MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sjamaan | 2025-11-18 10:19:53+00:00
> When someone uses my name in conversation, it makes me think less of them, because it's so unnatural and clearly they might be doing it to manipulate me.

Oh man, I always find it so slimy when people do that! I've also noticed it's mostly HR people or sales people who do this, so clearly it's a phony technique they learned somewhere. But I suppose it gets taught because it works, maybe for people who don't pick up on the fact that it's so forced?
by wrxd | 2025-11-18 10:20:40+00:00
Dismissing full-blown programming languages is a mistake IMHO. Sometimes it's useful to generate configuration (e.g. starting from a template and to build configuration for prod vs QA or for various deployment targets).

If you have a full-blown programming language you can sprinkle a little bit of code in the template and get express everything you need in a clean way. If all you have is a templating language you have to shoehorn your logic into it (likely making a mess) or use the templating language + a "real" programming language.
by balamatom | 2025-11-18 10:21:13+00:00
>am I really that good at masking that my therapist didn't realize I am absolutely terrified in near all social situations?

Or is your therapist attempting to bootstrap a self-fulfilling prophecy, i.e. when you feel socially overwhelmed, you'd remember that they praised you for being social, and the warm fuzzies of being praised would make you feel less overwhelmed?

You know, as the grand maxim of software engineering goes, "whatever works" lmao
by jstanley | 2025-11-18 10:21:26+00:00
In my experience the problem with Debian is that sooner or later you're bound to want to use something that is only 5 years old and therefore not included yet, so you end up having to install it from source or something else, but something doesn't quite work right so you have to hack it one way or another, and over time all this cruft adds up and you end up with a broken system caused precisely because the base distro refused to change fast enough.
by tovej | 2025-11-18 10:22:18+00:00
I have not said that Israel should not exist, that is your extrapolation.

Israel should be held accountable for what it has done, and if it does not further a two state solution, it should be sanctioned by the international community. Current and previous political leaders should be prosecuted for war crimes, and the country should be reformed into a secular democracy.

That's it, that's my stance.

Now, I don't see any of this happening, and I see a genocide being committed.

You're then characterising any military response as genocidal. This no longer feels like an honest response. First, it's Israel that has decided it wants to be an ethnostate, the only reason it would seem genocidal is because Zionists have conflated a religion with a nationality with citizenship. The bad actor of Israel should still be a valid target of military actions just like others are. Would you say that the allies committed a genocide when they attacked Nazi Germany in the second world war?

And where are you getting these ideas of "invading forces slaughtering everybody"? This is starting to sound like Zionist propaganda. I'm sorry but hypothetical threats do not matter when compared with actual apartheid and genocide.

The Palestinians have always been the less violent party. Israel is also a much more violent and offensively postured military actor than Iran, they developed nukes in secret for chrissakes, and they seem to have immunity from international sanctions.

Israel could choose to live in peace by changing it's military posture, by not constantly attacking its neigbours and destabilizing the region. They currently illegally occupy territory in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. They could simply stop doing that to begin with.
by Lio | 2025-11-18 10:22:22+00:00
I remember Damien Hirst's response to people saying that anyone could have created his "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living"[1].

He'd simply respond with "But you didn't, did you?".

I think that Hirst had a point.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physical_Impossibility_of_...
by lil-lugger | 2025-11-18 10:23:53+00:00
The only AI tools that will ever be truly useful are the ones you build yourself. Basically in this world useful = dangerous. Moving files around, changing file names, deleting files, reading emails responding to emails. The AI’s can do it but it’s dangerous, safeguards like human in the loop aren’t feasible at scale. Yet I’ve built agents or used Claude Code in folders to do this manually and it’s amazing - but every application with an AI button now you just KNOW it can’t do the thing you want it to do.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-18 10:24:51+00:00
In C I am responsible to tell the compiler where my arrays end. How is it supposed to know how many arrays there are in an allocation? Why should the compiler trust one expression about the size, but not the other? If I would want to limit memcpy by the size of the destination, I could write memcpy(dest, src, MAX(dest_size, ...)) instead, but I don't want that most of the time.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-11-18 10:26:38+00:00
That certainly seems to be their attitude. If israel had listened to all of the advice from Britain and France it may well have been 60k Israelis dead. Imagine how many palestinians would have died. Nobody here is arguing against israel in good faith. If anyone had genuinely cared about the palestinians they would have put massive pressure on Hamas and put their full support behind a quick and brutal campaign. What would have happened? A 2 month long war and 20k dead max.
by doctorshady | 2025-11-18 10:28:02+00:00
I had a cat for a while that seemed surprisingly capable when he was motivated. The most interesting thing I saw him pull off was pushing a heavy bag of cat food off the top of a refrigerator to split it open.

