MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yawaramin | 2025-11-07 17:36:31+00:00
> There are many organizations (we talk to them) which have plans and applies that take 5 - 10s of minutes, some even close to an hour. That's a problem. We talked to one customer that a dev can make a change in the morning and depending on the week might have to wait until the next day to get their plan, and then another day to apply it

That's us. Especially because our teams are distributed across NA/Eastern Europe/Japan. So getting a lock is a problem because you have to wait for someone else to finish, then getting the required reviews is a problem because you have to wait for people from other timezones to come on, then by the time you're ready to re-plan after the reviews someone else has taken the lock, then you have to wait for them,...
by JoshMandel | 2025-11-07 17:37:19+00:00
I think that it's basically fair and I often write simple agents using exactly the technique that you describe. I typically provide a TypeScript interface for the available tools and just ask the model to respond with a JSON block and it works fine.

That said, it is worth understanding that the current generation of models is extensively RL-trained on how to make tool calls... so they may in fact be better at issuing tool calls in the specific format that their training has focused on (using specific internal tokens to demarcate and indicate when a tool call begins/ends, etc). Intuitively, there's probably a lot of transfer learning between this format and any ad-hoc format that you might request inline your prompt.

There may be recent literature quantifying the performance gap here. And certainly if you're doing anything performance-sensitive you will want to characterize this for your use case, with benchmarks. But conceptually, I think your model is spot on.
by oldsklgdfth | 2025-11-07 17:37:22+00:00
I suspect that's how it started and then put it out there and gained momentum. Possibly as a joke.

As a note on satire, is there a term for satire which is perpetuated for long enough that is take seriously at some point by someone?

I have been referring to this pattern as "the pizzagate phenomenon". Basically, making a joke repeatedly until it reaches an audience that's not in on the joke. It is not quite a "self-fulfilling prophecy.
by lbeurerkellner | 2025-11-07 17:37:34+00:00
Everybody should try. It helps a ton to demystify the relatively simple but powerful underpinning of how modern agents work.

You can get quite far quite quickly. My toy implementation [1] is <600 LOC and even supports MCP.

[1] https://github.com/lbeurerkellner/agent.py
by w10-1 | 2025-11-07 17:37:39+00:00
Given the technical achievements and industry impact, I'm struck that his emphasis is on the people, and in particular growing people to take on challenges. His influence might lie as much in what they do. The connection linking them seems to be building curiosity and wonder into delight for users.

If there's a soul to silicon valley, that's it. However many jerks and political/power players I encounter, I remain inspired by the few like this.
by throwaway106382 | 2025-11-07 17:38:01+00:00
Contribute? That's basically its only purpose now, rot your brain with a dopamine drip and show you a bajillion ads. Now with AI slopgen being baked right into most of them it's been set into overdrive.

Deleted all my social media accounts except Youtube (but I use Unhook to remove everything except my subscriptions and the search). Haven't felt better. I use Telegram and Whatsapp and SMS to keep in touch with friends and family, nothing connected to any social app. I avoid all of the social-media-lite features in those apps like the plague.
by cube2222 | 2025-11-07 17:38:20+00:00
Duck typing is often equated with structural typing. You’re right that officially (at least according to Wikipedia) duck typing is dynamic, while structural is the same idea, but static.

Either way, the thing folks are contrasting with here is nominal typing of interfaces, where a type explicitly declares which interfaces it implements. In Go it’s “if it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck”, just statically checked.
by fryz | 2025-11-07 17:38:28+00:00
The "magic" is done via the JSON schemas that are passed in along with the definition of the tool.

Structured Output APIs (inc. the Tool API) take the schema and build a Context-free Grammar, which is then used during generation to mask which tokens can be output.

I found https://openai.com/index/introducing-structured-outputs-in-t... (have to scroll down a bit to the "under the hood" section) and https://www.leewayhertz.com/structured-outputs-in-llms/#cons... to be pretty good resources
by throw0101d | 2025-11-07 17:38:43+00:00
> My local weather news has all the benefits of real time data and weather models yet I think their accuracy rate is just as poor when it comes to producing the 7 day outlook.

