MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jlokier | 2025-11-01 20:13:18+00:00
The original is 'lex', written in 1975 by Mike Lesk and Eric Schmidt.

Yes, that Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

1987 was the clone, 'flex' :-)

It did "compiling the regex into regular code, which can then be optimized by the compiler" before the C programming language as we know it was created. I think 'lex' was compiling regex to C before the C language even had 'struct' types, 'printf' or 'malloc'.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-01 20:13:28+00:00
> How come dubai hasn’t experienced any sanctions yet?

The UAE has crafted itself as a new Switzerland. (Qatar is trying to copy, but clumsily.)

They buy American weapons and financial assets, making them influential. They’ve also established themselves as a logistics hub in an important logistics channel to the West and Asia. (They also pitch their balancing effect on Saudi Arabia skillfully.)
by prmph | 2025-11-01 20:13:38+00:00
Exactly, this seems like a fear mongering hit piece bashing mostly African countries.

India already has far more people than these countries he mentioned, and I fail to see how it can be described as a well run country; it has more poor people than the whole of Africa combined.

Initially the Malthusian panic was about a world running out of standing room. When that did not pan out, now it is about a fear of brown/black people multiplying with abandon and overrunning supposedly well run countries. The majority of people who have migrated to, or sought asylum in, Europe in recent years (since the upheavals of the Arab spring) have been middle Eastern, not African.

Yet people persist in promoting a narrative of a supposed invasion of the West by Africans. so much so that its become the main geopolitical issue in the minds of common people there, fanning the flames of extremist far right sentiment.

He does have a point about trade though. More trade and less "aid" will help. Aid is a form of control, and the amounts given are a pittance anyways.
by julian-klode | 2025-11-01 20:14:06+00:00
It's rather that GnuPG is ill-regarded for its code immaturity tbh. You don't even need to read the code base, just try to use it in a script:

It exits 0 when the verification failed, it exits 1 when it passed, and you have to ignore it all and parse the output of the status fd to find the truth.

It provides options to enforce various algorithmic constraints but they only work in some modes and are silently ignored in others.
by PorterBHall | 2025-11-01 20:14:18+00:00
I think your take makes sense. Thanks for laying it out. I worry about the containment aspects of this. Sure, the capex for this is coming off corporate balance sheets, but a bad event could wipe away a lot of stock market value, which would trigger a deep recession given that AI spending is really the only thing keeping our economy afloat at the moment. It feels like we’re in a doomed if we do, doomed if we don’t moment. I see breadlines in our future whether or not we achieve AGI. The only question is whether or not we’ll have to deal with some added existential risk.
by qsort | 2025-11-01 20:17:12+00:00
This resonates with me a lot:

> As ever, I wish we had better tooling for using LLMs which didn’t look like chat or autocomplete

I think part of the reason why I was initially more skeptical than I ought to have been is because chat is such a garbage modality. LLMs started to "click" for me with Claude Code/Codex.

A "continuously running" mode that would ping me would be interesting to try.
by finnborge | 2025-11-01 20:18:06+00:00
I think this is well illustrated in a lot of science fiction. Irregular or abstract tasks are fairly efficiently articulated in speech, just like the ones you provided. Simpler, repetitive ones are not. Imagine having to ask your shower to turn itself on? Or your doors to open?

Contextualized to "web-apps," as you have; navigating a list maybe requires an interface. It would be fairly tedious to differentiate between, for example, the 30 pairs of pants your computer has shown you after you asked "help me buy some pants" without using a UI (ok maybe eye-tracking?).
by anigbrowl | 2025-11-01 20:18:47+00:00
I downvoted you even though I know you're being sarcastic. The reflexive use of snark and sarcasm is bad. Poe's law (observing the difficulty of separating sarcasm from actual nastiness) identifies a real problem: reflexive snark is easily weaponized by people who argue your position sincerely and use you as cover. They can always say they're trolling until suddenly they're not.
by jstanley | 2025-11-01 20:19:34+00:00
The part about "don't think it's fair to have a child" meant that you don't think it's fair for the child.

