MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aspenmayer | 2025-11-29 17:24:21+00:00
> Because, similar to "your color scheme is not a11y-friendly" or "you're posting affiliatate-links" or "this is effectively a paywall", there is zero chance of a productive conversation sprouting from that.

Those are all legitimate concerns or even valid complaints, though, and, once raised, those concerns can be addressed by fixing the problem, if the person responsible for the state of affairs chooses to do so.

If someone is accused falsely of using AI or anything else that they genuinely didn’t do, like a paywall, then I can see your “downvote and move on” strategy as being perhaps expedient, but I don’t think your comparison is a helpful framing. Accessibility concerns are valid for the same reason as paywall concerns: it’s a valid position to desire our shared knowledge and culture to be accessible by one and by all without requiring a ticket to ride, entry through a turnstile, or submitting to profiling or tracking. If someone releases their ideas into the world, it’s now part of our shared consciousness and social fabric. Ideas can’t be owned once they’re shared, nor can knowledge be siloed once it’s dispersed.

It seems that you’re saying that simply because there isn’t a good rejoinder to false claims of AI usage that we shouldn’t make such claims at all, even legitimate ones, but this gives cover to bad actors and limits discourse to acceptable approved topics, and perhaps lowers the level of discourse by preventing necessary expectations of disclosure of AI usage from forming. If we throw in the towel on AI usage being expected to be disclosed, then that’s the whole ballgame. Folks will use it and not say so, because it will be considered rude to even suggest that AI was used, which isn’t helpful to the humans who have to live in such a society.

We ought to have good methodological reasons for the things we publish if we believe them to be true, and I’m not trying to be a naysayer or anything, but I respectfully disagree with your statement generally and on the points. All of the things you mentioned should be called out for cause, even if there isn’t much interesting discussion to be had, because the facts of the matters you mention are worth mentioning themselves in their own right. Just like we should let people like things, we should let people dislike things, and saying so adds checks and balances to our producer-consumer dynamic.
by StillBored | 2025-11-29 17:24:53+00:00
https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xextproto/security.ht...

Is the security extension from 1996, which has a section on keyboard security

and its crazy to me that this anyone can claim X11 can't be off loaded, which its been doing for decades. From all the crazy blt/pattern HW acceleration to GL/vulcan implementations to the fact that the entire server can be on the other side of a network pipe, meaning it could be anywhere, including entirely encapsulated on a graphics card/smart nic/etc.

And if your talking about the xlib serialization, that was largely fixed with XCB.
by wombatpm | 2025-11-29 17:24:55+00:00
I worked for a fortune 300 company that engaged in a Business Process Redesign initiative. After spending 90 million on the project they pulled the plug.

My takeaway was that the project was doomed because it was named wrong. Should have been called Business Process Design.

They are now owned by Private Equity. I can only wonder what madness the would have wrought with AI.

They tried to implement a system whereby a customer has a single customer number. Between mergers, acquisitions and shutdowns it was impossible to keep straight and keep tracking history. It impacted rates, contracts, sales commissions, division revenue-everything. In they end they gave everyone a new number while still using the old ones.
by gloftus | 2025-11-29 17:24:58+00:00
Countability is the whole point, there's no need to apologize. I was merely offering the perspective that "towers of infinity" is possibly the least useful consequence that comes from defining the notion of countability. To my mind, what we really reap from Cantor's work is a better understanding of the topology of the real numbers. But you have to define countability first in order to understand what uncountability really implies.
by ghtbircshotbe | 2025-11-29 17:25:06+00:00
I should probably qualify my statement more. There are certainly new and interesting problems in numerics. And even going from say O(n) convergence to O(n log n) convergence can lead to whole new classes of problems you can solve. I don't want to discourage anyone who loves numerics.

What I was trying to say was that as a graduate student you might be given a problem that already has many really good and smart solutions and be essentially told to find a better solution than all of these. How this goes will depend a lot on the specific problem, your advisor, etc.
by throwaway150 | 2025-11-29 17:25:33+00:00
> This incident was one of the most toxic things I’ve ever experienced, and it lasted for days.

Yet when I look at the conversation itself, I cannot find anything that seems directly hostile towards them:

https://archive.md/q8htc

https://lobste.rs/c/mejg0v

I do not see personal attacks from either side. I see a normal debate with some snark now and then, which is hardly unusual in online discussions. I may be missing something that happened out of view, but from what is available, the tone does not appear toxic.

It looks like a normal debate, very prolonged, but a normal debate until the author gets banned: https://lobste.rs/~7u026ne9se I don't understand why they get banned though. I see no bad interaction from either side.

A moderator rebukes the OP for starting a fight: https://lobste.rs/s/gkpmli#c_mejg0v I don't understand this either. Both sides were equally forceful in the debate. But the debate was always civil. Yet only one side receives a rebuke. The whole incident seems strange to me.

