MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stackedinserter | 2025-11-10 20:50:43+00:00
I wouldn't call Russia weak. They have their strengths, one of which is insensitivity to losses. They can grind 20000 soldiers to get a small town, and nobody cares. Also, total control over population, brainwashing the youth, military-oriented economy.

Also, Russia knows how to operate in Arctic, and has real combat experience that none of NATO countries have.

> To think they'd have a shadow of a chance against NATO is a joke.

Which NATO with what army? Do you think Bundeswehr is combat-ready? Is society in any NATO country (except Poland and Finland) ready to fight?

Russians will easily take Baltic countries, for example, is it NATO? Will NATO commit into full scale war with Russia over Estonia? They don't even have guts to block shadow fleet tankers and shoot russian drones over their own territory. Or forget doing something, they can't even stop buying russian oil and gas, because their population will pay more and be upset.

Ukraine stopped them like a bag of teeth would grind teeth of someone who decided to eat them. West is not Ukrainians, even after all these wake-up calls.
by mothballed | 2025-11-10 20:50:46+00:00
The lesson learned is that people going to their immigration hearings to stay legal are getting nabbed, and going the legal way is a convoluted recipe for failure.

As soon as enforcement lets up an iota the lesson will be it is wiser to stay off paper and off the visa pathway and go underground. People who aren't arrested and don't present to CBP for entry and don't get a visa, as far as the government knows, don't exist.
by lazide | 2025-11-10 20:50:51+00:00
Have you ever used a WYSIWG editor?

One of the most frustrating (but common) things is you do v1. It looks good enough.

Then you go to tweak it a little (say move one box 10-15 pixels over, or change some text sizing or whatever), and it loses its mind.

So then you spend the next several days trying every possible combination of random things to get it to actually move the way you want. It ends up breaking a bunch of other things in the process.

Eventually, you get it right, and then never ever want to touch it ever again.
by robocat | 2025-11-10 20:51:16+00:00
Recent experience with United: the SMS option was deeply broken (as in couldn't actually get one boarding pass from the link in SMS). Their kiosks were crap too (as in attendant tries to tell me I'm doing it wrong, then they can't do it, and they finally have to check me in on their own terminal).

The overall UX/UI of airlines is terribly broken.
by andrepd | 2025-11-10 20:51:16+00:00
Keeping the planet habitable, or making line go up? Truly a difficult choice...

More seriously: what is the benefit for the citizens of Europe to chase trends? AI is shaping up to be a bubble. Even if "market remains irrational longer than you stay solvent", what is the purpose? Clean air, clean water, all that has value. Line going up, what does it give me?
by PopAlongKid | 2025-11-10 20:51:24+00:00
> a corporation can not (e.g.) commit murder or theft because that usually requires some physical action.

Not true. Consider investor-owned utility PG&E in northern California.

"While on probation [for previous felonies], PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter for a 2018 wildfire that wiped out the town of Paradise, about 170 miles (275 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco."

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/24/1075267222/californias-embatt...
by necovek | 2025-11-10 20:51:25+00:00
I stand corrected: HTML was defined as an SGML application from the very first published version in 1993 (https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt), but I know the original draft in 1990-91 was heavily SGML inspired even if it didn't really conform to the spec (nor provide a DTD). Thanks for pointing this out, it's funny how memory can play games on us :)

While HTML is clearly the most used document markup language there has ever been, almost nobody is using an SGML-compliant parser to parse and process it, and most are not even bothering with the DTD itself; not to mention that HTML5 does not provide a DTD and really can't even be expressed with an SGML DTD.

So while HTML used to be one of SGML "applications" (document types, along with a formal definition), on the web it was never treated as such, but as a very specific language that is inspired by SGML and only inspired by the spec too (since day 1, all browsers accepted "invalid" HTML and they still do).

Ascribing the success to SGML is completely backwards, IMHO: HTML was successful despite it being based on SGML, and for all intents and purposes, majority never really cared about the relationship.
by kstrauser | 2025-11-10 20:51:30+00:00
Yeah, that's a rabbit hole to be sure. I personally only count languages that you write a non-trivial amount of production executable code in. Examples of things I wouldn't count: HTML and CSS, JS in the browser, Bash used in the build system. If you wrote your webserver in Bash for some wild reason, it's included. Mise and Just and Makefiles aren't.
by sai18 | 2025-11-10 20:51:37+00:00
Reminds me of this comment on the Dropbox HN launch thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

There are may be other general-purpose tools out there that overlap in some ways, but our focus is on vertically specializing in the mainframe ecosystem and building AI-native tooling specifically for the problems in this space.
by smsm42 | 2025-11-10 20:52:01+00:00
Better solution for a race car, driven on specialized tracks, by highly seasoned professional, who is paid enormous money, in compensation for the grave risks he is taking. It's not a better solution for everyday car driven by everyday person. Most race cars aren't even street legal, and getting arrested for driving one on the street would be the best outcome. Getting seriously hurt would be most likely.
by inshard | 2025-11-10 20:52:09+00:00
The author misses the science of emergence. Reductionist views can’t fully explain macro-level capabilities that arise in these systems. Something emerges at higher scales from the possibility space as model sizes grow; they stop being mere “stochastic parrots” or black boxes running simple regressions.

