MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MrJohz | 2025-11-25 20:37:53+00:00
Why is that a better descriptor? I don't understand this desire to demarcate between programming languages and whatever a "syntax" language is. All languages have syntax, even natural languages - it's one of the terms we've borrowed from linguists.

HTML is one of the languages I use when I am programming. In the sense, I really struggle to see the argument that it isn't a programming language, unless someone is using a very precise definition of "programming language" that I'm not privy to. There's a bunch of well-defined stuff it _isn't_ (e.g. Turing-complete), and a bunch of well-defined stuff that it is (e.g. declarative, or a markup language), but as far as I can tell there's no better definition of "programming language" than "language used for programming", and it certainly seems to fit that bill.
Show HN: A tiny browser-based voice-to-text tool (no signup, no tracking)
by digi_wares | 2025-11-25 20:37:53+00:00
I built this because I got tired of opening big apps just to convert my voice into text. This runs entirely in the browser using the Web Speech API and doesn't store anything— no login, no backend, no cloud uploads.

It started as a personal tool, but then I noticed people were using it daily, so I'm sharing it here. Works on mobile and desktop.

Would love to hear feedback on what to improve or add.
by Jtsummers | 2025-11-25 20:37:58+00:00
Designing or intending a system to be used at massive scale is not the same as building and deploying it so that it only initially runs at that massive scale.

That's just a recipe for disaster, "We don't even know if we can handle 100 users, let's now force 1 million people to use the system simultaneously." Even WhatsApp couldn't handle hundreds of millions of users on the day it was first released, nor did it attempt to. You build out slowly and make sure things work, at least if you're competent and sane.
by anon84873628 | 2025-11-25 20:38:32+00:00
Another complication / nuance is that, of course you should be serving and supporting your partner (and vice versa)! Its part of what makes relationships rewarding. They're not always 50/50 in all aspects.

The trick, as you say, is to know when that is crossing into something unfair. When it goes beyond something like who does the dishes or makes the most money into supporting the other person's core identity. Or when it becomes unsustainable / exhausting for other person. Identifying these issues can be difficult. It requires both partners to be in touch with their feelings and able to communicate openly.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-25 20:38:38+00:00
IQ tests are very deceptive and often misused.

I don't dispute the differences in intellectual capacity between people but IQ tests are like weight lifting contests between people who didn't train to lift weights.

I don't understand why the scientific community keeps using methods that are so flawed. Perhaps it's due to my own lack of information.

The only way I could see IQ tests being a valid measurement of intellectual capacity is if participants were brought to the same level of knowledge and skills, and then were made to train for the IQ test using the exact same means, and even then cultural and language barriers must be accounted for.

Even if these twins have an identical intellctual capacity and they both had the same exact education, and same exact grades, that still doesn't mean they applied and exercised their brains in the same way for the questions of the IQ tests.

IQ tests to measuring intellectual capacity (instead of knowledge level) are like polygraphs to mesasuring truthfulness in terms of accuracy.

For measuring strength, i stand by my earlier correlation with weight lifting. If two people can dead-lift 500lbs, I only know that both participants are have reached that level of strength. What I don't know is how much effort each participant put into getting to that level of strength, which would tell me their natural muscular capacity per effort. IQ tests deceptively seem like they tell you what someone's capacity for intellect is, but they only tell you where that person is right now. Maybe that person worked hard and the score is their max, maybe the person rarely applies their brain to demanding tasks and this is their mid-level capacity.

My point is,it isn't just education or just genetics, it is also personality, effort, motivation. For all I know,someone with double-digit IQ score can work out their brain for a year and hit genius level. Choice. Can a person choose to be a literal idiot and succeed? Certainly, people choose to be incurious and ignorant all the time. Women can body-build and be as strong as many regular men for example. But simply because of a hormone difference, they have to work out a lot more than men to reach the same level of muscular strength. And men who never work out can be as weak as women who never work out.

