MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aeturnum | 2025-11-06 23:35:49+00:00
The way I talk about is is that the value you deliver as a software "engineer" is: taste and good guesses. Anyone can bang out code given enough time. Anyone can read docs on how to implement an algorithm and implement it eventually. The way you deliver value is by having a feel for the service and good instincts about where to look first and how to approach problems. The only way to develop that taste and familiarity is to work on stuff yourself.

Once you can show, without doubt, what you should do software engineers have very little value. The reason they are still essential is that product choices are generally made under very ambiguous conditions. John Carmack said "If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better."[1] This might seem like it goes against what I am saying but actually narrowing "everything possible" to two options is huge value! That is a lot of what you provide as an engineer and the only way you are going to hone that sense is by working on your company's' product in production.

[1] https://aeflash.com/2013-01/john-carmack.html
by simonw | 2025-11-06 23:36:01+00:00
> But I would agree that in most cases, a human saying "this is done" carries a lot more weight than an LLM saying it.

That's because humans have stakes. If a human tells me something is done and I later find out that it isn't, they damage their credibility with me in the future - and they know that.

You can't hold an LLM accountable.
by mmooss | 2025-11-06 23:36:04+00:00
> what do you think they should have done better?

Take a good position - the GOP leaves the field wide open, maybe as simple as 'Liberty and Justice for All' (part of the American pledge of allegiance that everyone knows) - and fight for it, stand up for yourself, against all enemies and attacks, and fight until you win. Take punches, never go down, keep going, have a winning strategy and keep going until it works. Nobody will believe in you until you do it.

The Dems never confront the GOP and always fold. I think if they fought, successfully, for almost any policy, they'd attract a lot of support.

> the most common denominator

Not at all. How about they were Democrats, Senators, .... If it stand out the most to you, maybe ask why?
by BeetleB | 2025-11-06 23:37:05+00:00
And it's not just that. They use dark patterns to inflate their ratings.

When I get done with a Teams call, I'm often asked to rate the call. If I pick 2 stars, I'm asked for written feedback on why it's low. If I pick 4 stars, I'm not.

Given how often they ask this, many will select 4-5 stars to dismiss the window.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-11-06 23:37:23+00:00
> it was really hard to track one down that still had flouride in it

Oh, so you are one of those tin foil hat types that does not want fluoride in their toothpaste or drinking water? What the hell is it with fluoride and Internet randos? There is always one who pops into a discussion who has a hysterical story about why they avoid it. Repeating from my previous post, but this time about fluoride: <<Billions of people use X every day and have no issues.>>
by spacechild1 | 2025-11-06 23:37:25+00:00
This is actually a very nice explanation!

I also enjoyed the linked article about the 5 value types: https://blog.knatten.org/2018/03/09/lvalues-rvalues-glvalues.... For some reason I never bothered to look up these terms as they sounded so obscure. Turns out the taxonomy is pretty clear and it's just a refinement of the existing two value types (lvalues and rvalues).

EDIT: I do think the naming is rather confusing and inconsistent, though.
by neoromantique | 2025-11-06 23:37:49+00:00
There is nothing to whitewash about wars and war crimes, they happen in every war, and are inexcusable in every war, no matter the side.

For every war crime from Jewish side you can always point to a similar one from Arab side, this finger pointing is not useful for anything but spurring more hate and igniting the conflict over and over.
by 8note | 2025-11-06 23:38:15+00:00
well, i got some gemini models running on my phone, but if i switch apps, android kills it, so the call to the server always hangs... and then the screen goes black

the new laptop only has 16GB of memory total, with another 7 dedicated to the NPU.

i tried pulling up Qwen 3 4B on it, but the max context i can get loaded is about 12k before the laptop crashes.

my next attempt is gonna be a 0.5B one, but i think ill still end up having to compress the context every call, which is my real challenge
by foxglacier | 2025-11-06 23:39:22+00:00
It seems like a double standard. If you approached a random member of the public that you didn't like the look of, shouted at them that you don't want them in your city and violently threw a soft object at them, you could easily be convicted of assault and receive some minor punishment. I think most people would accept that you should be. Should people have greater rights to assault policemen than other types of people? Or should assault be legal if the victim's workmates find it funny?
by martin-t | 2025-11-06 23:39:24+00:00
OK, tell me which dumb people understand:

- The differences between voting systems and why FPTP is one of the worst options possible.

