MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kragen | 2025-11-18 20:18:05+00:00
On the problems with STM in C#, see https://joeduffyblog.com/2010/01/03/a-brief-retrospective-on... (I can't believe nobody else has posted this link yet). As with the Chris Penner article, there are a lot of things described as features of STMs in general which are actually just properties of the STM he worked on, which explains some of the things that sound like nonsense if you've only worked with Haskell's STM or Clojure's. (Duffy is much better about delineating the boundaries of the systems he's talking about, though, because he knows there are alternatives.)

See also https://www.infoq.com/news/2010/05/STM-Dropped/.
by pyuser583 | 2025-11-18 20:18:16+00:00
I once read the the cheapest way to save a human life (ahem, the way to save the most lives for a given amount of money) is to spend it on DDT.

DDT is also a "very bad, evil, and wicked" thing - for anyone educated between 1970 and 2010.

I remember cartoons having villains who were seeking to make DDT legal again - that's how stigmatized it is.

The EA people did a pretty good job rehabilitating DDT. Good for them.

But the problem is there still asking, "What's the cheapest way to save a human life?"
by vlmrun-admin | 2025-11-18 20:19:44+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUbGVH1r_1U

Everyone is talking about the release of Gemini 3. The benchmark scores are incredible. But as we know in the AI world, paper stats don't always translate to production performance on all tasks.

We decided to put Gemini 3 through its paces on some standard Vision Language Model (VLM) tasks – specifically simple image detection and processing.

The result? It struggled where I didn't expect it to.

Surprisingly, VLM Run's Orion (https://chat.vlm.run/) significantly outperformed Gemini 3 on these specific visual tasks. While the industry chases the "biggest" model, it’s a good reminder that specialized agents like Orion are often punching way above their weight class in practical applications.

Has anyone else noticed a gap between Gemini 3's benchmarks and its VLM capabilities?
by adidoit | 2025-11-18 20:20:30+00:00
It's insane to me that I can't pay $20/$200 bucks after running out of limits in ~5 messages.

Why would you not at least link it to the pro and ultra accounts

at least you could upsell the pro subs to ultra. Millions of claude code and codex users who are into agentic coding is your servicable market paying attention today.

Now I'll delete antigravity and go back to codex / claude code / cursor ...
by wavemode | 2025-11-18 20:20:37+00:00
I had a similar experience with the play "A Raisin in the Sun". Reading it in class, it was boring and difficult to relate to. Watching the play live as an adult, you realize it's actually hilarious and heart-wrenching.

Part of it is growing up, but part of it is (obviously) that plays aren't meant to be read. There's a lot of detail and tone that doesn't really come across properly, and it sucks the life out of the story. Not sure why it's such a common practice in school.
by TheRealPomax | 2025-11-18 20:21:11+00:00
The title should probably read "Meta Did Not Violate Antitrust Law when buying Instragram and Whatsapp, Judge Rules (nytimes.com)" here.

The meat and potatoes aren't in the official page title, but Meta has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies, and Meta not violating antitrust in general is very different from them not violating antitrust for deals that were investigated by the FTC back in 2012 and 2014 and not found in violation of antitrust then.
by nateb2022 | 2025-11-18 20:21:18+00:00
From a practicality standpoint, writing in TS allows you to execute arbitrary JS in-process with a simple exec() call; I have no doubt they'll use this to more deeply integrate agents with existing codebases in the near future. E.g. agents rather than just reading the code, will be able to directly import the data structures themselves, use libraries within the JS/TS ecosystem to parse code into an AST, and execute in-process test harnesses to validate behavior while editing.

And the MCP field is already pretty heavily saturated with TypeScript and JSONSchema, so using TS for it is a very ergonomic experience. Also since it's written in TypeScript, it's much more easy to integrate it with editors like VSCode (or Google's new Antimatter) which are built on top of Electron.
by margalabargala | 2025-11-18 20:21:22+00:00
I did some digging in a reply to a sibling comment.