There is also the question of brain development. Maybe the effort you put has different effect depending on age. small efforts at a young age at applying your brain might have huge impacts, where as if you're a teenager or an adult, applying the same effort might yield less results.

I mean, personally, if I tired, if I ate too much, or too little,if didn't get enough sleep, if I am distracted by something, if I'm unprepared and thus second-guessing myself, these are some of the things that throw me off wildly when taking exams. I've seen huge differences by simply getting enough sleep and calories.

There is no way that asking the same set of questions to to large population (even with control populations in place) can account for all the presumptions of the test.
by SignalDr | 2025-11-25 20:39:07+00:00
I just got blocked by the CEO of ZoomInfo for documenting surveillance infrastructure on their GTM Studio landing page.

Timeline: 1. CEO posts product demo on LinkedIn 2. I analyze the landing page with Chrome DevTools 3. I post findings in comments (40+ cookies pre-consent, biometrics, etc.) 4. CEO blocks me within minutes

So I'm releasing the full evidence pack publicly: https://github.com/clark-prog/blackout-public

What I found: - Sardine.ai behavioral biometrics (mouse/typing patterns) firing before consent - PerimeterX device fingerprinting pre-consent - 118 unique tracking domains on a single page load - Base64-encoded config showing "enableBiometrics: true" - Formal partnership with Sardine (partnerId: "zoominfo")

The irony: ZoomInfo sells visitor identification tools but uses 3 external fingerprinting vendors on their own site.

All evidence is reproducible. HAR files, deobfuscated code, legal analysis included.

AMA about findings or methodology.
by dmurray | 2025-11-25 20:39:16+00:00
I've soured a lot on directly productionizing data science code. It's normally an unmaintainable mess.

If you write it in R and then rewrite it in C (better: rewrite it in English with the R as helpful annotations, then have someone else rewrite it in C), at least there is some chance you've thought about the abstractions and operations that are actually necessary for your problem.
by DrSusanCalvin | 2025-11-25 20:39:19+00:00
Unfortunately yes, teaching AI the entirety of human ethics is the only foolproof solution. That's not easy though. For example, what about the case where a script is not executable, would it then be unethical for the AI to suggest running chmod +x? It's probably pretty difficult to "teach" a language model the ethical difference between that and running cat .env
by wpm | 2025-11-25 20:39:23+00:00
I've been mainlining Orion on my iOS devices for a while now, over a year. Certainly have some issues here and there but overall it's been a solid experience for me, glad to see this hit 1.0. Congrats to the Orion team!

My favorite feature by far is the ability to disable the stupid "hide the address bar if you're not scrolled all the way to the top of a page" behavior every mobile browser does.
by Humorist2290 | 2025-11-25 20:39:43+00:00
Disappointingly, that is an exceedingly good story for a high school assignment. The use of an appositive phrase alone would raise alarm bells though.

It's nitpicking for flaws, but why not -- what lens on an old DSLR, older than a car, will let you take a macro shot, a wide shot, and a zoom shot of a bird?

In any case I'm not surprised. It's a short story, and it is indeed _serviceable_, but literature is more than just service to an assignment.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-11-25 20:39:45+00:00
I think it's very technically possible with a lil bit of cooperation from industry: Private servers that use school creds to login. Now:

* kids play with other kids with same school, worst that can happen is learning some fun words from upper classmate * both teacher and parents can join and play or keep an eye on them * with a bit more it could be segregated to per class /grade server too
by thisislife2 | 2025-11-25 20:39:48+00:00
Consider posting on https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/ . Note however that they don't allow posts about identifying problems - e.g. Why am I having a hard time with my wife?. Rather, you are expected to know what is your specific problem and seek solution to that. Don't go to Reddit - the standard advice there will be "your wife / husband is a toxic partner, run and get a divorce".
by crote | 2025-11-25 20:39:53+00:00
> There are simply far fewer differences between CPUs made in 2010 and today vs CPUs made in 2000 to 2010.

