MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by porridgeraisin | 2025-10-01 07:02:09+00:00
Yeah, I too feel that anything that's TV news should be left out of HN. I mean, as an outsider (to us politics), I didn't see a whack of difference between standard twitter/instagram slop and what was on HN, for something like say, recent US elections. It was just slop here too. Not to mention most comments just quoting tweets, making most threads "RSS for twitter".

I feel like enforcing the TV news rule better is probably the best bang for the buck.

This doesn't mean all government related stuff, for example, chatcontrol is kind of tech-relevant, so makes sense to talk about it. But really? did we need to discuss charlie kirk here, or gaza/ukraine/pahalgam/what have you? Multiple times too.
by komali2 | 2025-10-01 07:04:58+00:00
> The root cause of this Microsoft vulnerability wasn’t poor coding or lack of testing. It also isn’t correct to say that it’s the need to trust Microsoft. It’s more accurately what we’re trusting Microsoft with — Authority.

> As long as someone or something holds it, it can be exploited.

Wide distribution, as opposed to centralization, seems to be the most reliable way to ensure continuity. Am I wrong in seeing this pattern in so many different areas? The distributed animal survives ecological or geological collapse in one region, the distributed activist group survives fed infiltration into one entity, the distributed army holds off the centralized one (with infinitely better funding and weaponry) for decades, the distributed political power survives demagogue takeover.

I might be abstracting way too far here, but it makes me wonder why we keep trying to centralize authority, when it keeps failing spectacularly.
by smartmic | 2025-10-01 07:05:02+00:00
Concerning Fred Brooks "No Silver Bullet", I disagree on this conclusion:

> Modern AI has thrown a wrench into Brooks’ theory, as it actually does reduce essential complexity. You can hand AI an incomplete or contradictory specification, and the AI will fill in the gaps by cribbing from similar specifications.

The essential part is still not adequately covered by Generative AI, and probably never will be. Here is my detailed write-up about it: https://smartmic.bearblog.dev/no-ai-silver-bullet/
by hatmatrix | 2025-10-01 07:06:04+00:00
In this debate there seems to be a pervasive impulse to point out "that specific problem doesn't exist anymore," and to their credit the developers are generally good at responding to serious problems.

However, the spirit of the original post was about the lack of safeguards and cohesive direction by the community to find ways to preempt such errors. It's not an easy problem to solve since Julia's composability and flexibility adds complexity not encountered in other languages. The current solution is, 'users beware', while there are a few people working on ways to enforce correct composability. I think it's best to acknowledge that this is an ongoing issue and that it's not a problem anymore because the specific ones pointed out are fixed.
by EdSchouten | 2025-10-01 07:06:55+00:00
Yeah, GEAR hashing is simple enough that I haven't considered using anything else.

Regarding the RNG used to seed the GEAR table: I don't think it actually makes that much of a difference. You only use it once to generate 2 KB of data (256 64-bit constants). My suspicion is that using some nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers (e.g., the first 2048 binary digits of π) would work as well.
by yakshaving_jgt | 2025-10-01 07:07:13+00:00
> By that logic, any government funded public defender is the taxpayer condoning murder, robbery, etc.

No it isn't. We all have to pay our taxes. PETA didn't have to pay Rod Coronado.

> I would argue you have this talking point because of a concerted media effort to brand things as "Eco-Terrorism"

They firebombed research facilities to effect ideological change.

This is the textbook definition of terrorism.

> In which scenario are you more surprised? In which scenario were you given the most choice about how you can interact with the group; apply your own standards of behavior or what to expect?

The problem is the very obvious Motte-and-bailey fallacy that you're falling for here, as so many people do.

You brought up NixOS earlier. I like NixOS. I fund some of the development. I attend some of the conferences and meetups.