Basically, they are not a 501c3. They are a Michigan state specific nonprofit. My original comment was made after a 501c3 search turned up nothing.

I don't know why they would decline to be a 501c3 and instead only be a Michigan nonprofit.
by wat10000 | 2025-11-18 20:21:39+00:00
People just don’t care about driving.

I get it. Maybe you're not interested in it. You’re at A, you want to arrive at B, and driving is just your tool for getting there.

But to misquote Trotsky, you may not be interested in driving, but driving is interested in you. Driving is the most dangerous thing most drivers do on a regular basis. Probably by a significant margin. Even if you hate it, respect it. Put in the effort to do it well.
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-11-18 20:21:49+00:00
Same here - completely relate.

One thing I’ve noticed though that actually coding (without the use of AI; maybe a bit of tab auto-complete) is that I’m actually way faster when working in my domain than I am when using AI tools.

Everytime I use AI tools in my domain-expertise area, I find it ends up slowing me down. Introducing subtle bugs, me having to provide insane amount of context and details (at which point it becomes way faster to do it myself)

Just code and chill man - having spent the last 6 months really trying everything (all these context engineering strategies, agents, CLAUDE.md files on every directory, et, etc). It really easy still more productive to just code yourself if you know what you’re doing.

The thing I love most though - is having discussions with an LLM about an implementation, having it write some quick unit tests and performance tests for certain base cases, having it write a quick shell script, etc. things like this, it’s Amazing and makes me really enjoy programming since I save time and can focus on doing the actual fun stuff
by cnees | 2025-11-18 20:23:03+00:00
OpenAlex has 240M. https://docs.openalex.org/api-entities/works

CORE has 431M. https://core.ac.uk/data

Crossref has 165M. https://www.crossref.org/blog/2025-public-data-file-now-avai...

These datasets are all biased towards work published in the digital age, but it's important to note that work is coming out much faster now than it used to.
by nalekberov | 2025-11-18 20:23:41+00:00
This is mostly scaremongering, not all hosting providers take your site down just because someone you pissed off decided to DDoS you.

In Russia (I have nothing against Russia - I just know this info about “Дождь ТВ”), some news websites have been targeted by state-baked DDoS attacks, but I highly doubt most people are in this category.
by mrandish | 2025-11-18 20:24:05+00:00
> because of geographic features like mountains/deep valleys

I remember this being quite an issue trying to target geosync broadcast satellites like DirectTV/Dish. Even being in the shadow of a relatively small hill could block access if your location and local topology happened to create an unfortunate alignment. I've naively assumed Starlink's rotating constellation of thousands of LEO satellites reduces how often this is an issue - but maybe it doesn't?
by dabockster | 2025-11-18 20:24:17+00:00
> I don't know what IntelliJ is.

It started as a modernized Eclipse competitor (the Java IDE) but they've built a bunch of other IDEs based on it. Idk if it still runs on Java or not, but it had potential last I used it about a decade ago. But running GUI apps on the JVM isn't the best for 1000 reasons, so I hope they've moved off it.
by keybored | 2025-11-18 20:25:48+00:00
I wasn’t clear then. I would rather have N language features of increasing complexity/UX issues for dealing with increasingly complex situations rather than one mechanism to rule them all that can fail to instantiate in all cases (of whatever complexity). That’s the tradeoff that I want.

Why? Because that leads to better ergonomics for me, in my experience. When library authors can polish the interface with the least powerful mechanism with the best guarantees, I can use it, misuse it, and get decent error messages.

What I want out of partial evaluation is just the boring 90’s technology of generalized “constant folding”.[1] I in principle don’t care if it is used to implement other things... as long as I don’t have surprising instantiation problems when using library code that perhaps the library author did not anticipate.

[1]: And Rust’s “const” approach is probably too limited at this stage. For my tastes. But the fallout of generalizing is not my problem so who am I to judge.

> Okay, and I don't want any problem of any kind in my language, but unfortunately, there are tradeoffs in programming language design.

I see.

