MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nerdsniper | 2025-11-18 22:10:39+00:00
Both, but perhaps more often neither.

From what I've seen, sometimes the computer correctly assesses that the "bad" move opens up some kind of "checkmate in 45 moves" that could technically happen, but requires the opponent to see it 45 moves ahead of time and play something that would otherwise appear to be completely sub-optimal until something like 35 moves in, at which point normal peak grandmasters would finally go "oh okay now I get the point of all of that confusing behavior, and I can now see that I'm going to get mated in 10 moves".

So, the computer is "right" - that move is worse if you're playing a supercomputer. But it's "wrong" because that same move is better as long as you're playing a human, who will never be able to see an absurd thread-the-needle forced play 45-75 moves ahead.

That said, this probably isn't what GP was referring to, as it wouldn't lead to an assignment of a "brilliant" move simply for failing to see the impossible-to-actually-play line.
by MaxBarraclough | 2025-11-18 22:12:25+00:00
Agreed. In Java land, if I understand correctly the OpenJ9 JVM can (or at least could) beat HotSpot in memory consumption, while being slightly behind in execution times. It still sees only limited adoption. This may be just because it's seen as an 'alternative' option, less trustworthy than HotSpot, but it also seems to indicate the HotSpot developers aren't prioritising memory consumption.

https://bell-sw.com/announcements/2022/06/28/hotspot-vs-open...

https://eclipse.dev/openj9/performance/ (non-impartial source, of course)
by palmotea | 2025-11-18 22:12:33+00:00
>>> It's a shame that US didn't invest all that prosperity into social capital that could have helped create high value jobs.

>> What does this sentence mean?

> Cheaper education, free/subsidized healthcare, free/subsidized childcare, cultural norms around family support, etc.

Except for free/subsidized healthcare, didn't the US already have those things during the post-war boom?

Cheaper education? Public K-12 schools, the GI bill, generous state subsidies of higher education (such that you could pay for college with the money you made working a summer job).

Free/subsidized childcare, cultural norms around family support? Wages high enough to raise a family on a single income, allowing for stay-at-home moms to provide childcare.
by Jtsummers | 2025-11-18 22:12:57+00:00
Common Lisp or Python, keeping it simple. I've tried using AOC as a motivator to use a new language, but it's never been effective. Though this year with only 12 days maybe I'd make it all the way through with a different language. Usually I start in CL + something, and the something gets dropped after a few days.
by officeplant | 2025-11-18 22:13:30+00:00
Family raised multiple raccoons over the years until wildlife rescue became more of a common thing you could call up. The garage was seemingly a hot spot for the occasional runt raccoon with closed eyes to be left behind.

They not only get bored they get very particular with who in the family they enjoy following. Which can cause even more havoc when someone gets upset the raccoon doesn't want to be around them. One particularly funny story was a customer's kid (Business was attached to the house) begged and cried to be let hold the raccoon. We all knew it was a bad idea but Grandpa caved to the customer's demands so the kid would shut up. The racoon gladly let me hand her over to the kid, crawled up on the kids shoulder and proceeded to shit from one shoulder to the other then immediately jump off and return to my shoulder to glare at the kid. Never again did we let anyone outside the family touch the raccoon until we gave her up to a local zoo for use in educational programs since she was fairly well trained to behave for treats.
by arafalov | 2025-11-18 22:13:43+00:00
Try Improv (comedy) classes. They sell them as something to do on stage, but the real advantage is pattern building around social interactions.

First, you will stop being afraid to say the wrong thing. Then, you will start to hear the important part in what they said. Then, you will start to hear the part they did NOT say or super-interesting bit they skimmed over because it is not interesting to them FINALLY (at least so far for me and with other training), you will start feeling the tension in the conversation, the good time to interrupt and the time to pivot the topic.

Think Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, but in a free-to-fail environment. This, incidentally, may be the reason why I LIKE when there is low audience for the shows I do. Because, then it is really just my personal/group practice.
Meta-algorithmic judicial reasoning engine
by YuriKozlov | 2025-11-18 22:13:53+00:00
We’re experimenting with an architecture for automated adjudication that doesn’t rely on rule bases or statistical prediction. Instead of encoding law as “if–else” rules or training a model on past cases, we model abstract legal reasoning as a meta-algorithm: a control layer that orchestrates several heterogeneous components — hard-coded logic, numerical modeling, and structured natural-language procedures executed by an LLM.

The core idea is that the structure of legal reasoning (which stages to run, how to select and interpret norms, how to balance competing interests, when to revise earlier conclusions) is expressed in a strongly typed pseudocode / meta-language. Some parts of this meta-algorithm are implemented directly in code (procedural checks, basic qualification, graph updates), some are mathematical (utilities, equilibria, fuzzy uncertainty), and some are written as high-level instructions in natural language, which the LLM interprets under tight constraints. In that setting, the LLM is not a predictor of outcomes but an interpreter of a given procedural script.