- That opinions are N-dimensional vectors and elections are describing your opinion by picking one point from a small predefined set.

- How much money a day a person in the top 0.01% makes vs the top 50% and for how much time/effort.

I am sure dumb people see problems and they probably also see them to be as severe as those I listed.

But I don't think they understand how hard it is to find solutions, especially when those solutions involve convincing dumb people.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-11-06 23:39:37+00:00
This is good first hand information. If you had a guess, how much did these people make per hour? Someone who (1) locates a physical server (amoungst thousands) and (2) replaces a hard drive has roughly the same skillset as someone stocking supermarket shelves in 2025. I guess then make max 20 USD per hour.
by stefankuehnel | 2025-11-06 23:39:53+00:00
Just a note: the White House also uses archive.ph.

Search for “Americans are spending like never before: Retail sales are booming — up 5% over last year, far outpacing inflation — as Americans spend in record amounts.” [1]

The phrase “up 5%” links directly to archive.ph.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/09/the-economy-is-b...
by abhaynayar | 2025-11-06 23:40:05+00:00
I'd heard "happiness is reality minus expectations" before but never thought much of it. I had high expectations of myself in certain areas of life and worked hard towards them and I thought that they were realistic, so despite not having achieved them I still had hope.

And now over time reality has caught up to me and I've become sadder because I've realized that my expectations were indeed higher than my circumstances. I was just a naive oblivious idiot and life has now shown me that. It's sad but I now have just let go. I still am working towards stuff just playing to my strengths and inclinations instead of my wants.
by duxup | 2025-11-06 23:41:16+00:00
This all feels like a sort of suicide pact.

If they don't give Elon massive amounts of cash, then he maybe walks and they pick someone new as CEO and Tesla stock might start getting evaluated like any other stock ... the would result in a pretty sharp downward trend.

Keep Elon and the aspirational (that's the word I picked) stock price maybe holds?
by Jtsummers | 2025-11-06 23:41:41+00:00
Yes. The editorialized title includes a statement not present in the article at all, "Don't automate". Joshi actually describes how he has used LLMs and his experience with them, and he never says not to use them at all which is what the editorialized title suggested. The bulk of the article is describing how LLMs can break the learning loop (as hinted at in the original title) which is a much more interesting topic than HTML code generation a bunch of people are talking about.

[The title has been changed, presumably by a mod. For anyone coming later it was originally incorrect and included statements not present in the article.]
by p_ing | 2025-11-06 23:41:51+00:00
Police in the US as they're trained are a cancer on society as a whole. Prosecutors are afraid of prosecuting them as they are -- normal citizens. They deserve nor have any special rights under the law (there are two classes of people, civilians and military -- they're not military).

When an officer attempts to murder a civilian, they should face attempted murder charges. When an officer kills a pet, he should face a destruction of property charge.

Unfortunately this rarely happens.

Anyone should be able to exercise their human rights and resists so-called officers of the law where possible up to and including deadly force.
by immibis | 2025-11-06 23:42:05+00:00
That's what makes them incompatible.

But companies can be a lot shadier than we give them credit for. Like, remember that "wink payment" contract between Google and Israel? If Google knew what they were doing, they accepted the contract to do the illegal thing, so they'd sell their product and get money, but they were planning to simply not do the illegal thing, breaking the contract (the customer would never know and if they somehow did, you can't stop using a cloud on a dime) but not breaking any laws.

If Microsoft knows what they're doing, they'll accept contracts from EU customers that say "we will never give your data to US authorities", they break it immediately, don't tell the customer and the customer never finds out.