I have stopped replacing machines (and smartphones) because they became outdated: the vast majority of compile tasks is finished in a fraction of a second, applications basically load instantly from SSD, and I never run out of RAM. The main limiting factor in my day-to-day use is network latency - and nothing's going to solve that.

My main machine is a Ryzen 9 3900X with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. And honestly? It's probably overkill. It's on the replacement list due to physical issues - not because I believe I'll significantly benefit from the performance improvements of a current-gen replacement. I'm hoping it'll last until AM6 comes around!

Every task is either "basically instantly", "finishes in a sip of coffee", or "slow enough for a pee break / email response / lunch break". Computers aren't improving enough to make my tasks upgrade to a faster category, so why bother?
by btown | 2025-11-25 20:40:00+00:00
It's really vital to also point out that (C) doesn't just mean agentically communicate externally - it extends to any situation where any of your users can even access the output of a chat or other generated text.

You might say "well, I'm running the output through a watchdog LLM before displaying to the user, and that watchdog doesn't have private data access and checks for anything nefarious."

But the problem is that the moment someone figures out how to prompt-inject a quine-like thing into a private-data-accessing system, such that it outputs another prompt injection, now you've got both (A) and (B) in your system as a whole.

Depending on your problem domain, you can mitigate this: if you're doing a classification problem and validate your outputs that way, there's not much opportunity for exfiltration (though perhaps some might see that as a challenge). But plaintext outputs are difficult to guard against.
by filleduchaos | 2025-11-25 20:40:52+00:00
> I’m not sure where you’re getting these conclusions from

I'm not sure how to say this in a way that does not come across as rude, and I apologise in advance if it does, but I got those conclusions (in actuality, statements of fact) from actually reading the reports and understanding the terms and diagrams in them, where it is pretty clearly detailed that the sequence of events does not start with engine separation? You can quite literally read for yourself in both reports (as opposed to relying on a shallow pop culture understanding of the parts involved) the differences in the initial damage to the pylon.

Like, it is understandable that not everyone is an aviation nerd, but it is quite a bit silly to go "the engine separated so they're the same thing which should have been fixed by now". Or to put it another way - do you drive a car? Do you understand the car you drive, as well as cars in general - do you understand that e.g. there are many different things that can cause a flat tyre and so it makes little sense to point to two road accidents as being the same because they both "start" with a flat tyre, even if they involve the same vehicle + tyre manufacturer?

> My point - and from what I see in the report, a grievance shared by the NTSB, given their citation of AA191

I feel quite comfortable in saying that you are projecting your grievance on the investigating body, actually, especially considering that you've manufactured a narrative out of whole cloth where "all involved parties [threw] up their hands and [swore] they followed all the rules and maintenance schedules". In reality, the investigation detailed within about a month that American Airlines (as well as Continental Airlines and United) was most decidedly not following the maintenance guidance from McDonnell Douglas, which had directly led to the fracture of the aft pylon bulkhead (again, a different part from the one that failed in the UPS crash). But of course, that does not fit into the easy-to-swallow "McDonnell Douglas bad" story that people prefer over actually reading and understanding these reports for themselves.
by torginus | 2025-11-25 20:41:09+00:00
I'm not even sure it's mathematically appropriate to talk about IQ differences as there's no proof IQ is a linear metric. IQ is defined to have a normal distribution, unlike most things which are measured to have a normal distribution.

With IQ tests, the only thing you know that if 2 people fill it out and one of them scores higher, they have a higher IQ. Based on this you can sort people into a list by increasing IQ, but the standard distribution is implied not discovered.

This is like having a double-sided scale and a bunch of weights - you can similarly compare the weights to each other, and sometimes the arm of the scale will lean to the left, sometimes to the right, by a little or lot - you can postulate that the weights are normally distributed are normally distributed, but they are absolutely not required to be (I can choose them any way I like), so your assumption would be wrong. We know this because we have a direct, not just a comparative measure for weight.