The weights develop their own inherent logic based on how they relate to each other, analogous to how brain waves encode memory at a level higher than individual neuron networks.

Ultimately, the value of AI lies in the imagination of its wielder. The Unknown Unknowns framework is a useful tool for navigating AI effectively (it powerful to help elaborate on Known Unknowns and identify Unknown Unknowns), along with a healthy dose of critical thinking and understanding how reinforcement learning and RLHF work post-pretraining.
by nextaccountic | 2025-11-10 20:52:35+00:00
> regardless of what you think of him, he really does get things done, despite naysayers -- SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and even get Trump elected

Is a billionarie getting a politician elected - even by promising payment to voters (that is, buying votes) - something positive?

The US is supposed to be a democracy, it's the people that get politicians elected, not billionaries
by danaris | 2025-11-10 20:52:38+00:00
> I’m not convinced we can legislate morality.

I've never understood this argument in the least.

We legislate morality all the time. Slightly less so these days, with the reduction of laws against things like same-sex marriage, miscegenation, and such, but what do you think laws against murder, theft, and fraud are?

"That's not legislating morality!" you say. "Those are there to prevent real harms, or damage to society!" Well, so are laws against hate speech. They cause real, measurable harm to the people they are targeted at. The damage they do to society you can see all around you right now.

Our laws and our morals have always been inextricably entangled.

It seems to me that people who make that argument just think that the things they say it about (like hate speech) shouldn't be considered immoral.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-10 20:53:11+00:00
From what I read, the pressure from activist groups on Redmond’s city leadership began before the Skagit County ruling. So it is probably unrelated. But I think it’s still a bad outcome for Redmond. Why wouldn’t you want law enforcement to be able to observe public spaces (which these cameras are monitoring) and identify or track suspects? We want our city services (like policing) to be efficient, right? We want criminals to be arrested and face consequences, right? We all want safe cities and neighborhoods, right?

I think the Skagit county ruling is likely to be appealed. There is a lot of information that governments can redact for a variety of reasons, despite FOIA or state/local transparency laws. It seems obvious that there’s a case for law enforcement to be able to access footage but to avoid handing over that kind of intelligence to the general public, where criminals could also abuse the same data. And I just don’t buy the argument that surveillance through cameras is automatically dystopian - we can pass laws that make it so that data is only accessible with a warrant or in a situation with immediate public risk. There are all sorts of powers the government has that we bring under control with the right laws - why would this be any different?

As for Redmond turning off its cameras - this is just fear-mongering about ICE. In reality, it’s just sanctuary city/state resistance to enforcing immigration laws. Redmond’s police department confirmed they’ve never shared this camera data with federal agencies, but that doesn’t stop activist types from making unhinged claims or exerting pressure. In reality, it’s activists of the same ideological bias as the soft on crime types that have caused crimes to go up dramatically in the Pacific Northwest in the last 20 years. They’re happy to see law enforcement hampered and the public put at risk - the ICE thing is just the new tactic to push it.
by flashfaffe2 | 2025-11-10 20:53:28+00:00
Without being to self-centred here but since I have been using LLM heavily I have always challenged the results given

The post seems to propose the following vector:

Idea-> LLm validation -> confidence -> no further checks

My process is more :

Idea-> LLm response -> skeptical reflection -> adversarial prompting -> synthesis
by ar_lan | 2025-11-10 20:54:12+00:00
> while a corporation is easy to fine, it's hard to put in prison...

It would be interesting if there were some tangible way to prevent the company from performing operations for some period of time.

I don't think this is viable or even necessarily a good idea, but the concept that "Meta illegally collected user data in this way" means they cannot operate for 5 years. It would probably involve large deconstruction of megacorps into "independent" entities so when one does something bad, it only affects a small portion of the overall business. Almost introducing a concept of "families" to the corporate world.

But the rabbit hole is odd. Should (share)holders be complicit too, as they are partial owners? I think not.

Corporate entities and laws governing them are definitely weird.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-11-10 20:54:18+00:00
But you see, the destruction of your house is (protecting) nature.

I'm being facetious, and agree with your point. But I'd go further to say protecting nature is too vague a goal so as to not qualify as a reasonable basis to make laws on top of.

That's not to say there's nothing in nature worth protecting. We should strive to make those things explicit (by having the ugly debates they'll undeniably ellicit), instead of having a game of vague moral grandstanding.

