MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pdimitar | 2025-11-29 19:22:25+00:00
That's just the thing though: I want to know what those other incentives are and I was never told anything else than a hand-wavy "money" blurb with zero elaboration.

I mean OK, technically the ad viewing experience in f.ex. iOS is terrible; you sit through 30 seconds, then a white button on an almost-white background appears (dark pattern, they want you to sit looking at the ad longer), then when you "dismiss" is, an AppStore pop-under shows up and you have to dismiss that as well, and ONLY THEN you get another screen where you have to wait 5-10 seconds until the blessed micro X button finally appears.

This can be made much better: the ad platform might enforce the top-left corner be always black and the X button to appear only once and be effective immediately, for example. No shenanigans with bluffing that you are now leaving the ad but haha, you have fallen into our trap! Here's our AppStore page!

But why should Apple care? The money is literally pouring in! And humans operate on fight-or-flight responses much more than what 99% of them would be willing to admit; an Apple executive can drown you in executive jargon but the naked truth would still be "We don't want to change anything that might slow down our income". Or even more bare: "Don't touch it if it works and makes money".

So yeah, that's one of the examples where the hand-wavy "money" blurb would make total sense; I get it.

But in all my career I was never told in clear certain terms -- and they must also make sense -- about why not investing just a measly two hours more on technical excellence is so extremely unwelcome. Of course they always cite velocity and customer retention and how we must make sure we don't miss a potential client but I've never seen even one little piece of evidence of customers churning because a feature was delivered on Wednesday and not Tuesday. I am sure it happens, mind you, but I could never shake the feeling that those dangers are always hugely exaggerated.
by KaiserPro | 2025-11-29 19:23:32+00:00
> Doesn't London still have scandals about people renting out illegally small cupboards

Oh yes.

> Why aren't all the house owners building those extensions, splitting the place into flats, renting them out at a thousand a month, and moving their own accommodation to Essex?

Thats a good question, but I suspect its probably down to its not that profitable, and it requires a boat load of cash.

https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/71387241/ is 900k, thats been extended (pre planning changes)

You could _possibly_ rent it out for 5K a month, but you'd need to buy a similar sized house in commuting distance, which is 400-600k.

London is stupidly expensive.
by mingodad | 2025-11-29 19:23:41+00:00
I did an experiment while learning about LLMs and llama.cpp consisting in trying to use create a Lua extension to use llama.cpp API to enhance LLMs with agent/RAG written in Lua with simple code to learn the basics and after more than 5 hours chatting with https://aistudio.google.com/prompts/new_chat?model=gemini-3-... (see the scrapped output of the whole session attached) I've got a lot far in terms of learning how to use an LLM to help develop/debug/learn about a topic (in this case agent/RAG with llama.cpp API using Lua).

I'm posting it here just in case it can help others to see and comment/improve it (it was using around 100K tokens at the end and started getting noticeable slow but still very helpful).

You can see the scrapped text for the whole seession here https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/17600
by gs17 | 2025-11-29 19:23:46+00:00
They sort of already have this (IIRC Perplexity also has it), there's a "shopping" specific mode which presumably adds affiliate links. But even GPT-5.1 hallucinates a bit too much to be trusted buying anything without me as a human-in-the-loop. I tried to have it help me find climbing shoes for my cuboid feet and it went from making up specifications to telling me to buy shoes that don't fit and cutting them up with tools which wouldn't work.

EDIT: Looks like they don't add affiliate links? I'm surprised, it seems like a natural thing to do outside of the incentive to bias purchasing sources.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-29 19:23:51+00:00
I deal with something similar on about a monthly basis on a couple of projects I work on, where people will just submit a 5-digit-lines PR that's entirely AI slop and often a slightly smug "there that fixes all the problems" attitude to it.

No, it doesn't, and given that I've been a Python developer (albeit not a very good one) for 25 years now - this doesn't mean that I'm some great Python wizard, just that I know what it's pretty much supposed to look like - there's shit in there I can't even begin to decode. Why are so much of the lines of the PR just grafting in huge jumbled strings of characters? It looks like some blindingly obvious attempt to disguise a backdoor.

