MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-11-25 23:09:10+00:00
What's important to note is that this is just a matter of convention. An historical accident. It is by no means a law of nature that math need be formalized with ZFC or any other set theory derivative, and there are usually other options.

As a matter of fact, ZFC fits CS quite poorly.

In ZFC, everything is a set. The number 2 is a set. A function is a set of ordered pairs. An ordered pair is a set of sets.

In ZFC: It is a valid mathematical question to ask, "Is the number 3 an element of the number 5?" (In the standard definition of ordinals, the answer is yes).

In CS: This is a "type error." A programmer necessarily thinks of an integer as distinct from a string or a list. Asking if an integer is "inside" another integer is nonsense in the context of writing software.

For a computer scientist, Type Theory is a much more natural foundation than Set Theory. Type Theory enforces boundaries between different kinds of objects, just like a compiler does.

But, in any case, that ZFC is "typical" is an accident of history, and whether or not it's appropriate at all is debatable.
by nwienert | 2025-11-25 23:12:10+00:00
WebKit is not slower than Chrome/FF, this is just plain wrong, they tend to trade off over the years and over the last 5 years WebKit spent much of the time on top of a significant amount of the benchmarks people care about.

It's also by far the most resource efficient, especially on Mac, though Chrome invested heavily more recently to close the gap.

Overall in terms of "feel", Safari is hands down the best browser in terms of performance.
by nkoren | 2025-11-25 23:12:40+00:00
Airship To Orbit is JP Aerospace, not Bigelow. It seems like an utterly bonkers and fairly implausible concept and I'm definitely not equipped to analyze its merits. But the JP team have some legitimate accomplishments in the rockoon world, and appear to be honest, hardworking people. Definitely not grifters. I've been following their work on ATO since they first announced it at a Space Access conference in ... 2003, I think? Still can't figure out whether it's real or not.
Ask HN: Have major security breeches been less common lately?
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-11-25 23:12:53+00:00
A few years ago, it felt like we had another news story of a major security breech every other day or something. (I'm exaggerating of course but the stories were a regular occurrence.)

It occurred to me today that I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen a story like this.

Have news stories about major security breeches been less common during the (approximately) past two years compared to the two years before that?

I don't know how I would go about verifying this--I'd have to find a way to classify a "big news story" and "major security breech" and then go back through the news--but I'm wondering if others have noticed it.

If it's not just me, the next question would be why. Have actual security breeches gone down, or just reporting on it?
by mikestew | 2025-11-25 23:12:58+00:00
Good article, and the point of the author is well-taken, but I found the examples a bit disappointing. When I think, “never meet your heroes”, I’m thinking “great guitarist, but Jimmy Paige also shacked up with a 14 year old”, or “he made electric cars cool, buuut…”. That Dan Carlin might have a bias doesn’t contrast nearly as much, IMO.
by jgalt212 | 2025-11-25 23:13:12+00:00
> The question to consider: could this data become actionable in litigation?

That's sort of a silly question to pose. That risk always there. It's just a question of estimating that risk. EU is rolling back GDPR, so I'd estimate that risk is getting lower every day.

To play devil's advocate, why should FANG be the only ones allowed to crap all over the public internet's privacy?
by joshtbradley | 2025-11-25 23:13:19+00:00
Mostly whataboutism, but I think my point about cars is valid. I think nuclear is another good comparison. Nuclear could power the world, or destroy it, and I’d say we’re on the positive path despite ourselves.

It’s not that we shouldn’t worry, we should. But humanity is also surprisingly good at cooperating even if it’s not apparent that we are.

I certainly believe that looking only at the good or bad side of the argument is dangerous. AI is coming, we should be serious about guiding it.
by superkuh | 2025-11-25 23:13:22+00:00
Automatic execution of javascript from arbitrary random domains is the biggest mistake the web ever made. A completely 180 from the old "Don't run programs you don't know where they're from." We're doing this to ourselves. I know it's too late to save the corporate, institutional, etc environments, but in your personal life you should set your primary browser to not auto-execute random programs. It'd solve this.
by imiric | 2025-11-25 23:13:30+00:00
That article is from August 2024. A lot has changed since then.

