MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by user34283 | 2025-11-19 21:57:21+00:00
Do you think anyone cares in the slightest about your 'personal data'?

It's garbage and no one would waste energy for it, if it weren't for the ability to serve more effective advertisements.

If I'm going to offer an application monetized with Ads, I'm going to use a big ad network like Google which requires cookies to personalize the ads and prevent fraud. I could not care less about collecting your personal data.

And that's probably the same for 99% of websites.
by ok123456 | 2025-11-19 21:57:26+00:00
Unwrap is in a lot of example code.

If you're using Result<T,E>, there's no automatic language feature for statically typing a nested E that mirrors how it was called.

So out of brevity, they unwrap.

Expect to see this sort of error crop up a lot as people use LLMs to vibe with the borrow checker.
Ask HN: Reputation Based Software License
by rando77 | 2025-11-19 21:57:27+00:00
Does anyone know of work on a middle ground between open source and closed source where you can get a license to do what you want with some source if your reputation is okay.

How it would work: - Users create an minimal cryptographic identity for a nominal fee (this is not tied to their real identity), registered with an reputation tracking organisation.

- Users then use that identity to request a license for a piece of software of a specific version (git sha or version number) from the reputation provider.

- The software checks the license at start up cryptographiucally comes from a set of providers and also uses the identity included with the license when identifying as a client or server (to allow further reputation checks to be made).

This won't stop all bad actors but the idea is to make it obviously illegal to use the software if the people using it get a bad enough reputation.

I'd be interested in using simulations of software ecosystems to stress test any implementations and see if getting identities should be made harder.

But I thought I would see if there was prior art.
by layer8 | 2025-11-19 21:57:40+00:00
Citing AI software as the only examples of how AI benefits developing software, has a bit of a touch of self-help books describing how to attain success and fulfillment by taking the example of writing self-help books.

I don’t disagree that these are useful tools, by the way. I just haven’t seen any discernible uptick in general software quality and utility either, nor any economic uptick that should presumably follow from being able to develop software more efficiently.
by crote | 2025-11-19 21:57:54+00:00
I strongly recommend watching/reading the entire report, or the summary by Sal Mercogliano of What's Going On In Shipping [0].

Yes, the loose wire was the immediate cause, but there was far more going wrong here. For example:

- The transformer switchover was set to manual rather than automatic, so it didn't automatically fail over to the backup transformer.

- The crew did not routinely train transformer switchover procedures.

- The two generators were both using a single non-redundant fuel pump (which was never intended to supply fuel to the generators!), which did not automatically restart after power was restored.

- The main engine automatically shut down when the primary coolant pump lost power, rather than using an emergency water supply or letting it overheat.

- The backup generator did not come online in time.

It's a classic Swiss Cheese model. A lot of things had to go wrong for this accident to happen. Focusing on that one wire isn't going to solve all the other issues. Wires, just like all other parts, will occasionally fail. One wire failure should never have caused an incident of this magnitude. Sure, there should probably be slightly better procedures for checking the wiring, but next time it'll be a failed sensor, actuator, or controller board.

If we don't focus on providing and ensuring a defense-in-depth, we will sooner or later see another incident like this.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znWl_TuUPp0
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-11-19 21:58:13+00:00
"and WAGO Corporation, the electrical component manufacturer"

Sucks to be any of the YouTubers influencers today telling everyone they should use WAGO connectors in all their walls.

Seriously though, impressive to trace the issue down this closely. I am at best an amateur DIY electrician, but I am always super careful about the quality of each connection.
by radicalbyte | 2025-11-19 21:58:46+00:00
> Doesn't that describe SV in general, and big tech in particular?

Absolutely! It's just that the hopeful hacker/nerd culture used to be more dominant here (slashdot had the more cynical types).

Now there are a generation who don't know anything but Javascript but think that they're God's gift to programming. I can understand it as ZIRP resulted in the bar being dropped to the floor for jobs which paid SV salaries. Imagine earning that kind of money straight out of school and all you had to be able to do was implement Fizzbuzz.