"Oh I don't understand all of it, I just got <AI of the Week> to do it"

Yeah. Take it out of here. Do you like having knees? Well don't bring anything like this back.
by Waterluvian | 2025-11-29 19:25:03+00:00
I think this is what I’m running into. Other teams want my team to make tooling to simplify some data processing workflow. Nice UIs and such. But they can’t and generally won’t show me the written-down process for how it’s actually done today. Or how they’re going to do it manually as they develop their side of things.

Which leads us to turning into a different team: we have to go figure out what the process engineering even is, which means becoming a bigger expert than they are at the process they want us to make tooling for.
by alexpotato | 2025-11-29 19:25:08+00:00
> the result of that discussion was to not document Step 7, because doing that might enforce the idea of what it should be for and why it should be done.

In Charlie Beckwith's book about Delta Force [0] there is a line where he says (paraphrasing):

"The SAS never wanted to write down what their role was and what tasks they were trained for. Why? Because they didn't want to get pigeon holed into a role. ... They also never wrote down their SOPs b/c the argument was that 'if you can't keep it in your head, you shouldn't be in the Regiment'. At Delta, we were going to write down our mission AND write down our SOPs."

0 - https://amzn.to/4ahIAJV
by bloak | 2025-11-29 19:25:18+00:00
Never mind why you might want to rename the streets in this case, I would like a better understanding of why it is so difficult. A lot of the major users have access to the same postcode database. Is it possible for a street to have several alternative names in that database? If not, why not? If so, why can't they just accept both the old name and the new name for a period of 20 years, say?
by joecool1029 | 2025-11-29 19:25:31+00:00
fwiw I’ve used 24/7/365 plugged in phones as AP’s in multiple locations for a decade or so now, never had an issue. Past few years I use the battery threshold to set them to 70% charge and they don’t move from this for months at a time.

What roasts the lifetime of my laptop batteries is compiling with gentoo, but again never an issue with catastrophic failure and I have 20+ years of experience with that as well.
by _heimdall | 2025-11-29 19:26:12+00:00
I stopped paying attention to any specific thing Sam Altman says a while ago. I've seen too many examples of interviews or off the cuff interactions that make me think very little of him personally.

For example, I could see him saying not to waste tokens on "please" simply because he thinks that is a stupid way to use the LLM. I.e. a judgement on anyone that would say please, not a concern over token use in his data centers.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-29 19:26:19+00:00
I feel like this article hits the nail on the head.

I have learned to be careful of "too much process", but I find that the need for structure never disappears.

AI deals well with structure. You can adjust your structure to accept less-structured data, but you still need the structure, for after that.

Just maybe not too much structure[0].

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/various/concrete-galoshes/
by madars | 2025-11-29 19:26:46+00:00
That's a very good question. It all depends on how you pick the witness b: there is a procedure that definitely is not zero-knowledge: say, if prover uses his knowledge of factorization to construct an explicit b that betrays that factorization.

For example, if n = p1*p2*...*pk is square-free and not a Carmichael number, then by Korselt's criterion there exists a pi such that pi-1 does not divide n-1 (this also implies that pi>2). Use the Chinese Remainder Theorem to produce b such that b=1 (mod pj) for all j!=i, and b (mod pi) is a generator of (Z/piZ)^*. Then b is a Fermat witness: gcd(b, n) = 1 (because b is non-zero modulo every prime factor) and b^(n-1) != 1 (mod n) because b^(n-1) != 1 (mod pi) (as pi-1 does not divide n-1).

However, b "betrays" the prime factorization of n, since gcd(b-1, n)>1 (by construction b-1 is divisible by all pj with j!=i, but not divisible by pi>2), and thus gcd(b-1, n) is a non-trivial factor of n. (I assumed square-free above but if pi^ei (ei>=2) divides n, then b=1+pi^(ei-1) (mod pi^ei), b=1 (mod pj^ej) (j!=i) also would have worked.)