Occasionally, he'd demonstrate the ability to plan too. When he started to get territorial and start fights with neighborhood cats, we started keeping him inside. Naturally, this didn't sit right with him. After watching someone enter the house every day in the evening, eventually, he would perch next to the door in the evening waiting to bolt out the moment the door opened.
by npteljes | 2025-11-18 10:28:15+00:00
No need for personal attacks.

I don't know about your argument. PC doesn't have official support either. Games say they run on Windows, or whatever, but PC is notorious for tinkering, and for random things happening. And that's on the first party platform, Windows!

Then, for a more streamlined gaming experience, there are the consoles. Games come out for consoles, so they must work on the console, right? Well, they kinda do, and they kinda don't. There is a myriad of issues on consoles as well, most notably performance issues, but there are high-profile other ones as well, like with the launch of Cyberpunk 2077.

Running software, in my opinion, is just not a guaranteed experience like playing a movie, or listening to some music. Sometimes things just don't work, and that's in the name of the game. Sometimes, especially on PC, part of the happiness is to get it to run in the first place. And in this context, Proton works very well. There are millions of people out there enjoying it on the Deck, and I'd wager two orders of magnitude more people playing with other iterations of Wine, be that Lutris, proton-ge, Bottles, etc.

I think this is a case of letting the perfect be the enemy of good.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-18 10:29:09+00:00
It's such an erractic industry in terms of compensation. You can found a studio, make some acclaimed darlings, and still end up shuttering and being no better off than your average joe. Then there's being a "software engineer in games" where you're a cog in a wheel fixing bugs in the yearly Sportball game that gets compensated 200k and you live very well despite never truly "impacting" the industry the same way. 200k isn't mindblowing for a software engineer, but it's well beyond "average joe" range at that point.

I'm that cog. Or at least, was. Situations like this make me thing a lot about the state of the industry and where I lie in life.
by torginus | 2025-11-18 10:29:26+00:00
I wonder what happened to hardware transactional memory. Your CPU caches already keep track of which core is keeping which line in its cache and whether they have modified it via the MESI protocol:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MESI_protocol

So it has most of the hardware to support transactional memory, only it's not exposed to the user.

Intel had their own version, but it turned out it was buggy, so they disabled it and never put it in any subsequent CPU so that was that.
by aspenmayer | 2025-11-18 10:30:03+00:00
“The desert of the real” scene in The Matrix is a microcosm of an infodump that prefigures the film, just by virtue of being a reference in and of itself, and at once a callback to a prior scene which breaks the fourth wall, through subverting our own history and philosophical traditions by embedding them part and parcel in the Matrix itself as Neo knows it, before he’s even aware of its edges and contours:

In the earlier scene with Neo asleep on his desk at home (and still asleep in the Matrix) with everything strewn about, the book Simulacra and Simulation is briefly shown onscreen, which is the origin of the phrase that Morpheus speaks, perhaps because Morpheus knows that Neo would know the significance of it, or perhaps because, like the vase which Neo breaks after being warned to watch out for it, Morpheus wants the viewer to know that he knows what Neo does not: that he is the One, that the self-fulfilling prophecy must be proclaimed to become manifest.

I would suggest that each character on the Nebuchadnezzar has their own backstory and significance independently of Neo, and they don’t necessarily believe in Neo being “the One” until he’s tested and proved. Each of the ship’s crew acts as a foil or fan, a stumbling block or even antithesis to Neo. I think only Trinity is able to see him as a duality of man, one who could be the One when he thought he knew he wasn’t, with her perhaps being a kind of proto-believer in our self-doubting Thomas (Anderson) who himself wants to believe; that doubt causes Neo to have faith: that he might be the One, because he wants to be, for her sake and for all their sake, and that faith allows him to take up the mantle of the One, and to succeed others which came before him.

The visual medium is used to full effect in the film; Easter eggs follow white rabbits, after all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome_to_the_Desert_of_the_R...

> The book's title comes from a quote delivered by the character Morpheus in the 1999 film The Matrix: "Welcome to the desert of the real". Both Žižek's title and the line from The Matrix refer to a phrase in Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. Part of this phrase appears in the following context of the book:

> > If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly [...] this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacrum [...] It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.

> Early in The Matrix, Neo used a hollowed-out book with the title Simulacra and Simulation to hide an illegal data disc which appeared in an early scene of the film.
by nabla9 | 2025-11-18 10:30:03+00:00
I cry for Elon, that precious jewel of a human being.

Tesla (P/E: 273, PEG: 16.3) the car maker without robots, robotaxis is less than 15% of the Tesla valuation at best. When the AI hype dies, selloff starts and negative sentiment hits, we have below $200B market cap company.

It will hurt Elon mentally. He will need a hug.
by agalunar | 2025-11-18 10:30:53+00:00
> A data race occurs any time two threads access the same memory location concurrently and non-deterministically when at least one of the accesses is a write.