> So in practice, you either have one feature that can fail to compile in the client, or you can have the functionality split among multiple features, resulting in a more complicated language,

In my experience Rust being complicated is more of a problem for rustc contributors than it is for me.

> and still have some of those features exhibit the same problem.

Which you only use when you need them.

(I of course indirectly use macros since the standard library is full of them. At least those are nice enough to use. But I might have gotten some weird expansions before, though?)

That will have to do until there comes along a language where you can write anything interesting as library code and still expose a nice to use interface.
by zajio1am | 2025-11-18 20:27:11+00:00
CDNs and reverse proxies are important part of internet infrastructure. Problem here is not that webservers use CloudFlare, but that use only CloudFlare.

Let's assume that i could easily use multiple CDNs/proxies and put them all in my DNS record. It would be nice if web browsers would use happy-eyeballs like logic to switch between multiple IP addresses, but i don't think this is default behavior with multiple A/AAAA records.
by VBprogrammer | 2025-11-18 20:27:34+00:00
I dunno, maybe where you live is a lot flatter than the roads that I drive on, but the instant I see a car coming the other way (ideally before they come into direct view) is the time to turn off full beams.

Though from a game theory point of view, leaving them on for a couple of seconds is probably ideal to remind anyone who forgets to dim their own headlights.
by theshrike79 | 2025-11-18 20:27:46+00:00
My main issue is that I don't want or have space for a massive PC tower. And building a small form factor PC is both very expensive and very difficult.

All the components come at a premium price and you also get to spend hours finding obscure forums with exact measurements of cases and components to see if the GPU fits lengthwise or whether a specific CPU + cooler is too tall for the case =)

And even if you make it, you're easily way over 1k€ before get to even picking the M.2 drive and RAM.

Thus: Steam Machine. I click "buy" on Steam, it appears on my doorstep, I plug it in and it'll start working.
by pka | 2025-11-18 20:27:52+00:00
> immutability in Clojure doesn't mean inefficiency.

You are still doing a gazillion allocations compared to:

for (let i = 0; i < data.length; i++) { hist[data[i]]++; }

But apart from that the mutable code in many cases is just much clearer compared to something like your fold above. Sometimes it's genuinely easier to assemble a data structure "as you go" instead of from the "bottom up" as in FP.
by kazinator | 2025-11-18 20:27:59+00:00
Lisps have unnterned symbols also.

Interning is important for symbols that are involved in I/O: being printed and read, so that two or more occurrences of the same symbol in print will all read to the same object, and so there is print-read consistency: we can print an interned symbol, and then read the printed symbol to obtain the same object.

Symbols are useful without this also. Symbolic processing that doesn't round trip symbols to a printed notation and back doesn't require interned symbols.

Symbols have a name, but are not that name.

They also have various properties, which depends on the Lisp dialect.

Classical Lisp dialects, like MacCarthy's original, endow each symbol with a property list. Another classical property is the "value cell".

In Common Lisp lists have a home package retrieved by the function symbol-package.

A variable being globally proclaimed special can be implemented as a property of the symbol.

Symbols are interned in packages, not globally, so two symbols can be interned, yet have the same name: mypackage:let and cl:let both have the name "LET", but different home packages.

Uninterned symbols with the same name can be readily made: just call (make-symbol "FOO") twice and you get two symbols named "FOO", which print as #:FOO.

The #: notation means symbol with no home package, used as a proxy for "uninterned", though a perverse situation can be contrived whereby a symbol has no home package (and so prints with the #: notation), yet is interned into a package.

Introduce a FOO symbol in the keyword package:

[1]> :foo :FOO

Now import it into the CL-USER package:

[2]> (import :foo :cl-user) T

Verify that cl-user::foo is actually the keyword symbol :foo:

[3]> 'cl-user::foo :FOO

Now, unintern :foo from the keyword package, leaving it homeless:

[4]> (unintern :foo :keyword) T

Let's print it, accessing it via the cl-user package where it is still interned by import:

[5]> 'cl-user::foo #:FOO

There is quite a bit to this symbol stuff than just "interned strings".

