MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-13 21:53:20+00:00
>I'm starting to get this feeling that there's no way to satisfy everyone. Some people hate the sycophantic models, some love them. So whatever they do, there's a large group of people complaining.

Duh?

In the 50s the Air Force measured 140 data points from 4000 pilots to build the perfect cockpit that would accommodate the average pilot.

The result fit almost no one. Everyone has outliers of some sort.

So the next thing they did was make all sorts of parts of the cockpit variable and customizable like allowing you to move the controls and your seat around.

That worked great.

"Average" doesn't exist. "Average" does not meet most people's needs

Configurable does. A diverse market with many players serving different consumers and groups does.

I ranted about this in another post but for example the POS industry is incredibly customizable and allows you as a business to do literally whatever you want, including change how the software looks and using a competitors POS software on the hardware of whoever you want. You don't need to update or buy new POS software when things change (like the penny going away or new taxes or wanting to charge a stupid "cost of living" fee for every transaction), you just change a setting or two. It meets a variety of needs, not "the average businesses" needs.

N.B I am unable to find a real source for the Air force story. It's reported tons but maybe it's just a rumor.
by tptacek | 2025-11-13 21:53:24+00:00
There are many ways to use PGP just as there are many ways to use openssl or any other cryptographic suite of tools.

This is a very bad thing, because it is not in fact the case that there is one cryptosystem equally suited to all these tasks.

That you chose OpenSSL as your corroborating example is especially funny, because there is exactly one thing that OpenSSL is actually well-suited to doing (setting up TLS sessions), and then 20+ years of people getting themselves into grave trouble trying to get that library to do other things.
by bell-cot | 2025-11-13 21:53:50+00:00
> What system is failing to meet...

Not Applicable. If it somehow took an engineering degree to toast a Pop-Tart, the "failing to meet" would have nothing whatsoever to do with any education system for engineers.

EDIT: On another read...I'd say the bizarre quote is just Farley desperately trying to throw the blame somewhere, somewhere far away from where it belongs - with him and Ford.
by mschwaig | 2025-11-13 21:54:00+00:00
Yes, the cycle times are bad and some ecosystems and tasks are a real pain still.

I also agree with you when it comes to the task of auditing every line of Nix code that factors into a given system. Nix doesn't really make things easier there.

The benefit I'm seeing really comes from composition making it easier to share and direct auditing effort.

All of the tricky code that's hard to audit should be relied on and audited by lots of people, while as a result the actual recipe to put together some specific package or service should be easier to audit.

Additionally, I think looking at diffs that represent changes to the system vs reasoning about the effects of changes made through imperative commands that can affect arbitrary parts of the system has similar efficiency gains.
by xdennis | 2025-11-13 21:54:28+00:00
> The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people

The Senate does not represent the people. The House of Representatives represents the people. The Senate represents the states. That's why there are two senators per state and the number of representatives depends on the population of the state.

It's so bizarre when American's don't understand their own democracy and a foreigner has to explain it to them.

The US founding fathers learned from history and designed the US democracy to be more like the Roman system. In Greece they had a more direct democracy. That led to mob mentality. The Romans split the powers between different bodies and people. There were two executives (consuls). There were two legislative powers: the senate and the plebeian council.

The system was set up with conflicting groups. When they agreed reforms were enacted, when they disagreed the country stays the same. This was not a bug, it was an intentional feature.

The US democratic system was inspired by this.

Senators are supposed to represent states. That's why they were appointed, not elected. Senators have only been elected from 1913 when the 17th amendment passed.

---

On a separate not, this is also why the US does not have direct elections. The elector system is designed to take into account states, not just people. If it didn't exist. Candidates would only campaign in the populous east and west coast.
by VHRanger | 2025-11-13 21:55:38+00:00
We have rules of thumb and we'll have a more technical blog post on this in ~2 weeks.