On the other hand, it is also known that for non-Carmichael numbers at least half of the bases b with gcd(b, n) = 1 are Fermat witnesses. So if you pick b uniformly at random, the verifier does not gain any new information from seeing b: they could have sampled such a witness themselves by running the same random test. Put another way, the Fermat test itself is an OK ingredient, but a prover who chooses b in a factorization-dependent way can absolutely leak the factors - the final protocol won't be ZK.
by compsciphd | 2025-11-29 19:27:18+00:00
their suite is open source, what's needed to run on a particular hardware device isn't fully open source.

example, could one create a "VM" to run a virtual pebble watch without any of the firmware blobs? (I'm not saying that one exists today, just speaking theoretically, ala a virtual android environment).

Does that mean their software isn't open source? I'd argue no.

One could argue that trying to pass off the pebble watch itself as open source is perhaps "wrong" (but as you say, can debate the value of worrying about blobs), but I don't think that means the "pebble watch software" isn't open source as the title says.

Or better put, there's no legal restrictions on someone creating a "pebble competitor" using the pebble watch with different hardware (that doesn't depend on the blobs included for current hardware).
by kragen | 2025-11-29 19:28:43+00:00
Hmm, I guess you're right. Also EBCDIC does have ^ apparently, though not ↑: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC#Code_page_layout

But IBM's BCD character sets, including the 48-character ones you allude to, didn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCD_(character_encoding)#Examp... (though Honeywell's did)

There are a lot of decisions in Fortran that stem from the absence of useful characters. .LT., .LE., .EQ., .NE., .GT., and .GE. is another.
by sema4hacker | 2025-11-29 19:28:51+00:00
This is for giant items like monuments, obelisks, etc.

If you just need to move a big boulder (say the size of a small desk) on your property, it's relatively easy to use a big lever and fulcrum to lift an edge of the boulder, wedge some rocks under that edge to keep it lifted, reposition the lever deeper under the boulder, and keep lifting and wedging, until the whole boulder flips over. Repeat. Taught to me by my housekeeper who used to move boulders with her father in Mexico.
by FSALINAS26 | 2025-11-29 19:29:08+00:00
I wanted true native macOS “liquid glass” blur inside Qt 6, so this project wraps NSGlassEffectView (an undocumented API) and exposes it as a simple Qt widget. It falls back gracefully on Windows/Linux, so cross-platform apps still work normally.

This is mostly an exploration into how Apple achieves such a fast, low-latency blur compared to typical expensive multi-pass shader approaches. Open to discussion on cross-platform ways to approximate this effect or build a portable shader-based version.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-11-29 19:30:24+00:00
I've cycled the SF South Bay Area, Davis, Amsterdam, Kinderdijk, Bruge, and Antwerp.

Austin TX plants random, worn out, unpainted, leftover, camouflaged concrete shapes that serve no discernible positive purpose in the middle of city streets frequented by motorcycles, pedestrians, cyclists, scooters, and skaters. That's how much of a shit they give about anyone not in a truck or a rented Slingshot.

I keep meaning to cycle DC and Portland.
by pjmlp | 2025-11-29 19:30:34+00:00
That is basically X Windows, unless I am misunderstanding the description.

X Windows server is the part that runs on the client.

Hummingbird nowadays has a different name,

https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/products/remote-access/...

There are also other options like X Win32,

https://www.starnet.com/xwin32/
by alwa | 2025-11-29 19:31:59+00:00
Which way sounds toxic—wanting to get it right now that they’ve become aware it’s a problem? Or getting something down now, as close as possible to what happened yesterday and the day before, to unblock the larger process—then refining it after the fires are out?

Seems like horses for courses to me: I can imagine my very happy healthy teams needing to operate in either mode, depending on the specific problem. I also can imagine us needing the person closest to the problem to tell us which direction applies.

