MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HumanOstrich | 2025-12-11 05:06:38+00:00
The point is to not make a copy at all for the shared data of the same book. That's even what the page claims is happening (but it's wrong). That's the whole point of the flyweight pattern[1]. Instead, the example returns the same book instance for the same isbn in `createBook`, then blindly copies the shared data like title, author, and isbn every time in `addBook` to a new object.

> The shallow copy saves memory....

Versus not making a copy? A shallow copy of primitives still copies them and uses additional memory. Maybe there's some low-level optimization that makes it more efficient than that, but it's not relevant here. And there isn't any deep cloning happening in the example.

Might as well get rid of the complexity and instantiate a new Book class every time. And maybe stop shallow-copying class instances into new plain objects. It works for the example but has footguns.

Conveniently, there are other patterns on the site that would help you avoid creating an amalgamation of random merged class instances and objects.

The whole example is a mess.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyweight_pattern
by 1123581321 | 2025-12-11 05:06:46+00:00
I used to deal with a couple people who were against any automatic or free certs. It was part of their jobs to procure the annual certs, look them over, present them to the developers and maintain automatic checks to regularly inspect the certificates. This was partly how they justified their jobs, but they relished the ceremony and being able to tell developers what to do, even if only for a few minutes a year. They repeatedly blocked introduction of LetsEncrypt.

Just checked. They’re still using that manually installed cert!
by CSMastermind | 2025-12-11 05:06:54+00:00
Some other fun things you'll find:

- The models perform differently when called via the API vs in the Gemini UI.

- The Gemini API will randomly fail about 1% of the time, retry logic is basically mandatory.

- API performance is heavily influenced by the whims of the Google we've observed spreads between 30 seconds and 4 minutes for the same query depending on how Google is feeling that day.
by wvenable | 2025-12-11 05:09:32+00:00
I'm not sure what you're using. I've used Claude in agent mode to port a very complex and spaghetti coded C application to nicely structured C++. The original code was so intertwined that I didn't want to figure out so I had shelved the project until AI came along.

It wasn't super bad at converting the code but even it struggled with some of the logic. Luckily, I had it design a test suite to compare the outputs of the old application and the new one. When it couldn't figure out why it was getting different results, it would start generating hex dumps comparisons, writing small python programs, and analyzing the results to figure out where it had gone wrong. It slowly iterated on each difference until it had resolved them. Building the code, running the test suite, comparing the results, changing the code, repeat. Some of the issues are likely bugs in the original code (that it fixed) but since I was going for byte-for-byte perfection it had to re-introduce them.

The issues you describe I have seen but not with the right technology and not in a while.
by kbenson | 2025-12-11 05:12:10+00:00
I noticed from reviewing my own entry (which honestly I'm surprised exists) that the idea of what it thinks constitutes a "prediction" is fairly open to interpretation, or at least that adding some nuance to a small aspect in a thread to someone else prediction counts quite heavily. I don't really view how I've participated here over the years in any way as making predictions. I actually thought I had done a fairly good job at not making predictions, by design.
by cweagans | 2025-12-11 05:12:14+00:00
IMO, UCEPROTECTL3 is a scam and it's not worth even acknowledging their existence. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/eur4ju/removal_fr... among many other similar posts.

https://www.uceprotect.net/en/index.php?m=7&s=8 -- "pay us to fix a problem that we've caused, and if you have the gall to call it what it is (extortion), then we'll publish your email and be massive dicks about it"

(To be clear, not all spam blacklists are scams - just UCEPROTECTL3 specifically)
by s3graham | 2025-12-11 05:12:48+00:00
He rambles for "the humour bit" for a while, but I think the thrust of it is in the last two sections https://www.wheresyoured.at/nvidia-isnt-enron-so-what-is-it/... : Nvidia's valuation is dependent on an enormous amount of debt around the industry being funnelled to them, there doesn't seem to be a way to profit on this debt, so something is going to have to give.
by guelo | 2025-12-11 05:12:54+00:00
Not just gemini, my sense is that many of google's products are collapsing in terms of confusing features and quality. I use to be a fanboy but I've been painfully extracting myself from their ecosystem, more because of the constant churn of product issues than because of any political issues. I suspect it's an instance of conway's law where the org chart has become a disaster after all the layoffs and reorgs.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-11 05:13:01+00:00
True.

