MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andai | 2025-11-29 01:55:26+00:00
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/contextual-retrieval

Anthropic found embeddings + BM25 (keyword search) gave the best results. (Well, after contextual summarization, and fusion, and reranking, and shoving the whole thing into an LLM...)

But sadly they didn't say how BM25 did on its own, which is the really interesting part to me.

In my own (small scale) tests with embeddings, I found that I'd be looking right at the page that contained the literal words in my query and embeddings would fail to find it... Ctrl+F wins again!
by Unai | 2025-11-29 01:56:14+00:00
If you don't have a dice, you can mentally roll one. Think of a bunch of numbers and add them all together, then add every digit of that number, and so on until you end up with a single digit from 1 to 9. 1, 2 and 3 is rock, 4, 5 and 6 is paper and 7, 8 and 9 is scissors.

For example: 23+42 (or 2+3+4+2 if that's easier for you to do, the result will be the same) = 65 → 6+5 = 11 → 1+1 = 2, rock.

Great to fall asleep, given how boring the game must be. I use that dice system in bed but in a RPG game (1 = "No, and also..."; 2,3,4 = "No"; 5 = "Yes, but..."; 6,7,8 = "Yes"; 9 = "Yes, and also...").
by lovich | 2025-11-29 01:56:17+00:00
They, for every team I’ve ever managed, have an off company owned systems chat on shit like slack or discord where they are roasting the fuck out of you.

I’ve managed to be invited or told of them after ingratiating myself to the teams, or more often, after quitting and getting invited as one of the “good ones”

They all know that every word on company shit is being monitored
by otterley | 2025-11-29 01:56:33+00:00
IAAL but this is not legal advice; seek licensed counsel in your jurisdiction.

Copyright gives you a bundle of rights over your expressive works, but when you give them to someone else for republication, as you are here, you’re licensing them. By licensing according to the terms of service, which is a binding contract, you are relinquishing those rights. As long as there is a term in the terms of service that allows the publisher to convey your expression to a third party, you don’t get any say into what happens next. You gave your consent by submitting your content, and there’s no backsies. (Subject to GDPR and other applicable laws, of course.)

And these days, no web service that accepts user generated content and has a competent lawyer is going to forget to have that sort of term in their ToS.
by bodeadly | 2025-11-29 01:56:40+00:00
Ultimately Kerberos is used to authenticated basically everything in a Windows on-prem environment and in a way that is largely transparent to the user. Silent SSO is a very nice feature. Even if you're doing OIDC or SAML, those protocols do not define what is actually performing authentication at the IdP which, again, ultimately ends up being Kerberos if you're people are on-prem. So whatever your feelings are about Kerberos as a protocol, it doesn't matter if that's what Windows uses. And again, it cannot be obsoleted by other protocols. Even if you're using a newer fido thing like passkeys or client certs or whatever, ultimately the device has to be authenticated to get that passkey or cert or whatever it is installed into the authenticator app of the device. So Kerberos is king on prem. MIT Kerberos on Linux is not really compatible with Windows Kerberos in ways that cause problems that are not solved by re-writing Kerberos in another language. More important issues have to do with sharing credentials and getting trust info and other such things.
by slyall | 2025-11-29 01:56:56+00:00
The good news if you take 2 years to ship the system "properly" then you won't have to re-factor it because the company went out of business or that product was too late to market.

There is a phrase "million dollar problems". You do stuff at your startup that will take a million dollars to fix because it doesn't scale.

The point is that if your startup doesn't get to that scale then it doesn't matter. If you startup does reach that scale then you have plenty of money/people to spend a million dollars fixing it.
by threecheese | 2025-11-29 01:58:10+00:00
What does it say about me, that I was SURE his article was going to be admitting out loud that we are engineering ourselves into obsolescence, a lot of us are really enjoying it, and nobody is seriously discussing how afraid we should be for our families and future. I’m afraid to mention it professionally, given we have a literal policy around “AI doomers” (not the exact term) that has the word “separation” in it. Worse, I’m afraid to THINK it, like a cognitive dissonance while Claude writes module after module for me. I am enjoying the hell out of it, I’ve done nothing else for dozens of months, and I feel that hence I am/developers are in a unique position to understand what type of hell - or heaven - our society might experience in the next five years. Shouldn’t we be openly discussing how we can leverage this foreknowledge?
by dylan604 | 2025-11-29 01:58:37+00:00
> Nowadays, most MCU's have ECC on them so the time of this excuse is mostly gone now. :)