Where is your local source getting their forecast from?

> A seven-day forecast can accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time and a five-day forecast can accurately predict the weather approximately 90 percent of the time. However, a 10-day—or longer—forecast is only right about half the time.

* https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/about/k-12-education/weather-for...

There are also 'technicalities': I'm in Toronto, Canada, which is 40km east-to-east and 20km from the lake to the northern border. If rain hits the western half (around 427/Sherway/Etobicoke) but not the eastern half (Scarborough bluffs), is a "it will rain" forecast correct for the city? Some will perceive it as yes and some as no.
by jeffrallen | 2025-11-07 17:39:01+00:00
If you don't feel free to be honest with your skip level that's on all 3 of you to fix.

If I put my own spin on something my boss has already explained is a problem he's working on, this gives my skip level confidence we all understand the problem approximately the same. If I say, "this thing came to me that I don't really agree but I'm doing my best to get it done" this only reflects well on both me (taking one for the team) and my boss (he carried forward an unpopular thing and trusted me to give it a shot).

And if I say, "this other team's behavior is causing me this problem" that's just facts. Data that we can all use to fix it. Maybe my skip level can explain the competing priorities and I'll decide to solve my problem another way.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-11-07 17:39:10+00:00
> You can notice a blogger going slowly crazy more easily than you can notice a large group being slowly corrupted by hidden influences.

The former is a very private affair totally hidden. The latter is something happening between a large group of people, many of whom are very inclined to quit the anonymity of the large organization, write a book about it to become individually famous.

A significant number of those autists you espouse can be bribed by surprisingly small amounts. Politicians are far more vetted than bloggers, and yet a significant number of them have been caught changing their votes for $2000 or similar amounts.

You might be able to sway a NYT reporter for a similar amount, but they have processes to catch that.
by duttish | 2025-11-07 17:39:21+00:00
SEEKING FREELANCER

Location: Sweden

Remote: Yes, but EU only due to Apple restrictions.

I'm looking for an iOS developer to help me develop the iOS app to my existing android app. It's going to be a default dialer app and development of those can only happen on devices registered in the EU, hence the restriction under remote. I've got a start but I don't have the time to fix both android and backend and iOS.

Email: mikael@tricktrapper.com
by brucehoult | 2025-11-07 17:39:36+00:00
Intel has had a terrible habit of overcomplicating all of their attempts at a "serious" ISA and CPU -- iAPX432, I860, IA64 -- in absolutely impractical and crippling ways, while the stop-gap shitty little 16 bit 8086 [1] accidentally got used by the largest computer company in the world (because the far better M68000 was late) and untold gazillions of dollars fell on Intel.

[1] Morse was given three months to design the ISA -- shades of Eich later having 10 days to design Javascript
by abe94 | 2025-11-07 17:40:11+00:00
You can pick and choose what you see from the audit (though in no circumstances is it an astounding success).

The general points i'm trying to get across is

- Responder safety/back-up needs mean you can’t fully “swap out” police. This program still needed to bring in police most of the time. - Coverage and scale are hard in an actually big city, like NYC. (also why denver's success in a tiny city is sort of a useless comparison)

So why not just equip police to better handle mental health cases instead of creating a different task force which doesn't have any of structure the police already has? This isn't rhetorical - the reason is idealogical stubbornness, there are better solutions for achieving mamadanis goals.
by estebank | 2025-11-07 17:40:32+00:00
A backtrace won't give you the values of variables needed to identify that.

I did specify "succinctly as possible with all the information necessary for a human to be able to solve the issue". An error that doesn't have "all the information necessary" is a bad error. It can be worse than a backtrace. That doesn't mean a backtrace is good.
by Svip | 2025-11-07 17:41:01+00:00
Whether internet is covered by § 72 seems undetermined; as far as I can tell the Supreme Court hasn't made a decision on it; but considering that it considered fake SMS train tickets to be document fraud, even though the law text never explicitly mentions text messages: it seems clear that internet communication ought to be covered, if challenged.