The point about suicide is approximately what I meant, although of course I do not intend to drive anyone to suicide, only to help them see that their preference to live would also be shared by a hypothetical child.

If your revealed preference is to exist rather than not to exist in this "world in crisis", why would you not afford a hypothetical child the same courtesy?
by asadotzler | 2025-11-01 20:19:56+00:00
Non-profits are literally tax-exempt. OAI spent 10 years being tax-exempt in exchange for doing work that fully benefits the public. Now that work, 10 years of tax exempt work, is being handed over to a taxable outfit, a for-profit organization. If the result of 10 years of tax-exempt efforts get handed to a for-profit company, the taxes that were never paid should be because the public benefit that got them the tax benefit wasn't fulfilled, in fact it was stolen and handed to ultra-wealthy capitalists.
by mceachen | 2025-11-01 20:20:30+00:00
You can VACUUM INTO, ~~but standard vacuum won’t rewrite the whole db~~ (vacuum rewrites the whole db)

https://sqlite.org/lang_vacuum.html

(Edit: if multiple processes are concurrently reading and writing, and one process vacuums, verify that the right things happen: specifically, that concurrent writes from other processes during a vacuum don’t get erased by the other processes’ vacuum. You may need an external advisory lock to avoid data loss).
by Frannky | 2025-11-01 20:20:47+00:00
CLI terminals are incredibly powerful. They are also free if you use Gemini CLI or Qwen Code. Plus, you can access any OpenAI-compatible API(2k TPS via Cerebras at 2$/M or local models). And you can use them in IDEs like Zed with ACP mode.

All the simple stuff (creating a repo, pushing, frontend edits, testing, Docker images, deployment, etc.) is automated. For the difficult parts, you can just use free Grok to one-shot small code files. It works great if you force yourself to keep the amount of code minimal and modular. Also, they are great UIs—you can create smart programs just with CLI + MCP servers + MD files. Truly amazing tech.
by kreyenborgi | 2025-11-01 20:20:57+00:00
I don't have the same impression, but https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest and https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck are some popular ones that may be useful to hn'ers.

And https://github.com/mchav/dataframe?tab=readme-ov-file#datafr... is a library/framework that has had quite some velocity lately
by shawn_w | 2025-11-01 20:20:58+00:00
And at least one fire destroying a studios film archives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_MGM_vault_fire

(That article says that many other film studios destroyed old film prints, so it's not just fires (explosions really, since nitrocellulose film tends to go boom, plus even in the best case it degrades into an unusable mess with time))
by prmph | 2025-11-01 20:21:07+00:00
I guess the world has now given up on staving off climate change, and accepted it as inevitable.

Hopefully, or so the unstated thinking goes, it will be those poors who bear most of the brunt. Yes, many will perish or be uprooted, but humanity as a whole is nowhere near threatened with extinction.

Or, another strain of thought goes, technologies that are yet to be developed will suddenly appear to save the day...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-01 20:21:42+00:00
> Factors such as ethnicity or religion are never the reason for these conflicts

Economics motivates. But these divisions dominate in determining magnitude. You don’t need genocide to control mines, farms and oil fields. (You need labour.)

The dial turns from enslavement to extermination when there is deep-rooted fury. That sort of fury can really only be channeled on divisions of race and religion. (You need a way for poorly-trained, uneducated troops to mostly reliably identify the enemy.)

> heart of this conflict is Sudan’s gold

Why not oil, too?

> Just like in Gaza the US could stop this at any time with a phone call

This hubris fuels our forever wars, both in trade and militarily.

