MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amarant | 2025-11-17 21:20:57+00:00
I've had great success swapping in a in-memory database via dependency injection and just running 100% of the application, end to end.

in the ideal case my tests start by writing some randomised data using the external API, I then update it(if applicable) using the external API, and finally read it, also using the external API, and compare the actual result with what I expected.

I use randomised data to avoid collisions with other tests, which might cause flakiness and/or prevent running the tests concurrently. I avoid having seed data in the database if at all possible.

It's the only approach I've found that can survive a major refactor of the codebase. Anything short of breaking the external API, which is typically a no-no anyway, shouldn't break these tests.

Doing a refactor and being able to rely on the test suite for finding bugs and inconsistencies is amazing. Of course they won't find 100% of all bugs,but this way at least you know that a failing test means there's a problem in your production code.
by nextaccountic | 2025-11-17 21:21:59+00:00
On same level of abstraction I think it's useful to view those tools as some form of constraint solving. Think how you can solve sudoku with pen and paper by writing out each possibility, then fill squares either because it has only one possibility or by making guesses. After you fill a square, you can then update your possible states (propagate constraints), and repeat until you solve it or hit an impossible solve (in which case you need to backtrack on some earlier guess).

The algorithms differ mainly in how they keep track of all possibilities and how they update them

I think this answer is pretty good https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/a/29428 (take note at the end "sat is csp on boolean domains")
by shadowgovt | 2025-11-17 21:22:11+00:00
I don't see why. You can always subscribe to a newspaper. Or just use RSS and a subscription tool since it didn't just go away.

What I'm saying, though, is if you don't use social media at this point you're already an outlier (I am, it should be noted, using the term broadly: you are using social media. Right now. Hacker News is in the same category as Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, et. al. in this context: it's a place you go to get information instead of using a collection of RSS feeds, and I think the reason people do this instead of that may be instructive as to the ultimate fate of RSS for that use-case).
by enjeyw | 2025-11-17 21:22:59+00:00
I've been exploring this concept in LLMs for the last week or so, to see if I can RL train one into being inherently curious.

I haven't got any beyond my own working notes and some basic plots, but I've unceremoniously dumped them into a document here incase anyone else finds them interesting. If so I'd _love_ to chat with you. enjeyw @ google's email provder.

https://thealephengine.substack.com/p/67e3786f-8e84-41bd-888...
by munchbunny | 2025-11-17 21:23:07+00:00
> I don't want to disparage the author as this is a personal journey piece and I appreciate them sharing it. However this did leave me slightly uneasy, almost calling back to earlier days of the internet when advice about "social skills" often meant reductively thinking about other people, assuming you can mind-read them to deconstruct their mindset (the section about identifying people who feel underpraised, insecure, nervous,) and then leverage that to charm them (referred to as "dancing to the music" in this post).

I see why you'd think this, but I disagree. In my opinion it's two sides of the same coin, and the key moral question is whether you use those skills in a moral way. I've seen both well-meaning and charismatic people and not so well-meaning charismatic people, and at the end of the day I believe that charisma is a powerful tool, but it's not fundamentally good or bad.

Social interactions have always felt like a game whose rules I don't intuitively understand, and I've always envied people like my wife who handle it much more naturally and fluidly. The same way that I'm comfortable and capable in analytical settings, they navigate social settings with just as much finesse. I've personally spent a big chunk of my adult life trying to learn to navigate social interactions more comfortably and more intuitively, so I can see some parallels with what the author writes about. (For the record, I'm neurotypical, just awkward.)

For most people I don't think it's about charming, manipulating, or gaming social interactions, I think it's about wanting to make connections and friends because that leads to being happier.
by lelanthran | 2025-11-17 21:23:19+00:00
> In fiction it's called an info dump. As an aspiring science fiction author, virtually every beta reader I've had has told me they don't like them. I want my fiction to make sense, but you have to be subtle about it. To avoid readers complaining, you have to figure out how to explain things to the reader without it being obvious that you're explaining things to the reader, or stopping the action to do it.