(To your point though, I also can imagine that any type of pressures like these would really bring out the dysfunction in “toxic” teams.)
by LudwigNagasena | 2025-11-29 19:32:00+00:00
Ancient Greeks attributed Mycenaean remains to the “Age of Heroes”. They were amazed by the scale and engineering quality of the work and thought it was done by gods and mythical creatures such as Cyclopes. They didn’t approach progress linearly or mono-dimensionally.

Heinrich Schliemann was probably the first to connect the myths with tangible proof through archeology in late 19th century. While Lévi-Strauss work was much later and more political and polemical rather than scientific.
by troyvit | 2025-11-29 19:32:14+00:00
Even though we, collectively, are driving said train. As a believer in the great filter theory[1] it's a shame given how far we've apparently come, only to be brought low by our desires, our inability to believe we could screw ourselves this royally, and our collective lack of give-a-shit to fix it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
by ineedasername | 2025-11-29 19:32:52+00:00
There are a few things here.

First) This is correct in a trivial and incorrect in profound ways.

Trivial Correct: Clearly language is, at best, a lossy channel for thought. It isn't thought compressed, it is thought where the map would be too complex for language and so we draw a kindergarten scribble we all agree on, and that covers a lot of ground as a an imperfect pointer. This description is itself imperfect, but as a rough sketch not too controversial.

Profound Incorrect: As pointers, it facilitates thought in complex ways that would be incredible difficult otherwise. Abstractions you can build on like building blocks and, so long as your careful about understanding where the word ends and doesn't encompass the full thing, you reduce the risk of reifying the word overmuch. It's not thought, but is isn't thought in some-- not all-- of the ways in which a building's walls is not its interior spaces. Of course it isn't. The space would be there either way, but keeping it all arranged so nicely and easily to reference different elements of it, that is more than just convenience and it is inextricable from language, or at least some representational system for doing this sort of thing.

Second) It is so strange to see this sort of thing written about, in this way, as if it were a new conception, a new view of language. But then I look at the researchers involved: near always backgrounds outside the formal study of linguistics, language itself, and instead focused in other areas adjacent or related. Even computational linguistics-- perhaps especially computational linguistics. The educational pathway there is much more commonly coming from computational paths to applications to language, rather than vice versa. This is much less the case with Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, where traditional biology is much more often within a student's foundation. (This is not anecdotal, analysis of student pathways through academic studies is a past area of my own professional career)

Through the lens of the history of academia over the past few decades, this is not all that surprising. Chomsky's fault (my opinion) for trying to wall off the discipline from other areas of study or perspective other than his own.
by EdNutting | 2025-11-29 19:34:19+00:00
> I recommend more curiosity and less crusading.

That is wonderfully ironic.

Anyway, coming from a C background, sure, strings are kind of just sequences of bytes. For people coming from other backgrounds, they'll have different understandings of what a string is (probably more based on semantics of the language they learnt first than on the underlying representation in memory). I'm not trying to persuade you of one definition or another. Nor am I redefining the meaning of a string, as it's clearly subjective by background and/or by context.

To that end, take my point as merely "you need to know the context", and I happen to believe the context that matters is the semantics of the programming language you're using (as opposed to the underlying representation of an instance of the type in memory).

My comments are also for the benefit of the many folks (particularly junior members of our community) that perhaps don't have exposure to this way of looking at things.
by saghm | 2025-11-29 19:34:41+00:00
> The onus should not be on the communicator to qualify every statement of opinion. This is tedious and unreasonable.

I fundamentally disagree with this. In my experience, it's in pretty much in possible for people to perfectly understand intent without a certain amount of effort from both the communicator to express it clearly and the listener to understand it. In practice, I don't think there's a good chance of successful communication for any nuanced topic without good-faith effort from both sides, and I can't differentiate between the language the author used and what I'd expect to hear from someone who reflexively dismisses any disagreement as in bad faith.
by nunobrito | 2025-11-29 19:35:06+00:00
Most people don't know nor use Monero at all.