We don’t have that influence. If we tried restricting both Qatar and the UAE in Africa, we’d put serious economic and military interests at stake. Interests American voters care about enough that our leaders have even less free rein than our geopolitical limits circumscribe.
by bccdee | 2025-11-01 20:21:59+00:00
I don't have a problem with accessible development tools like that, but they do have tradeoffs. An Excel spreadsheet is an excellent tool for some business calculations, but once you start asking questions like, "can we add some authorization to this? Can we add some permissions? Can we pipe this into a UI?" we've passed the limits of Excel and we need to implement a real application. The more you implement in your spreadsheet, the more you may end up re-implementing in a real database.
by thegrim33 | 2025-11-01 20:22:23+00:00
We already create video games which both "operate on completely different principles" than our reality, and which are "lossy" approximations of our reality. We already have concrete examples of us making (simple) simulations that take those approaches. You seem to refuse the "higher reality working differently" premise because it's unfalsifiable, when we already actively do exactly that for simulations we create. Our video games aren't based on quantum physics, but our reality is.
by rayiner | 2025-11-01 20:22:29+00:00
> The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else", a place many in SF and the US more generally prefer to ignore, and which includes Bangladesh, alongside as much of the "global south"

San Francisco is not rich because Bangladesh is poor. This idea is not only wrong, but dangerous. I’m stuck in America because my parents and grandparents in Bangladesh were infected by such stupid thinking. Other people in the “global south” that rejected such victimhood leapt ahead. When we came to America in 1989, China’s per-capita GDP was a little higher than Bangladesh, but a little lower than India. Since then, China has become a livable place, while Bangladesh and India remain impoverished. Your mindset is a roadmap for the global south to remain poor and backward.
by julian-klode | 2025-11-01 20:24:01+00:00
Fil-C is amazing but is much more problematic than Rust at this point since it only supports amd64 at this time and is maintained by a single genius.

It also doesn't help you to attract new contributors. With the changes we made over in Ubuntu to switch to rust-coreutils and sudo-rs, we have seen an incredible uptake in community contributions amongst other things, and it's very interesting to me to try to push APT more into the community space.

At this time, most of the work on APT is spent by me staying awake late, or during weekends and my 2 week Christmas break, the second largest chunk is the work I do during working hours but that's less cool and exciting stuff :D

Adding Rust into APT is one aspect; the other, possibly even more pressing need is rewriting all the APT documentation.

Currently the APT manual pages are split into apt-get and apt-cache and so on, with a summary in apt(8) - we should split them across apt install(8), apt upgrade (8) and so on. At the same time, DocBook XML is not very attractive to contributors and switching to reStructuredText with Sphinx hopefully attracts more people to contribute to it.
by Aidevah | 2025-11-01 20:24:30+00:00
A lot of modern packages which began outside emacs have now been gradually been merged into the main emacs tree and come pre-installed (use-package for clean per package configuration, eglot for LSP support, tree-sitter, which-key etc). So you just need to learn how to configure them.

The most important packages which make emacs feel "modern" that are still outside the emacs tree for now are the ones which makes completion better, both in the main buffer and also in the minibuffer (what others may call your "command palette"). They are

- consult: search and navigation commands, provides candidates for...

- vertico: vertical display of candidates in the minibuffer

- marginalia: annotations for the candidates

- orderless: orderless fuzzy match for candidates

- embark: right mouse context menu for candidates

Getting these setup would make your whole journey onwards much smoother.
by lyu07282 | 2025-11-01 20:24:40+00:00
> This is America

It's probably not, but your post almost reads like satire in reference to the tv show by Sacha Baron Cohen with the same name. Living with so many contradictions for so long just leaves one confused and disoriented when it all shatters around you. American exceptionalism means the freedom to poison the well and the freedom to die from drinking poisoned water.
by SiempreViernes | 2025-11-01 20:24:58+00:00
Having taken a closer look, there's nothing really nefarious going on: what is mainly happening is that every step of the very long process of passing a EU regulation is getting lots of attention.

Back in 2020 or so the commission first proposed the reform that contains the chat control provisions, then there was like a year or two of well published fighting in the European Parliament (EP) before they reached a position on the entire reform (notably excluding chat control).

