MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by techblueberry | 2025-11-11 14:29:03+00:00
I think it’s a hair more complicated than that but directionally correct.

I think gender is stupid, I have just always hated gender norms, but I’m also not crazy about labels. There was a moment, probably prior to 2023 where I experimented with the term non-binary because that’s where the culture was. And now, I would probably just not answer that question in the surveys. But I didn’t change, I still think gender is stupid, and I’m either cishet male or non-binary pansexual depending on how deep into the conversation we get.

This whole thing is overblown in the first place. It’s weird for a magazine called skeptic to show an assertive preference for binary definitions of gender and sexuality.

I think everyone should question their gender. The idea that you should try and conform to some definition of what society thinks you should be based on your genitals is crazy. How your formulate your personality should be way more dynamic than that.
by bob1029 | 2025-11-11 14:29:06+00:00
The pollution issue isn't really possible to solve without using a proper power plant with a tall stack on each unit.

The portable gas turbine units are already very efficient and have surprisingly good emissions controls. Especially the aero derived variety. The problem is dumping the exhaust at ~ground level. This can create hotspots of nitrogen oxides. Especially with so many units running at once. If you exhaust at 100'+, the chances of hazardous accumulation are negligible by comparison.

There's really no clean way to do this fast. You typically need FAA approval to build a stack that would be tall enough to be effective. The best hope for local residents is a rapid crash sometime soon.
by estebarb | 2025-11-11 14:29:52+00:00
Not really. Youtube is not liable as long as they remove the content after a copyright complain and other mechanisms.

The problem is if OpenAI is liable for reproducing copyrighted content, so will be other products such as word processors, video editors and so on. So, as society where we will put the line?

Are we going to tolerate some copyright infringement in these tools or are we going to pursue copyright infringements even in other tools as we already got the tools to detect it?

We cannot have double standards, law should be applied equally to everyone.

I do think that overall making OpenAI liable for output is a bad precedent, because of repercusions beyond AI tools. I'm all fine with making them liable for having trained on copyrighted content and so on...
by pron | 2025-11-11 14:29:58+00:00
> do these languages let programmers explicitly assert that a certain, relevant property holds at runtime?

Yes, but the programmer has to do the really, really, really hard work of proving that's the case. Otherwise, the compiler says: you haven't proved to me that it's true, so I won't let you make this assertion. Put another way: the compiler checks your proof, but it doesn't write it for you.

The only programs for which all interesting assertions have been proven in this, or a similar, way have not only been small (up to ~10KLOC), but the size of such programs relative to that of the average program has been falling for several decades.
by tamnd | 2025-11-11 14:30:04+00:00
If you like Erlang, I recommend reading Making Reliable Distributed Systems in the Presence of Software Errors by Joe Armstrong: https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf

His PhD thesis explains the thinking behind Erlang, especially how it handles failures, message passing, and concurrency. It was last updated in 2003, 22 years ago, time really flies!
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-11 14:30:19+00:00
> (opposite meaning)

Funnily enough, e- means "out" (more fundamentally "from") and in- means "in(to)", so that's not an unexpected way to form opposite words.

But in this case, innumerable begins with a different in- meaning "not". (Compare inhabit or immiserate, though.)
by fakedang | 2025-11-11 14:30:30+00:00
Stellantis is garbage.

Volkswagen is en route to become garbage.

Ever driven a Chinese car? European generics don't hold a candle against them. And European cars can no longer claim a premium for higher standards - Chinese cars come with both reasonably good quality and more importantly in this climate, value for money. The only hard part currently is spare parts availability but that's very easy for the Chinese to rectify.
by raudette | 2025-11-11 14:30:30+00:00
I am not a huge gamer - maybe a dozen hours a year. But I feel that, say, Mario responds differently to controls in an emulator than how I remember Mario responding on an NES with a CRT.

But I was never very good, and it has been decades, so I don't know how much of this is just poor memory - I actually don't think I'm good enough/play enough that the latency of modern input/displays makes a difference at my level.

