MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gsf_emergency_5 | 2025-11-17 10:38:32+00:00
How does one reliably counter-signal competence? That would not just break social media, it would make nepo babies[0] obsolete in fields without straightforward measures of merit (like thought-leadership)

His other example of the decades-new identity makes it sound like special functions have seen better days, not that we should give him some brownies.

One type of counter-signal is being nuts and right at the same time, all the time. This is not anything I've seen in HN comments not to mention this blogger. (Nor from Neumann, really. He did point to people who were, though, like Szilard, Seth Neddermeyer, etc)

[0]"Precocity" is NOT a counter-signal, it's a bad system smell?

[1] I saw a YouTube comment today which observed that mathematicians agree [on whether something is a breakthrough] much more readily than philosophers (and physicists, I would add)
by sunrunner | 2025-11-17 10:39:39+00:00
> If you are mocking anything in the standard library your code is probably structured poorly.

I like Hynek Schlawak's 'Don’t Mock What You Don’t Own' [1] phrasing, and while I'm not a fan of adding too many layers of abstraction to an application that hasn't proved that it needs them, the one structure I find consistently useful is to add a very thin layer over parts that do I/O, converting to/from types that you own to whatever is needed for the actual thing.

These layers should be boring and narrow (for example, never mock past validation you depend upon), doing as little conversion as possible. You can also rephrase the general purpose open()-type usage into application/purpose-specific usages of that.

Then you can either unittest.mock.patch these or provide alternate stub implementations for tests in a different way, with this this approach also translating easily to other languages that don't have the (double-edged sword) flexibility of Python's own unittest.mock.

[1] https://hynek.me/articles/what-to-mock-in-5-mins/
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-11-17 10:40:22+00:00
Your reliable BloombergNEF says that onshore wind became the cheapest source of unsubsidized new electricity in Germany and UK in 2015, a decade ago.

Coincidentally that's roughly when the UK government banned the building of onshore wind across England, which was only recently revrsed.

Now that sounds like an Ideologically driven attempt to raise electricity prices.
by iainmerrick | 2025-11-17 10:41:51+00:00
Right, I just meant that for most popular US car models, the manufacturers do all the checks and modifications needed to sell a European variant, but that's specifically not the case for the Cybertruck.

Either the design is fundamentally incompatible with European regulations, or they just don't think there's market demand. But note that other US truck do sell in Europe and the UK, e.g. the F-150.

There's something special about the Cybertruck. The special thing seems to be that it's a lemon.
by zerr | 2025-11-17 10:42:02+00:00
Besides not wanting to give most enjoyable part of the work to LLMs, reviewing LLM-generated code is much more daunting compared to writing the code yourself. So, I only use it for a very narrow and specific 2-3 liners, e.g. some arcane Win32 API calls, where I'd otherwise be browsing some old forums.
by rudedogg | 2025-11-17 10:42:54+00:00
I submitted this and unfortunately it is likely AI generated. The authors github history suggests it at the very least, along with seemingly misunderstanding a reference to a Zig language feature (labeled blocks - https://zig.guide/language-basics/labelled-blocks/) in the project issues (https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/issues/4).

I’m not sure how much value is to be had here, and it’s unfortunate the author wasn’t honest about how it was created.

I wish I wouldn’t have submitted this so quickly but I was excited about the new resource and the chapters I dug into looked good and accurate.

I worry about whether this will be maintained, if there are hallucinations, and if it’s worth investing time into.
by dns_snek | 2025-11-17 10:43:15+00:00
It's not that simple though, Zig has equivalent spatial memory safety which prevents issues that are pretty consistently among (or at) the top of the list for most dangerous vulnerability classes.

And while I don't have enough experience with Rust to claim this first hand, my understanding is that writing correct unsafe Rust code is at least an order of magnitude harder than writing correct Zig code due to all of the properties/invariants that you have to preserve. So it comes with serious drawbacks, it's not just a quick "opt out of the safety for a bit" switch.

