MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pengaru | 2025-11-29 21:47:20+00:00
So how does it feel folks to be living through Idiocracy?

Flying the Clippy abomination as some kind of ideal is so misguided I don't even know where to begin.

The only redeeming quality of Clippy was one's ability to easily turn it off. Which I suppose feels like a significant consolation prize for folks already suffering through a proprietary software hellscape.
by mentalgear | 2025-11-29 21:47:50+00:00
Automerge is a great project, but it feels still way to academic in it's setup. If you need a superior DX and CRDT-based full-stack database, I'd recommend you to look at Triplit.dev and their docs. (while development has decreased somewhat, the product is in a fully-featured phase and should work well for anything from small to medium, probably also very large projects depending on your configuration). Give it a try, you will like it.
by KuSpa | 2025-11-29 21:48:27+00:00
However, by the fith axiom of euclid, the lines in your example cannot be parallel AND converge (not even in infinity). Thus, it's more an open rectangle.

Either they are overlapping which violates the definition of a triangle, or they don't and the parallel lines always maintain the same distance X to each other and consequently maintain distance X at infinity (let's say X=1, bc you can just scale it).
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-11-29 21:48:39+00:00
>Altogether, I think we can safely conclude it takes more strength to carry a baby

I dunno man, it looks like that big sword is pretty heavy duty. And one year old babies pretty much carry themselves around. I think you're doing a little too much agenda pushing and a little too little science. Both the social and physical science.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyvRllz7Vjg
by ColinWright | 2025-11-29 21:48:45+00:00
The version I'm describing has it physically sitting in front of you at the time, so you can see that the colours haven't been changed "on the fly" after you pick an edge. In this version:

(A) I colour it;

(B) I cover the vertices so you can't see any of them, but I can no longer change them;

(C) You choose the edge, and I reveal the endpoints.

Converting this to a digital version requires further work ... my intent here was to explain the underlying idea that I can prove (to some degree of confidence) that I have a colouring without revealing anything about it.

So just off the top of my head, for example, I can, for each vertex, create a completely random string that starts with "R", "G", or "B" depending on the colour of the vertex. Then I hash each of those, and send you all of them. You choose an edge and send me back the two hashes for the endpoints, and I provide the associated random strings so you can check that the hashes match.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-11-29 21:49:52+00:00
This is feedback. You press a shortcut; how do you know it worked or not? You do because the corresponding menu rapidly blinked. Or you double click an icon and suddenly a rectangle appears in another part of the screen. Is this related? Here the animation shows that yes, the icon transformed into a window.

On the other hand on my mobile Firefox I wait seemingly a half second each time I long press a link, because there is an animation that zooms a context menu. It does not zoom from the link, which could be justified maybe, but always in the same place in the center of the screen. This animation is meaningless and thus wasteful.
by jemmyw | 2025-11-29 21:50:01+00:00
I've built my own sync engine in rust to run against supabase. It doesn't run the browser though, it's for a native app (tauri in my case). It's column level lww.

I have one place where I'm thinking I might need a crdt due to the complexity of the data and how you collaborate with it.

People take my app offline for long periods of time then reconnect with 1000s of records to sync so my sync is backgrounded and built to deal with several mb of data in sqlite files.

Anyway I'm interested in taking a further look at your thing over the holidays to see if it's worth switching or making partial use of it.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-29 21:50:13+00:00
There's no such thing as a correct result to a search query. It certainly delivered exactly what was asked for, a grep of the web, sorted by number of incoming links.

They also don't use it at all anymore, they barely even care about your search query.

Google is successful, however, because they innovated once, and got enough money together as a result to buy Doubleclick. Combining their one innovation with the ad company they bought enabled them to buy other companies.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-11-29 21:50:25+00:00
Ah, sorry, I completely left out context, when I say by hand I don't mean there are no good CRDT projects, Loro is absolutely great, others are very good as well.