Most monero users are on the desktop where the common practice is to download and run their own nodes and/or use monero from Android on apps like CakeWallet, where their node is used and assumed as trustworthy.

To give background info: most users are on desktops because monero mining happens using CPU and instead of GPU, so they install the wallet which comes with a miner included and installs the node as well. They basically make some little income every single day and accumulate that profit.

The other miners like GuPax also install a node on the local computer as well, so a large majority of users simply runs nodes locally because they don't want to send their hashes to remote nodes which might fool them.
by pengaru | 2025-11-29 19:35:27+00:00
Not really, there was a brief excursion in kludging a ZTE MiFi device to use a DIY NiMh pack of AA cells when it refused to stop self-destructing its OEM LiPo batteries every summer. (I use a MiFi hotspot for a cheap security camera network)

It worked as a stop-gap but I've since replaced it with a GL.Inet X300b ruggedized hotspot without any batteries.

There's no UPS for now... if I went the route of wanting uninterrupted power at the property I'd probably put a battery bank underground outside to power the entire building. It's not worth risking anything rechargeable inside the place given how hot it can get, and how long I sometimes go without visiting.
by apparent | 2025-11-29 19:35:57+00:00
Passively charged in the sense that the driver cannot actively force it to be charged, either while driving or by plugging it in (it cannot be plugged in).

Vehicles with a stated electric-only range are typically PHEVs, which can be plugged in. Some non plug-in hybrids can be driven in electric-only mode for very short distances, at low speeds only.
by paulpauper | 2025-11-29 19:36:52+00:00
Everyone is focused on how 'the humanities' are in decline, but STEM is not immune to this trend. The state of AI research leaves much to be desired. Tons of low-quality papers being published or submitted to conferences . You see this on arXiv a lot in the bloated CS section . The site has become a repository for blog post equivalent papers.
by canyp | 2025-11-29 19:37:52+00:00
GP picked the less useful of the two examples. The other one is a use-after-move, which static analysis won't catch beyond trivial cases where the relevant code is inside function scope.

I also agree with them: I am pro-C++ too, but the current standard is a fucking mess. Go and look at modules if you haven't, for example (don't).
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-11-29 19:38:17+00:00
It is implemented behind a permission system. KScreenshot works perfectly fine and so will most of the applications using PipeWire I guess, same that screen captures.

KDE is merely saying that some applications will have to be updated to use it so all of the current screenshot applications won't work out of the box.

No idea of why some commenters here are implying screenshots don't work in Wayland. It seems their knowledge is somehow stuck at the first proof of concept ten years ago.
by rvz | 2025-11-29 19:38:53+00:00
> By 2024, the legacy Python service had a history of reliability and performance issues. Ownership and maintenance of this service had become more cumbersome for all involved teams. Due to this, we decided to move forward into modern and domain-specific Go microservices.

Using Python for a backend system to "scale" really is just pure cope and was unscalable in the first place and in the long run as Reddit just found out. They knew they needed a lot more than just fake optimizations from an interpreted language to improve the performance and a Golang rewrite unsurprisingly solved those issues.

This once again clearly shows that other than in the prototyping stage of an MVP, it really makes no sense to scale with backends written in these interpreted languages in 2025.

Switching to safe, highly performant mature languages such as Golang tells you that it not only generally improves performance, but correctly handles concurrency which Python has always struggled at, especially at scale which is why in Reddit's case, the race conditions now revealed themselves more clearly before the rewrite.
by array_key_first | 2025-11-29 19:38:58+00:00
Nobody is developing x.org because it's a hot mess. It's just been half-baked solutions smacked on top of each other. That's why hardware acceleration barely works and artifacts are just a fact of life.

It's just that Wayland is newer, it's that x.org is a dead end and has been for many decades. If other people want to develop it, then by all means. But they're not, and ultimately I can't put a gun to someone's head and force them to work on a codebase. So here we are.