The hackers ARE still here as are some really amazing people but this always seems to happen with communities. The only constant is change. And without change communities die.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-19 21:58:52+00:00
I'm really fucking math dumb. Can you explain what the "well grounded" part is, for the mathematically challenged?

Because all I've seen from the "energy based" approach in practice is a lot of hype and not a lot of results. If it isn't applicable to LLMs, then what is it applicable to? Where does it give an advantage? Why would you want it?

I really, genuinely don't get that.
CXOs suck at remote work so they mandate everyone for an in-office culture
by sankalpdomore | 2025-11-19 21:58:56+00:00
Getting a remote job is easy. Keeping it is 10x harder.

People see my posts working from different cities and countries and think remote work is just about freedom and flexibility. They see the coffee shop photos, the European trips, the "work from anywhere" lifestyle.

What they don't see is the years of discipline it took to make this work.

Finding and getting a remote job is actually much easier now than it's ever been. Companies are hiring remotely, the opportunities are there, the interviews happen over Zoom.

Remote work isn't hard because of the work itself. It's hard because it requires a completely different level of discipline and organization that most people don't have when they start.

Let me break down what I mean.

You need to be exceptional at communication. Not just good. Exceptional. Because when you're not in an office, nobody sees you working. Nobody knows if you're stuck. Nobody knows if you're making progress unless you tell them. You need to over-communicate in a way that feels unnatural at first.

You need to manage your own work without anyone watching. There's no manager walking by your desk. There's no peer pressure from seeing others work. You need self-discipline to actually get things done when Netflix is right there and nobody would know if you took a three-hour lunch.

Stakeholder management becomes critical. You can't just grab someone for a quick chat. Everything needs to be planned, documented, and communicated clearly. You need to keep multiple people aligned across time zones without the benefit of casual hallway conversations.

Your organizational skills need to be perfect. Files need to be where people expect them. Documentation needs to be clear. Your Figma files can't be a mess. When people can't tap you on the shoulder to ask where something is, everything needs to be self-explanatory.

And here's the thing that most people underestimate. It takes about 3 to 5 years of constant discipline to mold yourself into a great remote collaborator.

Three to five years.

Not three months. Not one year. Years of building these habits until they become second nature.

I've been remote since 2018. Seven years. And I'm still learning better ways to communicate, organize, and collaborate remotely. It's not something you figure out in your first six months.

So when people see me working from Europe or different cities and think "that looks easy, I want that," what they're not seeing is the seven years of practice that makes it look easy.

Remote work isn't for everybody. And that's okay.

It's for people who have the patience and discipline to build these skills over years. It's for people who can work independently without external structure. It's for people who can communicate proactively instead of reactively.

It's not easy. It just looks easy from the outside.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-11-19 21:59:52+00:00
this is a really good article. it makes none of the mistakes of thinking Bretton Woods I was a political choice (it uses the words "collapse") while separating the difference of the financial inevitabilities and political agencies in so called Bretton Woods III (that elected leaders do indeed have a choice to withhold funds from Russia, but on the other hand, there are inevitable financial & economic effects to war, like having to commit more money for credit of shipping oil).

someone on here is saying that Russia is an "economically small country." This is like saying the learning loss during COVID was "not very big." You are not appreciating the consequences of how big of a deal war and pulling kids out of school are, all the same.
by int_19h | 2025-11-19 22:00:00+00:00
> I believe they in an experiment also reduced friction in getting an API key to start making calls right away

This part is very easy now: you sign into https://aistudio.google.com/ and then click "Get API key" in the lower left corner.

The problem is that features and docs are still scattered all over. Some thing can only be done via Vertex, for example.
by nightpool | 2025-11-19 22:00:00+00:00
Yes, 100%. Lots of failures across the board here. Especially with large ships and how many different nations they might be registered in, I can't imagine it's easy to have a lot of regulatory oversight into their construction, mechanical inspection or maintenance schedules. I'm curious how modern ports handle this problem, feels like it could cause a ton of issues beyond just catastrophic ones like this one.
by lenerdenator | 2025-11-19 22:01:01+00:00
> The default reason some feature doesn't exist is simply because no one bothered to make it. Maybe they don't think there's a big demand from their users to disable shorts completely.

