MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ewoodrich | 2025-11-18 19:34:52+00:00
> The last point is how it usually fails in my testing, fwiw. It usually ends up borking something up, and rather than back out and fix it, it does a 'git restore' on the file - wiping out thousands of lines of unrelated, unstaged code. It then somehow thinks it can recover this code by looking in the git history (??).

Man I've had this exact thing happen recently with Sonnet 4.5 in Claude Code!

With Claude I asked it to try tweaking the font weight of a heading to put the finishing touches on a new page we were iterating on. Looked at it and said, "Never mind, undo that" and it nuked 45 minutes worth of work by running git restore.

It immediately realized it fucked up and started running all sorts of git commands and reading its own log trying to reverse what it did and then came back 5 minutes later saying "Welp I lost everything, do you want me to manually rebuild the entire page from our conversation history?

In my CLAUDE.md I have instructions to commit unstaged changes frequently but it often forgets and sure enough, it forgot this time too. I had it read its log and write a post-mortem of WTF led it to run dangerous git commands to remove one line of CSS and then used that to write more specific rules about using git in the project CLAUDE.md, and blocked it from running "git restore" at all.

We'll see if that did the trick but it was a good reminder that even "SOTA" models in 2025 can still go insane at the drop of a hat.
by trashface | 2025-11-18 19:34:54+00:00
Not sure about over-medication. I think about all the people I used to work with that were absolutely addicted to caffeine, just to get through the day. And the work we were doing (software) didn't seem _that_ boring to me. Some of most hardcore caffeine addicts were from when I worked briefly in game dev (and that was my own peak usage too; now I can't drink coffee due to acid reflux, its also bad for my eyes because I have glaucoma now).

I think untreated attention issues (if not the rather narrowly defined condition labeled "ADHD") are rather widespread. And society doesn't help, just look at the checklist of things you need to do on an ongoing basis to just keep a vehicle running for transport in the US, which pretty much everybody outside a city needs, and even many city dwellers elect to procure as well.
by alt227 | 2025-11-18 19:34:57+00:00
> downplaying the challenges of country road driving is weird.

Only if you cant drive very well.

I have always lived in the sticks and drive fast fine on dark lanes with old headlamps. I have never hit anything, never even a near miss. These new headligfhts are a nuisance and completely unecessary. Driving on country roads at night is not hard.
by kordlessagain | 2025-11-18 19:35:03+00:00
The "economies of scale" defense of Cloudflare ignores a fundamental reality: 23.8 million websites run on Cloudflare's free tier versus only 210,000 paying customers or so. Free users are not a strategic asset. They are an uncompensated cost, full stop. Cloudflare doesn't absorb this loss out of altruism; they monetize it by building AI bot-detection systems, charging for bot mitigation, and extracting threat intelligence data. Today's outage was caused by a bug in Cloudflare's service to combat bots.

That's AI bots, BTW. Bots like Playwright or Crawl4AI, which provide a useful service to individuals using agentic AI. Cloudflare is hostile to these types of users, even though they likely cost websites nothing to support well.

The "scale saves money" argument commits a critical error: it counts only the benefits of concentration while externally distributing the costs.

Yes, economies of scale exist. But Cloudflare's scale creates catastrophic systemic risk that individual companies using cloud compute never would. An estimated $5-15 billion was lost for every hour of the outage according to Tom's Guide. That cost didn't disappear. It was transferred to millions of websites, businesses, and users who had zero choice in the matter.

Again, corporations shitting on free users. It's a bad habit and a dark pattern.

Even worse, were you hoping to call an Uber this morning for your $5K vacation? Good luck.

This is worse than pure economic inefficiency. Cloudflare operates as an authorized man-in-the-middle to 20% of the internet, decrypting and inspecting traffic flows. When their systems fail, not due to attacks, but to internal bugs in their monetization systems, they don't just lose uptime.