Any reasonable person in the community would be against violence, I'm sure you'll agree. The last time I attended a NixOS conference, I saw many attendees with… Actually you know what, I've written about this before. You can read it if you wish, and you might then understand where I'm coming from.

https://jezenthomas.com/2024/11/I-feel-unsafe/
by kelnos | 2025-10-01 07:07:57+00:00
It feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy, though. If you go into a new job, full of cynicism, doing the bare minimum (or less), acting like everyone there is out to get you, then you shouldn't be surprised when you're the first to go when layoffs happen (or sooner, even).

Yes, the labor market has changed, and in many ways not for the better. But layoffs are not new. I remember my dad being afraid of them back when I was a teenager in the 90s. I remember him getting hit by one of them, even, and scrambling to figure out what to do (fortunately he was re-hired by the same company, in a different group). I survived layoffs in the three following decades; yes, the most recent waves were brutal, but I wouldn't say they were anything special compared to, say, ~20 years ago.

You can recognize a company for what it is (a capitalist organization that cares more about next quarter's numbers than whether or not you still have a job), but also be a positive, professional person, who goes in and does good work every day, gets along with coworkers and managers, and doesn't play games. You can be realistic without being a toxic cynic.
Show HN: A new version of the complex pattern discovery tool is now available
by chernishev | 2025-10-01 07:08:35+00:00
Desbordante, an open-source, high-performance data profiler designed to discover and validate complex patterns in data, has released version 2.4.0. This update introduces several key features, including support for validation tasks for four different patterns and a discovery task for graph functional dependencies. Additionally, it includes serialization of the identified patterns and provides Colab notebooks with examples, allowing users to quickly familiarize themselves with the profiler and select the most suitable pattern for their needs.

The detailed release notes are here: https://github.com/Desbordante/desbordante-core/releases/tag...
by crvdgc | 2025-10-01 07:09:11+00:00
Duolingo is useful, but not efficient. When people say I want to learn a language, they often mean I want to learn this language efficiently, e.g. to be able to write an essay like the post says after a realistic period of time.

I personally don't believe its pedagogical deficiency is mere incompetence. The whole business model is to keep you on the platform as long as possible, so why would they make you learn faster rather than just enough to keep you there?

As a long time user before, I have observed a lot of mechanism changes that bear out this observation.
by DimmieMan | 2025-10-01 07:09:21+00:00
I'll defend her on this one somewhat, Github has no exemption as written and she's doing her job.

It's just another layer in the stupidity of this all that GitHub would be blocked but steam, discord and Roblox are exempt because they're for gaming despite being infamous environments.

---[1]

(1) For the purposes of this Act, age‑restricted social media platform means:

(a) an electronic service that satisfies the following conditions:

(i) the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of the service is to enable online social interaction between 2 or more end‑users;

(ii) the service allows end‑users to link to, or interact with, some or all of the other end‑users;

(iii) the service allows end‑users to post material on the service;

(iv) such other conditions (if any) as are set out in the legislative rules; or

(b) an electronic service specified in the legislative rules;

----[2]

For the purposes of paragraph 63C(6)(b) of the Act, electronic services in each of the following classes are specified:

(a) services that have the sole or primary purpose of enabling end‑users to communicate by means of messaging, email, voice calling or video calling;

(b) services that have the sole or primary purpose of enabling end‑users to play online games with other end‑users;

(c) services that have the sole or primary purpose of enabling end‑users to share information (such as reviews, technical support or advice) about products or services;

(d) services that have the sole or primary purpose of enabling end‑users to engage in professional networking or professional development;

(e) services that have the sole or primary purpose of supporting the education of end‑users;

(f) services that have the sole or primary purpose of supporting the health of end‑users;

(g) services that have a significant purpose of facilitating communication between educational institutions and students or students’ families;

(h) services that have a significant purpose of facilitating communication between providers of health care and people using those providers’ services.