> Being able to guarantee that something can't happen is more valuable than making it simple to do something correctly most of the time.

Of course, all other things being equal, but they're not.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-17 10:43:16+00:00
> if major projects balk at the emergence of new classes of tools, perhaps the management strategy wasn’t resilient in the first place?

It's not the tools, it's the quality. No FOSS dev would care where the code came from if it followed the contributor's guidelines and coding style.

This is why it's a spam issue. a bunch of low quality submissions only gum up the time of such developers and slows the entire process down.

>that likely means extremely competent maintainers and contributors.

Your assumption falls apart here, sadly. Dunning-Kruger hits hard here for new contributors powered by LLMs and the maintainers suffer the brunt of the hit.
by swiftcoder | 2025-11-17 10:43:30+00:00
> It's easy to tell parents to let their kids roam free, but that advice is to copy the behaviour of parents that had ten kids. I said "had", because on average, two of them will survive to adulthood and procreation. That's natural. That's the way things were for our species for megayears.

We still roamed pretty free as kids in the 90s. That's long after the decline of childhood mortality and large families - I don't know more than a handful of families from that era who had more than 2 kids.
by symbogra | 2025-11-17 10:44:46+00:00
I didn't know there was a new diablo 2? I mean the original one from two decades ago. I agree its not bad compared to modern games since the grinding just wasted your time rather than money (there was a secondary market for items that was worth some money but you didn't need to participate). I feel like it was one of the prototypical games of this kind of grind.
by altairprime | 2025-11-17 10:46:18+00:00
I think this is close, and the video touches on that as a characteristic that’s contributing to this, but there’s a motivation left unaddressed by the video that needs to be called out:

Reducing depth of field reduces the render resolution, which reduces the costs of digital processing and generation.

The simplest way to demonstrate this on a desktop computer is with the photography mode in games like Minecraft or Satisfactory or Elite Dangerous or No Man’s Sky, where the user can modify the Render Distance and Depth of Field at will. Load up the game viewing some planetary scene and enable the fps counter, then start changing the render distance; the closer you set it, the faster each frame will be generated. But the background will look defective and empty, so add depth of field, and now it doesn’t look so cheap — and when you take the photo, depending on the game, it may override your realtime render distance because it can take five seconds (!) rather than 1/60th of a second to generate that frame at 20 megapixels.

I think that the shift towards low depth of field in movies is, in part, a reflection of cost pressures, especially in 99.9% CG movies like Quantumania. And I think this is where Avatar beats out the competition for pure CG worlds in this video, because it renders at full resolution. It must have cost significantly more to produce than Quantumania (yep, $250m > $180m). I wonder how much of that difference was due to rendering the entire movie with a cheapness DoF blur. If nothing else, shadow rendering is so much of the difficulty of CG, that it could plausibly alone be the reason.

(I think that low depth of field is also currently popular because mobile phones lack it, and so producers are consciously or unconsciously selecting for an experience that is distinct from what they might film on their own. Depth of field is a very cheap form of escape.)
by kotaKat | 2025-11-17 10:46:30+00:00
Long, long ago there were some jailbreak hacks to pull this off. It was some funky mess with swapping modem firmware and pulling in the iOS dialer, if I recall.

Closest thing you can get now is that they finally brought the dialer app to the iPad... I can sort of make calls now through my cellular iPad using my iPhone's voice account with the "wifi calling on other devices" feature.
by dwaite | 2025-11-17 10:47:15+00:00
Yes, USB extenders are not spec-legal (because the device isn't built expecting to be extended).

But you can have an extension cord which accepts USB on one end but doesn't accept USB on the other.

So the keyboard has a superset connector so that it can go in regular USB and notched USB, because it is verified to work right when using the extension cord.