They create a security vulnerability where encrypted connections briefly lose their encryption guarantee. They've done this before (Cloudbleed), and they'll do it again. Stop pretending to have rational arguments with irrational future outcomes.

The deeper problem: compute, storage, and networking are cheap. The "we need Cloudflare's scale for DDoS protection" argument is a circular justification for the very concentration that makes DDoS attractive in the first place. In a fragmented internet with 10 CDNs, a successful DDoS on one affects 10% of users. In a Cloudflare-dependent internet, a DDoS, or a bug, affects 50%, if Cloudflare is unable to mitigate (or DDoSs themselves).

Cloudflare has inserted themselves as an unremovable chokepoint. Their business model depends on staying that chokepoint. Their argument for why they must stay a chokepoint is self-reinforcing. And every outage proves the model is rotten.
by wisty | 2025-11-18 19:35:14+00:00
Here's part of a meta analysis.

> Using a random effects model, we found that CBTs had medium-to-large effects from pre- to posttreatment (self-reported ADHD symptoms: g = 1.00; 95% confidence interval [CI: 0.84, 1.16]; self-reported functioning g = .73; 95% CI [0.46, 1.00]) and small-to-medium effects versus control (g = .65; 95% CI [0.44, 0.86] for symptoms, .51; 95% CI [0.23, 0.79] for functioning). Effect sizes were heterogeneous for most outcome measures. Studies with active control groups showed smaller effect sizes. Neither participant medication status nor treatment format moderated pre-to-post treatment effects, and longer treatments were not associated with better outcomes. Conclusions: Current CBTs for adult ADHD show comparable effect sizes to behavioral treatments for children with ADHD, which are considered well-established treatments. Future treatment development could focus on identifying empirically supported principles of treatment-related change for adults with ADHD. We encourage researchers to report future findings in a way that is amenable to meta-analytic review.

Yeah, it's better at making people feel better. Not great but certainly OK at improving behaviour.

As I said, the evidence seems to suggest medication is extremely effective which is I guess is why people are quoting the first thing I wrote and acting like they disagree with me (they get mad for suggesting that CBT works a bit because they feel judged for using the arguably superior treatment?).
by svieira | 2025-11-18 19:35:18+00:00
> this was a bog standard example of a draft proposal where a bug was discovered, and rollout was adjusted

Yes, but the "bug" here was "a single website is broken". Here, we are talking about an outcome that will break many websites (more than removing USB support would break) and that is considered acceptable.

> That's a proposal for Javascript, whose controlling body is TC39

Yes, and the culture of TC39 used to be the culture of those who develop tools for using the web (don't break the Space Jam website, etc.)
by pseudalopex | 2025-11-18 19:35:37+00:00
He said Palantir could power the West to its obvious innate superiority.[1]

“The unfortunate thing, either in business or politics, is that many of one's adversaries and antagonists will never respond to anything but strength—that crude form of power that does not ask for but which requires compliance and deference. And so strength we have built.”

“As Samuel Huntington has written, the rise of the West was not made possible ‘by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion ... but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.’

“He continued: ‘Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.’”[2]

[1] https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2025/02/04/pa...

[2] https://www.palantir.com/q4-2024-letter/en/
by Szpadel | 2025-11-18 19:36:15+00:00
I gave it a spin with instructions that worked great with gpt-5-codex (5.1 regressed a lot so I do not even compare to it).

Code quality was fine for my very limited tests but I was disappointed with instruction following.

I tried few tricks but I wasn't able to convince it to first present plan before starting implementation.