You can break the AI / slop into a 4 corner matrix:

1. Not AI & Not Slop (eg. good!)

2. Not AI & slop (eg. SEO spam -- we already punished that for a long time)

3. AI & not Slop (eg. high effort AI driven content -- example would be youtuber Neuralviz)

4. AI & Slop (eg. most of the AI garbage out there)

#3 is the one that tends to pose issues for people. Our position is that if the content *has a human accountable for it* and *took significant effort to produce* then it's liable to be in #3. For now we're just labelling AI versus not, and we're adapting our strategy to deal with category #3 as we learn more.
by scheeseman486 | 2025-11-13 21:55:46+00:00
Not the first time Valve funded the development of FOSS drivers. They've already done so with Intel's Vulkan stack on Linux, AMD (AMDGPU) and Nvidia (NVK).

SteamOS's core functionality leans heavily on Mesa and there's been a lot of commits for the Adreno 750 lately, mostly coming from Linaro.
by johnwheeler | 2025-11-13 21:56:35+00:00
It's weird. It went up and down and up and down. Controversial POV. But thanks for the support. Sam Altman's just too dishonest. It's been said time and time again by so many people, by Paul Graham, Ilya Sutskeve, everybody's telling everybody he's dishonest. When are we going to wake up and get this guy out of there?
Show HN: Interview and Exam-Level Data Structures Problems (With Full Solutions)
by shhabmlkawy | 2025-11-13 21:56:39+00:00
I’ve spent the last two years writing a collection of 130 original problems in Data Structures & Algorithms, each with fully worked-out solutions, proofs, and time complexity analysis.

The goal was to create something that feels like a mix between a university-level exam set and an MIT-style lecture note, but with complete, step-by-step answers. Many of the problems involve new ideas that don’t appear in standard textbooks, including some heap variants I designed (Triple-L Heap and Layered Summary Heap).

Topics covered include: • Heaps, priority queues, and advanced heap structures • Union-Find (with potential function analyses) • Trees and balanced trees (AVL, Splay, etc.) • RMQ, suffix arrays, hashing, and more • Sorting, prefix/suffix techniques • Dynamic sequences and amortized analysis • 130 questions with 2–3 subparts each + full solutions

Example problem style: “Given an array A of size n, split it into two disjoint subsets such that the absolute difference of sums is minimized — without using DP or exponential search.” (The solution uses a prefix–suffix argument and runs in O(n).)

Happy to hear feedback, suggestions, or ideas for a second edition. If anyone wants to see the full book, here is the link in the URL field above.
by manmal | 2025-11-13 21:56:58+00:00
Apple should have modernized ObjC instead of making Swift the lingua franca. Both speed of iteration and flexibility (on which web-stack-rivaling productivity features would have been possible) are gone forever.

Swift Concurrency is a tire fire that not even their async-algorithms team can use completely correctly, and useful feature like typed throws are left half finished. The enormous effort the constant further bastardization of Swift takes, is at least in part the reason for the sorry state dev tooling is in. Not even a 4T dollar company can make a reliable SwiftUI preview work, in their own IDE. Variadic generics (a seemingly pure compiler feature) crash at runtime if you look at them the wrong way. Actors, the big light tower of their structured concurrency, are unusable because calls to them are unordered. They enforce strict concurrency checking now, but the compiler is too dumb to infer common valid send patterns; and their solution to make this abomination work in real codebases? Intro a default that lets _everything_ in a module run on the main thread per default!

</rant>
by guywithahat | 2025-11-13 21:57:24+00:00
It's really frustrating. So many women are getting abused in dorms now and nobody can talk about it; a friend of mine complained that a man was hanging out in the women's bathroom for hours on end on friday/saturday nights and the RA threatened to write her up. Rape/abuse rates are around 300x higher (depending on the numbers you use) for trans/non-binary people than women yet nobody cares, and just trying to do high-quality research on the subject can get tenured professors fired. It's frustrating because it's this enormous problem and we can't even have good research on the topic done, let alone address the crime numbers which have come out we can all see.
by takinola | 2025-11-13 21:58:06+00:00
If there is a different tree of life right here on Earth and we don't know about it, that would cast doubt on our ability to detect life in worlds light years away. Also, if life had multiple false starts here on Earth, that does also suggest that it is very difficult to take hold even on the original Goldilocks planet. The idea that multiple versions of "life" co-developed and became a single strain is quite interesting to consider. I wonder what else needs to be true to support that theory.
by grishka | 2025-11-13 21:58:08+00:00
Linux (with the "traditional" userspace) is a mess on the inside, has always been, and will always be. It blows my mind that there still isn't a universal, easy way to compile binaries that would run on any distro, of any version — something that all other mainstream OSes have solved from day one.