I for one think Pandas get too much care and attention. A species too lazy to reproduce doesn't deserve the resources we pour into them. :D
by ipaddr | 2025-11-10 20:54:37+00:00
I have felt similiar thoughts. You start off with a mental model of how to develop an app based on experience. You can quickly get the pieces working and wire them up.

What get's lost is when you normally develop an app that takes days you create a mind model as you go along that you take with you throughout the day. In the shower you may connect some dots and reimagine the pieces in a more compelling way. When the project is done you have mental model of all of the different pieces; thoughts of where to expand and fears of where you know the project will bottleneck with a mental note to circle back when you can.

When you vibe code you don't get the same highs and lows. You don't mentally map each piece. It's not a surprise that opening up and reading the code is the most painful thing but reading my own code is always a joy.
by hatthew | 2025-11-10 20:54:42+00:00
I don't think they are uniformly distributed. Anecdotally, in my friend's backyard, the ratios I found were more like

10000 three-leaf 15 four-leaf 7 five-leaf 4 six-leaf 2 seven-leaf

I would assume that the ratios in any given area can be quite different than another area.
by WolfeReader | 2025-11-10 20:54:44+00:00
As much as I heartily disagree with most of what you wrote - and seeing all the downvotes, I'm not the only one - there is a nugget of truth in what you wrote, which answers a lot of your complaints.

"Using it was a harsh reminder of what people running emacs or vim for the first time have to go through."

The benefit of keyboard-driven programs like Vim is that you're trading an initial learning curve for a vastly more efficient experience once the learning is done+.

Mouse-driven tools like VS Code don't demand that the user learns them. Keyboard shortcuts there are optional, since practically everything is in a menu or a UI that can be moused to. This adds on seconds per interaction, adding up quickly over time.

+And the "learning" for these tools can be shortened dramatically by keeping a printed-out cheatsheet. For Vim this can be a huge lifesaver; I made one for magit as well, back before I switched full-time to JJ.
by ComputerGuru | 2025-11-10 20:55:36+00:00
There is only a single sentence about how this works with US-resident data and foreign intelligence or LE apparatus.

I'm under no illusion about the willingness of most corporations to hand over everything from subscriber info to content on a dime, but does anyone have any experience with specifics?

Especially pertinent to my question: what is to stop a member of a (non-sanctioned) foreign country (let's say not five eyes) from requesting data on a user of an American service "pursuant to a foreign investigation" (whatever that means)? Does it make a difference in practice if the user is an American resident, a resident of said foreign country, or a resident of a 3rd country altogether?

Example: a dissident launches a website and employs a registrar-provided domain privacy shield (these have notoriously vague guarantees of actual privacy). A "law enforcement officer" from country Xyz "subpoenas" the .com or .tld registry (hosted in the USA) and requests information about the owner of the domain. What happens next (in practice, not in theory)? Do some normally go through US intermediaries? Can American companies just refuse (consider both if the registrar/company has or doesn't have a physical presence in the foreign country in question)?

(Not exactly the same situation, but I was surprised that the FBI request to subpoena the identity of the hero behind the archive.tld service made the news [0]. I a) thought these were very much normal order-of-business things that would happen quietly behind the scenes, b) expected companies would roll over on this info without even a subpoena given the loose guarantees most registrars make about privacy, c) made me wonder if the specific registrars were selected for related reasons, and d) wondered about when and where it makes sense to avoid registering a domain with you real identity even if you use a privacy shield service. Also, I think most companies/registrars wouldn't even bother to notify their customers/users, regardless of whether a gag order was in place or not.)

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/fbi-subpoena-tri...
by mentalgear | 2025-11-10 20:56:24+00:00
This reflects my XP as well: use LLMs for semantic search. Do not trust it with your code.

> Overall I would say it was a horrible experience, even though it took 10 hours to write close to 10000 lines of code, I don't consider this my project, and I have no sense of acomplishment or growth.

> In contrast, using AI to read all the docs (which are thousands of pages) and write helpful scripts to decode the oscilloscope data, create packed C structs from docs and etc, was very nice, and I did feel good after.
by lukaslukas | 2025-11-10 20:56:59+00:00
When we logged into the tax portal, only this amount was shown as to pay. Terrible UX.

In fact, the fine was actually what we paid (minimum tax + missed deadline + interest).

“Normal fine”: We just didn't expect you to be able to incorporate a company and if you miss the tax payment deadline, you will receive a fine 100 times higher than the cost of incorporating the company, no matter what.

But of course, I don't recommend our way. Don't do it. It was wrong. Pay your taxes. Fill out all the required documents.
by eszed | 2025-11-10 20:57:27+00:00
I agree with you about the way that the entertainment unions work. They have their quirks, but they are generally excellent.