The system doesn’t train on case law and doesn’t try to “predict” courts. It reconstructs the reasoning pipeline itself: from extracting the parties’ factual narratives and evidence structure, through norm selection and weighting, up to generating a decision that can be traced back step-by-step in the internal graph of operations. The same meta-algorithm can work with different jurisdictions by swapping norm packages; we’ve tested it so far on a set of international and domestic disputes.

There is an early public demo here: https://portal.judgeai.space/

If you upload a small statement of claim and a response, the engine runs the full pipeline and outputs a structured decision document.

We’d be grateful for feedback from people working on hybrid symbolic/semantic systems, “LLM as interpreter” architectures, or formal models of complex decision-making. Obvious open questions for us are: how best to test failure modes of this kind of meta-control, what formal tools to use for checking consistency of the reasoning graph, and how far one can push this approach before hitting hard theoretical limits.
by morganherlocker | 2025-11-18 22:14:02+00:00
> If you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly

My experience with VS Code is that it has no perceptible lag, except maybe 500ms on startup. I don't doubt people experience this, but I think it comes down to which extensions you enable, and many people enable lots of heavy language extensions of questionable quality. I also use Visual Studio for Windows builds on C++ projects, and it is pretty jank by comparison, both in terms of UI design and resource usage.

I just opened up a relatively small project (my blog repo, which has 175 MB of static content) in both editors and here's the cold start memory usage without opening any files:

- Visual Studio Code: 589.4 MB

- Visual Studio 2022: 732.6 MB

update:

I see a lot of love for Jetbrains in this thread, so I also tried the same test in Android Studio: 1.69 GB!
by gruez | 2025-11-18 22:14:08+00:00
>In a way it does not matter if the app is system or not. Even user apps (signed with some other key) can be powerful to do damage.

That might be true, but at the same time you shouldn't run random scripts off the internet as root, even though there are plenty of EoP or RCE exploits. The same applies to letting random apps get privileged permissions, even if sophisticated attackers can bypass those permissions with 0days.

>System partitions cannot be edited due to SELinux and also thesedays the partition ext4 is created with certain blocks - cant be changed.

That's irrelevant on Android because system apps can be updated without touching the /system partition, if the .apk is signed with the same key. The system will store the updated .apk file in /data/app, but otherwise grant it privileged permissions that only system apps can get. That's how google play services can update itself and still keep its privileged status, even though the phone OS hasn't been updated in years.
by Miraste | 2025-11-18 22:14:09+00:00
VS Code is technically an Electron app, but it's not the usual lazy resource hog implementation like Slack or something. A lot of work went into making it fast. I doubt you'll find many non-Electron full IDEs that are faster. Look at Visual Studio, that's using a nice native framework and it runs at the speed of fossilized molasses.
by m463 | 2025-11-18 22:14:30+00:00
Ok, here's where this becomes a problem:

older people.

As you age, you gradually develop cataracts. These are deposits in the lens of your eye that make them cloudy, and you get glare from bright lights.

When looking at bright lights, it is like looking through a dirty windshield. Light reaches your retina indirectly from the deposits which makes it incredibly hard to see, reducing or eliminating contrast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataract

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glare_(vision)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Flashlig...

You can also get cataracts earlier due to other health conditions
by kiitos | 2025-11-18 22:14:33+00:00
this is an overly simplistic and somewhat reductive perspective on a pretty fundamental concept/primitive

> they were designed to turn single-threaded code into multi-threaded

not really

> usually a single point of contention quickly becomes a problem.

not generally, no

> They're liable to deadlocks/livelocks,

deadlocks/livelocks are orthogonal to any specific primitive

> They're also often backed byOS primitives (with big overheads) with inconsistent behaviors between platforms (spinlocks, waiting etc).

the mutex as a primitive is orthogonal to any specific implementation...

etc. etc.
by groos | 2025-11-18 22:14:40+00:00
> I'm happy my Tesla does a decent job of having the screen be quite dark at night but the headlights are quite bad with the horizontal cutoff style that only lights the first few feet of horizontal ahead of the car. I need to see those deer and elk on the side of the road, damn it.

Turn on your fog lights? At least in my 2018 M3, they illuminate the sides as well.
by kazen44 | 2025-11-18 22:14:44+00:00
i also find the sentiment of "well we use a third party so blame them" completely baffeling.

if you run anything even remotely mission critical, not having a plan B which is executable and of which you are in control (and a plan C) will make you look completely incompetent.

There are very, very few events which some people who run mission critical systems accept as force majeur. Most of those are of the scale "national emergency" or worse.
by swed420 | 2025-11-18 22:15:27+00:00
> B. If it's becoming more common, what are the reasons?