Yes, I know that AppImage and Flatpak are a thing. No, they are not the answer, because they, too, all come with their own issues.
by jmadeano | 2025-11-13 21:58:32+00:00
That's correct. The flow is 1) user requests some change e.g. "change to dark mode", 2) a snapshot of the page is sent to an LLM, 3) the LLM generates and returns a deterministic script that handles the page editing.

And just to further clarify: "each use" means each generation. Applying the modification after generation doesn't cost tokens
by comfydragon | 2025-11-13 21:58:35+00:00
Did you get it in black like I did? My buttons also cracked practically right away (within a day), I suspect because the reinforcements were installed poorly (the buttons are VERY hard to press). It made the down button unusable.

But kudos to Eric and Claudio, they're shipping me a replacement (in white, which, as I understand it and as they said in their email, should be less susceptible to the issue, something about the white rubber versus black makes it less problematic). My only frustration was how quickly it failed, since I know it's a new-old-stock case.

Highly looking forward to the Time 2. I only stopped using my Pebble Time Steel when the battery life degraded to ~3 days (after about 6 years), used a Fossil Hybrid for a few years, now a Pixel watch. Measuring battery life in weeks will be a breath of fresh air :)
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-11-13 21:58:48+00:00
So we have two universes. One is pushing generated content up our throats - from social media to operating systems - and another universe where people actively decide not to have anything to do with it.

I wonder where the obstinacy on the part of certain CEOs come from. It's clear that although such content does have its fans (mostly grouped in communities), people at large just hate arificially-generated content. We had our moment, it was fun, it is no more, but these guys seem obsessed in promoting it.
by mebizzle | 2025-11-13 21:58:49+00:00
>(easy legal CBD/hemp, as long as there aren’t other things in there)

Your ignorance shows in spades. The arbitrary ban on THC and its analogues prevent chronic pain patients like me (a criminally underserved market) from becoming addicted to the big pharma system. The "other things in there" argument is the same as razorblades in candy, sanctimony to portray dissent as degeneracy.
by VHRanger | 2025-11-13 21:59:31+00:00
Slop is about thoughtless use of a model to generate output. Output from your paper's model would still qualify as slop in our book.

Even if your model scored extremely high perplexity on an LLM evaluation we'd likely still tag it as slop because most of our text slop detection is using sidechannel signals to parse out how it was used rather than just using an LLM's statistical properties on the text.
by greg_w | 2025-11-13 21:59:32+00:00
One cannot (in the US) get a patent for software itself. This was settled a while ago. There needs to be more in the claims. In fact, the patent discussed here does not claim continued fractions and nobody would be in danger using them even if the patent issued as is (which is not certain, because the patent claims rather trivial modification of a classic neural network architecture, which should be brought up by the examiner as obvious).

Patents are propelling the society when they work as intended. They made XIX century and at least good chunk of XX century. Without patents, people fall back to copying each other, because it is much easier to copy than to innovate.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-11-13 21:59:52+00:00
Firefox, UBO, CanvasBlocker. I entered my address, put one pizza in the cart, navigated the upsell and contribution ordeals and made it to checkout. Page loaded fine and it looked like I could check out.

It's not that I never see what you're describing - I do all the time. I didn't get it here tho.
by C1arkgable | 2025-11-13 22:00:01+00:00
Thanks for posting about Regexle! My buddy and I made it last year, inspired by Jimbly, but we regularly forget it's still up. Stoked that folks are enjoying it. If you have any suggestions for improvements, we're open to em! https://gitlab.com/Nathaniel.Belles/regexle/-/issues
by bigfatkitten | 2025-11-13 22:00:14+00:00
The difference in 2002 is that Gates actually meant it, I know this because I got to see it first hand.