Just to offer some nuance, "union members are not allowed to work on non-union projects" is not strictly true. Union members can apply for waivers to work on non-union shows, and smaller theatres operate under letters of agreement with SAG-AFTRA which require only X-number of union contracts per show or per season. Also, union members - no matter their usual wage level - are free to sign contracts to work for "scale" (minimum wage for union members) on projects about which they're passionate; this happens all the time.

Incidentally, the "minimum wage" scale is also different for theatres of different sizes and business models. It's an attempt to balance workers' rights with the exigencies and economics of a fundamentally unstable industry. Some shows won't (necessarily - there are always surprises!) be commercial enough to be produced at certain theatres, and some actors may be prevented from working on some projects, but the system itself won't ever prevent anything from being done at all.

Another advantage to keep in mind if you consider importing this model to another sector: operating under a LOA provides a huge measure of protection to non-union employees, as well. At a certain point in my theatre career I stopped wanting to work on any non-affiliated project - unlimited rehearsal hours with no required notice period were unappealing, for instance, and (even as a non-union actor) pay was usually better in affiliated companies. There was a line to walk, though: once you accumulate a certain number of affiliated weeks in a rolling period you'll be required to join the union, which can limit employability: it's important to make sure your career / skills / network are sufficiently developed to support that level-up.

Anyway, I think that general model would be a good fit for tech workers, and I'd like to see it tried.
by kannanvijayan | 2025-11-10 20:57:28+00:00
Unfortunately the practical effect of whatever policy that comes out of this theorycrafting has left your media landscape an absurd and abject failure. Where the idea of objective truth being open to the highest bidder and allowed to change on a week by week, or day by day basis without challenge.. is a reality Americans now live every day.

If the theory is "sensible", who cares? At some point you do want to connect it to reality and outcomes, no?
by verdverm | 2025-11-10 20:57:29+00:00
If we're talking about emulating users, sure, but this is supposed to be a tool that helps me get my job done.

If (i.e.) you dig into how something like copilot works, they do dumb things like ask^ the LLM to do glob matching after a file read (to pull in more instructions)... just use a damn glob library instead of a non-deterministic and known to be unreliable method

^ it's just a table in the overall context, so "asking" is a bit anthropomorphizing
by dcotter | 2025-11-10 20:58:05+00:00
> But for LLMs, my task might be something like "setting up apache is easy, but I've never done it so just tell me how do it so I don't fumble through learning and make it take way longer." The task was setting up Apache. The task was assigned to me, but I didn't really do it. There wasn't necessarily some higher level task that I merely needed Apache for. Apache was the whole task! And I didn't do it!

To play devil's advocate: Setting up Apache was your task. A) Either it was a one-off that you'll never have to do again, in which case it wasn't very important that you learn the process inside and out, or b) it is a task you'll have to do again (and again), and having the LLM walk you through the setup the first time acts as training wheels (unless you just lazily copy & paste and let it become a crutch).

I frequently have the LLM walk me through an unfamiliar task and, depending on several factors such as whether I expect to have to do it again soon, the urgency of the task, and my interest and/or energy at the moment, I will ask the LLM follow-up questions, challenge it on far-fetched claims, investigate alternative techniques, etc. Execute one command at a time, once you've understood what it's meant to do, what the program you're running does, how its parameters change what it does, and so on, and let the LLM help you get the picture.

The alternative is to try to piece together a complete picture of the process from official documentation like tutorials & user manuals, disparate bits of information in search results, possibly wrong and/or incomplete information from Q&A forums, and muddle through lots of trial and error. Time-consuming, labor-intensive, and much less efficient at giving your a broad-strokes idea of how the whole thing works.

I much prefer the back-and-forth with the LLM and think it gives me a better understanding of the big picture than the slow and frustrating muddling approach.
by sai18 | 2025-11-10 20:58:11+00:00
Absolutely true, and the challenge is that a large portion of modernization projects fail (around 70%).

The main reasons are the loss of institutional knowledge, the difficulty of untangling 20–30-year-old code that few understand, and, most importantly, ensuring the new system is a true 1:1 functional replica of the original via testing.

Modernization is an incredibly expensive process involving numerous SMEs, moving parts, and massive budgets. Leveraging AI creates an opportunity to make this process far more efficient and successful overall.
by dc396 | 2025-11-10 20:58:16+00:00
These cases come up far more frequently than "one or two court cases" -- many takedowns of botnet/malware (e.g., Avalanche) end up in ROLR. See "domain generation algorithms".

In general, the vast majority of registries are fine with marking particular domains as "allocated but not delegated" as long as they get paid. ISTR ICANN waiving their fees, so the costs of marking a domain as undelegatable essentially turn in lost opportunity cost, which most registries are willing to eat.