I have instructions describing that it should first do exploration (where it tried to discover what I want) then plan implementation and then code, but it always jumps directly to code.

this is bug issue for me especially because gemini-cli lacks plan mode like Claude code.

for codex those instructions make plan mode redundant.
by greybcg | 2025-11-18 19:36:47+00:00
Ive honestly wondered why people do not ask for or demand orange tinted lights? In the old times where we had sodium vapour lamps I was always under the impression that the orange wavelengths were specifically picked because our visual system is keenest under dusklike lighting conditions. Why then do we shift so much towards cold harsh lights? I dont think it's just the brightness that makes it unpleasant but also the wavelengths.
by ManuelKiessling | 2025-11-18 19:36:49+00:00
The problem is, we need to. It’s simply insane how many stupid, malicious requests we get without it, and we honestly are a small, unimportant site.

If we don’t filter all this crap out, our metrics become basically meaningless, and our Data Warehouse, whose analyses we need to do business with our partners, would be one big „shit in, shit out“ travesty.

And on the other hand, becoming non-affected by today’s Cloudflare incident was a single DNS update away, and effective in under a minute.

I’m not saying we are perfectly happy, and I don’t exactly love the Cloudflare bill, but just slapping them in front of our loadbalancer and have them filter out the bad guys has been a good deal so far.
by wat10000 | 2025-11-18 19:36:49+00:00
I'm amazed at the responses saying something like, "It's great because when you go down, you can point to the BBC and say, it's not our fault, everyone is down." That should be the clue that this gives them enormous power. It's also bad for overall resilience. Better that businesses go offline more often in an uncorrelated manner, than go offline less frequently but simultaneously. I guess it's great if all you care about is not catching blame.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-18 19:36:54+00:00
Which of these firms is too big to fail though?

It all depends on whether MAGA survives as a single community. One of the few things MAGA understands correctly is that AI is a job-killer.

Trump going all out to rescue OpenAI or Anthropic doesn't feel likely. Who actually needs it, as a dependency? Who can't live without it? Why bail out entities you can afford to let go to the wall (and maybe then corruptly buy out in a fire sale)?

Similarly, can you actually see him agreeing to bail out Microsoft without taking an absurd stake in the business? MAGA won't like it. But MS could be broken up and sold; every single piece of that business has potential buyers.

Nvidia, now that I can see. Because Trump is surrounded by crypto grifters and is dependent on crypto for his wealth. GPUs are at least real solid products and Nvidia still, I think, make the ones the crypto guys want.

Google, you can see, are getting themselves ready to not be bailed out.
by damnesian | 2025-11-18 19:37:16+00:00
>Variants on the "123456" were among the most common for all age groups, with that exact string proving to be the most common among all users – the sixth time in seven years it holds the undesirable crown.

I'm sometimes amazed to read multiple "help! someone's using my account" stories a day. facts like this bring me back to reality.
by kccqzy | 2025-11-18 19:37:44+00:00
Balance is too weak of a word. OpenAI was conceived specifically to prevent Google from getting AGI first. That was its original goal. At the time of its founding Google was the undisputed leader of AI anywhere in the world. Musk was then very worried about AGI being developed behind closed doors particularly Google, which was why he was the driving force behind the founding of OpenAI.
by theoldgreybeard | 2025-11-18 19:37:49+00:00
I've had to fix so many errors over the years due to string/symbol mismatch in function calls and/or hash access, and never once have I benefited from the extra optimizations that the guaranteed singular allocation of symbols have given me where I wasn't able to get the same benefit from a frozen string literal.

If it was up to me I'd get rid of them, but I know I have an unpopular opinion and it's really only a thought experiment.
by fl0ki | 2025-11-18 19:37:51+00:00
Putting aside that several of these were acquisitions, these are all great examples of things where Google introduced something for free because it would make the money through advertising, both directly and through ecosystem effects. Even the paid enterprise versions of these services were a tiny % of Google's overall gross revenue.

Prior to the push into Cloud computing, Ad revenue was well over 90% of all Google gross income, and Cloud was the first big way they diversified. GCP is definitely a credible competitor these days, but it did not devour AWS. Other commercial Google services didn't even become credible competitors, e.g. Google Stadia was a technically exceptional platform that got nowhere with customers.