That's kind of a misleading statement. Assuming you mean on planes built nowadays, as we clearly see that nowadays planes still flying (6K of them at least) still have issues. We don't need hand wavy comments trying to make it sound like modern day aviation is no longer susceptible, especially when it's in a thread on an article showing how that's just not true
by berti | 2025-11-29 01:58:46+00:00
You do get an audible "DUAL INPUT DUAL INPUT" warning and some lights though [1]. It is never allowable to make sidestick inputs unless you are the single designated "pilot flying", but people can sometimes break down under stress of course.

[1] https://safetyfirst.airbus.com/app/themes/mh_newsdesk/docume...
by zzo38computer | 2025-11-29 01:59:10+00:00
The standards are not all good for the same purposes, and many of them have problems anyways. Furthermore, you will not always know all of the details at first, and different computers will have differences than each other, for good reasons. Furthermore, people do not necessarily agree (this does not always break compatibility, but sometimes it does, although sometimes indirect compatibility is possible). This is some possible reasons why they cannot all be made compatible.
by k310 | 2025-11-29 02:00:10+00:00
Sequential Transcriptional Gates in The Thalamo-Cortical Circuit Coordinate Memory Consolidation

Paper.

https://digitalcommons.rockefeller.edu/student_theses_and_di...

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

PDF 6.6 MB. free download there. Save your $33.
by addaon | 2025-11-29 02:00:30+00:00
I’d really, really like to know what microcontroller family this was found on. Assuming that this is a safety processor (lockstep, ECC, etc) it suggests that ECC was insufficient for the level of bit flips they’re seeing — and if the concern is data corruption, not unintended restart, it means it’s enough flips in one word to be undetectable. The environment they’re operating in isn’t that different from everyone else, so unless they ate some margin elsewhere (bad voltage corner or something), this can definitely be relevant to others. Also would be interesting to know if it’s NVM or SRAM that’s effected.
by cal_dent | 2025-11-29 02:00:47+00:00
I’d change to “can be the same as being wrong” and agree. All these people out there thinking their being oh so clever with bubble this short that etc. Everyone knows.

One of the idiosyncrasies of modern human society is that we’re pretty good at knowing how things we create or initiate can go wrong, particularly with the economy. We’re just not great at perfectly understanding the degree of risk or the probability or at what point/level it goes wrong. That’s why I’ve never really got all the chat of “economists have predicted xx of the last x recessions yadda yadda”. I’m fine with that, I’d be more concerned if they predicted 0 of the last x recessions.
by BandButcher | 2025-11-29 02:01:16+00:00
I just gave it a quick search (using the placeholder suggestions) and personally it is too "clicky" and "type-y" for me.

Not hating on the AI aspect, more so on the UX.

I would just rather scroll and search on spotify.

For example, even after searching and seeing the results, at the bottom it says: "Not quite right? Try adding more specific details like "slower tempo" or "more bass"."

Instead of asking users to go back and add text to the search, you could include "slower tempo" & "more bass" as buttons or checkboxes to make it easier on me and users alike. Less navigation, less keyboard work, faster results.

Not sure if this is production ready as the links to pricing doesn't lead me anywhere...nor the features or artists links...
by JKCalhoun | 2025-11-29 02:04:11+00:00
I kinda do want to build a local RAG? I want some significant subset of Wikipedia (I assume most people know about these) on a dedicated machine with a RAG front-end. I would have then an offline Wikipedia "librarian" I could query.

But I'm lazy and assumed that someone has already built such a thing. I'm just not aware of this "Wikipedia-RAG-in-a-box".
by zmj | 2025-11-29 02:04:19+00:00
My feeling when I found this blog was "so I'm NOT the only one!". It's the painful truth about staff+ engineering that I've also experienced, but haven't felt safe to talk about.