Regardless, this wouldn't run afoul of this. This is similar to restricting who can buy alcohol, based purely on age; the identification process is just digital. MitID - the Danish digital identification infrastructure - allows an service to request specific details about another purpose; such as their age or just a boolean value whether they are old enough. Essentially: the service can ask "is this user 18 or older?" and the ID service can respond yes or no, without providing any other PII.

That's the theory at least; nothing about snooping private communication, but rather forcing the "bouncer" to actually check IDs.
by uecker | 2025-11-07 17:41:47+00:00
The memory model always had segmented memory in mind and safe C approaches are not new. The provenance model makes this more precise, but the need for this was to deal with corner cases such as pointer-to-integer roundtrips or access to the representation bytes of a pointer. Of course, neither GCC nor clang get this right, to the extend that those compiler are internally inconsistent and miscompile even code that did not any clarification to be considered correct.
by reaperducer | 2025-11-07 17:41:47+00:00
The laws need to be changed.

My how the worm turns.

HN users used to herald that law as the best thing since Betty White (who was older than sliced bread).

Without 230, there would be no YouTube. No Facebook. No Instagram. No social media. Forums would likely have gone extinct. Half of the tech industry and a good chunk of the jobs that people on HN do would never have happened.

Now people on HN want to get rid of the law. People who are too young to know what it was like before that protection set the internet free to create and collaborate.

I despise social media. But demonizing 230 just shows a basic lack of knowledge of history, economics, and the reasons it was created.
by D-Machine | 2025-11-07 17:42:11+00:00
There is no cynicism or brain poisoning here, health insurance is in no way comparable to news. The economic incentives for news media putting the truth first are simply not there. They can't tell blatant, obvious lies too often, yes, or they will lose trust and thus profit, but nothing really prevents them from lying by omission, and if, e.g., fear mongering, clickbait, and pandering leads to more profits, this is where they must and will go.

If people demanded truth, we might see a different story, but it is clear that enough people want other things more, often enough.
by skotobaza | 2025-11-07 17:42:33+00:00
> Skyrim is one of the most overrated video games ever

Agreed. Most of the systems do not work as intended, the amount of content is very low compared to previous entries. There is no excuse for it to be released in such poor state, since Bethesda had already released two games for the same generation prior to that. And they did what they always do - ship a couple of updates and then just drop the game until the DLC is release and then promptly drop all the support. Even though there are still many bugs left in the game. They've been doing that for years, yet people still praise them for some reason. A very irresponsible developer.
by tim333 | 2025-11-07 17:43:14+00:00
>it's the job that keeps you fit

I'm not so sure. I think cause and effect might be otherwise - either you quit working when you go gaga, or both are a function of age. Certainly my relatives stayed sharp after retiring but often went a bit demented around 85-90.

There's evidence at least some dementia is related to infections which may be easier to fix than other things. (as in https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/dec/01/the-bra...)
by gmanley | 2025-11-07 17:44:03+00:00
What if the action, it is responding to, is some sort of input other than directly human entered? Presumably, if it has a cameras, microphone, etc, people would want their assistant to do tasks without direct human intervention. For example: it is fed input from the camera and mic, detects a thunderstorm and responds with some sort of action to close windows.

It's all a bit theoretical but I wouldn't call it a silly concern. It's something that'll need to be worked through, if something like this comes into existence.
by worldfoodgood | 2025-11-07 17:44:04+00:00
I don't understand your comment. Is it an attempt at humor? Don't be a dick.

I don't object to eating animals, I object to torturing animals in the process of raising them. You can raise pork without forcing mother pigs to indefinitely share a space with a pile of their rotting children's carcasses.

Ask yourself why it warrants a terrorism charge to smuggle out photos of animal mistreatment.

Read the article:

https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...

https://archive.is/kqBbh
by 6c696e7578 | 2025-11-07 17:44:38+00:00
> I used per-account email with alias services and password managers.

20-something-ish years ago I setup qmail in my VPS and a .qmail-default file captures all my me-sitename@vps emails. If they send me junk I echo '#' > .qmail-sitename and that's the end of it.

Other things that get a mixture like someone annoying who harvested my ebay/paypal addresses or something, I'll sift out the good (stuff I need) via maildrop and everything else gets junked.