Among other mentioned factors like AI and layoffs: mass brain damage caused by never-ending COVID re-infections.

Since vaccines don't prevent transmission, and each re-infection increases the chances of long COVID complications, the only real protection right now is wearing a proper respirator everywhere you go, and basically nobody is doing that anymore.

There are tons of studies to back this line of reasoning.
by iLemming | 2025-11-18 22:16:12+00:00
> immense amount of work it took to understand code without static typing.

I've used it almost a decade - only felt that way briefly at the start. Idiomatic Clojure data passing is straightforward once you internalize the patterns. Data is transparent - a map is just a map - you can inspect it instantly, in place - no hidden state, no wrapping it in objects. When need some rigidity - Spec/Malli are great. A missing key in a map is such a rare problem for me, honestly, I think it's a design problem, you cannot blame dynamically-typed lang for it, and Clojure is dynamic for many good reasons. The language by default doesn't enforce rigor, so you must impose it yourself, and when you don't, you may get confused, but that's not the language flaw - it's the trade-off of dynamic typing. On the other hand, when I want to express something like "function must accept only prime numbers", I can't even do that in statically typed language without plucking my eyebrow. Static typing solves some problems but creates others. Dynamic typing eschews compile-time guarantees but grants you enormous runtime flexibility - trade-offs.
by keybored | 2025-11-18 22:16:13+00:00
I don’t use GitHub that much. I think the thing about “oh no you have centralized on GitHub” point is a bit exaggerated.[1] But generally, thinking beyond just pushing blobs to the Internet, “decentralization” as in software that lets you do everything that is Not Internet Related locally is just a great thing. So I can never understand people who scoff at Git being decentralized just because “um, actually you end up pushing to the same repository”.

It would be great to also have the continuous build and test and whatever else you “need” to keep the project going as local alternatives as well. Of course.

[1] Or maybe there is just that much downtime on GitHub now that it can’t be shrugged off
by kcplate | 2025-11-18 22:16:36+00:00
> Why are you changing your words?

I didn’t, do you find these two phrases functionally different? “military person (if so ordered) would gladly take up arms against their own citizenry” and “ordered military has been asked to take up arms against our citizens”

They look pretty much the same to me.

> Germany, 1930s. Cambodia, 1970s.

So are you attempting to equate genocidal regimes that operated over years where millions were slaughtered to Kent State where 4 people were killed and nine wounded in less than a quarter of a minute?

> US armed forces fired on citizens. No US military stopped them. The second amendment didn't stop them, or cause them to hesitate.

Nowhere did I make the claim that the 2nd amendment would cause every individual military people to stop or hesitate. Actually it was quite the opposite. I said the military would faction in that situation. Also, I was speaking about the government. Individuals are not the government. The Kent State massacre was over in exactly 13 seconds. It both started organically and ended organically and timing also speaks to this being an emotional chaotic event done by individuals and not one that was specifically ordered.
by hulitu | 2025-11-18 22:16:37+00:00
> Why would anyone use PayPal at the first place?

> A lot of people do not have a negative impression of Paypal. They think it always works.

I, for myself, i read a lot of negative stuff about it: accounts blocked because of various reasons, people denied access to their money because of various reasons.

They are not treated as a bank so they evade financial regulations.

Thanks, but no thanks.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-11-18 22:17:16+00:00
Yes, an <?xml-stylesheet href="..."?> directive is valid in every XML document. You can use CSS to get many of the benefits of XSLT here, but it doesn't let you map RSS @link attributes to HTML a/@href attributes, and CSS isn't designed for interactivity. That's a rather significant gap in functionality.

It is rather terrible to have two different pages, because that requires either server or toolchain support, and complicates testing. The XSLT approach was tried, tested, and KISS – provided you didn't have any insecure/secure context mismatches, or CORS issues, which would stop the XSL stylesheet from loading. (But that's less likely to spontaneously go wrong than an update to a PHP extension breaking your script.)
by wlesieutre | 2025-11-18 22:17:42+00:00
Not affiliated with Rebble, but IMO another worry is that Core Devices takes the store and turns around and says "the app/watchface store is for official Pebble hardware only via the official Pebble phone app." It's not only about Rebble being locked out, but any hypothetical future hardware from someone other than Core Devices.

Part of the excitement of the Pebble OS being open sourced is that someone else could cook up their own watch, either for a different physical style, weird niche features, a successor to Pebble Time Round that Core Devices so far hasn't shown interest in making, etc. Will that happen? Who knows. But I like that it could!

If Core Devices vacuums up the Rebble store, puts Rebble out of business, and says any 3rd party Pebble OS devices aren't allowed to download apps from the main source, that's not good for the open community. I have no idea if Core Devices intends to do that, but it would be nice if they agreed that the store will stay open for everyone with compatible devices.