You're not wrong that there's something cynical or nihilistic about it. The core thesis is "do what the company wants, even if it's not what they should want". That idea may be unpalatable, but getting ground up in the corporate gears is worse.
by GenerocUsername | 2025-11-29 02:05:02+00:00
Is this that easy for humans?

I promise I could give this to 10 people and get at least 7 wrong drawings.

Of the remaining 3, there would be erasor marks on 2. And the last one would technically hit the right numbers and linkages, but it would be a hand drawn sketch on a notepad.

Point is, these AI gotchas are always missing reality.
by snapplebobapple | 2025-11-29 02:05:13+00:00
I would like that as well, however I doubt it will happen because we can't even have honest conversations about blatantly obvious things like that there are pretty clearly different flavors of trans out there and some of them are concerning in some contexts (i.e. the men that get their rocks off wearing women's clothes who will only never do the surgery in the context of being allowed in women's locker rooms as one example). We need more honesty all around, it would make compassion a lot easier for those that need it.
by gnabgib | 2025-11-29 02:05:29+00:00
After AWS (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387346), Reddit (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35529137), AirBnB (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38524186), Instagram (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44465796), Gnosispay (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44766260), Hetzner (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46050904), and now TransferWise are problematic for you - are you sure it's all these services, and not something done with your account?
by Barrin92 | 2025-11-29 02:05:37+00:00
There's a different read of this by people such as Stirner. As he pointed out, people only ever abandoned the divine subject but left the divine predicates intact, making the tyranny even worse because now even the unbeliever can't escape. They never abolished religion but simply changed the masters. I think it's worth quoting the text because it has always to me explained why so little has changed in this regard:

"But, properly speaking, only the god is changed - the deus; love has remained: there love to the superhuman God, here love to the human God, to homo as Deus. Therefore man is to me - sacred. And every­ thing 'truly human' is to me - sacred! 'Marriage is sacred of itself. And so it is with all moral relations. Friendship is and must be sacred for you, and property, and marriage, and the good of every man, but sacred in and of itself. Haven't we the priest again there? Who is his God? Man with a capital M! What is the divine? The human! Then the predicate has indeed only been changed into the subject, and, instead of the sentence 'God is love', they say 'love is divine'; instead of 'God has become man', 'man has become God', etc. It is nothing more or less than a new - religion."
by Supermancho | 2025-11-29 02:06:45+00:00
This is largely how all complex competitive games work. At some point there is a shared valuation of which player is ahead and the behind player must take steps that are outside of optimal play to attempt to leapfrog ahead. The GWENT card game was particularly well designed for this. ie How many extra cards to play/sacrifice for round control if you drew badly, based on meta-matchups.

I have always asserted that some games (like Heroes of the Storm) suffer from not having catch up mechanics beyond player skill. This is problematic, when player skill can be quantized to an average value that has led to the losing state. This makes it much less likely to ever be a useful catchup mechanic, in comparison to some intrinsic gamble mechanics.

The lack of catch up mechanics also means the games are less interesting because risks are only worth taking after the known state, not casually during as a chaotic factor that might be capitalized on.
by theLiminator | 2025-11-29 02:07:39+00:00
> If you know what you’re doing and you know where to fit the LLMs (they’re genuinely the best system we’ve ever devised for interpreting and categorizing unstructured human input), they can be immensely useful, but they sing a siren song of simplicity that will lure you to your doom if you believe it.

I imagine using their embeddings and training a classifier on top of that is probably a lot more effective?

I've personally found agentic LLM workflows the most effective as extremely sophisticated autocomplete. Instead of autocompleting the current next few tokens, I tell it precisely how to edit my code at a high level. You can't tell it stuff at a feature level, but telling it how to implement the feature saves me a ton of time.
by SR2Z | 2025-11-29 02:07:44+00:00
I have a hybrid. If I remote start it, generally the engine doesn't start - and even if it does, it's extremely quiet because it's an Atkinson-cycle model. I have to be within 10 feet of the car to hear it running in a quiet parking garage, let alone on the street.