This design also means you can't plug one extension cord into another to get an even longer distance (which the keyboard wouldn't expect). Pretty clever solution.
by licorices | 2025-11-17 10:48:05+00:00
Not seen any claim like that about misgenedering, but I have seen a content creator have a very similar discussion with some AI model(ChatGPT 4? I think?). It was obviously aimed to be a fun thing. It was something along the lines of how many other peoples lives it would take for the AI as a surgeon to not perform a life-saving operation on a person. It then spiraled into "but what if it was Hitler getting the surgery". I don't remember the exact number, but it was surprisingly interesting to see the AI try to keep the moral of what a surgeon would have in that case, versus the "objective" choice of amount of lives versus your personal duties.

Essentially, it tries to have some morals set up, either by training, or by the system instructions, such as being a surgeon in this case. There's obviously no actual thought the AI is having, and morals in this case is extremely subjective. Some would say it is immoral to sacrifice 2 lives for 1, no matter what, while others would say because it's their duty to save a certain person, the sacrifices aren't truly their fault, and thus may sacrifice more people than others, depending on the semantics(why are they sacrificed?). It's the trolly problem.

It was DougDoug doing the video. Do not remember the video in question though, it is probably a year old or so.
by Xylakant | 2025-11-17 10:48:23+00:00
We haven’t had a malfunctioning battery in ~40 000km of ebike use in our family. We have one that failed to charge due to age. The number of times we ran out of battery due to forgetting to charge can be counted on one hand. The number of flat tires is in the single digits - modern general use tires are really sturdy, especially if you combine them with sealant.
by vkou | 2025-11-17 10:49:06+00:00
> This blog post talks as if mocking the `open` function is a good thing that people should be told how to do.

It does. And this is exactly the problem, here!

> TFA: The thing we want to avoid is opening a real file

No! No, no, no! You do not 'want to avoid opening a real file' in a test.

It's completely fine to open a real file in a test! If your code depends on reading input files, then your test should include real input files in it! There's no reason to mock any of this. All of this stuff is easy to set up in any unit test library worth it's salt.
by Vinnl | 2025-11-17 10:49:35+00:00
> Those places are very much not like the USA yet. Though as the article points out, they are definitely going in that direction.

In the Netherlands, some things are trending in that direction (e.g. car sizes/hood heights), but I wouldn't call it a general trend; infrastructure, for one, is still massively improving. Where it was bicycle-friendly twenty years ago, it's way more so today, and bound to be even more so tomorrow.
by Grimblewald | 2025-11-17 10:50:26+00:00
I know the style that most LLM's are mimicking quite well, and I also know people who wrote like that prior to the LLM deluge that is washing over us. The reason people are choosing to make LLMs mimic those behaviours is because it used to be associated with high effort content. The irony is now it si associated with the lowest effort content. The irony is I have stopped proof reading my comments etc. and put zero effort into styling or flow, because right now the only human thing left to do is make low effort content of the like only a human can.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-11-17 10:50:33+00:00
There's a thriving second hand market for wind turbines.

Similar to EV discussions a lot of motivated reasoning seems to assume that these items are disposed of in a black hole or set on fire in a school playground after a few years to try to equalize the damage done by combustion alternatives.

In reality people are spending tens or hundreds of thousands to buy these used turbines because they have value.

I've not seen full calculations for wind but I assume they exist. I've read ones for solar which calculate replacing panels in a farm after 17 years and landfilling the old ones is still ecologically positive because the extra generation of the new panels would pay off.

Obviously this only gets better if you resell or recycle the old panels instead.
by jiggawatts | 2025-11-17 10:50:34+00:00
I was an only kid that roamed pretty free as young as four, wandering the neighbourhood with similarly aged kids.

I chalk that up to the inertia of social behaviour. My parents grew up in a generation where they all had many brothers and sisters, and their parents were one of eight. They learned parenting from their parents, and I learned parenting from mine.

We adjust with each generation, but not completely.
by sunscream89 | 2025-11-17 10:50:57+00:00
Not “power over them”. Don’t be ridiculous.

Remember the Satanic sacrifices of the 80s/90s? The mass shootings of the 2000s? And now whatever we have today. You haven’t noticed the last ten years uptick on racism and other world affairs? You haven’t noticed all the “white extremism”?

