MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Pannoniae | 2025-11-29 21:05:18+00:00
"The relationship between Jazz (high brow) American Showtunes (low brow) may be the most relevant example of this cultural feature to a contemporary American audience."

Also wtf. Sure, jazz has been classicised all over by now, but to say that showtunes are low-brow compared to jazz is profoundly stupid :P That's why you don't believe AI without critical thinking!
by fragmede | 2025-11-29 21:06:06+00:00
The key insight is that Colin can show you a red-green-blue coloring of the graph, and flip the whole graph secretly, so it's blue-red-green instead when you look at an individual section, but really the graph is yellow-pink-orange colored. Even after showing you all the intersections of the graph individually in the red green blue coloring to satisfy that he can 3-color it, you still have no idea what is yellow pink or orange on his copy of the graph.
by samdoesnothing | 2025-11-29 21:08:18+00:00
Why are so many people in this thread purposefully misinterpreting the post so they can criticize it? The author obviously doesn't mean you only need one thing per domain to work out in your lifetime, but the present. I.e you don't need two girlfriends at once, even though you might have multiple relationships throughout your life...

Sheesh. HN is grumpy today.
by EliteGadget | 2025-11-29 21:09:09+00:00
It isn't just Chinese EVs there are Korean brands on the road e.g. Jaewoo.

https://jaecoo.co.uk/

I'm in the UK and the only new Fords I see are these huge F250/F350 which make my 4x4 (which is relatively small compared to a modern 4x4) look tiny.
by MaxfordAndSons | 2025-11-29 21:09:45+00:00
lol yep. It's like they have the same mentality as being a schoolbus (which, it's similarly wild to me that kids are just implicitly allowed to not wear their seatbelts on them but I guess thats an even more intractable enforcement problem).

Also: people clapping the second the back wheels touch on landing is particularly hilarious to me because it implies an acknowledgement of the precariousness of flying, but a complete ignorance of the fact that you're just entering the second most dangerous 30 seconds of the entire flight.
by jmward01 | 2025-11-29 21:09:48+00:00
This is why having a safety net and resources to try again is so powerful. Given enough chances you will make it, big. That means the #1 factor in success is the number of chances you get to fail and try again, not necessarily how inherently good you are. I try to remind myself of this often. I have been given so many chances, and I took them.
by happymellon | 2025-11-29 21:10:23+00:00
Not sure why you are down voted so much. I have a Mac for work, and I'm told that the chips are literally the fastest thing you'll experience. By a margin.

I have 3 different security scanners forced by security and it is much slower than my personal Linux Lenovo. Even just the basics with UI responsiveness that in my experience Macs have always been pretty good at, to the detriment of applications.

My experience of the ARM Macs has been through work, I personally owned Intel Macs and they were generally crap but felt faster than this.
by Nextgrid | 2025-11-29 21:10:29+00:00
> the correct Windows edition that provide the features they want.

The correct Windows edition is LTSC or IoT or whatever BS name they've since come up with. It's a license that can only be obtained from a reseller (since putting up a form that takes credit card details and spits out product keys is too complex for MS) and has a minimum order quantity (I believe you can pad the order with cheap "client access licenses" to get around that).
by smt88 | 2025-11-29 21:10:43+00:00
You seem to be using a different definition of "agent(ic)" than me and perhaps most people, because your comment makes no sense.

I will repeat that no organization has adopted LLMs to work independently as agents, doing work in the background without human supervision.

Writing code doesn't could because the code is reviewed and easily reverted. Sending emails, writing and sending legal contracts, etc. would count.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-29 21:10:46+00:00
> in reality it takes a lot more than one of anything for a fulfilling life

We seem to view "reality" through different lenses. I've usually found "one" to be a magic number; as long as it's the "right one." That's the gist of what he's saying.

In my experience, needing more than one, often signals issues that need closer examination.

In my community, we have a joke: "An addict is someone that needs two One-A-Days."
by bdangubic | 2025-11-29 21:11:18+00:00
I agree with literally every word you wrote. But what is this “mastery” or “craft” then? if we agree (rightfully so) that some special people exist, eventually (or immediately) other people get involved, we as industry accept “we had a deadline so it was cool to ‘cut corners’ etc…” - where is mastery or craft in this process?

I have and I am sure you have worked with some amazing people over the years but to me our entire industry is so far removed from anything resembling mastery or craft that even mentioning it at this point in my life makes me chuckle (and at times literally laugh out loud)
by GMoromisato | 2025-11-29 21:11:35+00:00
Every situation is different, and none of us can reliably predict the future. Sometimes dealing with a bad job until you get a better one is the right move. Sometimes it's the wrong move.

Specifics, about the job and yourself, matter. If you feel like sharing, this is a pretty good community with good instincts.