Sure, it sucks when someone idles a diesel outside your house, but new cars are QUIET.
by nobody9999 | 2025-11-29 02:07:55+00:00
>30 years ago it was rather normal that a manager would touch the behind of a coworker, which is clearly a bad thing. Nowadays looking in their direction a bit too long seems to be labeled 'not done'.

I was in the workforce 30 years ago and, no, it was absolutely not normal.

It was what we called an "HR violation" and a "Career limiting move."

Not sure where you were 30 years ago, but except in bordellos and strip clubs that wasn't "normal." Not even close.
by saint_yossarian | 2025-11-29 02:08:34+00:00
The author mentions FoxESSCloud, which led me to https://www.foxesscloud.com/public/i18n/en/OpenApiDocument.h... with this Python example:

signature = fr'{path}\r\n{token}\r\n{timestamp}'

So if this is indeed the API they're using it's not only literal "\\n" but also "\\r\\n", no "POST", and no body at the end.
by toastal | 2025-11-29 02:11:05+00:00
Why should we be trusting this centralized service? I regret getting my family onto Signal as I would love to get there somewhere where we control our data & aren’t reliant on US-based service. When you look at the EU’s Chat Control law that’s trying to be pushed, the easiest target is going to be big, centralized services in jurisdictions friendly to the EU—it’s gonna be real hard doing this with a decentralized protocol. Signal deserves just as much criticism as any other thing operating out of California.
by roncesvalles | 2025-11-29 02:11:29+00:00
>UBI-related experiments consistently find evidence that no participant responds to UBI experiments by dropping out of the labor force.

I'm not familiar with the details of these experiments but the first thing that strikes me is that this cannot be experimentally tested without guaranteeing participants a lifetime of UBI. They don't drop out of the labor force because they know it's temporary.

You wouldn't quit your job if you're only promised 2 years of UBI, because the cost that resigning has upon your future employability may be greater than the money from the UBI experiment. Or if you did quit, it would be to make a gambit (such as going back into schooling or training) that will leave you better off once the experiment is over.

The only reliable experiment design would be putting a few million per participant into some guaranteed annuities fund.
by inkyoto | 2025-11-29 02:13:17+00:00
By placing a statement upon the public internet, you both implicitly and explicitly consent to that content being consumed by anyone, and by any means. Such is the implicit covenant that access to the public internet imposes upon all participants.

Making the content queryable by a database engine is merely a technical optimisation of the efficiency with which that content may be consumed. The same outcome could have been accomplished by capturing a screenshot of every web page on the internet, or by copying and pasting the said content laboriously by an imaginary army of Mechanical Turks.

A private network may, of course, operate under an entirely different access model and social contract.
by buu700 | 2025-11-29 02:14:01+00:00
But they are diametrically opposed. It's not puritanical that I don't do drugs or that you're monogamous. What's puritanical is trying to impose those personal choices upon others.

It would be equally illiberal to mandate that everyone do drugs or be polygamous. The illiberality is the imposition itself, not the quality of the imposition.
by josephcsible | 2025-11-29 02:14:29+00:00
> But today, couldn't we just open up a mount namespace and bind-mount something else to /tmp, like SystemDs private tempdirs?

No, because unless you're already root (in which case you wouldn't have needed the binary with the capability in the first place), you can't make a mount namespace without also making a user namespace, and the counterproductive risk-averse craziness has led to removing unprivileged users' ability to make user namespaces.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-11-29 02:14:58+00:00
There's a difference between taking a photo of eg. random people on the street (eg. trying to show someone that there's a big crowd at the bus station) and recording 24/7 the same bus station. A single photo held by a single person makes it hard to establish movement patterns etc. for those people, while a 24/7 recording can be used for creating a database of all those people coming and leaving.

There are many nuances in privacy law, not just pertaining to photo vs. 24/7 recording, but also expectation of privacy, intent, etc. Taking a photo of some random touristy area with people there is ok, singling out a person is not. Same for eg. taking a panoramic shot of a city where someone just happens to be undressing by the window in one of the buildings in the photo, vs using a telephoto lens pointed at that persons window... so, were you taking a touristy photo vs intending to violate their privacy.