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2021A00076/latest/text

[2] https://www.legislation.gov.au/F2025L00889/latest/text
by Animats | 2025-10-01 07:10:39+00:00
There used to be a place called "Lost World" on Highway 17 from San Jose to Santa Cruz with about thirty full-scale concrete dinosaurs. That roadside attraction folded in the 1970s, but the dinosaurs remained for years, slowly being hidden by growing foliage.[1]

[1] https://www.facebook.com/groups/sanjosevalleyorchards/posts/...
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-01 07:10:45+00:00
> The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones.

It isn't actually different. It appears to be different, because people conceptualize the problem backwards, as learning to distinguish two sounds that, in the beginning, sound the same.

But what actually happens is that babies are born distinguishing all linguistically relevant sounds, and learn not to distinguish the sounds that their language considers equivalent. This ability is retained by adults.
by KoolKat23 | 2025-10-01 07:11:11+00:00
This part bothers me. Enforcement seems to be at their discretion. In this case the framing or reality around the fine is very bad, they sort of say it's intentional themselves.

They're leaving and they're getting the fine. Implying if they didn't leave and implemented changes, that there is a chance they may not have been fined.
by ninjin | 2025-10-01 07:11:34+00:00
This is art, so arguing about exact boundaries is pointless in my book. But can we at least agree that there is rather a big difference between "This is something that plays from a standard cartridge with a standard mapper on the Famicom/NES you have from your childhood" and "This is something that plays from a standard cartridge with a standard mapper on the Famicom/NES you have from your childhood with a modified superhuman-speed controller to in real time feed 16 times the amount of data of the largest cartridge ever released for the system"?
by hatmatrix | 2025-10-01 07:12:14+00:00
It doesn't happen so frequently in practice, which is maybe why it's not felt equally by everyone in the community. I've followed some discussions on this topic and the current solution is, as you say, to place the onus entirely on the user. There is another faction that wants to support the user through the IDE to warn them of errors they might be making, and others that want to implement formal specifications that catch the errors during specifications. It's not an easy problem to fix and therefore the "simplest approach" as you describe remains the leading solution.
by petre | 2025-10-01 07:12:51+00:00
Yup, that version is the good one. My wife had the Pro 2s and was super happy with them until they died after two years. I got her a pair of AirPods 4 with ANC and we had to return them because they were subpar compared to the AirPods Pro 2. The price difference between 4 ANC and the Pro 3s is like $60 and you get an actual useful product if you're willing to spend that amount.
Agent Knowledge Needs More Than Just RAG
by Arindam1729 | 2025-10-01 07:13:06+00:00
When people talk about “knowledge for agents,” it almost always collapses into RAG. But knowledge can, and should—be treated as a first-class runtime tool, not just a context filler.

In most implementations, knowledge lives in a vector database. Agents query it through a search_knowledge tool, often hybrid (keyword + semantic) with re-ranking. That’s essentially “Agentic RAG,” and it works well enough for a lot of use cases.

But once you think of knowledge as runtime-accessible memory, other patterns open up:

1. Dynamic Instructions Most serious agent use cases can’t just dump all instructions into the system prompt. Take a Text2SQL agent: it needs table schemas, column names, data types, and common query templates. You don’t bake all that into the core prompt—you store it and let the agent query the relevant slice when needed.

That’s dynamic instructions: system prompt as RAM, knowledge base as disk. Core logic in RAM, path-specific instructions pulled from disk at runtime.

2. Adaptive Learning Still experimental, but worth considering. The agent monitors its own conversations, flags successes/failures, and updates the knowledge base in the background. If it repeatedly fails on a domain-specific question, it can either suggest new entries or prompt a human admin to add them. Over time, the knowledge base evolves in response to real usage.

This is harder than it sounds (classification, trust, governance), but if solved, it gives agents a feedback-driven memory loop instead of a static RAG pipeline.

Bonus idea: pair the knowledge base with a scratchpad. Let the agent run iterative, multi-step searches over knowledge, not just one-shot retrieval. That’s where “deep research” style behaviors start to emerge.

I would love to know if you have tried dynamic instructions or adaptive learning?
by raxxorraxor | 2025-10-01 07:13:17+00:00
> why should the company keep them around?