My guess is they know exactly what users are doing with the app and website, and know that people use shorts more often than we think.

This is one of their prime products, and they're Google, the biggest surveillance company on the planet. Of course they know how users interact with their service.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-19 22:01:03+00:00
> Which is why the "retrospectives are useless" crowd spins me up so badly.

When I see complaints about retrospectives from software devs they're usually about agile or scrum retrospective meetings, which have evolved to be performative routines. They're done every sprint (or week, if you're unlucky) and even if nothing happens the whole team might have to sit for an hour and come up with things to say to fill the air.

In software, the analysis following a mishap is usually called a post-mortem. I haven't seen many complaints about those have no value. Those are usually highly appreciated. Thought some times the "blameless post-mortem" people take the term a little too literally and try to avoid exploring useful failures if they might cause uncomfortable conversations about individuals making mistakes or even dropping the ball.
by seemaze | 2025-11-19 22:01:10+00:00
>So if anything goes wrong in my install, it’ll be a lot of forum-hopping and Discord searching to figure it all out

This is not inaccurate, however every time I've had to interface with either Microsoft or Adobe issues, both the professional and community support have been abysmal. Both community forums seem to incentivize engagement to the point where every response is 3+ hyperlinks deep to someone else's vaguely related post.

Maybe the linux forums self select for independent problem solvers..
by xvector | 2025-11-19 22:01:40+00:00
Wasn't the case here really weak to begin with? I remember reading the FTC's initial filings and they just sounded absurd. The very premise that Meta didn't face meaningful competition from TikTok was a farce.

I'm not very happy with Lina Khan after she killed our only remaining low cost airline carrier. And killed iRobot to let Roborock, a a Chinese company, take over.

She "stood up" to big tech, failed, and her remaining legacy is destroying American businesses that people actually relied on. Literally no value was added, but a bunch was subtracted. I never understood the hype for her.
by ruinin | 2025-11-19 22:01:42+00:00
The most interesting vulnerability is the reuse of cryptographic keys, some of it apparently by design, like when transferring one's account to a new number - this can apparently be used to correlate identities despite the change of phone number.

Also, from examining the published data set I found it interesting that there are only five WhatsApp users registered in North Korea. I wonder who they are.
by legitster | 2025-11-19 22:01:49+00:00
So far, what has been revealed in the documents is embarrassing, but not necessarily implicating: https://searchepsteinfiles.com/person/163

For the most part, the threads are a mix of:

- Really cringe dating advice

- Epstein connecting Summers with other important people

- Dishing on Trump and his inner circle

Given there were many more prominently featured people with more dirt in here, I wonder if Summers is worried there's a lot more that's about to be revealed.
Show HN: MQ-AGI A neuro-symbolic architecture for modular AGI
by matheusdevmp | 2025-11-19 22:02:00+00:00
Hello HN,

I’m the author of this paper. I've been researching cognitive architectures and found that while LLMs are scaling impressively, they are hitting architectural ceilings regarding persistent memory, reasoning depth ("System 2"), and energy efficiency.

I wrote this paper to propose MQ-AGI, a theoretical framework that attempts to solve these bottlenecks through Orchestrated Modularity rather than just parameter scaling.

The core concepts:

Decomposition: Instead of a monolith, the system uses specialized Domain Expert Networks (DENs) coordinated by a Global Integrator Network (GIN) — heavily inspired by Global Workspace Theory.

Quantum-Inspired Routing: The "secret sauce" is treating the selection of experts not as a statistical gating problem (like in MoEs), but as a Combinatorial Optimization problem. I model this using Hamiltonian energy minimization to find the optimal coalition of experts for complex tasks.