Honestly one of the best, but annoying, things I've done, well worth the time invested as I have a nice clean mailbox.
by delusional | 2025-11-07 17:44:40+00:00
> Denmark's constitution does have a privacy paragraph, but it explicitly mentions telephone and telegraph

That's very much not how danish law works. The specific paragraph says "hvor ingen lov hjemler en særegen undtaglse, alene ske efter en retskendelse." translated as "where no other law grants a special exemption, only happen with a warrant". That is, you can open peoples private mail and enter their private residence, but you have to ask a judge first.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-11-07 17:45:18+00:00
Rust is very different from Ocaml. Rust is a low level language with a borrow checkers, traits, no first class module system, no GADT, no effects.

The similarities are fairly superficial actually. It’s just that Rust is less behind the PL forefront that people are used to and has old features which look impressive when you discover them like variants.

There is little overlap between what you would sanely use Rust for and what you would use Ocaml for. It’s just that weirdly people use Rust for things it’s not really suited for.
by jakelazaroff | 2025-11-07 17:45:27+00:00
> Donald Trump pulled off a stunning political comeback because of … young men.

If you break exit poll data down by race [1], Black men 18-29 supported Harris by a whopping 55 percentage points. So even though Scott pays lip service to Black male educators being particularly underrepresented, he can't explain why this alleged phenomenon affecting young men is so vastly different between demographics.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/national-result...
by nyeah | 2025-11-07 17:45:48+00:00
Yeah exactly. I understand you may feel that I bulldozed your house, but it was an honest mistake. I deployed an AI bulldozer. Some communities are very happy with the results. Others may need time to adjust. Look, I want to talk. First and foremost this is about communication.

As soon as you get Wi-Fi back up, let's hop on a call.
by jsbisviewtiful | 2025-11-07 17:45:55+00:00
Took 2 minutes of Googling and little effort to provide these 2 of 10+ articles that immediately popped up. So, you are fully aware you could have found these easily but were putting out "pRoVe It" energy for whatever reason.

https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/climate-change-cuts...

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/07/25/climate-change-...

> “If the climate warms by 3 degrees, that’s basically like everyone on the planet giving up breakfast.” That’s a high cost for a world where more than 800 million people at times go a day or more without food because of inadequate access.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-11-07 17:46:22+00:00
i think they're talking about Hims-type businesses and the type of stuff that makes low/mid-level right-wing grifters their money: colloidal silver, methylene blue, anything else Alex Jones is hawking. maybe you could group Tucker Carlson's Nicotine Pouches For Christian Nationalists in there too, idk.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-11-07 17:46:28+00:00
> Without 230, there would be no YouTube. No Facebook. No Instagram. No social media.

Sounds like a good thing to me?

> Half of the tech industry and a good chunk of the jobs that people on HN do would never have happened.

And it would be good. It's not like we do any real work. I know I don't.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-11-07 17:47:04+00:00
That would be one possible dystopia, but I think we actually are going to dodge it.

Smart, on device agents that are aligned with a user's interests will be able to act as the "walled garden" the user needs. In fact, this future is anti-dysopian, because the agent will not care about existing walled gardens and digital fiefdoms, and to the extent that it's using them it's going to deprive them of ad revenue, and they'll have to sit and take it because being agent unfriendly will be a death sentence for a business.
by simonw | 2025-11-07 17:47:12+00:00
Yeah, that's basically it. Many models these days are specifically trained for tool calling though so the system prompt doesn't need to spend much effort reminding them how to do it.

You can see the prompts that make this work for gpt-oss in the chat template in their Hugging Face repo: https://huggingface.co/openai/gpt-oss-120b/blob/main/chat_te... - including this bit:

{%- macro render_tool_namespace(namespace_name, tools) -%} {{- "## " + namespace_name + "\n\n" }} {{- "namespace " + namespace_name + " {\n\n" }} {%- for tool in tools %} {%- set tool = tool.function %} {{- "// " + tool.description + "\n" }} {{- "type "+ tool.name + " = " }} {%- if tool.parameters and tool.parameters.properties %} {{- "(_: {\n" }} {%- for param_name, param_spec in tool.parameters.properties.items() %} {%- if param_spec.description %} {{- "// " + param_spec.description + "\n" }} {%- endif %} {{- param_name }} ...