Smart companies should know that a large chunk of their value chain is knowledge work. For airplanes the danger of suddenly seeing a Boink 212 appearing on the market is probably quite low, but there certainly is engineering work to be done on planes, even if some of it won't see implementation for a long time.

But long time strategy is probably not even a term in some companies.
by darkamaul | 2025-10-01 07:13:50+00:00
Serious question: why are people siding with Imgur here, instead of blaming the company that chose to ignore the laws of the country it operates in?

Imgur's business model is ad sales and tracking users - that inherently requires collecting and protecting data, including vulnerable groups like children. Even if the UK rules are imperfect or possibly overbroad (I haven't read them), if a company choose to operate where a law applies, it's on the company to follow it or to challenge it through the courts, not to blame the regulator after the fact.
by madaxe_again | 2025-10-01 07:14:15+00:00
I prescribe Plato - Republic, book X, specifically. How can one set of shadows on the wall be better than another, as they’re just shadows, degraded representations of the real?

Or perhaps Aristotle’s Poetics - pop culture has value because it is mimetic, and AI generated pop culture is no less a mirror, just one which produces reflections of every moment, all the time - but rather than the grand catharsis we might experience in a work of literature with well wrought characters with whom we empathise, we find the void staring into us as we do into it. Hollow art for hollow men.

Like it or not, the void is culture, and has value because it reflects us, albeit through a glass, darkly.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-01 07:14:44+00:00
> if an adult is set in their ways and knows a particular set of phonemes, (or even tones, etc.) is it more difficult than a blank-slate child who has no prejudice about hearing and learning new sounds?

The answer is sort of "yes". If an adult is set in their ways and knows a particular set of phonemes, they will have a more difficult time with the phonemes of a new language than an infant would.

However, "learning new sounds" is not a correct way to think about it. You're born knowing all the sounds. You unlearn the differences between certain ones. If you, as an adult, have unlearned a difference that matters in your target language (because it didn't matter in your native language), you will have trouble with that difference. An infant can't have this problem.

Note that the cutoff point where an immersed child will fail to learn the pronunciation of a new language "automatically" is somewhere in the late teens, though.
by nolok | 2025-10-01 07:14:45+00:00
Use Apollo (a fork of Sunshine) : https://github.com/ClassicOldSong/Apollo

> Built-in Virtual Display with HDR support that matches the resolution/framerate config of your client automatically

It includes a virtual screen driver, and it handles all the crap (it can disable your physical screen when streaming and re enable after, it can generate the virtual screen by client to match the client's needs, or do it by game, or ...)

I stream from my main pc to both my laptop and my steamdeck, and each get the screen that matches them without having to do anything more than connect to it with moonlight.
by 71bw | 2025-10-01 07:15:22+00:00
There is no decent option on an alternative operating system. I do not like macOS and its many quirks, especially its extremely gatekept nature, including the system being SURE that what IT wants is the best for me; I understand that this might be an approach that some people prefer, but in my case it's the equivalent of showing a bull a red cloth.

I will say this - and most will not like this - that I'd go out and buy a M* MacBook if they still kept Boot Camp around and let me install Windows 11 ARM on it. I've heard Linux is pretty OK nowadays, but I have some... ideological differences with the staff behind Asahi and it is still a wonky hack that Apple can put their foot down on any day.
by vednig | 2025-10-01 07:16:44+00:00
As long as there is code their will remain a vulnerability.

All the security and compliances require that someone operates it, not everyone can design systems like Linux in an year or so.

The more darker truth is the entire existence of proprietary codebases and architectures, there's a saying either ask the question or forever remain foolish

It's time we ask it ourselves and the companies which we depend on to allow atleast open auditing their architecture

It's just one step but it prevents the level of exploits like these
by dns_snek | 2025-10-01 07:17:49+00:00
I think this is a pretty lazy dismissal as far as things go. Yes people "always complain" about many things, but that's the correct response to things that are always getting worse.