Windows XP SP3 was all about security. Vista introduced massive improvements with things like UAC, ASLR, Bitlocker, secure boot and add-ons like EMET that eventually got rolled into Windows itself. At the same time, there were massive changes in the engineering culture in terms of the secure development lifecycle.

A lot of other, arguably sexier feature work took a back seat to get all of these things across the line.
by clifflocked | 2025-11-13 22:00:16+00:00
This is not true, at least around where I live. Gigabit ethernet(which is gigabit for only the downloads, and <50 mbps for upload) is 110$ per month. Comcast is the only internet service provider who offers speeds over 50 mbps. So I make due. If I want to download a 40gb game, I take a break. I read a book, or eat dinner. It works itself out, and I can play my game.
by cthalupa | 2025-11-13 22:00:37+00:00
> The House of Representatives represents the people.

The House of Representatives represented the people until 1929 and the Permanent Apportionment Act.

The reasoning campaigned on for this act? To protect low population states from high population ones.

The House represents the people more than the Senate, but it still provides proportionally more power per capita to lower population states than higher population ones.

Repeal the 17th, overwrite the PAA, and we're back to something more closely resembling what the founding fathers intended. In the mean time, with the House having departed from their intent, it's just as reasonable for people to suggest the Senate depart from their intent too.
by ignoramous | 2025-11-13 22:00:38+00:00
> You can have that inside a datacenter too, maybe each node can only reach 75% of the other nodes, but A can reach B and B can reach C does not indicate A can reach C. Lots of fun times there

At BigCloud in the early days, things went berserk with a gossip system when A could reach B but B couldn't reach A.

Cloudflare hit something similar though they misclassified the failure mode: https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-byzantine-failure-in-the-real-...
by AngryData | 2025-11-13 22:00:54+00:00
Because people want an excuse to blame our problems on, and people living in big cities think they should be able to better dictate law as they often view poor rural people and their lives with contempt. And many politicians are happy to go along with because it means more power for themselves and less restrictions on how they use it.

Real solutions to the imbalance would be to split up big states into more smaller states, but big states don't like that because it means they have less power as individual smaller states. And we have already have congressman holding far more power than they were originally meant to because they froze congressional count in the 1929 reapportionment act which means we only have 1/3 of the amount of congressman representatives we are suppose to have.

The US political and legislative system has been corrupted beyond reason and this is just the next step to further consolidate political power and law into the hands of a few.
by xrd | 2025-11-13 22:00:57+00:00
I need to finish this but I get so depressed. The legitimate idea in the first few paragraphs seems to be that the technofeudalists will rule as kings using an algorithms and variants of ZK proofs. But, the overwhelming character of Trump's power feels more like violence and good old fashioned legal bludgeons. That does not seem like tech innovation to me.
by a_n | 2025-11-13 22:01:01+00:00
@jmadeano, i just wanna say this is the most inspiring post ive seen on HN, ever. The idea, execution and also your responses in the comments about just wanting to build cool stuff without really caring about the other stuff reminded me of why i started this journey, to have fun and build cool shit. This is genuinely soo inspiring man… lets gooo work, i really hope you win man lmao too much glaze but wtv y’all deserve it
by syspec | 2025-11-13 22:01:50+00:00
Hmm... it basically says that real power in the US isn’t with the government anymore, but with giant tech companies and the rich weirdos behind them.

These rich weirdos run the show through apps, platforms, and algorithms that decide what people see, do, and believe.

It’s not that democracy broke, it just quietly got replaced by a system where the rules are written by whoever owns the server.
by sfpotter | 2025-11-13 22:02:22+00:00
I'm being a little rhetorically over the top. Of course, sometimes it's what you have to do.