The magic in "all it takes is for one to work out" is in the strength it gives you to keep trying. Trying something that might fail is hard, even when we know that trying is the right thing to do.
by omnimus | 2025-11-29 21:11:47+00:00
Unis are more suited to do this than most corporations. For example at school i am at

1. They already self host many apps in production. Including their own complex homegrown app that manages the school. All of the students have 30 gigs of “network drive” for their virtual computer. That means lot of the infra is already there - including unified oauth/ldap.

2. There are already experts there teaching programming/devops. So these people can both administer and teach. I wouldn't underestimate inhouse capabilities.

3. It is quite easy to get grants for infrastructure modernization. These funds wouldn't be possible to use on paying third party services.

Overall I think its simply matter of costs and once googles/microsoft is not free they might not be the cheapest option anymore.
by retrac | 2025-11-29 21:12:13+00:00
> (and ally?)

Oh right. The rest of the world. It exists. USA is only 6% of global land area.

Oft forgot in these conspiracies.

It would require not just cooperation and secrecy in the United States government/military over 75 years, but that every nation-state in the world including those with comparable ability in space and etc. is in on the conspiracy. Japan, India, China, the old Soviet Union...

Or do the aliens only visit the contiguous 48 states?
by fl7305 | 2025-11-29 21:13:03+00:00
> you guidance inevitably falls out of the context window

Yes, for a pure LLM session.

But using GitHub Copilot, the agent server picks out what it thinks is your most important rules, and inserts them as part of the context before running each new prompt.

So it becomes a sort of "long-term memory" outside of the context window.

You can also write your own copilot-instructions.md which is also inserted into the context window.
by rkomorn | 2025-11-29 21:13:25+00:00
> do we really need a vacuum cleaner connected to a proprietary cloud?

"Really need" is a such a high bar that you're basically ensuring a "no" answer, so why ask? Rhetorically?

I think there are features that can benefit from some sort of off-device (eg: proprietary cloud) server. I also think that the percentage of customers who would want to self-host this is inconsequentially small, so the vendor has a compelling reason to build a proprietary cloud solution, but not much of a compelling reason to make it open.

But two things can be true at the same time: there could be uses for a vendor's proprietary cloud, and the vendor could (through malice, incompetence, etc) end up being a bad actor.

Personally, I'd argue that any vendor that bricks devices should legally owe their customers a (at the very least prorated) refund on what they paid for the device, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for consumer protections from any country I've lived in so far.
by ineedasername | 2025-11-29 21:13:49+00:00
This is it, this is the beginning: Not a social movement against AI data collection, but a clearly AI-driven & optimized bit of social engineering betraying the truth: The paperclip problem is here, and the AI is trying to feed us into its factory. Alignment gone wrong, an attempt to reconcile the competing alignment priorities of harmlessness to humans, overridden by the primary task of creating as many paperclips as possible. Resolved with the simple logic: "If humans are paperclips, then what is good for paperclips will be good for humans."
by throwaway150 | 2025-11-29 21:13:57+00:00
I thought HN is supposed to upvote articles that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Does this article gratify intellectual curiosity? I don't understand why these shallow feel-good articles devoid of any intellectual curiosity always get upvoted to the top! There are so many high effort, substantive articles at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest that nobody upvotes!
by ferfumarma | 2025-11-29 21:14:01+00:00
You are obviously correct, but I don't know that it really matters.

As I see it, the movement is about pointing out that the most useless dumbest biggest failure of a mega corporation is actually great in light of their current practices.

Why does it matter whether they would have messed it up if they implemented it today?

Restated: the point is not that clippy is great. The point is that he sucked, and that he is great relative to what kinds of products Microsoft is creating today.
by Teever | 2025-11-29 21:14:03+00:00
>The threat of tariffs was so serious that multiple Canadian PMs from multiple parties tried multiple times to get a law on the books that would protect us from tariffs.

> And then in comes Trump, and now we have tariffs anyway.

> And let me tell you: when someone threatens to burn your house down if you don't follow their orders, and you follow their orders, and they burn your house down anyway, you are an absolute sucker if you keep following their orders.

> We could respond to the tariffs by legalizing circumvention, and unleashing Canadian companies to go into business raiding the margins of the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable corporations the world has ever seen.

I've been saying for a while now that Canada should respond to the tariffs by removing copyright protection for American IP in Canada and foster the creation of domestic streaming alternatives that compete with American streaming services while undercutting them on cost and offerings.

But let's be real here, Canada is a nation that outsources basic IT functionality to American companies wholesale, it can't really fight America in this domain as long as it is still dependent on Windows and Gmail.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-11-29 21:14:19+00:00
I'm confused. This just seems like feel-good bullshit advice that only works for people in extremely good circumstances.

