MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TZubiri | 2025-12-21 05:19:39+00:00
I was just trying to think of an example of a non idempotent function. As in it depends on an external IO device.

I will say that error handling and logging in general is one of my weakpoints, but I made a comment about my approach so far being dbg/pdb based, attaching a debugger and creating breakpoints and prints ad-hoc rather than writing them in code. I'm sure there's reasons why it isn't used as much and logging in code is so much more common, but I have faith that it's a path worth specializing in.

Back to the file reading example, for a non-idempotent function. Considering we are using an encapsulating approach we have to split ourselves into 3 roles. We can be the IO library writer, we can be the calling code writer, and we can be an admin responsible for the whole product. I think a common trap engineers fall for is trying to keep all of the "global" context (or as much as they can handle) at all times.

In this case of course we wouldn't be writing the non-idempotent library, so of course that's not a hat we wear, do not quite care about the innards of the function and its state, rather we have a well defined set of errors that are part of the interface of the function (EINVAL, EACCES, EEXIST).

In this sense we respect the encapsulation boundaries and are provided the information necessary by the library. If we ever need to dive into the actual library code, first the encapsulation is broken and we are dealing with a leaky abstraction, second we just dive into the library code, (or the filesystem admin logs themselves).

It's not precisely the type of responsibility that can be handled at design time and in code anyways, when we code we are wearing the calling-module programmer hat. We cannot think of everything that the sysadmin might need at the time of experiencing an error, we have to think that they will be sufficiently armed with enough tools to gather the information necessary with other tools. And thank god for that! checking /proc/fs and looking at crash dumps, and attaching processes with dbg will yield far better info than relying on whatever print statements you somehow added to your program.

Anyways at least that's my take on the specific example of glibc-like implementations of POSIX file operations like open(). I'm sure the implications may change for other non-idempotent functions, but at some point, talking about specifics is a bit more productive than talking in the abstract.
by michaelteter | 2025-12-21 05:22:04+00:00
This seems like an intentionally misleading title, since they don't mention that the study was for one county (Montgomery County) in Ohio, which is basically just Dayton, OH and surrounding rural area - < 600k people.

I'm sure you can pick other counties in the US which have either very high representation of THC users or very low representations. Without knowing how other counties score in terms of driver fatalities and THC, this is not really very useful.

To me it sounds like an effort to paint THC as big and scary. But in my experience living in a few large cities, weed is rare - but lots of people go out, drink, and drive home one or more times per week.

ScienceDaily goes even further by rounding up to 50% and burying the location halfway down the summarization.

"Nearly half of drivers killed in crashes had THC in their blood THC-impaired driving deaths are soaring, and legalization hasn’t slowed the trend. Date: October 5, 2025 Source: American College of Surgeons Summary: Over 40% of fatal crash victims had THC levels far above legal limits, showing cannabis use before driving remains widespread. The rate didn’t drop after legalization, suggesting policy changes haven’t altered risky habits. Experts warn that the lack of public awareness around marijuana’s dangers behind the wheel is putting lives at risk."

Unless they publish who funded the study, I'm skeptical that the alcohol industry might be involved. It's absolutely in their best interest to paint marijuana as the devil (and take attention away from alcohol).

Obviously nobody should be driving with any impairment, but people do - driving tired, texting, even talking to passengers and turning their heads to look at the passengers while they talk! (Really, why??? I see people doing this all the time.)
by pyuser583 | 2025-12-21 05:23:31+00:00
In America big cities “squares” are associated with crime and homelessness. Times Square (NYC) and Union Square (SF) being two examples.

The crime wave of the 80s and 90s really messed up urban architecture.

Parks got a similar reputation- even now there’s still a “good park”/“bad park” mentality.

Mass surveillance has its downsides, but safer public spaces is not one.
by dvrp | 2025-12-21 05:24:50+00:00
A lot of the files are hosted on Cloudflare so their $0 egress cost helps a lot. Especially given that so many of the files can be considered immutable assets, so we can configure aggressive caching.