OTOH my point that the thing being suggested to be tested is not testable by seeing whether or not the system is capable of distinguishing homophones, but might be by seeing whether or not it distingishes heteronyms still stands. (The speculation that the record/record distinction intended was one that is actually a pair of heteronyms and that the error was merely the use of the word “homophone" in place of “heteronym”, rather than the basic logic of the comment is somewhat tangential to the main point.)
by goosejuice | 2025-12-11 05:13:11+00:00
It's not at all difficult for a scientifically literate person to be more up to date on the literature of something they have, or could have, than even a specialist in that broad area. There's too many disorders and not enough time.

I have something that about a quarter percent of individuals have in the US. A young specialist would know how to treat based on guidelines but beyond that there's little benefit in keeping up to date with the latest research unless it's a special interest for them (unlikely).

Good physicans are willing to read what their patients send them and adjust the care accordingly. Prevention in particular is problematic in the US. Informed patients will have better outcomes.
by dang | 2025-12-11 05:13:40+00:00
> I disagree with @dang's decision to leave the original link up, as it is nearly valuless in framing this discussion

I'm open to replacing it with a better link, but the one you've listed here (even though it's a much more in-depth article) isn't about this specific topic.

I found https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-used-palantir-its-... by googling. Is it better than OP?
by parineum | 2025-12-11 05:13:43+00:00
That's fine if you think that, but I hope you know that your position is not common at all.

I was born an American. Hezbollah is a group you have to choose to join. Accidents of birth and conscious choices to join a group with a violent ideology and a history of acting on it are so different, I find it hard to believe you would actually equate them.

Hezbollah is more akin to joining the KKK or Weather Underground.
by sailfast | 2025-12-11 05:14:09+00:00
Yeah it’s fascist looking as hell, and they’re the ones that have been registering all these rando program domains. So, so dumb - if only because it’s redundant and wasteful.

https://ndstudio.gov/

With such inspiring copy as “What's the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you're not wrong. But what's the foundation of that brand? One that's more globally recognized than practically anything else. It's the nation…where he was born. It's the United States of America.” how can you go wrong?
by schoen | 2025-12-11 05:14:40+00:00
I predict that, in 2035, 1+1=2. I also predict that, in 2045, 2+2=4. I also predict that, in 2055, 3+3=6.

By 2065, we should be in possession of a proof that 0+0=0. Hopefully by the following year we will also be able to confirm that 0*0=0.

(All arithmetic here is over the natural numbers.)
by autoexec | 2025-12-11 05:15:03+00:00
> They're already better than you at reciting historical facts.

They're better at regurgitating historical facts than me because they were trained on historical facts written by many humans other than me who knew a lot more historical facts. None of those facts came from an LLM. Every historical fact that isn't entirely LLM generated nonsense came from a human. It's the humans that were intelligent, not the fancy autocomplete.

Now that LLMs have consumed the bulk of humanity's written knowledge on history what's left for it to suck up will be mainly its own slop. Exactly because LLMs are not even a little bit intelligent they will regurgitate that slop with exactly as much ignorance as to what any of it means as when it was human generated facts, and they'll still spew it back out with all the confidence they've been programed to emulate. I predict that the resulting output will increasingly shatter the illusion of intelligence you've so thoroughly fallen for so far.
by TheTaytay | 2025-12-11 05:15:27+00:00
I think this is true at larger organizations, but even a “small/medium” startup can easily sign contracts for single services for $100k+, and in my experience, salespeople really do care about commissions at those price points. A lot of software gets a foothold in an org by starting with the ICs, and individuals, not groups, are often the ones that request or approve software. Github and Slack are good examples of services who make very good use of their ability to self-serve their customers out of the gate, in spite of also supporting very large orgs.