I would love to try both side-by-side to see if I could pick out the difference in latency/responsiveness.
by MikeNotThePope | 2025-11-11 14:31:00+00:00
I'm experimenting with how to code w/ LLMs. I used an AI assistant for about a month w/ a React app, prompting it to do this & that, and I learned almost nothing in that month about React itself. Then I prompted it to tell me what to do, but I did the typing, and I learned quite a bit in a short period of time.
by latexr | 2025-11-11 14:31:05+00:00
> With no rhyme nor reason beyond "free speech".

Who said anything about “free speech”? That has nothing to do with the matter. Tim Cook is not part of the government and we don’t live in the same country, free speech has zero relevance here.

> complaining from the internet peanut gallery

You might have a point if that were the extent of what I did. But it’s not, so you don’t. Even so, peanut gallery or not, I’d take speaking one’s mind about what one perceives to be wrong over simply shrugging one’s shoulders. Or worse, actively discouraging the one’s trying to do anything about it even when agreeing with the goal.

We saw a lot of that over the last attempt to pass Chat Control. Several people on HN being against it but being actively lame and saying it wasn’t worth fighting it. And then the law didn’t go through (again), because the ones who actually do something decided to ignore the naysayers who did nothing but talk down everyone’s efforts.

> instead of obeying your notions of propriety

Not my notions, his stated notions. Tim Cook’s the one who keeps touting to live by Martin Luther King’s words of “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”. He’s the one who came out publicly to “do his part to help others”. If Tim Cook wants to be a spineless stooge kowtowing to every bully, that’s his prerogative. But he shouldn’t pretend and hide his cowardice behind the words of someone who actually was brave enough to take a stand and face consequences.
by stavros | 2025-11-11 14:31:53+00:00
I have an issue with this, and it's not the perspective. It's not the AI usage directly that's producing the CO2, it's the fact that we're generating energy from CO2-producing sources.

I have the same objection with the scaremongering titles "electric cars emit a ton of CO2! (If you assume they get all their energy from coal, anyway)".

Yes, cars use energy, AI uses energy, so do lots of other things. We should cut down on frivolous uses of energy, but we should definitely, immediately transition away from fossil fuels to clean sources of energy. Then the title would be "AI adds no CO2 because how would it?".
by upwithme | 2025-11-11 14:31:57+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been using AI code assistants like Copilot a lot, and I've noticed what I call the "AI Trust Paradox": AI-generated code often looks correct but has subtle runtime bugs, leading me to spend more time debugging its output than if I had written it myself. The core issue is that these AIs are static—they can read code but can't see it run.

So, I built Augur.

Augur is an attempt to solve this by making the AI "runtime-aware." It's an open-source VS Code extension that hooks into the debug session using the Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP). When your code hits a breakpoint, Augur:

Intercepts the stopped event.

Gathers the live runtime state (stack trace, variable values, etc.) via DAP requests.

Formats this into a clean "golden context" prompt and sends it to an LLM (currently Gemini, but it's extensible).

The LLM analyzes this real-time state and decides the next debugging action (e.g., stepOver, stepInto).

Augur translates this decision back into a DAP command and executes it, creating an autonomous debugging loop.

To make the concept easy to grasp, I've created two components:

The VS Code Extension: This is the real tool you can install and use in your own projects.

A Web Visualizer (Live Demo): This is a React-based simulator that lets you see the "Context Engineering" and AI decision-making process in your browser without installing anything. It's the best way to understand the core logic.

It's still early days, but I'm really excited about the core idea of using DAP to give AI agents runtime perception. I would love to get your feedback, thoughts, and even harsh criticism on the approach.

GitHub: https://github.com/UPwith-me/Augur-Runtime-Debugging-Agent

Thanks for checking it out!
by SirensOfTitan | 2025-11-11 14:32:22+00:00
While I don’t think proper pluralization is indicative of anything outside of real world time constraints, I am a fan of these kinds of tacit signals.

Last week, my wife and I toured a school for our daughter. The school gave us these pretty notebooks with a blackwing pencil, saying that they “take writing seriously here.” I noticed that the students, however, did not use blackwings but cheap low quality yellow pencils. This signal prompted me to pay closer attention, and I found half a dozen things that affirmed the bad feeling I had about the place.