I could make up an imaginary 'weight point' scale based on these comparisons, and say weights A is 5 WP heavier than B and C is also 5 WP heavier than A.

But A might be 100g, B might be 1g, and C might be 1kg.

This is what I think of when I see studies clamining the difference between 2 groups was 5 IQ points.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-11-25 20:41:16+00:00
Thanks for your input but your answers still leave me with questions.

> programming language makes program

What makes a static .js file a program, not a document, and a static .html file a document, not a program?

> we use program to render document.

Is this like how node is a program that's used to render JS documents?
by thomastjeffery | 2025-11-25 20:41:26+00:00
What if a 3 day old human knew how to walk? I don't think that would look any different, because they physically can't do it anyway.

The first couple years of human development completely change the structure of the body. Walking is only possible after a significant amount of that process has happened, and the body keeps developing even after you learn how to walk.

A three minute old horse is both structurally and mentally prepared to run. A three year old horse will be taller and heavier, but not structurally different enough to change what walking is to their brain.

What a horse can never do as well as a human, is to learn a completely new behavior. Our brains are unmatched for flexibility in learning. Infant humans don't need to be born with the knowledge or the structure for waking. Both can develop together over time because our brains are able to develop new behavior.

The mystery here is the difference between a horse thinking "legs go" and a human thinking "legs that are just ready to hold me up, do what I see other people do, and don't fall over". We only have a vague linguistic model to express our understanding of the underlying complexity.
by nickpp | 2025-11-25 20:41:29+00:00
> a big chunk of USAmericans have been living paycheck to paycheck

That doesn't mean they are poor, just poor with their money. Saving is a skill that needs to be learned.

> That's bad advice.

No. Not investing, when the S&P500 index had a 6% inflation-adjusted annual historical return over the last 100 years - is bad advice. Not hedging the arrival of an AGI that you think can replace you - is bad advice.
by verdverm | 2025-11-25 20:41:31+00:00
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/2/new-prompt-injection-pa...

Meta wrote a post that went through the various scenarios and called it the "Rule of Two"

---

At a high level, the Agents Rule of Two states that until robustness research allows us to reliably detect and refuse prompt injection, agents must satisfy no more than two of the following three properties within a session to avoid the highest impact consequences of prompt injection.

[A] An agent can process untrustworthy inputs

[B] An agent can have access to sensitive systems or private data

[C] An agent can change state or communicate externally

It’s still possible that all three properties are necessary to carry out a request. If an agent requires all three without starting a new session (i.e., with a fresh context window), then the agent should not be permitted to operate autonomously and at a minimum requires supervision --- via human-in-the-loop approval or another reliable means of validation.
by Weves | 2025-11-25 20:41:43+00:00
Totally get this concern.

How we think about it: the chat product should be completely open-source and free (forever). To that end we've moved features like SSO (that used to be "enterprise") to be MIT licensed. The chat interface is something pretty much every team needs (be it a proprietary or open-source solution). You can think of this like Apache Spark for Databricks or Ray for Anyscale.

Also, as other folks have pointed out in the thread, there are quite a few other open source options out there. So there's a a ton of outside pressure for our open-source only offering to be very competitive. We hope this reduces the "enshitification" risk that you speak of.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-25 20:41:57+00:00
There are a lot of free-to-play mobile games (say Arknights) that you can play for free and have a pretty good time. I got lucky and got two “game breaking” characters playing for a reasonable time but if you have the idea that you absolutely have to have a specific character or collect all of them boy you can spend a crazy amount of money and those people pay for all the rest of us.
by zzo38computer | 2025-11-25 20:41:59+00:00
I think it depends what you will intend to do with the data (which is true for all of the formats that you mentioned); not everyone will do the same thing with it even if it is the same file. It might be helpful to know from other programs that do not know this schema to be able to parse the data (not always the case when using IMPLICIT types in ASN.1, which is one reason to use EXPLICIT instead, although it has avantages and disadvantages compared with IMPLICIT; however, in DER all types will use the same framing allowing the framing to be parsed even if the specific type cannot be understood by the reader), and can also be used in case the schema is later extended to use types other than the ones that were originally expected. (I prefer to use ASN.1 DER in my stuff, although JSON and other formats are also used by other formats that were made by someone else)
by PunchyHamster | 2025-11-25 20:42:02+00:00
> That’s pretty much the antithesis of online gaming. You’re not ONLY playing with other kids you know.