The gist of your linked article is that they were opposed to reading because they believed that reading distracted people from labor, which they considered undisciplined and immoral. Of course there also seems to be a healthy dose of misogyny associated with it:

> Poeckel's statement that women should acquire a certain amount of knowledge, but not too much, because then they could become a "burden on human society," is representative of many other texts in which reading regulations played a central role.

Then once you get to the progression of books > comics > movies > Youtube > TikTok (did I miss any?), you can observe a steady decrease in the amount of cognitive effort required to engage with the medium and a reduction in attention spans. Reduced attention span is a legitimate concern and it's only getting worse as time goes on (ask teachers).

I actually enjoy TikTok in moderation these days but I worry about people who struggle to engage with anything but TikTok, it's like a generational ratchet that only seems to go one way, towards shorter and shorter attention spans.

Maybe someone can make the argument that this won't actually matter, but it's incorrect to say that things haven't changed in observable and measurable ways, and that people are just complaining about nothing.
by oblio | 2025-10-01 07:18:06+00:00
> When questioned by State Department security officials, VanGoethem told them he and Wentworth had spent the evening bar-hopping, followed by an early morning pizza at a third Bucharest establishment called Everest.

> VanGoethem also called Wentworth on his cell phone immediately following the collision and asked her to match his lie when she spoke to investigators.

https://www.stripes.com/news/vangoethem-cleared-of-major-cha...

Also, regarding hearsay... I just said that I saw myself the car wreckage the next day. And actually I also saw the metal panel fence next to the road. The Dacia was totaled, smashed like a plastic toy, and the fence next to it was also destroyed due to the Dacia (a much smaller and lighter car) being catapulted onto the fence. It's been a while since I saw it, but that road was dangerous and the direction the SUV was coming from was famous for allowing high speeds. Maybe the taxi driver ran the red light, but that's extremely unlikely as a taxi driver would have been familiar with the risky road and the possibility of getting hit by a car doing 80kmph or more.
by e1g | 2025-10-01 07:18:08+00:00
It takes no imagination or insight to see reasons why something wouldn’t work. It’s the default mental pathway for every risk-averse beast. Skepticism is not born out of contentment and abundance but out of self-preservation. It’s not correlated with feeling enough, but with feeling bitterness and envy of those who took risks and gained an advantage instead of suffering consequences.
by norman784 | 2025-10-01 07:18:09+00:00
From their blog [0]

> With Linux 6.16 now out in the wild, it’s time for yet another progress report! As we mentioned last time, the Asahi and Honeykrisp Mesa drivers have finally found their way upstream. This has resulted in a flurry of GPU-related work, so let’s start there.

Seems that they are doing pretty well upstreaming their work.

- [0] https://asahilinux.org/2025/08/progress-report-6-16/
by 0x_rs | 2025-10-01 07:18:23+00:00
Imgur is a joke. They block VPN users with an intentionally obtuse "Imgur is temporarily over capacity. Please try again later.". Most importantly, its value for the average person has plummeted ever since its 2021 acquisition, and when they started deleting inactive content. UK's regulations have no place on a free internet, but the company running it is anything but worthy of praise.
by kelnos | 2025-10-01 07:20:32+00:00
I don't think your analogy is apt. Having your development environment set up and knowing how to use your tools reasonably efficiently seems like it should be a low bar to pass. We're not talking about giving someone unfamiliar tools or an unfamiliar vehicle and expecting them to perform higher level tasks. We're just watching people use their existing tools to see if they're actually familiar and comfortable with them.
by rpwverheij | 2025-10-01 07:21:53+00:00
It seems a bit like this is reinventing what Linked Data (RDF) and Solid PODs already do. Solid: Personal storage repositories and granting access to different apps to read/write to it. Linked Data: you can link to other people's data with IRI's (URLS) and a common format is JSON-LD.

What's different here and why is it better? Do we really need another standard / protocol?