It’s a simple rule, but in the era where everyone is trying to sell me, I use Bill Hamilton’s Say Mean Do rule from his “Saints and Psychopaths” about finding real spiritual mentors. Broadly: saints say what they mean and do what they say. Unfortunately it’s probably just as hard to find tech companies who are honest as it is to find a true spiritual mentor. B2B SaaS sales cycle is usually just checkbox hunting and CYA.
by thunky | 2025-11-11 14:32:42+00:00
> Instead, you've gotta find a way to ride the wave -- but wisely, so that you don't stand to lose too much if/when it slows or hits the breakers.

Care to elaborate? Are you talking about stop losses? Options?

The former is a form of market timing and hard to get right. The latter is complicated.

Imo just buy the entire market at your appropriate risk tolerance level.
by Bender | 2025-11-11 14:32:49+00:00
Average number of sexual partners has skyrocketed for sure..

In the last few years? I would suggest it's much lower than it was in the 60's and 70's during the free love movements and other related movements. Prior to the 80's there was a lot more unprotected sex prior to the aids epidemic. Porn with a lot of body hair basically exploded when VHS tapes were created and people experimented a lot more.

Diet has certainly gotten worse. Most of the artificial crap was being introduced in the early 70's with a trailing 10 year lag on T2D increase but that has definitely gotten worse with time. What big change was introduced into the diet in the last few years?
by nandomrumber | 2025-11-11 14:32:51+00:00
Globally, solar hasn’t even started to look like it might want to consider putting a dent in fossil fuel usage.

There are three big GHG emitting sectors, electricity, transport, and agriculture, and solar has only started to scratched the surface in a handful of countries electricity production.

The scale of solar / wind rollout necessary to make a significant impact globally is truly stupendous.

Look at this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Australia

The more solar and wind you have, the more gas you need.

Batteries, the ones that haven’t even been built yet, are only at hours-of-capacity scale. We need weeks of backup capacity, which is why we need gas.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-11-11 14:33:17+00:00
I love saying this but OTP is a really roughneck standard library. They just added shit to it as they needed it without apparently putting too much consideration into the organization, naming, or conventions.

It makes it very powerful but very disorienting and experience gained with one part of it often does not really prepare you for other parts. Usually each specific tool was created by someone who used it immediately, so it's all reliable in its way. But there is a lot of redundancy and odd gaps.

Elixir's almost extreme attention to naming, organization, and consistent convention is almost as far as you can get from this approach too. It's fun to have them in the same ecosystem and see that there are actually pros and cons to each approach.
by nickelcitymario | 2025-11-11 14:33:54+00:00
I feel like I'd agree with your comment if it was in reply to an entirely different article.

As in: I agree with your sentiment and ideas. Out of context, you're bang on correct.

But I don't think paying attention to details (like pluralization) is an indication of obsession with the customer, at least not for me. It's about caring about the craft.

When I'm building something for my own use, I care about every aspect of it. I care about the unseen parts. I care about the process. It brings me satisfaction. And when I'm buying something, I like to know that the person who made it cared as much about their craft as I do.

I don't consider than pandering. It's respect: Respect for the craft, for the craftsperson, and for the end recipient/customer.

