MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by creesch | 2025-11-21 15:52:06+00:00
Don't forget the tradition of having to migrate to a new API after a while because this one gets deprecated for "reasons". Not just a newer version, but a complete non backwards compatible new API that also requires its own setup.

To be fair, that might have changed in recent years. But after having to deal with that a few times for a few hobby projects I simply stopped trying. Can't imagine how it is for companies making use of these APIs. I guess it provides work for teams on otherwise stable applications...
by perihelions | 2025-11-21 15:52:08+00:00
Tangential question that's been nagging me; in spaces of functions defined pointwise, is there a natural way to lift algebraic structures (group/ring/whatever) from the base set up to the function space? It's generally true across many separate objects in math, but I don't know a clear explanation of why. (Category theory, I assume).

Many of the propositions in the author's Appendix A are of this form.

I.e., if you look at how addition on function spaces is defined pointwise, (f+g)(x) = f(x)+g(x) -- that's different meanings of (+) on either side -- that looks exactly like the defining relation of a group homomorphism, except that the symbols are backwards.
by lukan | 2025-11-21 15:52:27+00:00
That will be great popcorn stuff to watch from the outside I think.

Or tragic, but I rather see drama than joy with this approach. The main thing with bugfixing is, that it can affect a whole lot of other areas, or introduce completely new bugs. So both teams then fighting over changes ..

Now a really trivial bug with no side effects, sure thing, no issue, but like a sibling commentor has said, the really trivial bugs are usually fixed already. And quick fixes of seemingly trivial things can induce a world of pain for someone else.

In other words, I think project management and prioritising things remain hard, with no magic bullets solutions avaiable. (But I wpuld also prefer a stronger emphasis on quality control in general, vs new feature)
by tcj_phx | 2025-11-21 15:52:36+00:00
Thanks for sharing your mom's experience with big pharma's then-new wonder-drug.

> Somehow, I doubt there is much motivation to look for economically inconvenient and unnerving side-effects in some demographics,

Robert Whitaker examined the pharmaceutical industry's ideological capture of conventional psychiatry in his third book, Psychiatry Under the Influence.

https://robertwhitakerbooks.com/psychiatry-under-the-influen...

I've written for the Mad in America Foundation's webzine. My latest piece was titled Theodoric of Arizona: State-Sanctioned Pharma-Based Pseudo-Doctor: https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/07/theodoric-arizona/

This was inspired by the old SNL skit, Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber. The article is structured around my proposal of a Theodoric’s Principle of Medical Advancement, to explain why medical progress is so glacial.
by hedora | 2025-11-21 15:52:45+00:00
It’s quite possible that the pollution controls on some of those engines wig out and turn the truck into a coal roller. Even with 10-100x fuel efficiency improvements, it could increase particulates, etc due to a bad fuel mix.

The real question is why they’re paying $100K per truck for a mobile smog test rig.

The test equipment can’t possibly cost more than $100K. That leaves $26.9M of “you’re doing something obviously wrong”.

My guess is that the regulations aren’t actually forcing the idiocy, or they are designed to subsidize emissions testers in some way. I’d guess it is the latter, which is just bad regulation.

Smog checks in California have been pretty poorly administered for years. For one of my cars, the lowered the nox standard until it would have failed fresh from the factory, then made me spend more than the car was worth on a special cat that reduced emissions by < 10%.

These days, cars continuously smog check themselves, so there could be a mandatory “send smog check report to the state” button on the dash, but that’d stop the gravy train for the smog test operators. At least they don’t make you smog test EVs, I guess.

With all the money that’s wasted on having stations that check dashboard error lights, they could install air and noise pollution monitoring sensors, and seize cars that have been modified to be non-street-legal. This would be stronger and better regulation than we currently have (less disruption to people obeying it, more bad cars taken off the road, minimal privacy implications for anyone in compliance with the law, and lower cost to enforce).