Meanwhile the council of minister (effectively the upper house of the EP) didn't get around to forming an opinion before the parliament, so they are doing that now, which means it the same fight over chat control all over again but with different people.

After the council of ministers agrees on a position on the entire reform proposal from the commission we'll get even more rounds of bickering over what the final text should be: the trialogue. Those tend to be very closed, but with how much attention chat control is getting expect lots of leaks and constant news about who's being an ass during that step too.

Note that it is explicitly expected that each of the thee bodies will come up with different positions on many aspects of a regulation proposal, so there is nothing strange with the commission or the council suggesting some the parliament has opposed.
by stopbulying | 2025-11-01 20:25:39+00:00
AFAIU critical runaway in a fusion reactor is less hazardous than in a fission reactor.

Fusion reactors are super hot and there can be thermal runaway, but you can just kill the electricity to kill some fusion reactors AFAIU.

There are described models where production of e.g. 3He (from standard D-T fusion or similar) is in a different facility than the fusion electricity production plants that process the 3He (in order to limit processing and distribution of hazardous materials).

Hopefully the nuclear transmutation folks can find a way to retrofit existing fission plants to burn the fuel further down before storage and transport; burn it all the way down in the existing casks with lasers and radiation please.
by lrvick | 2025-11-01 20:26:38+00:00
Unfortunately there is still no way to actually bootstrap haskell (or anything based on it) which makes it impossible to put anything written in Haskell near any high trust linux distribution or environment.

I guess sandboxing the untrusted binary in a browser is -something- to let people play with haskell in a lower risk way for the moment at least but it is hard to take a language seriously or trust it with no way to bootstrap it from source.
by MangoCoffee | 2025-11-01 20:26:55+00:00
>You're maintaining code written by someone else through the use of these tools, where it could have been good enough for them.

I believe everyone has to deal with that, AI or not. There are bad human coders.

I've done integration for several years. There are integrations done with tools like Dell Boomi (no-code/low-code) that work but are hard to maintain, like you said. But what can you do? Your employer uses that tool to get it running until it can't anymore, as most no-code/low-code tools can get you to your goal most of the time. But when there's no "connector" or third-party connector that costs an arm and a leg, or hiring a Dell Boomi specialist to code that last mile, which will also cost an arm or a leg, then you turn to your own IT team to come up with a solution.

It's all part of IT life. When you're not the decision-maker, that's what you have to deal with. I'm not going to blame Dell Boomi for making my work extra hard or whatnot. It's just a tool they picked.

I am just saying that a tool is a tool. You can see many real life examples where you'll be pressured into using a tool and maintaining something created by such a tool, and not just in IT but in every field.
by whatpeoplewant | 2025-11-01 20:26:58+00:00
The IP concern is real, but it isn’t binary: we can move from monolithic pretraining on scraped corpora to multi-agent, agentic LLM workflows that retrieve licensed content at inference with provenance, metering, and revocation. Distributed agentic AI lets rights holders expose APIs or sandboxes so models reason in parallel over data without copying it, yielding auditable logs and pay-per-use economics. Parallel agentic AI pipelines can also enforce policy (e.g., no-train/no-store) as first-class constraints, which is much harder to do with a single opaque model.
by whatpeoplewant | 2025-11-01 20:27:29+00:00
Great move by arXiv—clear standards for reviews and position papers are crucial in fast-moving areas like multi-agent systems and agentic LLMs. Requiring machine-readable metadata (type=review/position, inclusion criteria, benchmark coverage, code/data links) and consistent cross-listing (cs.AI/cs.MA) would help readers and tools filter claims, especially in distributed/parallel agentic AI where evaluation is fragile. A standardized “Survey”/“Position” tag plus a brief reproducibility checklist would set expectations without stifling early ideas.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-01 20:28:13+00:00
China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Turkey, (EDIT: the UK, indirectly) and Egypt have each also supplied weapons into this conflict [1]. Presumably due to Sudan’s position on the Red Sea. (China and the UAE seem to be alone in supplying the RSF, though.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023%E2%80...
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-01 20:29:36+00:00
Because the piecemeal sellout of the nation's industrial base to the far east on environmental grounds and then the piecemeal closure of any remaining paths up into the middle class on comparable grounds was such a resounding success?