The question now is whether Google carves out an edge in AI that makes it profitable overall, directly or strategically. Like many companies, there seems to be a presumption of potentially infinite upside, which is what it would take to justify the astronomical costs.
by bradfa | 2025-11-18 19:37:53+00:00
They have a capacity to "learn", it's just WAY MORE INVOLVED than how humans learn.

With a human, you give them feedback or advice and generally by the 2nd or 3rd time the same kind of thing happens they can figure it out and improve. With an LLM, you have to specifically setup a convoluted (and potentially financially and electrical power expensive) system in order to provide MANY MORE examples of how to improve via fine tuning or other training actions.
by rconti | 2025-11-18 19:38:07+00:00
What do you mean "do much"? Wouldn't negatively impact users, or wouldn't help the botnet problem?

The article makes it sound like the issue is largely compromised routers and cameras -- and presumably cameras are less likely to be publicly-accessible to get compromised in the first place.

ISPs are able to update firmware on the routers they own, so it's my guess that it's customer-owned routers that are the main issue here.
by sysworld | 2025-11-18 19:38:07+00:00
Just chuck in the old non LED lights. When I'm walking around town at night, it's only the cars with new bright white LEDs that are super bright and blind me. It's a relief when an older car come by with orange'y lights.

Even during the day, the other week I was driving and some small mini had super bright white lights on, no need for them, it was bright day out. Even just the normal "day" lights on new cars can be too sharp/bright. It's ok if I don't look at them directly, but if I accidently check that way it's distracting.
by greybcg | 2025-11-18 19:38:20+00:00
Ive honestly wondered why people do not expect, install or demand orange tinted lights? In the old times where we had sodium vapour lamps I was always under the impression that the orange wavelengths were specifically picked because our visual system is keenest under dusklike lighting conditions. Why then do we shift so much towards cold harsh lights? I dont think it's just the brightness that makes it unpleasant but also the wavelengths.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-11-18 19:38:26+00:00
Note that the CPB probably won't exist anymore in three years, for next renewal.

And because of congressional action not executive, so probably legal.

> The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the conduit for federal funds to NPR and PBS, announced on Friday that it is beginning to wind down its operations given President Trump has signed a law clawing back $1.1 billion in funding for public broadcasting through fiscal year 2027.

> The announcement follows a largely party-line vote last month that approved the cuts to public broadcasting as part of a $9 billion rescissions package requested by the White House that also included cuts to foreign aid. While public media officials had held a glimmer of hope that lawmakers would restore some of the money for the following budget year, the Senate Appropriations Committee declined to do that on Thursday.

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/01/nx-s1-5489808/cpb-shut-down-p...
by dpark | 2025-11-18 19:38:33+00:00
> The entire design of C++ is built around eliminating all distinctions between primitive "entities" and user-defined "entities"

If the intent was to erase all distinction between built-in and user-defined entities then making the primitive types unable to participate in object hierarchies was a pretty big oversight.

But at this point I think we’re talking past each other. Yes, in Java objects are more distinct from primitives than in C++. But also yes, in C++ there is a special group of “objects” that are special and are notably distinct from the rest of the object system, very much like Java.
by Dquiroga | 2025-11-18 19:38:40+00:00
I asked Gemini to write "a comment response to this thread. I want to start an intense discussion".

Gemini 3:

The cognitive dissonance in this thread is staggering.

We are sitting here cheering for a model that effectively closes the loop on Google’s total information dominance, while simultaneously training our own replacements.

Two things in this thread should be terrifying, yet are being glossed over in favor of "look at the pelican SVG":

1. *The Model Card Leak:* As user `rvz` pointed out, the leaked model card implies training on "user data... in accordance with Google's relevant terms of service." Given the recent terms updates, this essentially confirms that Gemini 3 is likely refined on the corpus of Gmail and Drive data that they’ve been hoarding for decades. We are cheering for a product sold back to us at a 60% markup (input costs up to $2.00/M) that was built on our own private correspondence.