Also, it’d eliminate the need for the startup to test their truck retrofit, since the trucks would just light the stations up like a Christmas tree if there was an actual problem.
by chaps | 2025-11-21 15:52:49+00:00
I'm with you on shooting for the moon, but there are many, many, many little wins that need to happen before then. But it's not work that'll happen on its own. If you want to have your hand in poking at the problem, the best place to start is to start submitting FOIA requests to the places you'd want disclosure from and hold them accountable (ie, sue them) when they inevitably don't give you what they're legally required to give.
by palata | 2025-11-21 15:52:57+00:00
I totally feel for that, you should not be harassed, demeaned or made to feel bad for that (or anything else for that matter).

But I don't think that the rational answer is to try to convince everybody that your system is more intuitive because the other has "ridiculous" features. I answered to a comment that said: "ridiculously better in the imperial system".
by keepamovin | 2025-11-21 15:53:10+00:00
Exactly! You got to know what you're doing.. Everyone is acting as if it will "replace us all". Insecure and desparate/defensive. However, AI will go quite wrong unless you do some snow-shoveling/entropy-reduction, too. You need a plan. So plan it, otherwise it will go wrong.

In the next 30 years, more code than has ever been written in history will be written. By AI. But that doesn't make CS less important - it makes it more important! Especially if we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past and exponentially grow the bug-space, we are going to need new approaches. But AI is an inesacapable tool.

You can continue to hand-scribe everything, but in a way, that will be alike to continuing to hand scripe codices after the Gutenberg moment permitted you to just typeset and mass press them. You can choose that path, out of a hermetic stubborness or puritan zeal, but your imapct will be, necessarily, limited. Embrace the scale. It's the only way. I think.
by dguest | 2025-11-21 15:53:35+00:00
Crazy what those kooky Europeans do. Now if I have a friend, I can

- send a file to their phone

- charge their phone if they visit me [1] (without a huge bag of accessories)

- send them money [2] (without them giving some weird company their banking details)

- pay them [3] (even if they are from a neighboring country)

What will they think of next?! And to think, some of these things even work in the US. What a time to be alive.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Equipment_Directive_(202...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Bank_Account_Num...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-11-21 15:53:53+00:00
Worth pointing out that their laptops cost you $1,000, and they probably cost a fair bit to make. A quick google says generally they make 10-20% margin on most products, and after accounting for other expenses involved, walk away with 50-75$ per unit. That's consumer, mind you, it's probably much more complicated for enterprise.

To be clear, I agree with you that it's fucking ridiculous. Avoiding taking a "loss" of 4 bloody cents on your margin to make your product unable to decode via hardware one of the most popular codecs on the planet is classic value engineering horseshit, and is exactly what I expect from a penny pinching corporation. I'm just saying let's be accurate in calling them out: Dell has made your Teams and other apps experience demonstrably much worse to retain 0.08% of their profit margin.
by petruarakiss | 2025-11-21 15:54:42+00:00
Teams spend weeks tweaking system prompts while accuracy stays stuck. The real gains come from structuring context: feed the model the right data instead of better adjectives.

Article covers: - Context pipeline architecture (Query → Hydrator → Structured Context → Intelligence) - Three laws: structure beats prose, dynamic injection, information gain metric - Production examples: fintech chatbot latency improvements, SaaS cost optimizations - Failure modes I've actually hit: over-engineering, latency budgets exceeded, wrong context retrieval

Includes TypeScript code examples with error handling, caching, timeouts, and test patterns.
by pm215 | 2025-11-21 15:54:50+00:00
For a learning project like this one, this would probably be overkill, but my personal suggestion for instruction decoding is that it really pays in the long term to use a data driven decoder. It's fairly easy to do a handcoded "if bits A..B are 0b1000 and..." decoder for the basic integer parts of the instruction set, but especially as you get into complexities like SIMD and if you need your decoder to be easy to modify to add new instructions later this gets very unwieldy.