I mean only in the context of writing your own, you can't use Ai, Ai can be used to write code and certainly can explain a lot of code and as a resuly people start ascribing more reasoning power to Ai than it has, CRDTs are an area where current models just completely lose the plot.

If you're only using Ai in well mapped areas it's easy to start assuming it has human level reasoning capabilities, the illusion is quickly shattered if you're operating at the edge.
by GermanJablo | 2025-11-29 21:50:38+00:00
Interesting read. I’ve spent the past two years developing my own CRDT, but along the way, I realized a CRDT involves too many trade-offs, so I ended up implementing an ID-based OT framework. Coincidentally, I’m planning to launch it this Tuesday, so here’s an exclusive for you: https://docnode.dev. I'd like to hear your thoughts!

In the future, I plan to add a CRDT mode for scenarios where P2P is required.
by maxtermed | 2025-11-29 21:51:00+00:00
After a LinkedIn post about AI hallucinations generated 166 comments, I realized: everyone was right, but talking about completely different problems.

This breaks down five perspectives (practitioners, displaced workers, engineers, educators, skeptics) and what each reveals that we're not discussing:

- The verification paradox (if you can verify it, you could probably do it yourself) - Three zones of AI appropriateness (Green/Yellow/Red) - Why AI hallucinations are structurally different from human errors - The human capital problem (if AI does junior work, where do seniors come from?)
by gpm | 2025-11-29 21:51:11+00:00
Absolutely wild to use a bunch of elite slavers as your example of the good guys.

Surely the less bad example is guy fawkes masks, where the underlying media (V for Vendetta) has a character who isn't unambiguously evil and the masks have actually been used at protests in real life (and banned in at least a couple of countries as a result).
by godelski | 2025-11-29 21:51:50+00:00
They use the phone to do their person vetting. It helps reduce bots because you have to have phone numbers[0]. It's not perfect but it does create a barrier to entry. That's unfortunately how security works, there's nothing impenetrable, there are only things that make certain things harder. The best security is where something is impracticable, not impossible (e.g. brute forcing a large password is not impossible, but it is impracticable). But at the same time you run into problems like that.

[0] They also use it as a means to help with the social graph. Building a social graph is pretty difficult and you don't want to do it completely from scratch. This is the same reason social media wants you to import your phone contacts and email contacts. The difference is that the "side benefit" to that is that they get data harvesting rather than security.

| > We're unable to provide a specific timeline. > I'm not sure if it's true, but it feels a bit suspect.

It's because Signal doesn't track metadata. The reason they can't tell you a specific date is that they don't know how to associate your physical name with your Signal account. The information is unavailable to them! Which is the whole point of Signal.

Honestly, the best solution to this would have been to buy a cheap phone or something like a VOIP number. I don't know your situation but it seems like it is not that easy to go a year without a phone number. I definitely think Signal should do better in this but I don't think the result is unreasonable. It brings up an edge case they probably didn't consider but having a phone number "abandoned" for a year sounds like it is a very low probability situation. Being reliant on phone numbers they also have to garbage collect, right? Because a phone number is not a unique identification to a person for their life. So while I do agree your situation sucks and is very frustrating I hope you can recognize that it is (from my best guess) a very unlikely situation. That the phone number is being sat on but unused and that the squatting is happening by a legitimate person rather than a scammer.

They can do better, for sure, but I don't think I'd judge a platform harshly by the results of an extremely odd outlier situation.
by watchful_moose | 2025-11-29 21:51:57+00:00
Reddit was founded in 2005, Go was released in 2007.

They picked the tech that was available and mature at the time, and enabled them to scale for 20 years (to 100M+ DAUs + IPO) - seems like a pretty good choice to me.

You know which other platform was built on Python? Youtube.

Python isn't a bad choice if you're building [certain kinds of] billion-dollar businesses.
by LightBug1 | 2025-11-29 21:52:04+00:00
>> "Chinese brands gain legitimacy, challenging Western carmakers"

Musk has been shaking around his political penis at just the same moment as the Chinese manufacturers came of age and are on course, now, to supplant Tesla completely.