Symbols are simply not strings objects; they have strings as a name.
by wartywhoa23 | 2025-11-18 20:28:19+00:00
> embracing open source

They needed to grab as much free code as they could to train their AI, so what better way could there be than setting up the GitHub honeypot for this sole purpose, evangelize The Greater Good Of The Open Source, and play along a bit as in "we do open source too, don't be shy to show your code to our gradient descent, erm, we mean world!"
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-11-18 20:28:30+00:00
>it is madness to require so many acknowledgements

Really? Madness? "We started with VS Code to develop our IDE...".

Oh, so onerous.

A thank you to the principle developers is a minimum if you're using someone else's work commercially and aren't an asshole.

No it's not a legal requirement, it's just about being a good part of society.
by illwrks | 2025-11-18 20:29:50+00:00
I would argue it's not about being better or worse than another country, but if 1 in 30 drivers have a different understanding then that's a risk. By doing a driving test in the country you live in you gain a greater understanding of what it's like driving in that country.

As a simple example I drove around Northern France and the first day almost went flying off the motorway slip road as I didn't realise how tight they tend to be in France compared to the UK and Ireland.
by beepbooptheory | 2025-11-18 20:29:58+00:00
I get that one can perhaps have an intuition about these things, but doesn't this seem like a somewhat flawed attitude to have all things considered? That is, saying something to the effect of "well I know its not too sycophantic, no measurement needed, I have some special prompts of my own and it passed with flying colors!" just sounds a little suspect on first pass, even if its not like totally unbelievable I guess.
by hn_acc1 | 2025-11-18 20:30:07+00:00
I mean, I have those types of lights on my car, but I am VIGILANT about checking that they have a slight DOWNWARDS slope (and I'm in a relatively low sedan to begin with). There's a T-intersection near my house with a retaining wall at the end - very convenient for checking the angle.

Even when I upgraded my old car to HIDs (because I could barely see anything over the other cars), I checked over and over to make sure I was low enough. Also, I ensure I never light up the TOP crease of the trunk of any sedan behind me. If I light up anything inside another car, it's bad.
by ndriscoll | 2025-11-18 20:30:16+00:00
Part of the point of the space race was to flex on how technologically ahead we were with the implication that our weapons systems were also more advanced, so I suspect that given the choice to actually have more advanced technology vs. merely convincing everyone they did, they would prefer to have actually had that capability. Surveillance companies would presumably also prefer to actually have such capabilities while not broadcasting that fact lest people avoid them or demand they be regulated.
by astrange | 2025-11-18 20:30:47+00:00
> laundering cobalt from illegal "artisanal" mines in the DRC

They don't, all cobalt in Apple products is recycled.

> and whitewashing what they do by using corporate layering and shady deals to put themselves at sufficient degrees of separation from problematic labor and sources to do good PR, but not actually decoupling at all.

They don't, Apple audits their entire supply chain so it wouldn't hide anything if something moved to another subcontractor.
by gehwartzen | 2025-11-18 20:30:54+00:00
I physically desoldered and replaced the very bright 6500k interior overhead LEDs in my VW with much warmer units. It makes a huge difference when turning them on for a second and not killing my night vision. Also just much more pleasant and natural light in my opinion.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tiguan/comments/1hq2hae/changed_ove...
by margalabargala | 2025-11-18 20:31:53+00:00
> Any chance they recently changed status, and it's just not showing up yet?

The Rebble Foundation incorporated in 2023, so I don't think so.

I agree it's strange. The advantages of being a 501c3 in the US are immense, and if you meet the criteria, it is not difficult to become one. Essentially every organization larger than 6 people in the US that could be a 501c3, is one, for this reason.

So if they aren't, I assume it's because they can't be. Which makes me wonder why.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-11-18 20:32:24+00:00
I used to be really excited about "agents" when I thought people were trying to build actual agents like we've been working on in the CS field for decades now.