In these conversations, I never ever see the buyers justifying or requesting a sales process involving people and meetings and opaque pricing.

It’s true that complicated software needs more talking, but there is a LOT of software that could be bought without a meeting. The sales department won’t stand for it though.
by ethin | 2025-12-11 05:17:18+00:00
Same thing applies to PCI. I can get USB specs for free from USB-IF. But the PCI and PCIe specs cost $4000 plus. Just so I can write my own PCI driver. Legally, I mean. Oh, there is external references, but what if I want the authoritative documentation? Should I have to pay thousands and thousands for access (!) to a standard that is ubiquitous in every sense of the word? There is, to me, a point at which ubiquity trumps any "IP rights" the standards org would have.
by anonymars | 2025-12-11 05:18:32+00:00
I will never understand the bizarre scene of the web's smug collective declaration that tables were dead and not to be used juxtaposed against the years it took to regain the ability to reliably center things. Assuming one agrees that we even did regain it.

Related: I also love when I can't paste tabular data into Excel/etc. anymore

For the record, I don't hate the idea of stylesheets, but...sheesh
by anuramat | 2025-12-11 05:19:21+00:00
sometimes they randomly choose the ugliest possible way to do pattern matching, eg multiple blocks of nested "if let" instead of a "match", or a "match" instead of a single "if let"

otherwise, works great; much easier to un-vibe the code compared to eg python

(gpt 5.* in codex/sonnet 4.5 in cc/glm 4.6)
by nerevarthelame | 2025-12-11 05:19:40+00:00
I don't know what studies Blinken's State Department considered, but here are 2 studies on the matter.

https://www.academia.edu/72263493/Effect_of_Typeface_Design_...: "For Latin, it was observed that individual letters with serif cause misclassification on (b,h), (u,n), (o,n), (o,u)."

https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10220037: [Figure 5 shows higher accuracy for the two sans-serif fonts, Arial and DejaVu compared to Times New Roman, across all OCR engines]
by sosodev | 2025-12-11 05:19:41+00:00
Weirdly, I just tried it again and it seems to understand the difference between record and record just fine. Perhaps if there's heavy demand for voice chat, like after a new release, they load shed by using TTS to a smaller model.

However, It still doesn't seem capable of producing any of the sounds, like laughter, that I would expect from a native voice model.
by raggi | 2025-12-11 05:19:42+00:00
Yes, there's a case to be made that exposing "real" pointers in a GC'd language was a substantial mistake, but I guess it simplified _some_ parts of FFI. The trade-off so far maybe is fine, but it is a shame that there are certain things that can't be done without introducing new substantial costs. Maybe the compiler could learn to do something suuuper clever like recognize when pointers are being used non-transparently and automatically pin those, seems fraught with potential error though, trivial example being stuff like &a[0] (that ones easier to catch, others might not be).
by irishcoffee | 2025-12-11 05:19:54+00:00
> For instance, I really do think I'm 10x faster with Terraform, because I don't need to read all the documentation, and that would have taken absurd amounts of time.

I think this is where the lede is buried. Yes, it takes time up front. But then you learn(ed) it and can apply those skills quickly in the future.

In 10 years when all sorts of new tech is around, will you read the docs? Or just count on an LLM?
by mullingitover | 2025-12-11 05:21:05+00:00
The idea that real, serious scientific debate was stymied by social media platform policies doesn't pass the smell test for me. Facebook/twitter/et al were making good faith efforts to stop the flood of downright harmful misinformation, and government didn't force them to do it. None of even the most questionable scientists were ever silenced. Those folks had the right wing press broadcasting their worst ideas to the world, the didn't even need social media when they could get on Fox News every day of the week.

It was the final attempt of social media even trying to be something more than a cancer. Now? Every social media platform (especially Facebook and twitter) would have zero problems being the driver of modern day pogroms, complete with running betting markets on the outcomes, if it would keep their share prices up.
by groby_b | 2025-12-11 05:21:58+00:00
It is extremely funny to me that the list thinks the mistake about !important was using the exclamation mark sigil, and not the concept of a single priority level.