Specifically, performance of SOTA models has been reaching a plateau on all popular benchmarks, and this has been especially evident in 2025. This is why every major model announcement shows comparisons relative to other models, but not a historical graph of performance over time. Regardless, benchmarks are far from being a reliable measurement of the capabilities of these tools, and they will continue to be reinvented and gamed, but the asymptote is showing even on their own benchmarks.

We can certainly continue to throw more compute at the problem. But the point is that scaling the current generation of tech will continue to have fewer returns.

To make up for this, "AI" companies are now focusing on engineering. 2025 has been the year of MCP, "agents", "skills", etc., which will continue in 2026. This is a good thing, as these tools need better engineering around them, so they can deliver actual value. But the hype train is running out of steam, and unless there is a significant breakthrough soon, I suspect that next year will be a turning point in this hype cycle.
by agreeahmed | 2025-11-25 23:13:39+00:00
Thank you! That’s exactly what we saw after speaking with a bunch of devs. They wanted to iterate on pricing as they all figure out how to price their AI products.

It turns out that the architectural changes that make that easier also make the tool generally easier to use for a bunch of different use cases.

In urban planning they have a name for this: the “curb cut effect”, whereby urban planners found that curb cuts, that had been made for a specific accessibility need such as people in wheelchairs, ended up being useful to all kinds of people: cyclists, people walking at night, pedestrians with weaker joints.

Devtools seem to benefit from a similar curb cut effect, where gains in a tool’s usability for one domain generalizes across many others.
by yummypaint | 2025-11-25 23:14:14+00:00
Part of the problem is that software engineers aren't real engineers. Engineering disciplines formally recognize their responsibilities to the public, and are expected to refuse to build dangerous or harmful systems.

The mechanical engineers who design cars and the civil engineers who design the roads and bridges they traverse are held to these standards, and hold themselves to these standards. The software engineers who write code that actually controls vehicles in practice have no such culture. Relevant professional organizations like the ACM should be leading the charge, but they aren't because their membership doesn't care.

One solution is to license software engineers. What do people working in the industry think about that?
by jermaustin1 | 2025-11-25 23:15:01+00:00
How can an LLM be at fault for something? It is a text prediction engine. WE are giving them access to tools.

Do we blame the saw for cutting off our finger? Do we blame the gun for shooting ourselves in the foot? Do we blame the tiger for attacking the magician?

The answer to all of those things is: no. We don't blame the thing doing what it is meant to be doing no matter what we put in front of it.
by mise_en_place | 2025-11-25 23:15:12+00:00
Expectations and reality will differ. Ultimately we will have soft eugenics. This is a good thing in the long run, especially with how crowded the global south is.

Nature always finds a way, and it's telling you not to pass your genetics on. It seems cruel, but it is efficient and very elegant. Now we just need to find an incentive structure to encourage the intelligent to procreate.
by harshbutfair | 2025-11-25 23:15:13+00:00
Thanks for writing this up! I have a similar setup, largely based on your earlier post. I'm looking forward to trying out some of these ideas.

Do 16Hz pulses make much difference? I found conflicting information and haven't yet tried it myself.

What do you use to get the data into influxdb? I'm using collectd but it doesn't gather a lot of useful info.
by zahlman | 2025-11-25 23:16:22+00:00
> HN is heavily biased towards silencing any content that

... violates the guidelines, in particular:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
by vladgur | 2025-11-25 23:16:23+00:00
This could be a general issue with SE Asia, but one thing that was a breath of fresh air for me as I departed Jakarta from my Bali trip last year was a thought that I no longer need to worry about quality of water being used to wash salad veggies or clean my toothbrush with.