From what I understand of the C++ memory model (shared by C and Rust), this is not the definition of data race – a data race occurs when two or more threads access memory concurrently where at least one access is a write and the accesses are unsynchronized. However, synchronized accesses may not have a deterministic ordering, in which case a race condition occurs.

(Confusing as it may be, I believe this is standard terminology.)
by Mystery-Machine | 2025-11-18 10:31:50+00:00
Symbols are a foot gun.

> Symbols aren’t interchangeable though.

user = { name: "Alice", age: 30 } puts user[:name] # Alice puts user["name"] # nil

I'm 100% convinced that every Ruby developer has at least once made a bug where they tried to access a hash entry using a symbol, where the key was actually a string or vice-versa.

It would be great if Ruby would finally have immutable strings by default and, at that point, it would be possible to make symbols be strings. This would prevent any such user[:name] vs user["name"] bugs while not breaking any other functionality. And also keeping the memory "optimized" by reusing a single immutable string.
by francescopace | 2025-11-18 10:33:06+00:00
Currently, ESPectre performs only binary motion detection (IDLE/MOTION) based on simple statistical thresholding.

It cannot ignore cats or prioritize size over speed directly on the device, but ESPectre's architecture is designed to enable this kind of advanced classification externally.

It collects a rich set of pre-processed features (spatial turbulence, entropy, etc.) and transmits them via MQTT.

Any external server (like a Home Assistant add-on or a dedicated Python script) can use these features as the input for a trained ML model to perform classification (e.g., Cat vs. Human vs. Fall detection vs. Gesture detection).

Regardin Ruckus Router / Beamforming: for CSI sensing, stability is generally more important than raw power. I recommend starting by disabling beamforming or reducing the power output if you experience poor motion sensitivity, as the stability of the ESP32 receiver is often the bottleneck.
by keyringlight | 2025-11-18 10:34:12+00:00
On the UI side of things the trouble with 8 was the push towards touch as the latest shiny object to chase, coming a few years into the boom of smartphones/tablets. The start menu was full screen with no option and many OS applications were either full screen only or by default until you clicked a new title bar button. The 8.1 release pulled back from a lot of that.
by Lapsa | 2025-11-18 10:34:18+00:00
point is - such tech is used right now to neutralize individuals. imagine hearing word "bread" inescapably couple hundred times a day coming from an unknown source right to your head. for months and (!) years right at the moment you are trying to conceptualize slightly harder thought than usual. everywhere you go 24/7. while there's no help from anywhere (police hasn't answered me for 2 years and counting) as the general public brushes it off as schizophrenia (it's not - voices completely stopped when the lightning storm took out the electricity) and Church paints it as the second coming of Christ (or antichrist when more suitable).
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-18 10:34:39+00:00
That's the issue I have with criticism of LLMs.

A lot of people say "LLMs are fundamentally flawed, a dead end, and can never become AGI", but on deeper examination? The arguments are weak at best, and completely bogus at worst. And then the suggested alternatives fail to outperform the baseline.

I think by now, it's clear that pure next token prediction as a training objective is insufficient in practice (might be sufficient in the limit?) - which is why we see things like RLHF, RLAIF and RLVR in post-training instead of just SFT. But that says little about the limitations of next token prediction as an architecture.

Next token prediction as a training objective still allows an LLM to learn an awful lot of useful features and representations in an unsupervised fashion, so it's not going away any time soon. But I do expect to see modified pre-training, with other objectives alongside it, to start steering the models towards features that are useful for inference early on.
by thrance | 2025-11-18 10:35:55+00:00
The Biden administration sat on many thing, their total passiveness is no indication of anything. After all, they let the Jan 6 coup attempt go by with nothing but a strongly-worded speech that no one listened to. At this point, there is zero doubt remaining that Trump is indeed a pedophile and a rapist, just click on his node in TFA and read all we know about him. If that is not enough to get him actually convicted, then this country is truly and utterly fucked, and there's nothing to do but to wait for it to crumble under the weight of its own stupidity and corruption.
by close04 | 2025-11-18 10:38:27+00:00
I wasn't compiling a list list of values that are consistent, just values that were historically taught to boys/men. There were teachings in that vein for centuries and millennia. Some are contradicting ("be a gentleman" / "don't take no for an answer"). Bottom line, "never give up", "control your emotions", "don't cry" are not a "nowadays" thing by any measure.

> That's why the main focus was not in fact "big boys don't cry", it was "big boys don't get angry/freak out/throw temper tantrums, EVER"

In practical experience "boys don't cry" has been a staple of the actual education boys get for centuries. To the point that a lot of boys got a smacking for crying. Temper tantrums are as natural as crying, a reaction to the developing brain. They were considered abnormal and "destructive" because that was the limit of our understanding in child psychology.