More weirdness:

https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/pull/828

https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/pull/829
by analog31 | 2025-11-29 17:25:40+00:00
I'm in Wisconsin, and I just got the bike with spiked tires out today. Even if there's not a lot of snow, I prefer to sacrifice one bike to road salt than have to maintain my "nice" bike through the winter.

People act like I'm some kind of freak when I arrive at work on my bike in the middle of the winter. But I remind them that there are people who work all day outdoors in places like Alaska and Canada, and 20 minutes on a bike doesn't even come close.
by amypetrik8 | 2025-11-29 17:26:15+00:00
> public static function words(string $document): array {

>, though is verbose, at least means something

I disagree, it is hardly verbose. there can be further detailing of the input and return value of the function beyond a simple type. Java didn't go far enough, not by a long shot - we need hardcore painstaking, completely brutal typing. Such typing will be highly beneficial for software reliability - you're not against reliability are you?
by jjk166 | 2025-11-29 17:27:18+00:00
Throwing people at a problem is very different from allocating an appropriate head-count of appropriately trained/educated people. A small but skilled team can accomplish a lot, whereas a lot of the wrong people can't do much at all. Generally there are more than enough warm bodies available, big companies are full of those, the issue is that skilled people aren't fungible - the team of 12 working on this project seems to be moving at a snails pace because really it's two people, both of whom are split across several other projects simultaneously, doing the real work and everyone else doing stuff that is likely unnecessary if not straight up counterproductive. It takes skill, effort and discipline to cultivate a team that actually has all the skills it needs to succeed, in the form of people who mutually work well together, to keep these people around over an extended period of time, and not try to split them up onto different projects and plug the gaps with the wrong people.
by bikenaga | 2025-11-29 17:28:45+00:00
Abstract: "Marine heatwaves (MHWs) cause significant harm to marine life, ecosystem services, and can intensify hurricanes. Global warming has increased MHW duration and intensity over the last century and permanent MHWs are predicted in many areas of the ocean by the end of the 21st century. Climate interventions such as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) have been proposed to reduce mean global temperature, yet the potential impact on MHWs is unclear. Here, we used output from the Community Earth System Model to quantify MHWs under multiple timeframes and climate change scenarios. We evaluated MHW properties including duration and maximum intensity over the historical (1990-2009), present (2015-2034), and future (2050-2069) periods. We analyzed output from two SAI scenarios aimed to maintain global mean surface temperatures at ∼1.5 and ∼1.0°C above pre-industrial levels (ARISE-SAI-1.0 and ARISE-SAI-1.5) and one non-SAI scenario (SSP2-4.5). Our results show that despite SAI reducing the global average maximum intensity and duration of MHWs relative to SSP2-4.5, the magnitude of effects vary spatially. Compared with the present climate, SAI scenarios would reduce MHW intensity in 25-76% of the ocean, and MHW duration in 21-80% of the ocean. The largest future reductions in maximum intensity and duration occur in the coastal regions, the Tropical Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, and South Atlantic oceans. Even with a more aggressive mitigation scenario (ARISE-SAI-1.0), nearly 25% of the ocean would remain unaffected,with areas like the North Atlantic, Tropical Pacific and parts of the Southern Oceans still experiencing more intense and longer MHWs, posing risks to marine life."
by roughly | 2025-11-29 17:29:05+00:00
> I imagine using their embeddings and training a classifier on top of that is probably a lot more effective?

I’d be interested in seeing this in action - I think the vector embeddings are underused generally - but my understanding is that’d be for something closer to sentiment analysis? In this case I’m talking about a setup closer to where you’ve got an LLM agent with a set of tools that’s interpreting a user’s request to identify which of those tools are the right ones to use. The requests can be complex, and involve multiple tool runs or chaining. If that’s doable by more deterministic mechanisms, I’d (genuinely) love to hear about it.
by jazzejeff1 | 2025-11-29 17:29:21+00:00
Thank you for sharing. My wife and I have been down this road in physical retail, SaaS, consulting, and real estate. It always feels like the first time when you learn slowly, and you’ve done a Good Thing by helping us all learn faster.

FYI - I tried to leave this comment on your blog, but I got a database connection error. HTH
by Etheryte | 2025-11-29 17:29:29+00:00
Bike paths don't have to be dry though, you can sweep them and it's fine. If you use studded tires, you can ride a bike in places where you can't even walk. Source is I used to do this when I lived in the middle of nowhere in Sweden. I agree with you that infrastructure is key though. The temperature doesn't really matter, if you're good to go on a walk, you're also good to go for a ride.
by jdietrich | 2025-11-29 17:29:31+00:00
Users have "brutally rejected" pretty much everything that Microsoft have done since MS-DOS. Some cohort of users will get incredibly angry about any conceivable change to mature software. Add in the people who passionately hate anything AI-adjacent and you've got a recipe for a social media firestorm that probably doesn't accurately reflect the sentiment of the average user.