Clean safe water from the sink was definitely not something I experienced in Bali in 2024 and I had the similar impression in Jakart
by rented_mule | 2025-11-25 23:16:41+00:00
XML and JSON only started about 5 years apart (1996 vs. 2001). I think XML's adoption was more broad more quickly, so the gap felt a bit longer than that (XML was a core part of my jobs from 1998-2007 and JSON ever since). I think more of what makes XML look so much older is the fact that so many new projects have been picking JSON over XML for 10-20 years now, and that's why younger folks have seen much more JSON than XML.

My software engineering career started long before either, and I have used both extensively. While I don't think that it makes sense for most well established projects to switch, just as rewrites often don't make sense, I would almost always pick JSON for new projects. Your points are valid, but one part of the ergonomics that you didn't mention is that it's so much easier for humans to read and write JSON, thereby speeding up development, debugging, testing, etc.
by aeonfox | 2025-11-25 23:16:54+00:00
> but their standard of living hasn't caught up yet, but soon will?

I'm not so sure they are living as badly as people imagine.

https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/china-reduced-extre...

But China do have significantly lower labour costs internationally. Part of that has been due to keeping their currency artificially low by sinking money in US bonds (which also inflates the US dollar). They also have plenty of specialised workers in manufacturing after they out-priced and out-classed every other country. Setting up an advanced manufacturing facility in China is far cheaper than basically anywhere else on the planet.
by carra | 2025-11-25 23:17:10+00:00
We may be facing a grim situation in a few years because of this. Right now most consumer-grade storage is flash memory, and all of it suffers from this problem. SSDs, pendrives, SD cards, Compact Flash... Apparently games for the Nintendo 3DS and PS Vita are already suffering from this, and people losing photos in faulty SDs is hardly news.
by joshtbradley | 2025-11-25 23:17:14+00:00
Many people are arguing for a ban. I did get reactive, because I’ve been hearing that perspective a lot lately.

But you’re right. This article specifically argues for consumer protections. I am fully in favor of that.

I just wish the NYT would also publish articles about the potential of AI. Everything I’ve seen from them (I haven’t looked hard) has been about risks, not about benefits.
by yieldcrv | 2025-11-25 23:17:43+00:00
people are pointing the fingers in the wrong direction, and its contributing to their frustration

until you find a way to legally tie off-platform behavior, such as on Discord, or the comment sections of a community, back to the platform Roblox itself, all CEOs are going to feel impervious and seem tone-deaf to lawsuits and the media

and it is factually impervious, Roblox' moderation tactics are comprehensive, the legal system goes after the people caught sexually harassing children, the same as how the legal system would go after someone caught sexually harassing children at Chuck E Cheese as opposed to Chuck E Cheese itself or the parking lot outside where the skaters happened to be hanging out

"but it's different and I'm a parent and it makes me uneasy" okay, heard.
by datavirtue | 2025-11-25 23:17:49+00:00
This is the default. I have a few teams like this under my charge, currently.

I ask them to protect themselves by logging what data they will need to troubleshoot a new feature.

Next release comes around and there is an issue and guess what...devs asking for access to prod to troubleshoot because they don't have logs.

It is really difficult to contain oneself when getting on a call to quiet three endless chat threads because someone failed to log basic shit.

Days long anxiety-filled shit storms for absolutely no reason.

I have had other teams that would do this and they had to have the fear of God put into them to wake up and start logging. We have real problems to solve without confounding ourselves...
by handfuloflight | 2025-11-25 23:17:55+00:00
Polar prohibits: Human services (custom development, design and consultancy).

Is this the case with Flowglad? We have a SaaS with a monthly team seat fee + usage fees, but we also offer a bespoke service where we may bill per hour or bill per project (for work done and delivered inside of the SaaS). So these would be higher ticket.

Would you support this?
by soiltype | 2025-11-25 23:18:19+00:00
> There are definitely times you want to specify a type.