And the Tesla shareholders / BoD waived through $1t pay package as a reward.

Dysfunctional Leadership writ large.
by throwaway150 | 2025-11-29 21:52:48+00:00
It wasn't possible to exfiltrate data in those days because internet access wasn't ubiquitous. In that setting, wasting CPU cycles and our time so Clippy could pop up with its "helpful" was almost malicious.

It may not seem that way now, since even visiting a simple blog page consumes far more processing power than an entire Windows boot sequence from that era and no one thinks twice about it. But when Clippy was introduced, processors were slow, resources were tight and squandering CPU time for no good reason brought it close to being considered outright harmful.
by ab_testing | 2025-11-29 21:52:55+00:00
I feel like a lot of readers are missing the main point. US and European manufactures do not want to enter this low volume zero margin market. The total sales in Latin America (that includes Mexico and South America is around five million units - that is less than half of what is sold in the US each year. And at a price point of 20K it just does not make sense for American and European manufacturers given that their R&as costs are higher than Asian manufacturers and their North American models are too large and expensive for South America markets.

In addition they know that the US is a captive market as the government will not allow Chinese companies to sell their cars here due to data and security concerns.

So it does not make sense to chase tiny profits.
by cheema33 | 2025-11-29 21:54:03+00:00
Agreed that RDP is very well designed. And we don't have an equivalent in Linux or Mac world. All competing protocols are a compromise. I am particularly impressed with good multi-monitor support in RDP. Competitions has had more than a decade to get it right. But I am unaware of any that does.

If I connect remotely from a 2 monitor setup, disconnect and re-connect from my laptop with just a single display, it all magically works. Everything readjusts automatically. I don't know of any other remote desktop protocol/tool that does this so well.
by dwoldrich | 2025-11-29 21:55:13+00:00
Out of sight, out of mind.

When I was a remote worker (forced to be so during extended lockdown insanity in my state), I worried constantly about how I was seen by coworkers and my manager.

I felt very vulnerable to (and fell prey to) RIF's like I had never experienced in my whole corporate career stretching back to the 90's.

Slack is no replacement for confidential discussions with coworkers for understanding what is really going on with the business, with budgets, with whatever demons the brand folks are flirting with. And generally speaking, informal desk meetings and socializing during breaks was artificial when forced and non-existent otherwise.

It was sad to go to holiday parties and see some of the introverted young guys so hungry for in-person contact and chats.

When I joined a hybrid office, I found I was very short with people in-person and was very demanding. Remote work had left me sensitive to and irritated with faults I perceived in people, and I had to consciously work to soften up with them.

I know many remote workers have drunk the koolaid and are very passionate about it, God bless 'em. I personally think it's shortsighted and weakens our bargaining power.

When my grumbliest coworkers eventually self-exit as the RTO announcements inevitably roll in, its partly a relief, but I worry about them and my industry.
by quesera | 2025-11-29 21:55:16+00:00
FWIW: When I was in undergrad, the students who showed up only for exams and sat in the back of the room were not cheating, and still ended up with some of the best scores.

They had opted out of the lectures, believing that they were inefficient or ineffective (or just poorly scheduled). Not everyone learns best in a lecture format. And not everyone is starting with the same level of knowledge of the topic.

Also:

> A 4.0 and a good score on an online assessment used to be a great signal that someone was competent

... this has never been true in my experience, as a student or hiring manager.
by throwaway150 | 2025-11-29 21:55:32+00:00
> With the intention of helping us... Today, it's done with the intention of changing us, to be more profitable to our digital masters.

This sort of thinking sends us straight onto a slippery slope. If you asked any of these trillion-dollar companies why they feel the need to exploit our data, they would insist it is all for our benefit, to provide better recommendations and personalize our experience, and other such nonsense. It is much the same logic that was used to justify Clippy's wasteful behavior at the time.