In fact, right now I'm doing exactly Test/Implement because I don't know how else to solve the problem. But this is a last resort. Only because the first few attempts failed and I must solve this problem have I resorted to grinding out individual cases. The issue is that I have my back against the wall and have to solve a problem I don't understand. But as I progress, eventually I will understand the problem, and then my many cases are going to get dramatically simplified or even rewritten.

But all the tests I've created along the way will stay...
by stillatit | 2025-11-13 22:02:49+00:00
User: "In other words you did not sign off on the chad IDE?"

Gary: "Sorry, YC is a pretty big place and I can't be all places at all times"

User: "I'm confused. why did you fund it then?"

Gary: "We're a partnership of 15 general partners"

Seemed to me like he was apoligizing for admitting them. However I see now he also added "I wouldn't count them out, one questionable video does not mean someone is bad". Maybe I misread it.
by nxor | 2025-11-13 22:02:49+00:00
Interesting topic but (A) Musk, for example, was cool among 'the other side' until just recently. Did they play a part in his prominence? (B) JD Vance's funding is mentioned, but what about the fact that Kamala's campaign was far better funded than Trump's? If Trump and Vance were forced on people then clearly others were too.
by ModernMech | 2025-11-13 22:02:56+00:00
The thing about Rust is you pay for everything up front, and the dividends come later. You pay first to learn it, which is not easy. Then you pay every time you have to compile your code, which can kill development momentum. When you are learning, often times this manifests as a moment where you have to completely rearchitect your approach because plowing forward is too costly. It's at this point a lot of people say "Rust is too hard!" and they give up.

But if you stick it out, as Google has, the dividend is that more often than with other languages, you are not paying these costs continually but instead reaping dividends on the long run.

First of all, Rust has the Haskell-like property that (as long as the logic is sound) if your code compiles, it usually runs just fine. This is why testing speeds up, because all of the edge cases that are explored during testing were already accounted for by the compiler.

It also translates into easier refactoring, where you can make sweeping changes in the codebase and feel confident that you can put it all back together again.

And then there's the fact that the programs themselves are fast. How many times has uv been brought up here and the #1 remark people have is "wow it's so fast!". Fast is a feature, and your users benefit from it every time they run your code.

It's hard to find that nexus of features in other languages. Usually they are just as fast and hard to write as Rust, without the safety guarantees. Or they are just as safe as Rust, but without the speed. And that's why Rust has hit a sweet spot where other languages can't quite get it.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-11-13 22:03:20+00:00
> but not in the years where they sell the most.

Nope. Take 1 example, the PS3. It lost money in 2007 & 2008, but became profitable in 2009. They sold 16 million PS3's in 2007 and 2008 out of a total 87 million. So approximately 20% of PS3's were sold at a loss.

And the PS3 is perhaps the console that was sold at the biggest loss at the beginning due to the horrendously expensive Cell chip.

It's kind of moot, anyways. The discussion is about the consoles of 2026 competing against Steam Machine. The PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch 2 are all currently being sold for positive margin.
by torginus | 2025-11-13 22:03:51+00:00
The reason you can go anywhere on the internet and trust at least that the website you're viewing is in the form the creator intended is that HTTPS exists - which requires that a trusted entity has issued a cert that proves the domain is indeed held by the person and what goes on in that domain hasn't been tampered with externally.

That is the default on the internet, and even enforced. I'm merely saying that for average users (or power users even, who understand the risks) the default should be that the same guarantees apply to desktop apps as well (especially considering those usually have far more access).

HTTPS shows that such a world where people live with this restriction is possible and practical, and far from the jackbooted tyranny you describe.
by 0xTJ | 2025-11-13 22:04:12+00:00
0.4 mg is an extremely low amount. The as far as I understand (and have seen) the limit of THC in Ontario is 10 mg/container for gummies. Some companies will get around that limit by packaging multiple 10 mg THC bags together.

While it's annoying and definitely creates more waste than is needed, 10 mg is a relatively reasonable limit. Most people aren't going to consume more than 10 mg THC worth of gummies in one sitting (at least if they're getting something government-sactioned).