Whether Rebble has any legal leverage to do that since the data they archived from the original Pebble store isn't legally theirs to begin with, I have no idea. But given that the store's contents only survived because of their efforts, it feels like the right thing to do.
by nabla9 | 2025-11-18 22:19:05+00:00
There are some tight groups, but number of active users is very low and getting lower, number of serves is also decreasing.

I did some random sampling and it looks like large number of active users are talking to void and may not have realized it. They post regularly, have 100s of followers but no active followers.

The most popular servers like mastodon.social are cesspools of snark, anger and grandstanding. Oh, and the moderation is random/nonexistent depending on the day.
by bluGill | 2025-11-18 22:19:10+00:00
you don't call fhqwhgads() on your proxy class though. You call runFunction("fhqwhgads") and it all compiles - the proxy class then string matches on the arguments. Of course depending on what you want to do it can be a lot more complex. That is do manually what other languages do for you automatically under the hood.

Again, this is not something you should do, but you can.
by bespokedevelopr | 2025-11-18 22:19:53+00:00
Maybe it’s an overcorrection because the Tacoma I had, a couple years older than yours, had auto high beams and they would just stay on all the time. They only turned off from reflecting on road signs or when a car was only a few lengths away approaching. Quickly found the button to disable that feature.

The feature seems to be poorly implemented by all manufacturers. I see Teslas driving around flashing high beams every night because they trigger on/off really quickly and the drivers seem oblivious to the rapid change.
by onion2k | 2025-11-18 22:20:07+00:00
There is a legal minimum standard for vision to be able to drive in the UK (basically you have to be able to read a number plate at 20 metres, not have double vision, and have a normal field of vision in one eye.) The punishment for failing to stop driving if you fail that is a £1000 fine.

People with serious cataracts shouldn't be driving.
by divan | 2025-11-18 22:20:10+00:00
One of the main reasons for me for sticking with Claude Code (also for non-coding tasks, I think the name is a misnomer) is the fixed price plan. Pretty much any other open-source alternative requires API key, which means that as soon as I start using it _for real_, I'll start overpaying and/or hitting limits too fast. At least that was my initial experience with API from OpenAI/Claude/Gemini.

Am I biased/wrong here?
by quickthrowman | 2025-11-18 22:20:11+00:00
Station clocks in Switzerland receive a signal from a master clock each minute that advances the minute hand, the seconds hand moves completely independent from the minute hand. This allows them to sync to the minute.

> The station clocks in Switzerland are synchronised by receiving an electrical impulse from a central master clock at each full minute, advancing the minute hand by one minute. The second hand is driven by an electrical motor independent of the master clock. It takes only about 58.5 seconds to circle the face; then the hand pauses briefly at the top of the clock. It starts a new rotation as soon as it receives the next minute impulse from the master clock.[3] This movement is emulated in some of the licensed timepieces made by Mondaine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock
by mdasen | 2025-11-18 22:20:20+00:00
Yea, it just feels calmer, where you can follow neat and quirky people who aren't posting like they're addicted to it.

It also feels like one place that can just keep going. With BlueSky, I know they're going to need to find a business model to cover the $36M worth of VC they've taken, many millions in salaries and hardware costs they've paid out, and provide a healthy return for all that risk.

Mastodon feels like a better version of the early days of the internet. Not everything is perfect, but it's a bunch of people running stuff for themselves and their communities. Now even giant universities with tens of thousands of students outsource their email systems to Microsoft or Google. Most content is going through three companies (ByteDance, Meta, Google) with ByteDance being the "tiny" player at an estimated $300B value (tiny compared to the $1.5B of Meta and $3.4B of Google).

Mastodon/ActivityPub stands against that. It lets everyone have their own little piece of the internet and get and send feed updates to each other. No one dominates the network so much that there's a risk of them cutting off the rest. Mastodon gGmbH is a non-profit.

It feels like it can have longevity in a world where I'm always waiting for the enshittification to be turned on. One of the reasons I love Wikipedia is because it feels like a breath of fresh air on an internet that's always trying to make a quick buck, influence me, etc. Mastodon similarly feels like a breath of fresh air.
by amiga386 | 2025-11-18 22:20:43+00:00
I'd give him the benefit of the doubt 7 years ago. But it has been 7 years and the number of Mastodon instances just grows and grows, causing more and more useless traffic every time someone links to a site.

7 years of "limited dev time"? How much money have the world's webmasters had to pay out of their own pockets, so that nobody developing Mastodon has to spend their precious dev time on being a good netizen and not wasting other peoples' resources?

This is why webmasters block Mastodon user agents. Then Mastodon changed the order of text in its user agent string just to fuck with webmasters - ostensibly they wanted the user agent to look a little bit nicer, but what they did was evade everyone's existing blocking rules, and cause 100,000s of webmasters to have to update their blocking rules for what should've been a solved problem.