Personally, I think that Copilot for Work is a good product that does useful things. I use it daily. It isn't particularly groundbreaking, but it's nicely integrated with the wider 365 ecosystem and it has saved me a bunch of time on tedious tasks. The usual LLM caveats apply, but I just don't get why someone would be so annoyed by an entirely optional feature.
by rainsford | 2025-11-29 17:29:41+00:00
> If you take the Top 500 companies as an indicator how well your economy is doing, but everything is carried on the shoulders of only 1.4% of those 500 companies then what is the point of looking at the 500 companies in the first place.

It's valid to argue that success of companies in the S&P 500 is not evenly distributed, but if you really want to understand the impact of that distribution on the economy you have to look at the value of each company rather than treating them equally.

The top 7 companies might only be 1.4% of the companies in the S&P 500, but they represent roughly 35% of the market cap of companies in the index. Because of that, they have an impact on the broader economy much larger than the raw number of companies would suggest. "Just" Nvidia doing well is going to have a much larger economic impact than just Newell Brands, which I have never heard of but is apparently one of the smallest on the index. In fact Nvidia's market cap is roughly 1000 that of Newell Brands with presumably similarly disproportionate economic impact.
by stego-tech | 2025-11-29 17:29:43+00:00
Reality is subjective. There is no singular objective "reality" that everyone shares, so we get by with objective, repeatable measurements instead. Business in particular means contact with realities that are not your own, and that can be a real gut check to some people.

Thing is, working as a cog in a larger machine is itself another form of reality check. Both situations force you to confront data and perspectives that aren't your own, and to adapt to them. Reading through the comments here, I find myself resonating with folks who very much enjoy being cogs or have a desire to run a smaller business for themselves, profit-motives and moat-building be damned. Almost as if there's a desire to return to a simpler market devoid of the complexities that computers have allowed to thrive (algorithmic pricing, big data analysis, surveillance capitalism, etc), where what mattered was running a good environment with fair pricing rather than grandiose plans for expansion or market monopolization. I empathize with those goals, given my "fuck you money" pie-in-the-sky plans of running a small makerspace/net cafe in a community and eating the modest loss through ROI elsewhere in my investments.

To get back to the (still-down) article, running a business absolutely means confronting the reality of the fickleness of the marketplace. It means dealing with customers who are ill-informed and also ill-suited to critique or correction. You have to make a product others want to buy, rather than one you believe is best. The pressure is there to capitalize on every avenue, every opportunity, never turning down business for fear of it reverberating into collapsing other opportunities. It's a really immediate reckoning over what's more important to you in terms of success vs ethics, in an environment incredibly hostile to the latter (and exploitative of those who reside on that side of the proverbial fence). It's stressful, and it's why I refuse to open my own shop despite my dissatisfaction with corporate life at present.
by Telaneo | 2025-11-29 17:30:09+00:00
Providing the rockstars with a sandbox where they can do anything and work independently, while being shielded from all the processes and paperwork that slow them down (while also having people to pull that slack), is a fairly good method, but depending on the work that isn't viable. Their work has to come out of the sandbox at some point, and there will be some back-and-fourth which will probably put blocks on the team in that case.

I doubt there's much to do about the specific process that can be done to minimise the problems of the rockstars without also causing problems further down the ladder, without just starting to make exceptions like you said. It's probably just an emergent behaviour of processes like this intended to raise average quality. You pull up the bottom floor, but the roof gets lower as a result. You can find similar problems in schooling.
by bink | 2025-11-29 17:30:28+00:00
For those who haven't read it yet, the book "In the Weeds" does a pretty good job of showing the hidden side of Bourdain (if there was such a thing). He was as imperfect as you might imagine. I personally enjoyed learning how cruel he could be as I always had a tremendous amount of respect for him and it made him more human to me.

They even cover an incident where the crew played a practical joke on him with a clown (his fear is mentioned in a li.st).
by DrierCycle | 2025-11-29 17:30:35+00:00
Language may ultimately be maladaptive as it is arbitrary and disconnected from thought. Who cares about the gibberish of logic/philosophy when survival is at stake in ecological balance? The key idea is, there are events. They are real. The words we use are false/inaccurate externalizations of those events. Words and symbols are bottlenecks that place the events out of analog reach but fool us by our own simulation processes into thinking they are accurate.

Words are essentially very poor forms of interoception or metacognition. They "explain" our thoughts to us by fooling us. Yet how much of the senses/perceptions are accessible in consciousness. Not very much. The computer serves to further the maladaption by both accelerating the symbols and sutomating them, which puts the initial real events even further from reach. The only game is how much we can fool the species through the lowres inputs the PFC demands. This appears to be a sizable value center for Silicon Valley, and it seems to require coders to ignore the whole of experience and rely solely on the bottleneck simulations centers of the PFC which themselves are disconnected from direct sensory access. Computers, 'social' media, AI, code, VR essentially "play" the PFC.