Alternatively, they can give the US government a bunch of nothing, in order to comply with the EU customer contract, and pretend this is all the data the customer had on their account. I doubt this will happen though.
by NoPicklez | 2025-11-06 23:42:17+00:00
I appreciate that and you're right.

My point is to highlight for the original commenter that whilst buying online is incredibly useful, has more variety and in some a number of cases is cheaper due to being able to shop around. Having a central store like a Micro center has enormous value, there's not many of them around.

For me in Australia, I certainly cannot order something at 9pm and have it at my doorstep in the morning. Nor do we have any places like Microcenter with such variety. Genuinely if I wanted to go into a store to check the size of a particular PC case, I can't do that because there aren't any around and I live in a state capital city.
by imiric | 2025-11-06 23:42:20+00:00
> Give each call different tools. Make sub-agents talk to each other, summarize each other, collate and aggregate. Build tree structures out of them. Feed them back through the LLM to summarize them as a form of on-the-fly compression, whatever you like.

You propose increasing the complexity of interactions of these tools, and giving them access to external tools that have real-world impact? As a security researcher, I'm not sure how you can suggest that with a straight face, unless your goal is to have more vulnerable systems.

Most people can't manage to build robust and secure software using SOTA hosted "agents". Building their own may be a fun learning experience, but relying on a Rube Goldberg assembly of disparate "agents" communicating with each other and external tools is a recipe for disaster. Any token could trigger a cascade of hallucinations, wild tangents, ignored prompts, poisoned contexts, and similar issues that have plagued this tech since the beginning. Except that now you've wired them up to external tools, so maybe the system chooses to wipe your home directory for whatever reason.

People nonchalantly trusting nondeterministic tech with increasingly more real-world tasks should concern everyone. Today it's executing `ping` and `rm`; tomorrow it's managing nuclear launch systems.
by sega_sai | 2025-11-06 23:42:32+00:00
I agree, writing some software requires learning and understanding. But sometimes, one just needs something done (if one's job is not software engineer) and then LLMs are indispensable. Also in some software projects (at least in my personal experience) there is stuff that is important and requires thought, and a lot of other stuff that's just boilerplate, connecting this to that etc. I am more than happy to delegate that. It gives me more time to think about stuff that's actually important.
by johnea | 2025-11-06 23:42:58+00:00
I think this is a great development!

It does illustrate that the EU has started to understand something that S/W devs seem to have totally forgotten: dependencies are bad, use as few as possible.

The rest of the world has not yet caught on. When I was in Japan this past summer, I was shocked at how dependent business, government and individuals are on US internet infrastructure.

I tried describing the ICC situation, and most people (even s/w devs) stared with a blank face.

The main thing I wonder about the opendesk project in general is, why do they think it's only for the "public sector"?

Do government employees use email differently from other people? Does their calendar s/w need some special features?

To me this just seems like an office productivity suite, for everyone.

The opendesk project should expand the concept of who they intend to serve...
by 8note | 2025-11-06 23:43:07+00:00
> A subtler thing to notice: we just had a multi-turn conversation with an LLM. To do that, we remembered everything we said, and everything the LLM said back, and played it back with every LLM call. The LLM itself is a stateless black box. The conversation we’re having is an illusion we cast, on ourselves.

the illusion was broken for me by Cline context overflows/summaries, but i think its very easy to miss if you never push the LLM hard or build you own agent. I really like this wording, amd the simple description is missing from how science communicators tend to talk about agents and LLMs imo
Ask HN: Does Google bury relevant results 3 pages deep?
by n1xis10t | 2025-11-06 23:43:20+00:00
Someone made this claim here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45816968 The user name was “mtillman” if you want to find the comment in that page.

He cited this court document as a source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/1436/united-states-of-america-v-google-llc/

I can’t find a part of that document that backs the claim up, but it might just be because I don’t know what to search in the page for.