But maybe I missed something. What was it about the original post that felt like excessive customer obsession? Genuinely curious and open to being mistaken here.
Show HN: I benchmarked our AI tool from 30% to 100% success
by sadafnajam | 2025-11-11 14:34:47+00:00
Hi HN, I'm a Senior SDET at Plotly. My company just launched Plotly Studio, a new tool that uses AI to build data visualizations and analytics apps. My job was to answer the big question: does it actually work with real, messy data? When I first started testing it against our collection of 100+ diverse datasets, our success rate was around 30%. The problem I faced was that you can't just unit-test an AI that generates code for a desktop app. You have to test the full, end-to-end user experience. So, I led the effort to build our own internal benchmark system to validate performance at scale. Every day, our CI (GitHub Actions) kicks off a job that: Generates a full data app from each of our 100+ test datasets Launches each app in a real browser using Playwright Asserts that the app loads without any Python or JavaScript errors Takes screenshots to verify the visual output Runs each test 3 times to detect "flakiness" (inconsistent results) This gave me and the rest of the team a clear, actionable metric. The dev team used the failure reports to improve the backend, and we just hit a 100% success rate on our latest test run. I wrote an article about the architecture of this benchmarking system. We're now expanding it with user-donated datasets to make it even more challenging. I'd love to hear your feedback. You can read my full technical write-up here: Link: https://plotly.com/blog/chasing-nines-on-ai-reliability-benc...
by muststopmyths | 2025-11-11 14:34:55+00:00
It is a lot like the Division's DZ. Less toxicity out of the gate, but we'll see how that goes as time passes. They should've taken the "rogue" mechanic from that game.

Arc Raiders is a ton of fun though. Also recommend Helldivers 2 if you just want a PvE shooter. It tends to be buggy as hell but the core game experience is hilariously fun.
by EdgeExplorer | 2025-11-11 14:34:57+00:00
The obsession with protecting access to lyrics is one of the strangest long-running legal battles to me. I will skip tracks on Spotify sometimes specifically because there are no lyrics available. Easy access to lyrics is practically an advertisement for the music. Why do record companies not want lyrics freely available? In most cases, it means they aren't available at all. How is that a good business decision?
by jacquesm | 2025-11-11 14:35:17+00:00
It's a bit like cutting wood. Cutting wood can feel terrible. You do it every day because you have to. Along the grain, in wet wood, with a handsaw.

And then, one day you discover the chainsaw, and the fact that you should cross cut.

Suddenly cutting wood no longer feels terrible, it's smooth, stuff works the way you expect. Your chainsaw turns out to have features for all kinds of wood and for many different kinds of joinery that you were hand carving before. It turns out that your chainsaw can be used to control an army of chainsaws without having to do anything at all. You just declare it to be so and it works.

Instead of focusing on your tools all day long you find yourself focusing on the thing that you are actually trying to solve. Where you needed 50 people before, now you need 5.
by tmtvl | 2025-11-11 14:35:46+00:00
That's a funny thing to get hung up on, though I can understand it. I suppose that's the downside of some programming languages going with the worst assignment operator. If they didn't they could use = for (numerical) equality tests. If your wife has a strong mathematical background you could also show her some logic programming like Prolog or Mercury.

Also, various ways of assignment:

Pascal style:

x := x + 1

Scheme:

(set! x (+ x 1))

Forth:

x 1 + x !
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-11 14:35:59+00:00
Eventually you'll run into a decision that was made for one set of reasons but succeeded for completely different reasons. A decision document can't help there; it can only tell you why the decision was made.

That is the nature of evolutionary processes and it's the reason people (and animals; you can find plenty of work on e.g. "superstition in chickens") are reluctant to change working systems.
by ema | 2025-11-11 14:36:36+00:00
While I'm always ready to throw away code when I realize that there is a better way to do things I found it quite difficult to write code with the intent to throw it away. However I often do write code with intent of modifying it once I have a better idea of what is needed. It might be because I'm comparatively better at refactoring than at starting from scratch.
by AEVL | 2025-11-11 14:36:45+00:00
Just some trivia (and an aside):

The collaboration is with Issey Miyake. Steve Jobs black turtlenecks was Issey Miyakes:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferhicks/2022/08/10/heres-...

(As an aside, I swear by pants from the Issey Miyake Homme Plissé collection. Since investing in some pairs about 10 years ago, I have hardly worn anything else—no other pants match their comfort. The iPhone Pocket is of course ridiculous anyway.)
by throw7494949 | 2025-11-11 14:37:09+00:00
I guess experience depends. If positive diagnosis, is attached to some sort of compensations.

If psychiatry can sell you cheep medicine for a huge profit, they will overdisgnose.

If employer, institute, state, or university would have to pay compensations, they will under diagnose.