It's clear now that "agents" in the context of "AI" is really about answering the question "How can we make users make 10x more calls to our models in a way that makes it feel like we're not just squeezing money out of them?" I've seen so many people that think setting some "agents" of on a minutes to hours long task of basically just driving up internal KPIs at LLM providers is cutting edge work.

The problem is, I haven't seen any evidence at all that spending 10x the number of API calls on an agent results in anything closer to useful than last year when people where purely vibe coding all the time. At least then people would interactively learn about the slop they were building.

It's astounding to watch a coworker walk though through a PR with hundreds of added new files and repeatedly mention "I'm not sure if these actually work, but it does look like there's something here".

Now I'm sure I'll get some fantastic "no true Scotsman" replies about how my coworkers must not be skilled enough or how they need to follow xyz pattern, but the entire point of AI was to remove the need for specialize skills and make everyone 10x more productive.

Not to mention that the shift in focus on "agents" is also useful in detracting from clearly diminishing returns on foundation models. I just hope there are enough people that still remember how to code (and think in some cases) to rebuild when this house of cards falls apart.
by Fwirt | 2025-11-18 20:32:29+00:00
On the other hand, I have a friend who worked in retail as a teenager tell me that employees sometimes appreciate carts getting left out, as it means they get to go for a nice leisurely walk outside, away from the toxic work atmosphere, to go round them up. So while carts getting left out may be positive for other shoppers, it might be doing a disservice to overworked employees.
by pseudalopex | 2025-11-18 20:32:44+00:00
> $500M can hire a lot of $250k salaried engineers, though.

$250,000 is conservative for the total cost to employ a software engineer in the US. And their expenses are not limited to software engineer salaries of course.

A fair question would be what Google or Apple spend to produce their web browsers. The answers are secrets. $1 billion is a common Chrome development cost estimate in my experience.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-18 20:32:45+00:00
> We regulate the operation of motor vehicles because they pose an immediate safety risk.

That's not the legal reasoning as i recall. it is because they use public roads. They are just as unsafe when you drive them in a racing circuit or on your ranch, but traffic laws only apply on public roads. Same with your post mail being scanned and searched, or your baggage at airlines, it isn't just for safety and no warrant is needed, they look for contrabands,customs violations,etc.. too. It is because you are engaging in a privileged activity.

> Yes, which is why we avoid direct democracy pretty much everywhere in the world.

News to me, i thought it was because of practicality. I think you mean pluralistic?

> If you could vote away your rights then pretty much every authoritarian government would be wholly justified in their abusive actions.

Maybe a clear definition of digital rights is what is missing? But explain to me why your right to privacy is more important than the rights of victims. If victimization was rare, that would be one argument, but it is frequent, and something can be done to reduce it. From what I understand, the scanning methods Apple proposed are differential, your privacy won't be violated unless there is a match.

Going back to my earlier point, you have rights. But those rights can only be protected by the government so long as the security of its people remains in tact. Every right we have is taken way when it comes to "national security risk" for example. Is a potential terrorist attack any worse in terms of security compared to the very real impact of CSAM against the most innocent members of society? If there was a terrorist attack impending and the only way to stop it is by scanning everyone's phones, guess what? it is already the law that the government can do that.

> Most people don't care about a lot of things. That's another reason why we don't have most people writing legislation. There are tons of things I have extremely limited knowledge about that someone else feels very strongly about and vice versa. The majority of people feeling apathetic towards something isn't an indicator that the majority is correct.

They don't write legislation, but they determine what legislation gets written. They vote based on promises of legislation, they may not care about details but they care about outcomes. In this case "not caring" is for that, outcomes, not the technicalities of legislation. As a matter of policy the voters don't care. And law makers have a duty to reflect the sentiment of their constituents.

Even it comes down to taking away the rights of the minority voters, it may not be as simple legislation, but constitutional amendments exist and it all comes down to how many people want that change. We could literally have something insane like slavery back again within a year given enough popular sentiment.

The patriot act has been getting renewed since its inception, now almost a quarter of a century ago, across multiple administrations, and with bi-partisan support. that is the will of the people in effect.