As for how LLMs know when to stop... they have special tokens for that. "eos_token_id" stands for End of Sequence - here's the gpt-oss config for that: https://huggingface.co/openai/gpt-oss-120b/blob/main/generat...

{ "bos_token_id": 199998, "do_sample": true, "eos_token_id": [ 200002, 199999, 200012 ], "pad_token_id": 199999, "transformers_version": "4.55.0.dev0" }

The model is trained to output one of those three tokens when it's "done".

https://cookbook.openai.com/articles/openai-harmony#special-... defines some of those tokens:

200002 = 
 - you should stop inference

200012 = 
 - "Indicates the model wants to call a tool."

I think that 199999 is a legacy EOS token ID that's included for backwards compatibility? Not sure.
by rpdillon | 2025-11-07 17:47:31+00:00
Thanks so much for taking the time to reply. This is fascinating because when I switched to a hybrid, I started tracking my MPG really closely as well, and it turned me into an efficient driver rather than an aggressive driver. It's funny that the effect seems to hold with others as well. I didn't anticipate that response, but now that you've said it, I find it much less surprising.
by atomicnature | 2025-11-07 17:48:12+00:00
1. The survey seems limited to UK or so. Not sure - it doesn't look like a global report.

2. Don't confuse "enjoyment" with "number of readers". The previous generation may have enjoyed it more - because there were no better options.

3. People over the globe are more educated now, and engaged in knowledge work. They must read to get work done.

4. Don't forget the "pirate book" scene - such as lib gen, Anna's archive, etc. - in developing countries.
by luciferin | 2025-11-07 17:48:58+00:00
I vehemently reject the idea that the left believes, or even phrases their policies to imply, that men, young men, or white men are "the problem". There is a portion of society experiencing persecution bias, and I'm not singaling out any group(s) with that statement. We will never again progress as a society as long as we continue to view the success of someone else as our failure. This goes both ways.

The article lists a number of issues, and 90% of them apply to everyone in our society, not just men, not just the young, not just white people. Why do these young white men read "we the people" and not see it literally applying to all humans? Martin Luther King Jr's speech was as much about little black boys and girls holding hands with little white boys and girls. This isn't exclusion.
by tokai | 2025-11-07 17:49:05+00:00
>considering that it considered fake SMS train tickets to be document fraud, even though the law text never explicitly mentions text messages

That has nothing to do with the medium of the ticket and is all about knowingly presenting a fake ticket. The ticket is a document proving your payment for travel. They could be lumps of dirt and it would still be document fraud to present a fake hand of dirt.
by culebron21 | 2025-11-07 17:50:04+00:00
In one particular matter software engineering has measurements -- performance. Lots of cross-language comparisons, before-after. Although, it's still not done where it should be -- e.g. when planning an architecture, sometimes I personally hear "in the cloud it will be different" and nothing else.

In other areas, software engineering seems a lot like alchemy, ages before it became the serious science of chemistry.
by dec0dedab0de | 2025-11-07 17:50:45+00:00
I got scammed on Instagram when I was in the hospital getting chemotherapy.

It was christmas time, and I got an ad for a cool looking steam punk keyboard. I ordered it for my kid who had recently got into PC gaming. It was only $60, and when it didn't come I checked my bank and credit card and didn't see any charges, so I assumed that I didn't actually finish the order. Until almost a year later when I realized I paid with paypal, and they used funds I had sitting in there for some reason. By then it was too late to challenge.
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-11-07 17:51:02+00:00
There's a helpful crate that abstracts that away: https://docs.rs/ordered-float/latest/ordered_float/

You have a strongly ordered `NotNan` struct that wraps a float that's guaranteed to not be NaN, and an `OrderedFloat` that consideres all NaN equal, and greater than non-NaN values.

These are basically the special-cases you'd need to handle yourself anyway, and probably one of the approaches you'd end up taking.