About 20% of US population went through horrible sexual abuse (documented fact). I would not discount the amount of people who have anxiety and PTSD from past events.
by binaryfuel | 2025-11-11 14:37:11+00:00
No one other than devs ever cared about the quality or readability of code. Devs are a necessary evil to business

Now that a ‘machine’ can write code no one give a crap.

Does it work? Then it’s done.

Why would anyone need devs to harness some ‘human capable’ but highly syntactically specific programming instructions that get compiled down into machine code anyhow

The new programming language is English
by nickelcitymario | 2025-11-11 14:37:30+00:00
Holy moly, and I thought French (my mother tongue) was complicated due to conjugation. I'm fascinated by what possible context could call for this many variations on how you spell/pronounce a number.

Any chance you know of a good article on this? (I could ask ChatGPT, but I'm trying to let go of that crutch.)
by jmyeet | 2025-11-11 14:37:35+00:00
At least a shoe factory will employ people and produce something people will buy. After a DC is built, it only needs a handful of people (compared to the capex) and as for its output? We just haven't seen AI create a service or product people really value and will pay for.

This is really the most alarming thing about the AI boom: it's so much like 2000 and the dot-com bubble because so many companies never had a business model or revenue let alone made a profit.
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-11-11 14:38:32+00:00
Like everything in the world today, there is a lot of nonsense, pseudoscience (and actual science), influencer garbage, etc... around psychedelics. However, if you are in a good mental space, and in a comfortable and safe location, and the opportunity comes up, you should absolutely have a psychedelic experience if you can. It is one of the pleasures of life. Start with mushrooms. Be sure to start slow, you can always take more, you can never take less. And if you do take more, don't double your original does, that always gets people in trouble.
by pron | 2025-11-11 14:38:33+00:00
> Zig doesn't even pretend to do memory safety

This is simply untrue. Zig offers the same spatial memory safety as Rust does, and that is the kind of memory safety that prevents more dangerous vulnerabilities [1] than the kind Rust offers and Zig doesn't (temporal memory safety).

> if you don't free something manually it won't get freed

Rust also isn't free of memory leaks, and doesn't even pretend to guarantee that all allocations are freed. Lack of memory leaks doesn't fall under what Rust defines as memory safety (which Rust defines as guarantees it does provide, excluding those it doesn't).

[1]: https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2024/2024_cwe_top25.html - Rust and Zig's memory safety prevent #2 and #6 on the list. Rust, additionally, prevents #8. C prevents none of those.
by tyleo | 2025-11-11 14:38:42+00:00
Yeah, I'm with you. I've worked on several i18n frameworks, including ones for AAA game titles at Microsoft.

You can make pluralization work but the "(s)" is going to tend to work better.

And localization isn't just an opportunity for development bugs, localizers get things wrong too. Some non-English speakers mentioned to me that some translations are so bad, it's better to use the English version anyways.
by chuckadams | 2025-11-11 14:39:00+00:00
I'll admit, the Rule of Zero is the kind of thing I've been wanting all along, but so much code out there seems obsessed with micro-managing its pointer and reference semantics, and one still learns of their mistakes through segmentation faults and linker errors, at least in those codebases.

Also, an artist friend tells me you can make some pretty keen sculpture with razor blades and a spot welder. Still recommended to use pliers and gloves tho.
Show HN: Scout QA – AI that finds small bugs people often overlook
by htieu | 2025-11-11 14:39:07+00:00
We’ve been working on Scout QA, a tool that uses AI to catch subtle bugs that usually slip past manual testing and reviews.

Instead of focusing on test automation, Scout analyzes your app’s UI, flows, and logs to surface tiny inconsistencies — things like broken states, unclear error messages, or small regressions that humans might ignore because “it still works.”

The goal isn’t to replace testers but to act like an extra pair of curious eyes — pointing out issues that affect real users’ experience.

We’re exploring questions like: - How can an AI develop an intuition for “something feels off”? - What kind of feedback loop helps it learn from real user bugs?

Would love feedback from developers, QA engineers, and indie makers: what small-but-painful bugs do you wish tools could catch automatically?