QEMU switched to a data driven representation with a python program to autogenerate the "check bit patterns and extract fields" code, and it's one of the better design overhauls we've done: we started using it mostly for new code but went back and converted some of the old handwritten decoders too. It's much easier to add a new instruction when you only need to add a line like

USADA8 ---- 0111 1000 rd:4 ra:4 rm:4 0001 rn:4

and add a function trans_USADA8() that gets called with the field values, compared to trying to find the right place in a big existing set of handcoded switch and if statements to add the extra checks for the insn.
by pavlov | 2025-11-21 15:54:59+00:00
The same applies to color space. You can’t interpret the pixel data without knowing the color space. If it’s not in the metadata, you just have to assume sRGB and hope for the best.

It’s the same with rotation. Both are essential information on how to interpret the pixel data for display, but we’re so very used to assuming certain defaults that it’s easy to forget about this.
by tych0 | 2025-11-21 15:55:23+00:00
[disclaimer, maintainer here]

> Doesn't this require the environment to be owned by root? Doesn't it make more sense to leave things that are in /opt as root-owned anyway? (Or at least, change them back after running the installation as an unprivileged user.)

No, it doesn't require that, it just means your user-owned binary will be exec'd by root. But if you want the root -> user owned indirection, you can set `Exec=/etc/X11/xinit/Xsession`, which will exec your ~/.xsession as your user, and then you can keep a local install.

> Will any random greeter program just naturally pick up the contents of /usr/share/xsessions, then?

Ones that support x11 do, yes.

> So does it just ignore all your other dotfiles? Can I safely just try this out regardless of my usual WM/DE choices?

We try to read XDG_* things where relevant, e.g. themes and icons. But generally yes, once you point your xsession at qtile, we only use our config file.
by runeks | 2025-11-21 15:55:44+00:00
I think it would be super interesting to see how the LLM handles extending/modifying the code it has written. Ie. adding/removing features, in order to simulate the life cycle of a normal software project. After all, LLM-produced code would only be of limited use if it’s worse at adding new features than humans are.

As I understand, this would require somehow “saving the state” of the LLM, as it exists after the last prompt — since I don’t think the LLM can arrive at the same state by just being fed the code it has written.
by JohnFen | 2025-11-21 15:55:49+00:00
> Stop thinking of AI like an unfair "cheatcode" and start thinking of it as a new programming language.

I have never thought of it as a cheat code at all. I also don't think of it as a new programming language (because it's not). It's a tool.

It's not one that I find all that useful, and under ordinary circumstances, all that would mean is that I don't use it. Where the hard feelings come in is that it's being shoved into other tools that I use and so is increasingly becoming an irritation that gets in my way. The constant stream of sales pitches and propaganda doesn't help, either.
by tliltocatl | 2025-11-21 15:56:20+00:00
>”Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality or death!” types.

That's just not true. The Black Hundred responsible for pogroms were in decline already before revolution having lost state support as bureaucrats felt it was getting out of control. They played zero role after the revolution. Monarchists were a minority among Whites, it is just that the most competent military leaders were (i. e. Kolchak Denikin, Kappel) - but even them were not too loud loud about it as not to lose support. The Reds nearly lost simply because they had zero approval rating to begin with, what got them any support at all was the promise to exit WWI - and the support fell considerably when it turned out that exiting the war meant Brest peace accord.
by danans | 2025-11-21 15:56:54+00:00
Lenovo Chromebook Plus 12 or Acer - Chromebook Plus Spin 514. Both have an M2 equivalent MediaTek Kompanio ARM CPU/GPU, and comes with native Debian VM built in (Crostini) that runs standard Linux desktop apps. Battery life and performance are great. You can even get it pretty loaded up with RAM to run smaller LLMs if that's your jam.

As you can tell from my past comments about Chromebooks as Linux workstations here, I'm a daily user and very happy with them.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-11-21 15:57:44+00:00
Tomato, tomato. I think the problem is, much like Google engineers get promoted by shipping features (even if no one uses them), politicians get ahead by shipping laws, even if they're ineffective or cause more harm than good, so long as they can convince enough voters that it was a good thing (hence the proliferation of bills with names like Ultra-Triple-Plus-Good-For-The-Children-Act").
by 542354234235 | 2025-11-21 15:58:12+00:00
>both Boeing and Airbus have given up on quadjets.