The whole "The audience wants to know, but they don't want to hear it" problem.

Usually solved by having characters do something that shows their character. If it's from the past, have a flashback, don't have a narration.

Like real life, people hate sermons.
by akerl_ | 2025-11-17 21:23:59+00:00
My argument is that "open source principles" do not suggest anything about how the maintainers have to handle input from users.

Open source principles have to do with the source being available and users being able to access/use/modify the source. Chrome is an open source project.

To try to expand "open source principles" to suggest that if the guiding entity is a corporation and they have a heavy hand in how they steer their own project, they're not meeting those principles, is just incorrect.

The average open source project is run by a person or group with a set of goals/intentions for the project, and they make decisions about the project based on those goals. That includes sometimes taking input from users and sometimes ignoring it.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-17 21:24:17+00:00
> But instead, if I were really on the Nebuchadnezzar I would have wanted to have hours-long conversations with Neo about the nature and limitations of his powers.

Its a rather important part of the plot of the film that Neo neither understands, nor thinks he understands, not even believes in his powers until fairly late in the film where there are rather urgent pressing concerns that prevent casual hours-long conversations.

Morpheus believes and has at least a fuzzy understanding, and there is an important conversation the whole crew watches between him and Neo where he tried to communicate that understanding so that Neo will understand and believe, but (being an action movie), the conversation is set within a sparring session, not sitting around a conference table.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-17 21:24:50+00:00
>People's moral righteousness on whether they think a person can be judged by a morally neutral and inconsequential action sheds light on their true moral character.

You call it moral righteousness. I call it emotional intelligence. You realize as you grow up that your small actions shape and reflect your larger self. And you can see it in others too.

We call it "work ethic" in white collar jobs, and I'm sure you wouldn't defend someone who's otherwise an excellent programmer submitting sloppy reports, having inconsistent time estimates, or simply making snarky PR's. It's a shame we don't value it when it's not about maximizing shareholder value.
by XorNot | 2025-11-17 21:24:55+00:00
YAML isn't really the problem with Kubernetes though. The Kubernetes problem is that the config is complex and heavily typed, but also essentially ad hoc - outside some basic constructs there's conventions but they're all different or evolved and not uniform.

It does get a lot easier to deal with when you have VS Code tied into CRD definitions for example, butcimmnot convinced config is the problem so much as just Kubernetes is all things to all people and as a result what any given configuration actually does is almost completely random and likely to hit a bunch of edge cases.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-17 21:25:05+00:00
>On a rational level I'm aware that this is probably my sheltered upbringing and that she will understand the dangers of car traffic better than I did

She can understand it all she wants, it won’t make a difference to a driver who is texting in a huge suv/pickup truck with a hood twice your daughter’s height.

It is objectively more dangerous to be a pedestrian/bicyclist/even a person in a smaller car than in previous decades.

And if it’s dark or raining outside, forget about it. Crossing a 50ft wide road with a 40mph speed limit (which means people are actually distracted driving at 50mph) as a kid is daunting.

A 50ft wide road is just 5 lanes, 2 in each direction, and 1 turning lane. Very common in the US, even in small communities.
by throw4847285 | 2025-11-17 21:25:56+00:00
But that's the entire point of the term neurodivergence. Rather than categorizing people into specific pathologies, you acknowledge that every spectrum of human behavior is just that: a spectrum. And that means that some people will be outliers on any given axis.

For example, the author of this piece is clearly on the autism spectrum. Of course, everybody is on the autism spectrum, even people who show no symptoms (they are on the left hand side). This person is clearly functional, but far from what would be considered neurotypical.

