were far easier to corral. It comes down to those efficiencies rather than any moralising about the intelligence and awareness of the animals.

As an animal lover, particularly cats, and active member of People Eating Tasty Animals, I don't have a problem with cultures that eat animals we consider pets, as I know the pigs and cows I eat are more intelligent than many are comfortable thinking. My concern is how the animals are treated before being food which comes down to the factory farming debate and similar: a life of torture before being eaten compared to a life of care before being eaten.
by lossolo | 2025-10-17 15:35:36+00:00
Most of them run Debian (some have Windows VMs running on those Debian machines), while a minority use Ubuntu. I reboot them once every few years when I upgrade the OS, kernel, or migrate to newer machine types.

I run most of the workloads in containers, but there are also some VMs (mostly Windows) and some workloads use Firecracker micro vms in containers. A small number of machines are rebooted more often because they occasionally need new kernel features, and their workloads aren't VM friendly, so they run on bare metal.
by berkes | 2025-10-17 15:35:42+00:00
But how can this "remote-grass-touching-arm" push the "smell" and "tactile" back to the user? Is there an open spec for this? It should certainly be P2P and E2E encrypted. Also "smells" should ensure not to use patented or proprietary names.

Maybe some CSmS, Cascading Smell Sheets? Or TFP, Tactile Feedback Protocol, the one that uses JWT and JSON over HTTP2 and websockets?
by saghm | 2025-10-17 15:35:43+00:00
Your addition also misses an important part where the only reason he was able to do that was because the servers were forcibly taken from the previous owners for the ostensible purpose of security, but the new regime forgot to change the passwords as part of that.

At this point, it's probable that any attempt to just list the pertinent events isn't going to end up being as neutral as one might hope because even the choice of what context to include or exclude is itself editorial. This is the same lesson people might learn in a high school history class, just applied to something much more recent.
Ask HN: Is it worth it to build projects from scratch or should I just use AI?
by numcap | 2025-10-17 15:35:46+00:00
I am a third year Software Engineering Student, is it still worth it to build projects from scratch or should I just use AI (claude, chatGPT, lovable, etc.) to build them for me? I have built plenty of Projects from scratch, trying to learn the ins and outs of languages and frameworks, but it seems like everyone and their mother uses AI to just build stuff for them. So is it still worth it to learn or should I just become a prompt engineer?
by kkukshtel | 2025-10-17 15:35:46+00:00
From one hand-pixeled isometric dev (https://store.steampowered.com/app/690370/Cantata/) to another, congrats!

People really discount the complexity of doing isometric — it's a surprisingly nuanced thing to implement, especially if you want inner-tile sorting/depth, tiles that occlude others, etc.

For sorting for me I ended up using geometry shaders with fixed layers to basically emit objects on top of each other and render everything in one pass. It makes things like the editor and runtime incredible fast, which looks like you did as well! Happy to see more games with this style, I think the look is unbeatable.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-17 15:35:58+00:00
In fairness, your teacher was absolutely correct and would have shamed themselves if they gave you the point for that one. What humanity considers to be music predates tonality and harmony entirely. There were thousands of years where humans satisfied themselves without the help of a tuning fork, carefully-constructed scales, sheet music notation or instruments of any kind. It is a fantasy that music doesn't exist until cultures find some sort of audible ley line to follow.

If you want to ascribe their reasoning to "proof by emotion" then you're welcome to make that logical leap, but instantially your teacher was asking you to think outside the anglobox here. You made an unlucky guess, but props to you for trying.
by rootusrootus | 2025-10-17 15:36:11+00:00
In this conversation I keep seeing comments about good newspapers. I'd be interested in seeing a more specific discussion that debates which newspapers qualify as good. Everyone has their own opinion, but maybe a consensus would emerge.

Is it as easy as NYT? Or Economist? Or is that still slop and ProPublica is the standard? But even then, something like ProPublica is great for investigative journalism but less useful as a general source of information.

I'm happy to pay for a good source of news. But finding something that doesn't just look good, but is in fact actually good, that's my problem.
by Mystery-Machine | 2025-10-17 15:36:45+00:00
First of all, thank you! It's unbelievable that you built the first version of `gem install` in a single night. It must have been an amazing feeling. I remember the drive when I was doing some hackathon with a few friends. It's the best feeling a software engineer can have.

When you left RubyGems and Bundler (let's call them "Projects") team, you handed over your authority to whoever was left and/or was added later. It doesn't matter in which order things happened. What matters is that Ruby Central _and the rest of the team_ were the stewards of Projects. The important part here being _and the rest of the team_. André had every right to keep being part of that team, and he was for a long time, together with many other team members, all of which were removed by "a representative from Ruby Central". What an inhuman way to remove someone from a Project. "Hire" someone to do the dirty job for you so you don't have to. The decisions in a team should be done by reaching a team consensus. Not by one actor. I believe it's for the better that André was removed from the team, but it shouldn't have been done like this. Ruby Central lost their trust in the eyes of many. They could've achieved the same goal in a much better way. How can I trust an organization with management of something if they failed to manage this whole situation? Claiming this is all in the name of security and then not even knowing how to properly remove access from someone. So much about security...
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-10-17 15:36:59+00:00
>With Zorin OS, your next computer can be the one you already own. It’s designed to be the perfect Windows replacement for everyday users, professionals, and everyone in between.