It is possible “to make appropriate decisions” up to a certain size. They didn’t stop making new quadjets because the design doesn’t work as well as a twin engine, but because airlines don’t need/want aircraft that large. You wouldn’t build a successor to the A380 as a twin engine.
by mindslight | 2025-11-21 15:58:38+00:00
No, it won't. And lashing out with random shots in the dark tends to advance corporate control, as we've seen with the results from the trumpist tantrum. As long as ownership (/controlling interest) of companies continues to be basically unregulated cross-border (because the class of people having it also have the ears (if not the necks) of politicians), then things like sanctions are merely speed bumps on commerce that increase large-scale market friction and thereby increase the domestic power of corpos.
by dboreham | 2025-11-21 15:58:50+00:00
Re-reading the 1979 report might be helpful here. This isn't my field, but it seems that the engine is attached "hard" to the pylon, then the pylon is attached via a bearing mount system to the wing frame. The bearings wear out, and hence have to be replaced (not sure how often, but they were doing it on the entire fleet prior to the 1979 crash). The 1979 investigators thought that the fatigue cracks were caused by removal of the entire pylon/engine assembly as one unit (because that put excess stress on the aft bearing, they suspected due to support being provided from below by a fork lift). After the 1979 accident engines had to be removed first, then pylon, supposedly removing that cause for mount cracking. Perhaps there was another cause.
Ask HN: Is anyone building an LLM based digital surrogate?
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-11-21 15:58:57+00:00
I’ve toyed with the idea of building a digital assistant/surrogate to handle most of my coordinating Dr. appts, negotiating bills, inquiring about trash/medical/home/car services and generally just being a proxy between myself and my non-friend interactions.

Is anyone working on this or having any luck using any services like this? I’d pay $100s/month for this but don’t have $100,000 or 12 months to invest in an MVP unfortunately
Show HN: A tiny CLI that pipes logs/errors to an LLM for instant debugging
by jenia_n | 2025-11-21 16:00:51+00:00
I made a small CLI tool called "que". It’s meant for those moments when you're SSH’d into a box or staring at a CI failure and just want to pipe the output into an LLM and get “here’s what broke + how to fix it.” Nice and simple to install and use.
by lq9AJ8yrfs | 2025-11-21 16:01:26+00:00
I rather disagree on the difficulty of pulling it off. The problem space is well-defined and there aren't that many degrees of freedom in functional design.

I'll concede there is some complexity in integrating with everything and putting up with the associated confusion. And granted the stakes are a little raised due to the nature of identity and access, and like you point out what could go wrong. Implementation is annoying, both writing the identity solution and then deploying and operating it. But the deployment & operation part is still there if you go with Okta or 1Login or Cognito or whomever.

The implementation is a capital type thing that is substantially solved already with the various F/OSS solutions people are mentioning - it's just a docker pull and some config work to get it going into a POC.

There are much harder problems in tech IMO, anything ill-defined for starters.

The C-level folks seem to think they are buying some kind of indemnity with these "enterprise" grade solutions, but there is no such thing. They'll even turn it around and take Okta's limitations as existential--"if even Okta doesn't get it right, there is no way we could pull it off". Out of touch, or less politely, delusional.
by shermantanktop | 2025-11-21 16:01:27+00:00
It is possible to radically increase your chances of success. You have to speak the LLM’s language, just like you write Java or Rust. But it doesn’t come with a language spec, so you get to figure it out by trial and error. And a model change means revisiting what works.

Lots of tips on how to do this out there but one thing I do is have it try, throw away everything it it did, and try again with a completely restated question based on the good bits in what it was able to produce.

E.g., if you ask for a web app that does X and it produces a working web app that doesn’t do X, throw that away and just ask for the web app scaffolding. You’ve still come out ahead even if you take over fully.
by parsimo2010 | 2025-11-21 16:01:32+00:00
It's great to do experimentation because you get to learn a lot, but at the end of the day stick with well-studied designs if you're making a something you want to use. The oscillators mentioned below all have well known strengths and weaknesses:

The author mentions that they consider a center-tapped inductor to be "fancy," but if you consider a regular inductor to be fair game, then the Colpitts oscillator is a good choice. And I suppose you could build a Hartley oscillator with two inductors rather than one center-tapped inductor.