The point of neurodivergence is to better understand the various spectra that make up human personality without judgement. And by understand people who are outside the norm, we can better understand humanity as a whole.
by hypeatei | 2025-11-17 21:26:03+00:00
The bit about him spilling olive oil onto someone's dress then playing it off with a flirtatious joke seems very strange to me. Maybe it's just my upbringing but trying to pull off a joke like that in a tense situation seems very risky. I would be worried about coming off unserious, indifferent, and sleazy while also stoking an even angrier reaction from the person.
by canucker2016 | 2025-11-17 21:26:14+00:00
My parents like to tell the story about me getting bored at kindergarten class one day.

I grew up in a residential area in a city of several million people.

The teachers had let the kids out for recess. But even that amount of playful distraction didn't diminish my boredom that day.

So I went home.

In the middle of the school day.

Without the teacher finding out...

I had to cross a stroad to get home - two lanes each way. I can't recall if I crossed at the street light or at a crosswalk a few blocks away. But I made my way home unscathed. My mom was surprised when I showed up at home a few hours early.

The next few days at school, I could feel the teacher's eyes boring into my back as I played during recess. Definitely felt like I was being watched for awhile. :)
by cxr | 2025-11-17 21:26:50+00:00
> It's just ill-informed ideological thinking.

> People see Google doing anything and automatically assume it's a bad thing and that it's only happening because Google are evil.

Sure, but a person also needs to be conscious of the role that this perception plays in securing premature dismissal of anyone who ventures to criticize.

(In quoting your comment above, I've deliberately separated the first sentence from the second. Notice how easily the observation of the phenomenon described in the second sentence can be used to undergird the first claim, even though the first claim doesn't actually follow as a necessary consequence from the second.)
by elmerfud | 2025-11-17 21:27:33+00:00
I don't think anyone actually read the law including the Forbes article. Apparently my previous comment no one seems to understand even the most perfunctory things about the law.

There is no general prohibition about using the seal of the United States. It is only violating these provisions when you use it in a way where a reasonable person would believe it is being endorsed by the United States government.

Clearly based upon the insanity in these comments no one believes that these things are actually endorsed by the government they're just upset at Trump and they're upset at the usage of the seal. Not liking it doesn't violate the law you actually believing that these things are somehow part of the federal government would. As you all represent reasonable people and clearly don't believe this including the author of this article it's just this vague threat that it could violate the law.

If you want it to violate the law you're going to have to be a lot dumber than you actually are or find a bunch of dumber people. Then you would have a case where you could show that these reasonably dumb people believe these are things from our federal government.

Your feelings about something aren't what matters. Try and set them aside.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-17 21:27:34+00:00
>Extra-judicial murder through out of control deployment of weapons via subterfuge is terrorism, also.

No? The slave workers in Nazi germany who purposely fucked up equipment to get german soldiers killed were not committing a war crime. Sabotage is legitimate warfare. The french people getting the trust of german soldiers and then slitting their throats were not committing war crimes.

>Civilians died in those indiscriminate attacks - which were terrorist in nature and deed.

Civilians die in every war because war is messy and the geneva conventions, which only considered prisoners of war until the 4th, do not prevent civilian causalities. They are not intended to. The Geneva conventions were updated after world war 2 and were STILL not made to prevent things like the London Blitz or infrastructure attacks, and indeed things like Russia trying to freeze Ukraine to death by blowing up it's electrical infrastructure is not a war crime.

If hezbollah are legitimate combatants, then they have to wear a uniform during hostilities to be protected by the conventions/protocols/hague. If they do not wear a uniform, they are considered defectors to lawful war and have less protections than actual combatants.

If China puts backdoors in all the chips we buy from them, and we build weapons with those chips, and China pressed a button that self destructs all things made with those chips, that is also not a warcrime.

War crimes are pretty much only treating POWs incorrectly by doing medical "experiments" on them or genociding them. If you are not a POW yet, the Geneva conventions don't say much about you.

Do you people think anyone would have signed a treaty that says "You can't kill more than 1 innocent person per bad guy"?

>Tell me you don't care about the Geneva convention without telling me you've probably never read the Geneva convention.