Sorry for sounding curt, but this is yet another flavor of the week distribution that claims it's the best choice for everyone. It's exactly what everyone has needed for decades.. There's nothing wrong with making yet another distro, but call it what it is: another shade of brown. It will not, ever, evolve itself beyond what hasn't already been delivered by the top distros. Users discard it when they're having issues and the next flavor of the week distribution is popular. Or the rug is pulled and the distro simply rots away. This is the defacto progression for Linux distros. It is nowhere close to a full replacement for everyone, let alone Windows 10.
Show HN: Searchable compression for JSON – ~99% page skip and sub-ms lookups
by kodomonocch1 | 2025-10-17 15:37:08+00:00
Problem JSON/NDJSON is everywhere in data platforms, but compression usually breaks searchability. You either keep queryable raw stores (high I/O/egress) or compress into gz/zstd blobs (cheap to store, painful to probe). The “cloud tax” shows up as wasted reads.

What I built (SEE — Semantic Entropy Encoding) A schema-aware, searchable compression codec for JSON that keeps exists/pos lookups fast while still compressing. Internals: structure-aware delta + dictionaries, a PageDir + mini-index to jump to relevant pages, and a tuned Bloom filter that skips ~99% of pages. AutoPage (131/262 KiB) balances seek vs throughput.

Benchmarks (apples-to-apples, FULL) - size ratio: str ≈ 0.168–0.170, combined ≈ 0.194–0.196 - Bloom density ≈ 0.30; skip: present ≈ 0.99, absent ≈ 0.992 - lookup (ms): present p50/p95/p99 ≈ 0.18/0.28/0.37; absent ≈ 1.16–1.88/1.36–2.11/1.58–2.41 Numbers are stable on a commodity desktop (i7-13700K/96GB/Windows).

Try it in 10 minutes (no build) 1) pip install see_proto 2) python samples/quick_demo.py It prints size ratios, Bloom density, skip %, and lookup p50/p95/p99 on a packaged sample.

Why not “just zstd”? We sometimes lose pure size vs zstd alone. The win is searchable compression: Bloom + PageDir avoids touching most pages, so selective probes pay less I/O/egress and finish faster. On large log scans this often wins on TCO even with similar raw ratios.

Link (README + quick demo + one-pager) https://github.com/kodomonocch1/see_proto
by kragen | 2025-10-17 15:37:13+00:00
But Ruby Core is not the same thing as Ruby Central, apparently? This blog post says, "To provide the community with long-term stability and continuity, the Ruby core team, led by Matz, has decided to assume stewardship of these projects from Ruby Central. We will continue their development in close collaboration with Ruby Central and the broader community." What, if anything, is the relationshp between Ruby Core and gem.coop?
by runjake | 2025-10-17 15:37:16+00:00
What you believe and what you can document are two separate things.

Per the concept of "innocent until proven guilty", there is no burden on Shopify to prove they didn't do what you believe. The burden is on you to provide evidence for the motivations behind their actions.

I personally doubt Tobi got Shopify to where it was by making rash decisions based on emotions and drama.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-10-17 15:37:25+00:00
> The BBC pulled that article/episode

Pulling after publishing isn't much better. The damage has already been done. The story has already been absorbed by viewers. The viewers are already spreading the thing they saw to each other. The information narrative has already been influenced.

It is blatant dereliction of responsibility to publish something in the first place without checking and relying on later outcry to go "oopsie daisies".
by tracker1 | 2025-10-17 15:37:44+00:00
As long as I can use a password manager for passwords... unfortunately, I have to login to the OS to get to the password manager itself.

I think there are plenty of other solutions, including 2fa, push notifications and likely more valuable than any of the previous mentioned bits would be to ensure that SSO works across an organization.

In general, simply requiring a minimum length of say 15 chars and the suggestion to use a phrase or sentence is enough. I've switched Bitwarden to the word generation option with capitals and numbers, which usually works, except when there's an arbitrarily small maximum length on the input field.

I switched because trying to type 20 random characters including special characters in under 20s (was a remote terminal limit on a VM I'd misconfigured and had no other way in) was pretty much impossible and had to run the reimage from scratch.
by ajross | 2025-10-17 15:37:51+00:00
> Cellular devices are an obvious application that needs dedicated spectrum allocation.

Not since the death of TDMA, it isn't. Mobile bands are regulated to be exclusive, but nothing about LTE or 5G requires exclusive access or the absence of interference. These devices step on each others toes all the time and (via the magic of OFDMA and other dark trickery) still receive their data just fine.

You could start up a transmitter right in the middle of Verizon's or TMO's exclusive band (ICE is doing so all the time at protest sites across the country!) and the phones wouldn't bat a proverbial eyelash.