So I'm coming from basically obly TypeScript type system experience but that seems completely ok to me. There are times I make my TS uglier to make it less ambiguous and times I make it more ambiguous to make it more readable. It's unreasonable imo that such a system could universally land on the most readable format even if we could all agree what's most readable. Instead, some cases are going to be tradeoffs so that the more common cases can flow unimpeded.
by dafelst | 2025-11-25 23:19:01+00:00
If it were a more compact format, it is likely both the uncompressed AND compressed sizes would be smaller.

By your logic, if you 10x'd the length of the XML tags in XMPP then it would be even better since you you would get an even further improved compression ratio.

To be clear, I don't have a problem with XML in XMPP since it is negligible overhead, but "it compresses well because it is full of redundancy" is not the argument that should be used to justify it.
by JimmyBuckets | 2025-11-25 23:20:09+00:00
I respect Ilya hugely as a researcher in ML and quite admire his overall humility, but I have to say I cringed quite a bit at the start of this interview when he talks about emotions, their relative complexity, and origin. Emotion is so complex, even taking all the systems in the body that it interacts with. And many mammals have very intricate socio-emotional lives - take Orcas or Elephants. There is an arrogance I have seen that is typical of ML (having worked in the field) that makes its members too comfortable trodding into adjacent intellectual fields they should have more respect and reverence for. Anyone else notice this? It's something physicists are often accused of also.
by ffsm8 | 2025-11-25 23:20:37+00:00
At least Claude will absolutely tell you if it determines something is on point, even if you explicitly tell it to do the opposite.

I'm just pointing this out because they're not quite as 2 dimensional as you are insinuating - even if they're frequently wrong and need careful prompting for decent quality

(after the initial "you're absolutely right!" And it finished "thinking" about it)
by simonask | 2025-11-25 23:20:54+00:00
My criticism is not of any particular feature in C++ (though there is much to both hate and love about it), but of a particular approach to software engineering that the language design leans into, and which even the newest iterations of the language do nothing to alleviate, and in many many cases even reinforce.

The easiest path in C++ is almost always the dangerous path. (The classic example is operator[] versus at().) With every tiny feature of the language, things we take fully for granted in every other language, there is a host of caveats, gotchas, footguns, and trap doors.

This is as serious risk as a project and its team grows, because the accumulated sum of accidental complexity grows exponentially.

It’s possible to manage this risk, but it is also expensive, and every modern-ish competitor to C++ allows fewer people to deliver better software quicker.

It’s not a good choice for almost anything that doesn’t specifically require C++ for its own sake.
by RyanOD | 2025-11-25 23:21:50+00:00
I make up all my passwords on the spot and never write them down. Every service I use has a different password I may or may not remember. If I need to reset it, so be it. I consider changing my passwords frequently a good thing. Yes, it slows me down from time to time, but whatever.

And for something I use every day like email, I just leave myself signed in on my main devices. But eventually that even gets reset...probably a few times a year.
by psunavy03 | 2025-11-25 23:22:19+00:00
I'm not sure what that last example is meant to be other than an anti-Python caricature. If you're implementing calculating things like standard deviations by hand, that's not real-world coding, that's the undergraduate harassment package which should end with a STEM bachelor's.

Of course there's a bunch of loops and things; you're exposing what has to happen in both R and Python under the hood of all those packages.
by ameixaseca | 2025-11-25 23:22:48+00:00
I used OCaml extensively for a few years, around the time of OCaml 3 and OCaml 4, and I can add a few cents to this discussion.

Some of the points listed here can be considered a matter of taste or opinion, some are indeed pain points, and some are implementation details.

OCaml as a whole is hard to directly compare with most other languages you mentioned above as "better" or "worse". It both suffers and benefits from being an academic/research project not directly in control of a larger corporation.

As a language, IMHO, it is miles ahead of mostly all the languages mentioned above. It recently adopted a novel mechanism for modeling concurrency called algebraic effects, together with state-of-art multi-core support. This not only abstracts away several features that are usually hardcoded on most languages but puts it on another level as a language and abstraction capability. There are other toy languages that implement similar mechanisms or part of this, but none with the adoption level of OCaml.