On the other hand getting educated to never "get angry/freak out/throw temper tantrums, EVER" is just as toxic. Boys and men are asked to bottle up everything and this sort of worked, still with a high mental health price, in the past when there were outlets for that pressure. With those gone we just made the situation worse.
by pjmlp | 2025-11-18 10:38:35+00:00
Win32, Windows Forms, WPF, even MFC, I do agree.

WinUI, only Microsoft employees on the Windows team, and fools that aren't aware of all the WinRT tooling reboots since Windows 8 was introduced, buying into WinUI marketing of how great it is.

As one of the fools that thought WinRT was a great idea, what .NET 1.0 should have been, I doubt there are many of those left.

WPF wasn't brought back into active status at BUILD 2024 by accident.
by Arisaka1 | 2025-11-18 10:38:52+00:00
>It's the same with genetics. Getting lucky with looks is fine but working for the same goal (eg surgery) is somehow bad and people often hide it.

We also tend to hide how hard we work to make our success look natural, but we reveal how hard we work on the extremes of success. For example, if I work hard and take a score of 17 out of 20 in a test people will say "I barely read last evening, phew", but if you're consistently scoring 19-20/20 people may even approach you to learn your studying methods and for tips, because they assume there are important takeaways that they can adopt.

It's my pet peeve with how society recognizes that someone is talented, which is blatantly flawed because all you can do is see what they're capable of doing. Someone may be talented yet unable (or unwilling?) to tap into their talent, but since we recognize talent by the output you can't really tell the existence of talent unless it's at the extremes of success, like the 8 year old who can solve mathematics that are a grade or more above the current grade.

I see talent like a genetic predisposition that can be appropriately cultivated to attain success. It's not much different than my height, because I didn't choose it, yet I can guess that there are men out there who hate the fact that I have their desirable height yet I never hit the gym, cultivate my social skills, or take advantage the fact that I look younger than I am. I am willing to bet everything that I met at least one person who thought of all of these things the first moments they looked at me.

But at least genetic predispositions like height are visible to the naked eye and no one can dispute the differences. When it comes to differences in the brain it's where we ignorantly proclaim that things are obscure therefore they can violate the very facts of observable nature.

In sort, not only I fully agree with you, but I also agree with the obvious double standards in society around it. If I take ADHD medication and that helps with my focus to improve my performance in school or work then I deserve that success as much as someone who naturally had no problems with ADHD. Why is this different for looks (like hair transplants, etc.) is beyond me.
by Draiken | 2025-11-18 10:39:38+00:00
I use i3wm and I have this issue with escaping mouse in CS2. I thought about using gamescope but never did. You mention you found a solution so would you be kind enough to share it?

That would definitely save me part of that hour you lost :) But honestly, I'd trade that hour on linux a thousand times to not have to close another notification from Windows about this amazing new game they have for me to install. And I don't even have Windows 11.

Linux has quirks, of course, but every OS has them. People like to dismiss quirks on Windows because they're used to it, but a lot of the time they're worse than Linux's quirks.
by npteljes | 2025-11-18 10:39:54+00:00
"We" are absolutely not fine with the state of things there, but there is also not much to do for these poor people, aside from some non-political volunteer help. One of the reasons is the that, as I understand it, China and NK are diplomatically close, with them having a mutual defense treaty among other things. So if you meddle in NK, you also meddle with China, and "we" don't exactly meddle with China either, even in face of their most condemned actions like the treatment of Uighur, since they are a superpower.

Another thing is that NK is very highly publicized in Western media, and people seem to have a kind of fascination with it. But regarding humanitarian catastrophes, other parts of the world are very busy as well. If you look at the HRI table, there are a lot of horrible places, and "we" don't as much talk about most of these.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem?t...
by pjmlp | 2025-11-18 10:40:45+00:00
Agreed, or I don't know, actually promote internal trainings for the folks that lack the experience.

The problem isn't hiring people that only know macOS/Linux, we always argue about how bad HR hiring processes are in our field.

The problem is apparently the lack of management motivation to bring those peoples up to speed, and is confortable pushing for Web widgets instead.
by Lapsa | 2025-11-18 10:40:48+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromyography

``` Unvoiced or silent speech recognition recognizes speech by observing the EMG activity of muscles associated with speech. It is targeted for use in noisy environments, and may be helpful for people without vocal cords, with aphasia, with dysphonia, and more. ```

radiomyography ~= form of electromyography
by dwattttt | 2025-11-18 10:41:10+00:00
The maybe unexpected point is that if you know you're the only one who has a reference to a Mutex (i.e. you have a &mut), you don't need to bother lock it; if no one else knows about the Mutex, there's no one else who could lock it. It comes up when you're setting things up and haven't shared the Mutex yet.

This means no atomic operations or syscalls or what have you.