The fact is that these trillion-dollar companies now and Clippy then were exploiting our resources (data now, CPU then) to push features down our throat that they decided were "beneficial" or "helpful" for us.

The only redeeming feature of Clippy was that you could disable it easily. Can't do that with the trillion dollar companies.
by WCSTombs | 2025-11-29 21:56:40+00:00
> This proof assumes that the area a triangle is some function k c^2 of the hypotenuse c where k is constant for similar triangles.

Area in what units? "Square" units? But we're free to choose any unit we want, so I choose units where the triangle itself with hypotenuse H has area H^2 units. To justify that, I think the only thing we need is the fact that area scales as the square of length. (There's that word "square" again, which implies a specific shape that is actually completely arbitrary when talking about area. Perhaps it's better to say that "area scales as length times length.")

> To me that truth isn’t necessarily any less fundamental than the Pythagorean theorem itself.

I think the Pythagorean Theorem is surprisingly non-fundamental, in that you can get surprisingly far without it. It's surprising because we usually learn about it so early.
AI-Revived Cube World
by liangzn | 2025-11-29 21:57:23+00:00
Hi, hackers. Are you interested in Cube World?

Here is the introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDptwH_Rl8k

It was a successful product 20 years ago. We wanted to create an AI-version Cube World.

How do you think about it?

Thank
by zmmmmm | 2025-11-29 21:57:26+00:00
you can extend that to all Silicon Valley and the US in general.

It has one of the weakest social security systems. Not even proper healthcare is guaranteed. Yet it out innovates all of Europe, Canada, Australia, other places that have incredible social "safety nets".

I agree with the other commenter: safety nets and multiple tries are always good to have, but persistence and grit are even more important, and these come more from necessity.
by keeda | 2025-11-29 21:57:27+00:00
We all knew this was coming, but I had an experience a year+ ago that showed this ChatGPT already had this capability back then. It also showed how AI could truly differentiate itself from other ad vectors, potentially in an actually heplful way: I had requirements very specific to my situation, and ChatGPT helped me find the exact products that could meet my unique requirements.

Briefly, I had an old Surface Pro whose SSD had died, and given that disassembly was too cumbersome, I wanted to fix it by booting off an external drive. So I wanted a USB drive or microSD card that was fast, durable and spacious enough to support my Windows version for typical usage over extended periods of time, but also small and light enough to keep perma-attached without being too cumbersome, for a reasonable budget.

I explained my requirements in a conversation with ChatGPT and after some back and forth, especially about the physical characteristics of the ideal drive, it eventually recommended 3 very specific USB drives. Those were then my starting point for a search on Amazon, and I did end up buying a closely related product.

I'm not even sure if this was an intentional outcome or yet another emergent thing. But I recall thinking that a) doing this research on my own would have taken me 5x the time, and b) if ChatGPT had simply provided affiliate links to those products it could have effectively monetized that conversation. Win-win for everyone without the need for intrusive ads.

Unfortunately, the lure of ad revenue is too strong and enshittification will ensue... but it doesn't have to.
by sfink | 2025-11-29 21:57:34+00:00
> Well, I don't know that we can separate external forces from why people might dislike bad code...

I'm not denying the validity of the reasons stemming from external forces. I'm just enumerating a bunch of additional reasons why developers might have a problem with bad code.

>> If you try to do something right and take pride in your work, your teammates will be resentful that you're not closing your bugs fast enough.

> Right, but why would they resent that? Probably because management has expectations on the team, and they are concerned that you're sandbagging the metrics. It ends up being a management or cultural problem regardless.

Heh. That's definitely a valid and common reason for resentment, but again I think the resentment can arise from more internal reasons as well. Even the craft coders recognize that you can't polish forever, and if one person spends 90% of their time polishing, then effectively that requires the others to pick up the feature work slack. That person is leaning on the rest of the team. It might be sometimes the right thing to do, but if it's a perennial pattern then even a team with 100% anal-retentive craft coders is going to get annoyed. Possibly because it cuts into their polish time, so they end up shipping worse code than they'd like.