Those are the voices in our heads.

Bannon is a client. Bannon is an “inside man”. Bannon makes human sacrifices of the innocent and lawful for Power, and this Power makes him act like Yoda and commit treason through Trump as he eviscerates national security and loots our humanity for Power.
by 1313ed01 | 2025-11-17 10:52:58+00:00
When the first version came out, around the time I got my first job, it felt like everyone around me had read this book, and for a long time we were throwing around quotes from this book. Sadly after a few years it felt like the only thing that really stuck in the larger community was "Don't Repeat Yourself", which wasn't really something that at the time stood out as much more important than many of the other "rules".

My personal favorite was always the one about "English is just a programming language", but when I read the 20th anniversary edition that one seemed like it had been toned down? I did not go back to find the original one to compare, but the way I remember it it was pretty hardcore about keeping text as text and using tools like for programming (use macros in text to avoid repeating yourself etc).

Overall the 20th anniversary did feel a bit less idealistic? I guess for a "pragmatic" book that makes sense, but I remember the original like it was making stronger arguments for or against things. I really liked the (anti-)IDE chapter, or the parts on the importance of learning how to use a good text editor well, for instance, but now they basically cut that out. Did give me the impression that they were trying to be down with the kids at times.
by pjmlp | 2025-11-17 10:53:03+00:00
If we ignore recent movents in govermental cybersecurity agencies, and big tech to move away from unsafe programming languages, as much as technically possible.

Introducing a language with the same safety as Modula-2 or Object Pascal, would make sense in the 1990's, nowadays with improved type systems making the transition from academia into mainstream, we (the industry) know better.

It is not only Rust, it is Linear Haskell, OCaml effects, Swift 6 ownership model, Ada/SPARK, Chapel,....
by Grimblewald | 2025-11-17 10:53:22+00:00
I get you, It grinds my gears. I've been told that I "Talk" like an LLM because I go into detail and give thorough explanations on topics. I'm not easily insulted but that was a first for me. I used to get 'human wikipedia' before, and before that 'walking dicitonary' which I always thought was reductive but it didn't quite irk me as much as being told my entire way of communicating is reminiscent of a bot. So perhaps I take random accusations of LLM use to heart, even if it does seem overwhelmingly likely to be true.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-17 10:54:11+00:00
>and playing smug semantic arguments like that doesn't help.

How is it semantic? They go outside and now they are running in a giant parking lot. They go a bit further and now you're a bad parent for not keeping an eye on your kid. Tell them to sit down and play on a tablet and you're also a bad parent.

There's no winning here.

>you wouldn't tell someone in the library not to hush them.

I don't consider a mall the equivalent of a libary in this situation.
by rsynnott | 2025-11-17 10:54:12+00:00
> While most countries have deinstitutionalized, they still make it much easier to force treatment on an out-patient basis.

Where are you getting that? Which countries? Certainly in Ireland and the UK, I'm pretty certain that it is all but impossible to force outpatient treatment, and I think this is generally more or less the case in Western Europe as a whole. Involuntary admission to psychiatric hospitals is still, marginally, a thing, but very rare.
by dkh | 2025-11-17 10:54:58+00:00
I give things like Duolingo a pass because it’s not trying to trick me into doing something they want me to do but I don’t want to do. It’s trying to gamify something that I do genuinely want to do (learn/practice a language) but haven’t had the discipline or plan in place.

Just like how there are apps that gamify getting through tasks, gamify chores, etc. They aren’t really dark patterns in this context.
by manc_lad | 2025-11-17 10:55:18+00:00
This summarises my thoughts as well. People used to give away children that were too much of a burden. With higher mortality, some were also not expected to make it.

We're in a societal place where we have set the bar high in terms of an expected level of education and quality of life for our kids. kids are expensive and we've grown the population massively. There is also a social stigma associated with having lots of kids in Western countries.

I worry about my kids. But im always fascinated when they stretch the boundaries and show me how resilient they are. So I let them push limits but explain the pros and cons hoping they build their own feedback loops with some sense of perspective.