The peddlers of the things that caused the legitimate gripes that drove them into the harms of these movements need to do some looking in the mirror.

Most people don't care about most issues most of the time. If they're holding their nose and voting for blatant extremism, the people they're not voting for ought to do some reflecting.
by 9dev | 2025-11-01 20:29:44+00:00
> At least most Christians and Muslims accept that others don't believe in their religion and, for the most part, don't force them to act as if they do.

Just like most trans people accept that others don’t understand their way of life, and, for the most part, don’t force them to act as if they do.

Yet you can’t acknowledge that and pretend all trans people are some kind of opaque mob.
by probst | 2025-11-01 20:30:16+00:00
I am really curious about LiteSync. Any chance you could share a bit on your experiences with it (recognising it’s somewhat off-topic…). Do you run with multiple primaries? What sort of use cases do you reach to it for? Conflict resolution seems a bit simplistic at first glance (from the perspective of someone very into CRDTs), have you experienced any issues as a result of that?
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-11-01 20:31:00+00:00
That's how ICE wants you to think about it, but they've tricked you. The rule that they actually implemented is that you must accept temporary detention while being scanned. If a random guy wants to take a picture of my face, he has every right to, but I in turn have every right to hide my face or flip him off and leave the scene before he gets a good shot. If ICE stops your car, and they don't trust your word that you're a citizen (or if you refuse to engage with them as is your right as a citizen), they will not let you leave until you've accepted a scan.
by pseudalopex | 2025-11-01 20:31:51+00:00
> Birth certificates are how we have proven citizenship in the United States almost since the founding of the Republic.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not everyone had a birth certificate: between one-half and three-quarters of births in the United States went unregistered.[1]

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/44285276
by jcranmer | 2025-11-01 20:32:11+00:00
> But hasn't all that foundational code been stable and wrung out already over the last 30+ years?

Not necessarily. The "HTTP signature verification code" sounds like it's invoking cryptography, and the sense I've had from watching the people who maintain cryptographic libraries is that the "foundational code" is the sort of stuff you should run away screaming from. In general, it seems to me to be the cryptography folks who have beat the drum hardest for moving to Rust.

As for other kind of parsing code, the various archive file formats aren't exactly evolving, so there's little reason to update them. On the other hand, this is exactly the kind of space where there's critical infrastructure that has probably had very little investment in adversarial testing either in the past or present, and so it's not clear that their age has actually led to security-critical bugs being shaken out. Much as how OpenSSL had a trivially-exploitable, high criticality exploit for two years before anybody noticed.
by larusso | 2025-11-01 20:32:45+00:00
Yeah I get point for attracting young blood. But I wonder if the core utils which have been rewritten got rewritten by the original maintainers? And again the question why not simply write something new. With a modern architecture etc rather than drop in replacements.

On your second part. I wonder how aviation and space and car industry do it. They rely heavily on tested / proven concepts. What do they do when introducing a new type of material to replace another one. Or when a complete assembly workflow gets updated.
by superfrank | 2025-11-01 20:33:04+00:00
We're kind of in the middle of that shift, but yeah, prediction markets are futures contracts and handled differently.

The main sportsbooks you see advertising on TV like Draft Kings, Fan Duel, etc are still the old sports betting model where you're betting against the house. That's still taxed as sports betting. Kalshi, Polymarket, and some smaller sports focused apps like NoVig and Sporttrade are prediction markets that allow sports predictions and those would allow a full write off.

That said, I've heard that most of the major sportsbooks like Draft Kings and Fan Duel are building out their own prediction market platforms, so I think it's only a matter of time until everyone is in that model. Even ignoring the tax implications, it's lower risk and more consistent revenue for the books since they can structure things so they make money on every trade (if they want).