Same nuances, mostly regarding intent appear in other laws too.. you can walk in public, you can stand in a public location, you can work the same shift as your coworker and walk the same path as them, since you both finished work at at the same time. But under slightly different circumstances that same "walking down a public road" or "standing in a public location" can be interpreted as eg. stalking if done with different intent.

That's why there are signs at every store entrance about video surveillance, even though it's private property, they must give info to customers who the contact person for the recording is and they need to have some kind of a retention policy defined for those recordings, and even then they cannot record in areas where people expect privacy (bathrooms, dressing rooms, etc.).

So yeah, taking a random photo of your street is not problematic, since it's "random" and done for other reasons (eg. tourism) while recording 24/7 is gathering enough data to be possibly problematic. Some streets (eg highways) are under video surveillance, but there are signs saying that when you enter the highway: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Mj3GjA7m8BLwUfs77
by 29athrowaway | 2025-11-29 02:15:34+00:00
> software development is better when you breathe the same air as the folks you work with

Ever heard of flu season? What if you have a family and don't want to bring diseases home?

> Attempts to represent ideas spatially get mutilated by online whiteboard and sticky note software.

Right... like, the Linux kernel team? Or any of the major open source key pieces of technology you use? Built by large teams that worked remotely for decades even when tools where orders of magnitude worse than the current state of the art? Some of them never meeting each other in person?

---

Remote work DOESN'T suck. YOU make it suck.

Remote work is great if you care about shipping.

Want to go for coffee or want to talk about our weekends? No thanks.

Did you see the distracting thing outside the building? No, I didn't because I don't have to go there anymore.

Is the heat too high or too low? It's your own home, just adjust it to YOUR convenience.

Worried about your pets being alone? Just be next to them. I care more about my pets than some stranger from work.

Want to be loud and flex about random stuff? Log into LinkedIn and talk to the other geniuses like you while I focus on doing my job.

Most people SUCK at drawing, suck at calligraphy and their whiteboard diagrams SUCK. Therefore, whiteboards SUCK. Unless you have great calligraphy and drawing skills, whiteboards are not helpful. You are just sad because you are not getting attention by being in front of other people looking at you.
by dylan604 | 2025-11-29 02:16:08+00:00
This is one of those situations where I think it'd be fun to be a flight simulator "operator". Finding new ways to cause pilots to figure out how to overcome whatever the plane is doing to them. Any pilot that ever comes out of a simulator thinking "like that would ever happen" instead of "that was an interesting situation to keep in mind as possible" should have their wings clipped.

Taking a grain of salt since it's from a movie, but one of the things about Sully setting the plane down in the river was due to his experience of not just the aircraft itself but also situation awareness to realize he was too low to safely divert to an airport. He instinctually "skipped" several steps in the procedures to engage the APU which turned out to be pretty key. The intimated thing being that the procedure was so long that they might not have gotten to the APU in time going step-by-step.
by phantasmish | 2025-11-29 02:17:09+00:00
I find this as a reaction to the quoted passage (not to some hypothetical other passage, perhaps) so confusing that I can't wrap my head around it without categorizing it as the result of misreading. "Gutturally revolting"? But your objections hardly seem related to the text at all. To something you feel was suggested (a couple steps removed, and not necessarily) by it, or some expansion of it you're making, maybe, but to that text? I'm at a loss.
by mancerayder | 2025-11-29 02:17:28+00:00
Has anyone tried asking the exact same product questions to both ChatGPT 5.1 and Gemini? I did this twice today with wildly different results. In one case I was comparing capabilities and suggestions on audio equipment, being very specific in the setup, the models, and my goals. It was completely different in the results. I was comparing objective metrics and product specifications.

I plan on doing this every time now because ChatGPT gets things wrong constantly, apologizes and changes its facts, while Gemini is cheerful and positive like a salesperson.

These things have given me tremendous doubt after one year of usage.