It's a delicate balance as a parent. I'm consistently fascinated how others parent. It's amazing how changes in parental style can be generational and show how long the changes will take to change.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-11-17 10:55:38+00:00
A red flag for me is that it lists stopword lists as a feature. Those went out of fashion in Lucene/Elasticsearch because of some non trivial but very effective caching and other optimizations around version 5.

Stopwords are an old school optimization to deal with the problem of high frequency tokens when calculating rankings. Basically that means dealing with long lists of document ids that e.g. contain the word "to". This potentially has a lot of overhead. The solution is to eliminate the need to do so by focusing on ranking clauses with low frequency terms first and caching the results for the low frequency terms. You can eliminate a lot of documents by doing that. This gets rid of most of the overhead for low frequency terms without resorting to simply filtering them out.

The key test here is queries that consist of stop words, like "to be or not to be" to find documents about Hamlet. If you filter out all the stop words, you are not going to get the right results on top.

Just an example of where Seekstorm can probably do better. I have no direct experience with it though. So, maybe they do have a solution for that.

But you should treat the need for stop word lists as a red flag for probably fairly immature takes on this problem space. Elasticsearch doesn't need those anymore. Also, what do stop word lists look like if you need multi lingual support? Who maintains these lists for different languages? Do you have language experts on your search team doing that for all the languages you need to support? People always forget about operational overhead like that. Stop word lists are fairly ineffective if you don't have people curating them and it creates obvious issues with certain queries.
by SyneRyder | 2025-11-17 10:55:50+00:00
Nice! I couldn't see the list of search engines that are included in your meta-search, the FAQ currently seems to imply that it only serves Google results?

If you give users the option to include / not include certain search engines in their results, so their money never goes to those particular engine companies, that could be of interest to some Kagi refugees.

I ended up vibe coding my own meta-search engine (augmented with a local SQlite database of hand-picked sites) so that I could escape Kagi, but I'm excited if Waterfox Search is an alternative I can recommend to others!
by wtcactus | 2025-11-17 10:56:22+00:00
We are talking about pennies here.

I don't get it, what guidance do you really require? Do you think there will be some major cartel by the retailers to rip the costumers off, at maximum, 0.04 cents of a dollar per every purchase in the absolute worst case scenarios?

Will we have major lawsuits about it? "Latest news: Costumer sues Walmart for 1 billion USD for rounding a 157.01$ bill to 157.05$"
by hogdanish | 2025-11-17 10:58:00+00:00
My point was that 1 Gbps+ internet is available in enough select metropolitan areas that saying "almost no one has it" is inaccurate, not that it's widely available everywhere to the average user.

Obviously the subset of users with multi-gig fiber is relatively small, but not practically zero like the comment suggested. Anecdotally, 3 Gbps fiber is widely available in my medium sized US city of about ~500k for as low as $110. I paid the same for asymmetrical gigabit cable internet in the last city I lived. It just depends.
by jcul | 2025-11-17 10:58:34+00:00
I don't believe that's true.

The article suggests flooding the system with dummy "should send" transactions so that they become the majority.

Quote:

> One such solution that I know of is one that Carl Cook talked about during his CppCon 17 talk2: we can fill our system with mocked transaction data for which should_send(t) returns true. We have to do this enough times such that the mocked transaction data becomes the vast majority over the real data, so the branch predictor will be primed to assume that the send() path will be executed practically on every resolve() call. Overall, this may actually be a better approach than hard-coding prediction rules, because those rules wouldn’t really guarantee us that the whole send() path would get executed (the assumption may just lead to partial execution, until the should_send(t) condition is actually evaluated and the pipeline is flushed; so at the end we may still have important stuff not placed in the instruction/data cache).

What I am suggesting is to remove the branch entirely, and instead poison the "should abandon" transactions so they get dropped or null routed on the NIC. This is the kind of thing that low latency cut through L1 switches do.

Thereby removing the CPU branch predictor from the equation entirely.