How these basic thought experiments that have been tested in cog neuroscience since the 90s in the overthrow of the cog sci models of the 40s-80s were not taught as primer classes in AI and comp sci is beyond me. It takes now third gen neurobiology crossed with linguistics to set the record straight.

These are not controversial ideas now.
by evrydayhustling | 2025-11-29 17:31:41+00:00
Best lines in this article. But it doesn't get to IMO a very important point: why can't these processes easily be structured? Here are some good reasons:

- Your process interacts with an unstructured external world (physical reality, customer communication, etc.)

- Your process interacts with differently structured processes, and unstructured in the best agreed transfer protocol (could be external, like data sources, or even internal between teams with different taxonomies)

- Your process must support a wild kind of variability that is not worth categorizing (e.g. every kind of special delivery instruction a customer might provide)

Believing you can always solve these with the right taxonomy and process diagram is like believing there is always another manager to complain to. Experienced process design instead pushes semi-structured variability to the edges, acknowledges those edges, and watches them like a hawk for danger.

We should ABSOLUTELY be applying those principles more to AI... if anything, AI should help us decouple systems and overreach less on system scope. We should get more comfortable building smaller, well-structured processes that float in an unstructured soup, because it has gotten much cheaper for us to let every process have an unstructured edge.
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-29 17:31:50+00:00
Europe will be thrown into chaos if the AMOC actually fully collapses. Minimum temperatures in the north and west dropping twenty degrees celcius will wreak havoc on harvests, put pressure on trade relations, and will probably drain several large cities. No doubt one asshole biding their time will take the chance to start a war in Europe amidst the chaos.

From what I've read, a full collapse is unlikely, though. Plus, preventing this from happening requires a concentrated worldwide effort, which seems unlikely with the leader of the leading greenhouse gas emission source per capita having gone on record saying climate change is a Chinese conspiracy.

At this point, I think a lot of governments are just hoping the best case scenario is right, because there's hardly anything we can do if the AMOC does indeed start collapsing fully, other than southbound mass emigration.
by pscanf | 2025-11-29 17:32:07+00:00
Yeah, implementing it with data flowing one-way only from the URL to the state is cleaner.

Conceptually, however, I prefer to think of my state being at the center of things. I mean, that's where I define (via types) what the state is. The URL is just one serialization of that state that is convenient to use in a web browser (making it work with links, back/forth buttons, etc). Maybe in another environment another serialization would be needed. Or maybe no serialization could be needed at all (making it a memory router).
by bakkoting | 2025-11-29 17:32:21+00:00
Yes. I'm on TC39 as well, and I've talked to Jordan about this topic.

It's true that there are a few people who publish packages on npm including polyfills, Jordan among them. But these are a very small fraction of all packages on npm, and none of the compromised packages were polyfills. Also, he cares about backwards compatibility _with old versions of node_; the fact that JavaScript was originally a web language, as the grandparent comment says, is completely irrelevant to the inclusion of those specific polyfills.

Polyfills are just completely irrelevant to this discussion.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-11-29 17:34:14+00:00
Perhaps break the two apart with the "well rounded" core being one degree (Associate of General Studies) and the major subjects another degree (Associate of [subject]). If you earn both, they get bundled into a Bachelor of [subject] degree. Employers could decide for themselves if they want to hire someone with just the technical skills and assume that the well-rounded part would either happen through socialization or not be relevant. I've found many of the university core classes I had to take for my degree to be useful in life but not necessarily useful for the workplace. Some, such as English composition, were useful in both.
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-11-29 17:34:58+00:00
Yeah? How many robots? What kind of robots? What would the AI need to survive? Are the robots able to produce more robots? How are the robots powered? Where will they get energy from?

Sure it's easy to just throw that out there in one sentence, but once you actually dig into it, it turns out to be a lot more complicated than you thought at first. It's not just a matter of "AI" + "Robots" = "self-sustaining". The details matter.
by thefourthchime | 2025-11-29 17:35:06+00:00
The article glides over the fact that FMVSS 226 is a performance standard, not a materials mandate. Manufacturers can stick with tempered glass if they beef up the side curtain airbags enough to prevent ejection, which is exactly what happens on a lot of base models and rear windows to keep BOM costs down. The list of brands using laminated glass is accurate, but it applies mostly to their premium trims or front rows only.

There is also the issue of fleet turnover. With the average age of US vehicles pushing 13 years, the install base is still overwhelmingly tempered glass. Writing off the tool entirely because new luxury cars have moved on ignores the reality of what people are actually driving. You are statistically much more likely to be trapped in a 2012 Civic than a 2025 S-Class.