But then, I'm not sure we're even disagreeing. The above could be labeled as "cultural". I think of the internal/external distinction as one where it's internal to the team vs imposed by management.
by machomaster | 2025-11-29 21:57:37+00:00
The difference is in the: 1. purpose of the mention. 2. Influence on the opinion.

Was it solely because the manufacturer gave sponsor money or was it because the writer is sharing his own personal opinions (and having affiliate links did not change the verdict)?

I don't see a problem people getting financially rewarded for helping people. Actually, I see as a positive. Nothing to be ashamed about, nothing to separately disclose.

In a similar vein as posting helpful videos on youtube/tiktok and not separately disclosing "when my content does well, I receive a cut from google/tiktok". Duuh.
by fragmede | 2025-11-29 21:58:14+00:00
That sounds good, but with a safety net, are you really going to be hungry enough to make sure your one shot at getting out of the ghetto doesn't fail? The entrepreneur that says to themselves, if this doesn't work, I'll just ask mom for another $300k at St Barts over Christmas doesn't sound like the one sleeping under the desk at the office to get the demo ready for TechCrunch Disrupt. Or maybe they are (to prove daddy wrong). The human condition contains multitudes.
by m463 | 2025-11-29 21:59:36+00:00
I think there are a bunch of uncomfortable gut reactions that people just "conveniently leave out" of the argument.

Stuff like "why should I pay for this", or "why should they get to be lazy while I work" or "I don't feel like I should work as hard"

So they find other arguments, in a doth-protest-too-much-other-logic-arguments way.
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2025-11-29 22:00:13+00:00
> If you can buy a unit for e.g. $500,000 and build 20 units that each sell for $350,000, that's likely to be profitable

True, forgetting construction costs and assuming you have a gun to point at the land seller's head to sell cheap.

> This is the same premise as zoning.

No you need to get approval to build the thing. Zoning is one aspect. Necessary but not sufficent.

> This is by no means necessary. You buy one plot of land, replace a single house with a 5-story condo containing 10-20 units. The whole idea is that you don't need a lot of land but rather taller buildings.

Depends. Maybe quarter acre is enough but typical burbs you may have 200-400sqm. Depends what country I guess.

Hard to do this individually. And profitably. That is why in London you see long streets of appartments 5 stories high. Or maybe they were houses but already terraces so easy to convert. It will all depend on the specifics but most often you need to join lots unless fortunate to have a big plot of land or something that only requires repartitioning.

> The problem we're trying to solve is the huge amount of unmet demand for housing. If you ran out of buyers the problem is solved.

I meant buyer of the land. Not the end product.
by andy99 | 2025-11-29 22:01:29+00:00
You’re both making similar points I think. It was “bad” - for all the reasons you mention, but back then it was done seemingly to try to add functionality that people wanted, it was just shitty, and that was as bad as it gets.

Now nothing is done even remotely to try and help the customer. Every feature and every stupid “nudge” is done with pure malice, as the thinnest possible pretext to extract more information, more ad revenue, etc. from the user.

Clippy sucked, it would be nice if it still represented the worst kind of corporate shenanigans, but now it’s benign and naive compared to the evil rapaciousness arrayed against us by virtually all modern software.
by sfink | 2025-11-29 22:02:32+00:00
> From the perspective of the organization that pays you to do it, it is?

I agree. I'm just saying that if you limit yourself to explanations from that perspective, you will miss some of the explanations and be unable to describe real-world phenomena.

> If you want to create software as an end in itself or enjoy the craft without compromise, it usually can’t be in the context of a job or a business

Sure, but that's an extreme position. Maximizing the "ship features that make money" end of the balance doesn't end well in the long term. Maximimizing "all code must be perfect" also doesn't end well. There is very much a place for an appropriate amount of craftsmanship, and businesses do better and even make more money in the long run if that isn't choked out. ("Appropriate" varies widely by situation.)