Note: I explicitly address the QRAM bottleneck and latency issues in the paper. The proposal focuses on optimizing low-dimensional metadata (routing signals), making it feasible for NISQ devices or classical simulation via Tensor Networks.

DREAM Memory: It integrates a hierarchical memory protocol (Episodic/Semantic) with adaptive retention (TTL) based on user engagement, rather than raw context window stuffing.

The paper includes the full mathematical formalization (Hamiltonians, Free Energy Principle equations) and a critical feasibility analysis.

It’s a preprint and a conceptual blueprint. I’d love to hear your feedback on the routing topology and the feasibility of the hybrid core. https://zenodo.org/records/17654543
by sdk- | 2025-11-19 22:02:11+00:00
We implemented this in the Daily build of the desktop app last year, using a staging environment for Firefox Sync. But Firefox Sync is called Firefox Sync because it’s built for Firefox. Thunderbird profiles, in comparison, have a lot more data points. This meant we had to build something completely different. As we started to spin up Thunderbird Pro, we decided it made more sense to have a Thunderbird account that would manage everything, including Sync. Unfortunately, this meant a lot of delays. So Sync is still on our radar, and we hope to have it next year, barring further complications. Source: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/09/state-of-the-thunder-mo...

In other words, it was more work to adapt Firefox Sync than they thought at the beginning. It's still actively developed so finger crossed it's coming soon.
by muldvarp | 2025-11-19 22:02:45+00:00
> Software engineers been automating our own work since we built the first assembler.

The declared goal of AI is to automated software engineering entirely. This is in no way comparable to building an assembler. So the question is mostly about whether or not this goal will be achieved.

Still, nobody is building these systems _for_ me. They're building them to replace me, because my living is too much for them to pay.
by atonse | 2025-11-19 22:02:47+00:00
I just tried this out, and was VERY impressed with the speed of the plan mode. I was also totally fine with the code it wrote.

Then I made the mistake of saying "run npm run build and fix all issues" (something I've run probably 50 times across codex and cc in the past 2 months). CC does it pretty much 100% of the time. I walked away from Codex, and when I came back, it had installed 2 new node packages, and gone down some crazy rabbit hole with eslint and something else. (this was for 2 minor typescript errors)

After I reverted all its changes, had CC do it and it fixed it in about 30-60 seconds.

I'll try a few more times. Let's see.
by chickensong | 2025-11-19 22:03:00+00:00
If you're anti-shorts, you could also choose to send a message to the creators by not watching their shorts. If they previously made long form but have switched to shorts, they're concerned with views, so you deny them the views.

Of course this may have little impact since so many people have no self-control and the gains from shorts may outweigh loosing your views, but it's still something. Enjoy the warmth of angry spite and move on.

Vote with your wallet, your clicks, and be the change you wish to see.
by gopalv | 2025-11-19 22:03:11+00:00
> For double/bigint joins that leads to observable differences between joins and plain comparisons, which is very bad.

This was one of the bigger hidden performance issues when I was working on Hive - the default coercion goes to Double, which has a bad hash code implementation [1] & causes joins to cluster & chain, which caused every miss on the hashtable to probe that many away from the original index.

The hashCode itself was smeared to make values near Machine epsilon to hash to the same hash bucket so that .equals could do its join, but all of this really messed up the folks who needed 22 digit numeric keys (eventually Decimal implementation handled it by adding a big fixed integer).

Databases and Double join keys was one of the red-flags in a SQL query, mostly if you see it someone messed up something.

[1] - https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-12217
by cfu28 | 2025-11-19 22:03:18+00:00
I know nothing about what happened in your fathers case, if it is exactly what you mentioned it sounds a little inappropriate but I’m wondering if something is lost in translation. You do mention he was admitted a few times to the hospital this year alone if I’m reading correctly, which is not normal and I am wondering if he is sicker than you are letting on in your comment.