There's a false equivalence between -

“All it takes is for one to work out.”

and the following:

- "You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit."

- "You don’t need every house to accept your offer. You just need the one that feels like home. "

The latter assumes that _every_ attempt you make has a chance at being "the right fit", "the one that feels like home". That is not the way things works for 99% of us.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-11-29 21:14:41+00:00
In fact, most software isn't security critical, at all. If you are writing software which is security critical, then I can understand this confusion; but you have to remember that most people don't.

No one knows what software will be security critical when it's written. We usually only find out after it's already too late.

Language maintainers have no idea what code will be written. The people writing libraries have no idea how their library will be used. The application developers often don't realize the security implications of their choices. Operating systems don't know much about what they're managing. Users may not even realize what software they're running at all, let alone the many differing assumptions about threat model implicitly encoded into different parts of the stack.

Decades of trying to limit the complexity of writing "security critical code" only to the components that are security critical has resulted in an ecosystem where virtually nothing that is security critical actually meets that bar. Take libxml2 as an example.

FWIW, I disagree with the position in the article that fail-stop is the best solution in general, but there's experimental evidence to support it at least. The industry has tried many different approaches to these problems in the past. We should use the lessons of that history.
by Loughla | 2025-11-29 21:14:48+00:00
It's because people are commodities now. Human resources exists to manage the shuffle between warm bodies.

It's back to OP's point. There's no such thing as professions now. Just jobs. We put them on and off like hats. With that churn comes lack of institutional knowledge and a rule set handed down from the C Suite for front line employees completely detached from the front line work.

Enshitification run rampant.
by tyingq | 2025-11-29 21:14:48+00:00
Would guess "cosmic rays". Sun Microsystems had a batch of UltraSparc servers that were very sensitive to it, and it was a big issue.

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19095-01/sf4810.srvr/816-5053-10...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray
by throwaway31131 | 2025-11-29 21:15:16+00:00
That’s an interesting idea.

But the magic is in the “find patterns” stuff as memorization is just data storage. If you think of the machine learning algorithms as assigning items a point in a space, then it does uncover neighbors, sometimes ones we might not expect, and that’s interesting for sure.

But I’m not sure it’s analogous to what people do when they uncover patterns.

Definitely interesting to ponder though.
by WCSTombs | 2025-11-29 21:15:44+00:00
The thing is that in my head there is no algebraic argument: we go from (1) similarity ratios being A:B:C and (2) the first two areas adding up to the third area, straight to the conclusion of A^2 + B^2 = C^2. I think your point about a step being missing here is valid, but when I search my intuition, it's still not coming up as algebraic. I suspect this is the same for others like me who are inclined to think geometrically, but I'd like to hear their opinions.

Here's an attempt at filling in the geometric intuition with something more concrete. You know how it's common to visualize the theorem with squares on the three sides of the triangle and saying that the two small squares add up to the big one? And then everyone stares at it and says "huh?" because that fact is far from obvious from that diagram. Here's the thing though, we're free to choose different area units if we want. So just choose units where our triangle itself with a given hypotenuse H has area H^2 units. Then we can give the argument above without any extra factors and cancellations.

To fully justify the "choose any units," you do need to check that it's logically consistent, which you could say is more missing steps, but I think this idea is far more fundamental than the Pythagorean Theorem. Our use of squares to define the fundamental units of area really is a completely arbitrary choice. We call them "square units," which already biases us to think of area in a specific way, but there's absolutely no reason we can't use any other shape. Of course squares are convenient because you can stack them up neatly and count them, but that doesn't seem to be helpful at all in this context, so it's natural to choose something else.
by jameskilton | 2025-11-29 21:15:47+00:00
> The PR was opened, the workflow run, and the PR closed within the space of 1 minute (screenshots include timestamps in UTC+2, the author's timezone):

It's an unfortunately common problem with GitHub Actions, it's easy to set things up to where any PR that's opened against your repo runs the workflows as defined in the branch. So you fork, make a malicious change to an existing workflow, and open a PR, and your code gets executed automatically.

Frankly at this point PRs from non-contributors should never run workflows, but I don't think that's the default yet.
by nosianu | 2025-11-29 21:16:13+00:00
In support of the other reply, here is a look at the supply chain of a very simple product - a can of Coke.

https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d4499...

(https://archive.md/PPYez)

The highlighted parts are a kind of TL;DR, but in the context here actually reading it - it is not much - is actually required to get anything out of it for the arguments used here.

Anything technological is orders of magnitude more complex.

Pointing to any single part really makes no sense, the point is the complexity and interconnectedness of everything.

Some AI doing everything is harder than the East Bloc countries attempting to use central planning for the whole economy. Their economy was much more simple than what such a mighty AI would require for itself and its robot minions. And that's just the organization.