In the words of one of my CS profs, from a few decades ago: "There are only 3 numbers - zero, one, and infinity. And 'one' is often a mistake"
by defrost | 2025-12-11 05:22:28+00:00
I'm aligned with @iberator here.

I grew up with children and people in Northern Australia that had zero fear of snakes and spiders with plenty of exposure to both.

When I was 13 a friend of my sister, a large imposing Torres Strait Islander girl, visited and saw a cat for the very first time and screamed fit to break glass while jumping back to break the wall panel and up onto the couch.

This was someone comfortable handling large live mud crabs on the floor, gutting fish, handling snakes and killing them, etc.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-11 05:23:32+00:00
Huh, I thought I had mine earlier. Mine was from May 2021. They were very very new and had very few reviews, and it was $56. For a 100' fiber optic cable that promised 8k60 and was light.

This cable is absurdly long. I have no idea how to coil it nicely. At my last place I had three stories, and would sometimes just dangle most of it down to the ground then wind it up from the roof.
by hilbert42 | 2025-12-11 05:24:12+00:00
"The rest of the world needs similar restrictions on American tech and social media..."

Yes, it does but don't kid yourself, all of Big Tech will cooperate with governments for mutual benefit. Big Tech collects data that governments would otherwise have difficulty collecting, if Big Tech is refrained from collecting data because of regulation and privacy laws then both lose out.

We should never expect governments to maintain our privacy or protect us from Big Tech leaching our data. In short, we're fighting different enemies on two fronts and that's a difficult and invidious position to be in.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-11 05:26:07+00:00
That HDMI Forum does not allow TVs to be sold with DisplayPort is a massive reason I think they deserve to have their building surrounded by angry people with pitchforks and torches. Anti-competitive abusers, doing awful things to prevent a better world.

DisplayPort actually makes sense as a digital protocol, where-as HDMI inherits all the insane baggage of the analog past & just sucks. HDMI is so awful.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-12-11 05:26:56+00:00
Holy shit, I feel the same. I was arguing with an LLM one day about how to do Kerberos auth on incoming HTTP requests. It kept giving me bogus advice that I could disprove with a tiny snip of code. I would explain. It would react just like yours. After a few rounds, it would give the first answer again. Awful. So infuriating.

I had a similar issue with GNU plot. The LLM-suggested scripts frequently had syntax errors. I say: LLMs are awesome when they work, else they are a time suck / net negative.
by notpushkin | 2025-12-11 05:28:21+00:00
Yes, but those are in the physical world. [1] In digital realm, having to verify your ID has way more consequences. My passport has been leaked and I have a “quick cash loan” in my name as a result of that.

---

[1]: Tangentially, those are trivially circumvented in many countries. When I was a teenager in St. Petersburg, we’ve used a “duty free delivery service”, which (I suppose) just stocked liquor at the duty free shop on the border with Finland, and then sold it. Not sure how legal was the core premise (probably not), but we used it because their couriers didn’t even pretend they need to check our passports (definitely illegal).

In many countries, alcohol is available in grocery delivery services. Couriers happily leave your order at the doorstep even though they are supposed to check your ID. In many other countries, even buying in-store is possible (e.g. Japan, where in any konbini you can just press a button on screen saying “yes, I’m 21”).
by nixpulvis | 2025-12-11 05:28:49+00:00
I want to read a study that compares what readers estimate for much effort was put into producing the same page of text in two contemporary and basic serif and sans-serif fonts. My hypothesis is that the serif font is viewed as more polished or refined, and therefore the result of more hours of work. But I could be wrong.