However, since it does not have the same amount of resources and adoption, progress sometimes is slower that one would expect. Documentation can be sparse, community is smaller, etc.

Regarding OCaml on Windows, I myself used it exactly 20 years ago. It not only has one implementation, but three. There are some tradeoffs and support is not at the same level as Linux but it's still there, and I wouldn't call it mediocre:

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/README.win32.adoc

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-aTygzDsxy4mnqvSKEVhifA1...

You might find it harder to find libraries, for sure. I have not checked the situation recently, though given the smaller community that is likely still the case.

As a tongue-in-cheek comment, I could definitely say "OCaml is certainly not a good language - not as bad as most of all the others though".
by nickff | 2025-11-25 23:22:57+00:00
This Pluralistic post seems very rant-y, but it links to a Bloomberg piece that seems like a better source for backing up the claim: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-obamacare-open-enrol...

As someone with a little experience with the 'advertiser side' of Google, they also push junk to their paying clients, using every opportunity to sell terrible, worthless placements to advertisers. Which is to say that the problem is not that 'searchers' are the product, the problem is that Google is not focused on creating value for its counter-parties.
by letmevoteplease | 2025-11-25 23:23:38+00:00
"The latest survey data available, compiled by researchers at CAS, revealed that most experts hold negative attitudes towards LLM development"

Let's check the source...[1]

"The survey was conducted in 2021 from May to July."

...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250903025427/https:/long-term-...
by riskassessment | 2025-11-25 23:23:41+00:00
> R is perhaps the closest, because it has data.frame as a 'first class citizen', but most people don't seem to use it, and use e.g. tibbles from dplyr instead.

Everyone in R uses data.frame because tibble (and data.table) inherits from data.frame. This means that "first class" (base R) functions work directly on tibble/data.table. It also makes it trivial to convert between tibble, data.table, and data.frames.
by inesranzo | 2025-11-25 23:23:48+00:00
Any company?

Don't you think if Kagi introduced spyware it would ruin their reputation quickly, why would Kagi want to quickly ruin that brand reputation?

The answer is that there is no incentive for 'spyware' on Orion as you can pay for Orion+ to support development.

https://kagi.com/onboarding?p=orion_plan
by uws | 2025-11-25 23:24:05+00:00
Introducting Browserver, the website that turns your web browser into a web server!

The app uses WebRTC to serve your index (.html/.htm) and/or directories directly from your web browser.

Step 1 - Choose your root directory on your device. If it doesn't contain an index, then a list of directories and files are shown. Step 2 - Click the Start Server button. Step 3 - Share the link!

As long as your browser stays open and your PC doesn't sleep, your website remains active.
by ModernMech | 2025-11-25 23:24:29+00:00
It makes sense from a historical perspective. Tables are a thing in many languages, just not the ones that mainstream devs use. In fact, if you rank programming languages by usage outside of devs, the top languages all have a table-ish metaphor (SQL, Excel, R, Matlab).

The languages devs use are largely Algol derived. Algol is a language that was used to express algorithms, which were largely abstractions over Turing machines, which are based around an infinite 1D tape of memory. This model of 1D memory was built into early computers, and early operating systems and early languages. We call it "mechanical sympathy".

Meanwhile, other languages at the same time were invented that weren't tied so closely to the machine, but were more for the purpose of doing science and math. They didn't care as much about this 1D view of the world. Early languages like Fortran and Matlab had notions of 2D data matrices because math and science had notions of 2D data matrices. Languages like C were happy to support these things by using an array of pointers because that mapped nicely to their data model.

The same thing can be said for 1-based and 0-based indexing -- languages like Matlab, R, and Excel are 1-based because that's how people index tables; whereas languages like C and Java are 0-based because that's how people index memory.