Have you guys seen this claim elsewhere?
Open-source MCP Security scanner
by vimokumar | 2025-11-06 23:43:41+00:00
Most MCP security scanners we have tried are noisy, endless alerts and false positives. We think developers deserve better. We are looking for early adopters who want to try and help shape something that actually works.

We are building an open-source security scanner to catch below issues:

- Prompt Injection - Indirect Prompt Injection - Cross-Origin Escalation - Tool Poisoning - Tool Name Ambiguity - Command Injection - Excessive Permission - PIl Detection

If this sounds interesting, drop a comment.
by 8bitsrule | 2025-11-06 23:43:50+00:00
Revival, yes!

I mailed off for so much weird stuff from WEC ... stuff I'd never known about before ... from all over the hemisphere. Unusual teas and bakeries, kinnikinnick, oddish books, even some chair-caning materials (used on one VERY old chair). Sometimes forgotten about because of "Please allow 3 to 6 weeks for delivery."
by kccqzy | 2025-11-06 23:44:05+00:00
I agree the names are confusing. But it's just a simple matter of having a diagram nearby to remember which is which. (I think I first saw that diagram on Stack Overflow.)

There have been a lot of times in science when I have trouble remembering names but have no trouble at all understanding the concepts behind these names. I just keep an index card nearby. I noticed this tendency of mine as early as high school. For example, in chemistry I sometimes couldn't remember which is dextro and which is levo, but I understand chirality and know how they are different. In physics I sometimes forget which is the magnetic B field and which is the magnetic H field, though I understand the difference between them. I don't use these concepts often so I haven't internalized the names. I think it's totally alright to have a name–concept dissociation for these.
by costco | 2025-11-06 23:44:33+00:00
I use a Hetzner server with Ryzen 7 3700X and an SSD.

I think I could get the model to work with ONNX web but it'd be a 2GB download so the user experience wouldn't be too great. My Meilisearch index is ~40GB but I don't know how much that could be compressed down.

Here's how the similar page for books is generated, which I forgot to mention on the "how it works" page: https://gist.github.com/chris124567/8d06d64bfe827cb7f6121f93...
by dijit | 2025-11-06 23:45:29+00:00
it’s all just people at the end of the day.

Without oversight, abuse is inevitable.

You have two choices:

* Limit the damage that a person can do- IE; don’t aggregate everything in the hands of one person.

* Tonnes of oversight into who accesses the data and why.

In theory the US chooses the latter, but only for nationals and the snowden leaks were proving that this was basically just a rubber stamp and constantly was bypassed on technicalities..

.. outside of the US, there’s no legal framework to protect your data from US authorities, no matter who they are, at all.
by guywithahat | 2025-11-06 23:45:41+00:00
In the strict legal sense, this is assault; assault is just "offensive touching". If I spit on someone in an offensive manor (such as after yelling at them), that's classified as assault, and this has been affirmed by many courts (one such ruling by the 9th circuit court https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/1424739.htm...). I'm not saying I personally agree with the legal definition, that's just how they do it in the US. Throwing a sandwich at someone in a situation like this absolutely counts as assault, I don't think there's any debate about that.

What we have is a case of jury nullification, where a jury recognized the crime and decided not to convict. This is probably fine with the prosecution though, as the real punishment was holding him in jail, getting him fired, and wasting his life savings defending this case.
by malkia | 2025-11-06 23:46:06+00:00
Yup - I wish that was not the case, I've learned relatively recently that the state the variable becomes (after moving) is "valid, but unspecified" - e.g. you can still destroy it (I guess how would RAII work otherwise), you can still assign to it, and even check some basic properties (!) - but you can't know anything about the actual value (contents) it carries (weird)

It's like a tombstone for a deleted file, object - something that tells you - "Here lived Obj B Peterson, was nice folk, but moved away to a higher place"
by andai | 2025-11-06 23:46:26+00:00
I used to be obsessed with what's the smartest LLM, until I tried actually using them for some tasks and realized that the smaller models did the same task way faster.