Are these palliative care doctors and nurses engaging with the patient and your family? One thing they do is ask about code status (full code vs DNR/DNI) and clarify what the wishes of the patient are, help out with legacy planning, make sure everyone is aware of all the possible outcomes (not just death but reduction in QOL), and provide emotional support. Note that this job is not limited to a palliative team, but most patients and families don’t think about these things until it’s too late. CPR can have a pretty poor outcome in many elderly patients and can do more harm then good, so they may just want to make sure you have all the right information. It’s becoming the standard to engage in these talks sooner, not necessarily because they anticipate a poor recovery on this admission but you never know about the next one.

Just FYI and to tie this back to the original article, the physicians taking care of your father have no say in organ donation, it’s a conflict of interest for obvious reasons.
by jcgrillo | 2025-11-19 22:03:26+00:00
Yeah I personally never really bought into Arduino. I got their Uno back whenever it came out but never really got into their whole IDE experience. Latest projects are on esp32 using embassy which so far has been going great. Interested to check out rp2040 or rp2350 at some point maybe.. There are tons of interesting, easy options out there now
by tclancy | 2025-11-19 22:03:42+00:00
Yeah, I remember reading an issue of Planetary from about (GOD HELP US!) two decades ago where the plot involved baddies who had invaded a fictional universe. In the time since then, I went from thinking "What a crazy idea for a plot" to "Hmm, I can see what inspired that" to "Jesus wept. People can basically choose to do this now. And they vote!"
by bigyabai | 2025-11-19 22:03:52+00:00
If you didn't Snowden your way to Russia or North Korea within the hour, they would lynch you like nothing that has been seen before in American politics. FBI agents, Mossad sleeper-cells and private security would have you looking like that John Wick movie poster at the Aeroflot terminal: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/unpopular-opinion-guns
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-19 22:04:01+00:00
> Basically, the line of causation of the mishap has to pass through a metaphorical block of Swiss cheese, and a mishap only occurs if all the holes in the cheese line up.

The metaphor relies on you mixing and matching some different batches of presliced Swiss cheese. In a single block, the holes in the cheese are guaranteed to line up, because they are two-dimensional cross sections of three-dimensional gas bubbles. The odds of a hole in one slice of Swiss cheese lining up with another hole in the following slice are very similar to the odds of one step in a staircase being followed by another step.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-19 22:04:19+00:00
Thanks for the summary for those of us who can't watch video right now.

There are so many layers of failures that it makes you wonder how many other operations on those ships are only working because those fallbacks, automatic switchovers, emergency supplies, and backup systems save the day. We only see the results when all of them fail and the failure happens to result in some external problem that means we all notice.
by sothatsit | 2025-11-19 22:04:38+00:00
Exactly this. As a recent example, the documents for the new Online Safety Act in the UK are over 2400 pages long! That means that even small businesses that want to comply have no reasonable option other than relying on summaries, and the regulator and big businesses will probably just negotiate on what the details actually mean in practice anyway.

I understand that there's nuance when dealing with all the edge cases to regulations. But it seems that the answer should not be extending the regulations to insane lengths to try to cover everything. That way lies insanity.
by nandomrumber | 2025-11-19 22:04:39+00:00
I’m saying you can do each of those separately for six months, and you’ll probably find the resistance training to be the most beneficial.

It will make your dick harder (or clitoris, whatever), your muscles bigger, your mind clearer, your sense of purpose more apparent. It will increase your bone density, and improve your sense of well being. Things that aren’t doing you any favours will tend to fall by the wayside.

Failing that, asking people who’ve tried the resistance training / puzzles / nootropics / meditation experiment themselves is a low effort way of revealing a pattern.

Imagine it’s 2025, there’s an obesity epidemic, and people still think they can sit around and do fuck all to get well.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-19 22:05:01+00:00
In this context, the relevant protocol is IMAP, not SMTP. And IMAP very much has tagging and filtering, which is what Thunderbird exposes here. Heck, IMAP even has notes, you can attach to mails, so you could discuss mail drafts using plain IMAP, but no client I know exposes this.