If you consider op-amps to be fair game even though it is made from multiple transistors, then you might consider digital logic to also be fair game and should consider a Pierce oscillator. I'm also assuming that a crystal is also fair game, but those are quite cheap.

Side note- these oscillators are all part of the exam material for the Extra class amateur radio license in the USA. If you find lcamtuf's Substack interesting, then amateur radio might be for you.
by Gormo | 2025-11-21 16:02:27+00:00
> 1. Every "adaptive ecosystem" has limits.

This is a very vague claim. Everything in nature has some sort of "limits"

> 2. Without proper government regulation, which includes some "government planning", an "adaptive ecosystem" cannot and will not exist.

It's very much the other way around. Governments are institutions that form within the bounds of civil societies that already exist, and already have a sufficient common ground of norms and behavioral expectations to enable formal institutions to be established and sustain themselves over time in the first place.

You seem to be looking at this from the perspective of government being some sort of prime mover, or something that exists outside the ecosystem of society and able to place external constraints on it -- but no, governments are just ordinary institutions within society, subject to the same incentive structures and failure modalities as everything else, and there is no "outside" at all.

> 3. Abusing 1 and lacking 2, things not only don't "turn out better every time", they turn out really bad every single time.

(1) is reality itself, and (2) is a set of aspirational ideals that exist within (1). Pursuing (2) means working within the manifest nature of (1), not trying to supersede it with something else -- treating (2) as a unbounded solution to everything turns it more often into an instrument of abuse, rather than a mitigation for abuse.

> With that said, abusing immigration enforcement in order to habituate disregard for due process is deceptive and over the limits and it leads to worse consequences than immigration itself.

Yes, this is absolutely correct.
by vidarh | 2025-11-21 16:02:39+00:00
Run it with --dangerously-skip-permissions, give it a large test suite, and keep telling it "continue fixing spec failures" and you'll eat through them very quickly.

Or it will format your drives, and set fire to your cat; might be worth doing it in a VM.

Though a couple of days ago, I gave Claude Code root access to a Raspberry Pi and told it to set up Home Assistant and a voice agent... It likes to tweak settings and reboot it.

EDIT: It just spoke to me, by ssh'ing into the Pi and running Espeak (I'd asked it to figure it out; it decided the HA API was too difficult, and decided on its own to pivot to that approach...)
by Aardwolf | 2025-11-21 16:04:48+00:00
PNG now does - and they've been as vague as they could be in the spec about whether any exif data should affect the image display or not. The spec says:

"It is recommended that unless a decoder has independent knowledge of the validity of the Exif data, the data should be considered to be of historical value only."

Instead of either saying: "yes you must rotate it" or "no you shall not rotate it" to make everyone do the same thing. And if it were yes, they should also have made this a mandatory chunk since now they made it optional to read.
by mapehe | 2025-11-21 16:05:16+00:00
Well, upon a closer look, one notices that the chessboard coloring is not necessary for the problem statement. It's kind of a hint actually as you could equally well just consider a blank 8x8 board and realize that this coloring arugment works. I just feel the problem is unreasonably difficult that way.

The coloring is kind of additional structure that is applied on the object you are working with. And I think this idea of "applying structure" is a very generic. You can solve similar combinatorial arrangement problems that way, but it goes beyond that.

I think that a nice, classic (and significantly more advanced) example is showing that plane and punctured plane (a plane with one missing point) are topologically different. The fundamental (homotopy) groups of these spaces are different, and hence the spaces cannot be continuously deformed to each other.

Somehow the spirit is the same, I feel. In this topology proof it's not a grid you are working with, but a topological space. And the structure you apply is not a coloring, but something quite abstract (a homotopy group). The idea in both cases is similar, though: You apply structure and this structure reveals something that's not easy to see directly.

The magic part is figuring out the structure that produces the data you need.