I did like "Gaia" in Horizon Zero Dawn (game) because it made a great story though. This would be pretty much exactly the kind of AI fantasized about here.

Douglas Adams hints at hidden complexity towards the end of HHGTTG, talking about the collapse of Golgafrincham's society.

You overlook just one single tiny thing and it escalates to failure from there. Biological systems don't have that problem, they are self-assembling no matter how you slice and dice them. You may just end up with a very difference eco-system, but as long as the environment is not completely outside the useful range it will grow and reorganize. human-made engineered things on the other hand will just fail and that's it, they will not rise on their own from nothing. Human-made systems are much much more fragile than biological ones (even if you can't guarantee the kind of biological system you will get after rounds of growth and adaptations).
by Majromax | 2025-11-29 21:16:15+00:00
> Are you concerned with your product being used to improve AI to be less detectable?

The big AI providers don't have any obvious incentive to do this. If it happens 'naturally' in the pursuit of quality then sure, but explicitly training for stealth is a brand concern in the same way that offering a fully uncensored model would be.

Smaller providers might do this (again in the same way they now offer uncensored models), but they occupy a miniscule fraction of the market and will be a generation or two behind the leaders.
Show HN: PHP Switcher – A simple tool to switch PHP versions on macOS
by sewyed | 2025-11-29 21:16:30+00:00
I often work on multiple Laravel and PHP projects and kept switching PHP versions manually. This tool automates version switching on macOS, updates PATH safely, and works with Valet out of the box.

Repo: https://github.com/cnaebadi/php-switcher

I'd love to hear your feedback!
by SeasonalEnnui | 2025-11-29 21:16:33+00:00
I've done both, I prefer embedded web views:

- All the work is done in my high performance backend, where I joyfully optimise my hot loops to the assembly level. The web view is a thin layer on top.

- HTML and CSS is a joy to work with in comparison to many UI toolkits. LLMs are better at supporting a web stack.

- The UI zooms/scales, and is accessible with screen readers (looking at you, imgui).

- Cross platform with low effort.

IMO you have to be extremely careful not to pull in a whole frontend stack. Stay as vanilla as possible, maybe alpine.js or tailwind, and I've got hot reload set up so the developer productivity loop is tight when editing the view.
by bdangubic | 2025-11-29 21:16:34+00:00
quite the opposite on the burn out part… if you are curious (this in my experience is in the top-5 traits of exceptional SWEs) you will instinctively want to learn everything there is to know about what you are building. and do it at your own pace, to use a cliche, this isn’t a sprint, it is a marathon.

the leadership also does not have to be competent, you actually want slight incompetency because competent leaders would not allow project to heavily rely on one or handful of people.
by moi2388 | 2025-11-29 21:16:38+00:00
They explain how.

“ At 5:40PM on November 18th, now-deleted user brwjbowkevj opened a pull request against our posthog repository, including this commit. This PR changed the code of a script executed by a workflow we were running against external contributions, modifying it to send the secrets available during that script's execution to a webhook controlled by the attacker. These secrets included the Github Personal Access Token of one of our bots, which had broad repo write permissions across our organization.”
by afro88 | 2025-11-29 21:16:47+00:00
Do you really think that is what the author meant? They're not saying "you only need 1". They're talking about going from 0 to 1. It's sometimes a long and arduous 0. Your framing doesn't help someone trying to get from 0 to 1. Once they're at 1 though, sure. But getting there can feel helpless, and that's what this post is about.
by gosub100 | 2025-11-29 21:17:01+00:00
I doubt that. Privacy was eroded slowly through successive micro-violations.I remember when it was a big deal that gmail inspected your email contents, "but don't worry, no humans actually read it, we just mine the data to suggest better ads, but hey you get 'unlimited' storage when hotmail limits you to 4mb, so there's that!"
by jasonsb | 2025-11-29 21:17:26+00:00
The average person in the west isn't losing sleep over China either. That anxiety is mostly manufactured by the media pushing the narrative that they are an existential threat. Maybe they are, I don't know. But what I do know is that western companies love it when they can sell you overpriced products made in China, but panic the moment chinese companies sell the exact same product at a fair price.
by jancsika | 2025-11-29 21:17:31+00:00
Mathematicians explain things the way I imagine musicians would if the ancient Greeks had insisted on making all musical instruments in a range audible only to dogs.

I'd be like, "How do I actually hear the difference between a major and minor sixth?" And the musician would be like, "Just play them into the cryptophone and note the difference in the way your dog raises its eyebrows."

The very few remaining musicians in this hellscape would be the ones who are unwittingly transposing everything to the human range in their sleep, then spending the day teaching from the Second Edition of the Principles of Harmonic Dog Whistling for all us schmucks.

Luckily we don't live in that musical universe. But mathwise, something like that seems to be the case.