Big words from someone who doesn't seem to recognize that they geneva convention they've "totally read" doesn't say what they seem to think it says. Please quote the part where blowing up a civilian with your target is called a war crime
by codingdave | 2025-11-17 21:27:51+00:00
Your corporate governance docs should already have the mechanics in place for how this could work. Ask whomever is your attorney/accountant, and be ready to get one of your own.

That being said, try not to accept equity. They can easily dilute that down to nothing in future deals. Ask them to buy out your stake, negotiate as appropriate to agree on a number, walk away with cash, call it a success story, and move on to whatever is next.
by hcta | 2025-11-17 21:27:54+00:00
Trying to show off how smart one is is probably part of the motivation behind many interesting comments posted on here, and more generally, a big motivation behind a huge number of the useful things people do. Doing it in a non-obvious way requires additional ingenuity. The cumulative effect of people trying to show off how smart they are has undoubtedly greatly accelerated the development of our species.
by kbelder | 2025-11-17 21:27:54+00:00
I kind of like Motorola in the cheap android phone space. I have a moto-g stylus in my pocket now, and it's big (which I like), has a heaphone jack, and has an sd-card port. I thought I'd like the stylus, but I rarely use it.

It pre-installs some games, but you can uninstall them. The only thing it forces on you is a weather app which you can deactivate but not uninstall.
by lampiaio | 2025-11-17 21:27:58+00:00
Reminds me of a funny WWII story:

Kenneth Arrow and his statisticians found that their long-range forecasts were no better than numbers pulled out of a hat. The forecasters agreed and asked their superiors to be relieved of this duty. The reply was: "The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good. However he needs them for planning purposes."
by basscomm | 2025-11-17 21:27:59+00:00
Users don't log in to my site.

I eventually started using server-side XSL processing (https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_xslt_module.html) because I wanted my site to be viewable in text-based browsers, too, but it uses the same XSLT library that the browsers use and I don't know how long it's going to be around.
by indigodaddy | 2025-11-17 21:28:09+00:00
Speaking of F5 Big IP DNS devices, does anyone know of any auth DNS software solution for GSLB/health checking for DNS (I guess excluding Route 53 or other cloud/SaaS). Last I looked all I could find was the polaris-gslb addon for PowerDNS, but the GitHub for that has no activity in 8 years.
by cestith | 2025-11-17 21:28:17+00:00
A few things in the article are Douglas Adams quotes, and more specifically from the Hitchhiker’s Guide series.

Creating the universe being regarded as a mistake and making many unhappy is from those books. Whenever someone figures out the universe it gets replaced with something stranger and having evidence that’s happened repeatedly is too. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is reference in the article.

I’m a bit surprised nothing in the article was mentioned as being “mostly harmless”.
by svieira | 2025-11-17 21:29:36+00:00
FYI, you're missing two patterns that allow the `--key=value` admirers and the `-alltheshortopsinasinglestring` spacebar savers among us to be happy (for the otherwise excellent options parsing code).

shopt -s extglob case "$1" # Flag support - allow -xyz z-takes-params -@(a|b|c)*) _flag=${1:1:1}; _rest=${1:2}; shift; set -- "-$_flag" "-$_rest" "$@";; # Param=Value support -?(-)*=*) _key=${1%%=*}; _value=${1#*=}; shift; set -- "${_key}" "$_value" "$@";; esac
Show HN: A Interactive Story App
by easymode | 2025-11-17 21:30:07+00:00
I recently built an iOS app called Pabah — an interactive storytelling app for kids aged 3–6. Inspired by the bedtime stories I tell my daughters, it lets kids guide the adventure through choices that affect the story.

Link: pabahapp.com

Would love to hear what other builders think about the concept or design approach.
by jamesrr39 | 2025-11-17 21:30:27+00:00
Sounds like a Samsung phone... no end of dark patterns and pushing Bixby AI and whatever else. And then once you have the phone set up you get to spend the next 10 minutes uninstalling a load of pre-loadded apps that you didn't want.