That's how online gaming looked for us back then, played in school over LAN or in local small town's "ISP" (which was just a bunch of ethernet cables strung together between apartment blocks).

It was fucking great.

And if choice (with parents not wanting to risk wider internet) is "play with your classmates/grade" and "don't play", it's far better option
by lelanthran | 2025-11-25 20:42:19+00:00
> I, too, settled on a minimalist process for deploying my blog, just build it with a Hugo, copy the files over to a cheap server, and there you go, deployed.

Meh. That's over-engineered[1] /s :-)

--------------------

[1] I have a bash script that produces the site from markdown snippets, commits it to a repo and the VPS pulls master periodically.
by evanelias | 2025-11-25 20:42:22+00:00
I had a similar reaction to that, glad it's not just me.

Meanwhile with the 4th item, this whole example is gross, repeatedly polling a buffer every 100ms is a massive red flag. And as for the data race in that item, the idiomatic fix is to just use io.Pipe, which solves the entire problem far more cleanly than inventing a SyncWriter.

The author's last comment regarding "It would also be nice if more types have a 'sync' version, e.g. SyncWriter, SyncReader, etc" probably indicates there's some fundamental confusion here about idiomatic Go.
by mbesto | 2025-11-25 20:43:17+00:00
> We want to go as "close to the metal" as we realistically could as soon as we could.

All of the value in payments is on the top (acquiring payfac side)...all of the value on the issuing side is only made via extremely high volume and requires a ton of tech that just schleps data (no fun). I'd recommend getting this idea out of your head.
by retskrad | 2025-11-25 20:43:47+00:00
Speaking of IQ, when I listen to interviews and podcasts of supposed high IQ people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, I struggle to see signs of intelligence (not saying that they don’t have above average IQ). I find that these 2 have a hard time sifting through the noise (competing thoughts) in their head to get to want they want to say (the signal).

When I listen to Steve Jobs, I hear someone who has very strong ability to sift through noise. So Jobs couldn’t see engineering in a new way like Elon does but Elon couldn’t do what Jobs did either.

Regarding Zuckerberg, from what I’ve read he is the Bill Gates type where he has the traditional variant of high IQ, aka raw hardware/horsepower but lower on creativity/imagination side.

So intelligence seems to have different shapes and sizes.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-25 20:43:48+00:00
greed, as always. It's an interesting Tragedy of the Commons. Though "commons" is a weird word to use for private corporations.

They could have charged $50 a month if everything were truly in one place and always available. Instead they had to cut here and there to dodge residuals. Then cut more here and there to optimize slop over prestige, then cut more here and there to try and save money on licenses, then cut more here and there to try and become the middleman themselves. the cut more here and there to "maximize engagement" and compete with an entirely different business model and medium.

Ultimately the shareholders ruin everything with their short term mentality of companies. They keep rewarding hype over substance and overall health. And of course the consumers suffer in teh end.
by stackghost | 2025-11-25 20:44:29+00:00
Too often on this site you see the opinion "keep politics out of it" expressed.

But there are going to be software engineers working at these surveillance and tracking firms, probably some on this site.

Just like there are people here getting paid to work on Facebook or Instagram despite knowing deep down (even if they're in denial) that those products are profoundly harmful to society at large and young people in particular.

Technology is only becoming more intertwined with daily life, not less. When does the software industry develop scruples?