2. *The "Agentic" Trap:* Everyone praising how `Gemini 3` solves complex bugs one-shot or handles entire PRs is missing the macro view. We aren’t looking at a productivity tool; we are looking at the devaluation of the software engineer. When the entry barrier drops to "can you prompt a seminal agent," the economic value of what we do on this forum evaporates.

Google has successfully gamified us into feeding the very beast that will make the "14-minute human solve time" (referenced by `lairv`) irrelevant. We are optimizing for our own obsolescence while paying a monopoly rent to do it.

Why is the sentiment here "Wow, cool clock widget" instead of "We just handed the keys to the kingdom to the biggest ad-tech surveillance machine in history"?
by bulbar | 2025-11-18 19:39:02+00:00
Idk about US, but in Europe we are in dire need of migration. The shortage in for example health care is acute and alarming, at least in Germany.

Our cleaning women is just about to finish her three year training program. However she failed the final exam because of the complicated wording of the test. Her German is good enough but formal German is a different beast. She is allowed to redo the test a single time next week. If she passes, she will have an official German degree but has to leave the country because her visa is based on the training program. She then has to reapply for another visa to be allowed to reenter Germany.

Completely dysfunctional in my opinion. The system should bring people in that will be a net positive for the country while filtering out criminals.
by zogrodea | 2025-11-18 19:39:12+00:00
As programmers and as engineers, we often seek objective metrics to judge the value of things, neglecting aesthetic value and value that cannot easily be reduced to objective metrics.

This accessible paper reminds us that reasoning is not dispassionate and that we should attend to aesthetic matters as well.

The paper itself is in the context of education and seeks how to convey to students the importance and value of a subject matter.
by IAmBroom | 2025-11-18 19:40:00+00:00
"We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is." NY Governor Charles Evans Hughes, 1907.

No English sentence is without ambiguity in its meaning. If a controversy over meaning arises on a matter as important as law, we cannot function as a nation on the basis of, "Aw, everyone knows what they meant...".

Whether the courts are currently too flexible is a matter of opinion, and unless you get nominated personally to the SCOTUS, an inconsequential one.
by iLemming | 2025-11-18 19:40:07+00:00
> I made a half-hearted attempt to learn Haskell

Try Clojure(script) - everything that felt confusing in Haskell becomes crystal clear, I promise.

> Consider a histogram function.

You can absolutely do this efficiently with immutable structures in Clojure, something like

(reduce (fn [acc x] (update acc x (fn [v] (inc (or v 0))))) {} coll)

This is O(n) and uses immutable maps. The key insight: immutability in Clojure doesn't mean inefficiency. Each `update` returns a new map, but:

1. Persistent data structures share structure under the hood - they don't copy everything

2. The algorithmic complexity is the same as mutable approaches

3. You get thread-safety and easier reasoning for a bonus

In JS/TS, you'd need a mutable object - JS makes mutability efficient, so immutability feels awkward.

But Clojure's immutable structures are designed for this shit - they're not slow copies, they're efficient data structures optimized for functional programming.
by MostlyStable | 2025-11-18 19:40:23+00:00
Honestly curious: how many of those satellite dead-zones have good radio coverage? In my various times driving places, I've often lost radio signal in a sufficiently remote place where I 100% would have had satellite coverage. Those same features that can block satellite will also block (some kinds of) radio, if you don't have a broadcast tower at the top of the ridge or something.

Yes, I agree that satellite coverage is not 100%. But neither is radio.
by markdog12 | 2025-11-18 19:40:28+00:00
I asked it to analyze my tennis serve. It was just dead wrong. For example, it said my elbow was bent. I had to show it a still image of full extension on contact, then it admitted, after reviewing again, it was wrong. Several more issues like this. It blamed it on video being difficult. Not very useful, despite the advertisements: https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/1990865172152660047