Fortunately Android is a pretty diverse range and Samsung is just one player. I had much more user-friendly experiences with Fairphone and Motorola.
by pjmlp | 2025-11-17 21:30:28+00:00
I could write a similar rant based on C and all the dialects that many uneducated on the ways of WG14 assume being proper C, after all I keep track of it since 1991, its UB flaws and security holes that plague C++ due to the base compatibility, but I won't change your mind, nor you will change mine.

By the way, C auto now means the same as C++11 auto.
by volkl48 | 2025-11-17 21:30:32+00:00
I think the problem with your thought is that it really requires a "stars to align perfectly" kind of thing for that to actually be achieved, especially over the long-term.

Many people had that sort of experience in say....the 1950-2000. You had a lot of smaller new developments bulldozed into new areas, and for the first 20 years especially - almost everyone who moved in to those new homes, moved in at a similar time and with young children of a similar age.

In this way, those pockets of suburbia had a bunch of temporary features. You had a much higher quantity of local children within walking distance than would naturally be the case in the long-term for that number of mid-sized SFH homes, and you had a highly developed area with a highly undeveloped area nearby. (land not yet turned into subdivisions like your own).

But a few decades down the line, even without the large behavioral shifts in society - now you've got an endless sea of divided-up suburbia with no nearby wilderness accessible by children on foot/bike, and there's only 2 nearby kids of the same age range rather than 20.

Which is to say - I think it's very difficult to achieve that as as a stable long-term environment, at least with the typical US SFH subdivision density.

And once you get out to rural you run into the problem of the kids not being able to see each other without parental involvement.

-------

Anyway, I did grow up in a "goldlocks zone" environment like you describe. It was very nice, and I was particularly adventurous + had more relaxed than average parents.

But I actually found in (Upstate NY) college that the kids who had the most similar levels of life experience to me were the...NYC kids. The city enabled and outright required them to be much more independent than the more normal US suburb experience was. They'd be taking transit all over the city, many even just to get to school by middle/high school - and then after school they'd be going out with their friends to get snacks or hang out in the park or whatever.

In contrast, many of the "average" suburb peers had basically never been able to go a single place in their lives without an adult driving them until maybe they got a license at 16-17 and seemed very limited in their development for it.

-------

tl;dr - I think the idealized version of a suburb can be good for it, the average US suburb can't stay that way, but I also think major cities offer a lot of potential for them. Denser + walkable medium towns + nature outside them could also be good - but that's more of a EU than US development pattern.
by dimatura | 2025-11-17 21:30:47+00:00
were you using single cycle waveforms or longer samples? in the former case, I guess there's not much to it, you just cycle through the waveform (in which case the waveform you choose would usually start and end at a zero crossing by construction, like sines, triangles, etc - or, if it does not, well, that will just create extra harmonics that might or not be desirable). For the second case, it's more subtle. Most samplers that implement this feature will assume correct loop points (usually, but not necessarily at a zero crossing) are chosen manually by the user. Some of them implement cross-fading at the looping point to make that more forgiving, but that may be CPU/RAM intensive for some devices. If you're referring to small clicks you may get at the start and stop of sample playback, it's fairly common to use very short (ms or less) fade-in/fade-out to avoid that. There's a lot of books out there, but the main one I've read and enjoyed is this one, that happens to be free: https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/book/synthesis/. it's more of a textbook than a cookbook.
by wmf | 2025-11-17 21:31:21+00:00
AFAIK Cloudflare runs their whole stack on every machine. I guess that gives them flexibility and maybe better load balancing. They also seem to use only one NIC.

why is tcp/ip special? The kernel should expose a raw network device. ... Why run a complex network protocol stack in the kernel when you can just expose a configured layer 2 device to a user space process?

Check out the MIT Exokernel project and Solarflare OpenOnload that used this approach. It never really caught on because the old school way is good enough for almost everyone.

why stop there, why not TLS as well?

kTLS is a thing now (mostly used by Netflix). Back in the day we also had kernel-mode Web servers to save every cycle.