So I switched my focus from "what's the smartest model" to "what's the smallest one that can do my task?"

With that lens, "scores high on general intelligence benchmarks" actually becomes a measure of how overqualified the model is, and how much time, money and energy you are wasting.
by dpark | 2025-11-06 23:46:48+00:00
> Open web means popular browsers supporting a wide range of technologies that institutions, businesses, and people use.

The “wide range of technologies” is not what makes the web “open”.

The openness comes from the fact that anyone can write web sites and anyone can write a browser that can render the same websites that chrome can render. “More features” does not imply “more open”.

Dropping support for xslt would make the web less open if it were being replaced by some proprietary Google tech. But that’s not what’s happening here at all.

> Not: popular browsers needle through technologies and tell everyone they know best

How else would it possibly work? Everyone has to actively choose the features they will build and support.
by wtcactus | 2025-11-06 23:47:09+00:00
Standard candles (all these measurements of redshift according to distance, need us to actually get the distance of what we are measuring right) are the gift that keeps on giving.

This study (and many others, depending on the cosmic scales they use) mainly use Supernovas of Type Ia. I.e. the energy emitted by the supernova of a binary acreccion star, which is a star that is capturing the mass from another start that is very nearby and increasing its mass until it collapses into itself, increases temperature up to the point it starts fusing helium, and goes supernova with all the added energy.

That was (and still is now, with some corrections we found since middle last century) supposed to be the same everywhere. Problem is, we keep finding new corrections to it - like this study claims.

That is in fact the big claim of this study (ignore the universe expansion part), that they found a new correction to the Supernova of type Ia luminosity. It's a very big claim and extremely interesting if confirmed. But, like all big claims, it needs a big confirmation. I'm a bit skeptic TBH.
by immibis | 2025-11-06 23:47:28+00:00
I don't think that Trump himself really thinks all the things he's pushing for - I think most of it is coming from people who aren't him, and he's just the figurehead. It's not clear he's capable of understanding what he's doing, at this point, since he has dementia. I think the more emotional-outburst type stuff, like "You have 100% tariffs? We'll have 200% tariffs!" is him though.
by michaelmrose | 2025-11-06 23:49:15+00:00
They are trying to distract from multiple crisis at home including the relationship of the president with a disgraced pedophile and alleged misdeeds.

I would expect them to provide the proof that served as justification for the strike and an explatation as to why a strike rather than interdiction was lawful and justifiable.

Eg an intelligence source suggested this very boat was being being used by Bob the blow on such and such a date Bob was responsible for ordering the murder of 4 FBI agents and due to assets available it would have been a huge risk to our people and it might be difficult or impossible to local bob any time in the near future.

If need be this justification may be given secretly to a bipartisan group of lawmakers who assert vague but important findings like we believe that the strikes are justified and didn't kill innocent people.
by 8note | 2025-11-06 23:50:05+00:00
as a simplest thing, i would expect them to abduct the survivors and bring them to the US to face some trial, rather than putting them on a boat back home

as a general best practice, id expect them to send a patrol boat to go board and confiscate the drugs, then show off said drugs.

its not hard to collect the evidence of drugs, since the drugs will be on the boat/sub, and with the size of the deployment, there's more than enough capacity to just sail over to it, rather than destroying it with missiles.
by walletdrainer | 2025-11-06 23:51:27+00:00
Yes, but to get something nearly as good as 365 would realistically cost 100x as much as just buying from Microsoft.

Who would you even hire to do this? A big consulting firm known for delivering poor quality software, or an unproven startup? What kind of a process could you use to make such a selection in a way that would ensure a good outcome?

It’s the same as the old libreoffice vs. MS office debate. Yeah, you can download libreoffice for free. It sucks. What sucks even more though is how much money you will spend on support, training and all the inevitable productivity losses associated with weird software that approximately nobody you hire will have experience with.