This is in-line with the advice here to use serif for long form and sans for short. When you're making signs and things like that, you don't have the repeated forms to inform your ability to interpret letters, so the serifs act to confuse readers, while in long form, they add flair, which could be more artistic and tasteful.
by skeledrew | 2025-12-11 05:28:49+00:00
Instead of reverting the updates to appease those who've been ignoring the warnings, a way forward could be to gate the old API behind an environment variable, with a name like "TEMPORARILY_REENABLE_DEPRECATED_APIS". And maybe put an expiry on the variable so it resets occasionally. Otherwise the project just becomes mired and stagnant.
by rendaw | 2025-12-11 05:28:54+00:00
Doesn't Scala have this? It sounds like a good idea to me too, but I haven't had a chance to try it for real myself and I've heard other people say it's a bad thing.

But maybe it's like exceptions, where people get involved with a project originally written by people who misused all sorts of language constructs and came away thinking the language was awful, or don't learn idiomatic usage or something.
by NoPicklez | 2025-12-11 05:30:18+00:00
As someone who began their career in financial audit over a decade ago and learning about Enron, it has frustrated me that people have been calling Nvidia the new Enron.

Just because companies are throwing chunks of money around, does not mean Nvidia is like another company that was found to commit fraud and be required to file for bankruptcy. Its a classic social media reductionist take that has gained popularity and has been misattributed to what happened at Enron, not even close.

From what I have seen it has been "Nvidia is doing some big deals with other big companies in a way that I don't understand, it must be dodgy and an Enron like scandal"

Nvidia based on its audited financial statements which are audited in accordance with the very standards set following Enron (Sarbanes Oxley) which any US accountant would be familiar with, is an extremely profitable company.
by bgbntty2 | 2025-12-11 05:30:30+00:00
It's different. You show an ID card to a human if you don't look old enough. They look at it and return it. The ID card doesn't get scanned or tied to all your future recreational drug purchases - you don't have an account or a trail that identifies you.

When uploading ID documents, your account gets tied to your real world identity. That's not a precedent the government should be setting, because private entities having an excuse (the law) to require identification erodes privacy, and because in the future other services could be required to ask for an identification, too. Yes, it's the slippery slope (aka "boiling the frog") argument, but that's how laws that erode privacy evolve - step by step.

Now it's account for social media, then it's porn sites, then it's forums where you might see porn or discussions on suicide, drugs or anything deemed morally hazardous. They might require an ID just to view the site or require the site to not make it public. If (or "when", if we don't oppose such laws) enough countries mandate something like this, most sites will likely require an account for all content, regardless of where the person is located, as otherwise they'll likely have to prove that they've not only geolocated the IP of the visitor, but checked that they weren't using VPNs, Tor or similar services.

As for using zero-knowledge proofs and similar technology to make it less infringing on privacy - I very much doubt the government (any government) to implement this with 100% privacy and security.
by seventytwo | 2025-12-11 05:30:35+00:00
The problem isn’t necessarily the wealth itself, it’s the power feedback loop that comes with it. It’s the ability to influence the government to pass laws which maintain or amplify your existing wealth, which then increases your influence, etc.

There is nothing “free market” about this. There is no equitable or efficient destitution of resources when this kind of thing happens - and it will always happen, because it is an inevitability.
by s_shaik | 2025-12-11 05:30:50+00:00
I built a tool to make GitLab SOS bundle debugging easier, especially for multi-node setups where the logs get really large.

Why I built it: I was spending too much time manually grepping thousands of logs, dealing with mixed formats, and jumping between Kibana/Elasticsearch setups.

What it does: - Aggregates 10k+ logs into patterns for fast overview - Traces correlation IDs chronologically across mixed formats - Simple grep-like search (no infra or ELK stack required) - Analyze SOS bundles or any custom logs - Optional GitLab Duo AI analysis - Runs locally with: `python start.py`

Repo: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/toolbox/soslab

Feedback welcome!
by oasisbob | 2025-12-11 05:31:17+00:00
The dimensioning of DNA was an immediate turn-off for me. A common biochemistry demo is to show how long and macroscopically visible a chromosome can be. Saying DNA is 3.5 nm tall (long?) flies in the face of what is a pretty interesting and notable experience for a lot of people.

It essentially starts the whole project with a weird take on "How long is a piece of string?"

> In theory, you could create a polymer of infinite length (or height).

Works pretty well in practice too.