I know that Luke was working on stuff so as not to hit the database as much, but I was in the middle of a flight as that was happening so he'll have to come and provide more details.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-21 05:25:06+00:00
Huh. I believe that, but didn’t know it (I write apps for Apple kit). I have done low-level networking stuff that would definitely have run into issues, but that was over ten years ago. These days, I rely on the upper layer of the stack.

I really should try an exercise like the one the author did. I’m not necessarily against IPv6, but I’m still a bit skeptical of it. We’ll likely be forced into it, as there’s no alternative, but that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.
by komali2 | 2025-12-21 05:26:30+00:00
You might find it interesting that there's an entire genre of youtube video that's designed to just be chucked one by one into slideshows for elementary school teachers to use as their lesson plan. Including videos that are just "2 minute timer for kids!"

e.g. https://www.youtube.com/@Ask.the.Teacher

"Independent Reading: Count Up Timer for Classrooms": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfLfJtVeME8 straight up just stock imagery and a timer lol
by laidoffamazon | 2025-12-21 05:26:34+00:00
I guarantee (as I have before and you’re well aware) every Yale 2017/2018 grad in CS (or likely any quantitative degree) out earns me and my public school undergrad from 2018 and likely has a multiple of my net worth if they decided to pursue private sector employment instead of academia (though exit opportunities for the academic track are pretty lucrative too)
by tripletao | 2025-12-21 05:26:37+00:00
Here's Chomsky quoted in the article, from 1969:

> But it must be recognized that the notion of "probability of a sentence" is an entirely useless one, under any known interpretation of this term.

He was impressively early to the concept, but I think even those skeptical of the ultimate value of LLMs must agree that his position has aged terribly. That seems to have been a fundamental theoretical failing rather than the computational limits of the time, if he couldn't imagine any framework in which a novel sentence had probability other than zero.

I guess that position hasn't aged worse than his judgment of the Khmer Rouge (or Hugo Chavez, or Epstein, or ...) though. There's a cult of personality around Chomsky that's in no way justified by any scientific, political, or other achievements that I can see.
by mattwilsonn888 | 2025-12-21 05:28:18+00:00
Why not? The individual grunt knows it is more productive and the managers tolerate a non-zero amount of risk with incompetent or disgruntled workers anyways.

If you have clean access privileges then the productivity gain is worth the risk, a risk that we could argue is marginally higher or barely higher. If the workplace also provides the system then the efficiency in auditing operations makes up for any added risk.
by esseph | 2025-12-21 05:28:34+00:00
We've been harnessing fire for over 400,000 years

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/11/nx-s1-5640109/early-humans-fi...

> The discovery suggests early humans were making fire more than 350,000 years earlier than previously known.

> "For me, personally, it's the most exciting discovery of my 40-year career," Ashton said.
by themafia | 2025-12-21 05:29:34+00:00
The California Assembly is one of the weakest legislative bodies in the entire nation. It's too disorganized to engage in any effective oversight or lawmaking. It's left to the people to come up with constitutional amendments to try to manage this enormous machine.

It's a beautiful state. There's literal mountains of opportunity here. It's lately all too easy to become irrationally angry at these con artists and their ruinous agendas.
by aidenn0 | 2025-12-21 05:29:44+00:00
> Unlike symmetric codecs (LZ4), ZXC trades compression speed (build-time) for maximum decompression throughput (run-time).

Huh? This is exactly what lz4 does. Yes, zxc is faster than lz4 at decompressing, but lz4 is clearly asymmetric in the benchmarks shown further down on the page.
by komali2 | 2025-12-21 05:31:03+00:00
When I left my apartment back in 2018, I was switching the Comcast account over to my housemate who was staying on there. In doing so I discovered I had a myname2342@comcast.com email account. The UI showed something like 8,000 unread emails. Bemused, I opened it to see what kind of spam it had accumulated. None at all! It was just under 8,000 DMCA / torrent warning emails from Comcast itself. "We know you torrented The.Pokemon.Movie.2001.h264.mkv, you better stop that!"

A full year of these emails and nothing more than that ever happened.

(if you're wondering how I hit 8000 torrents, the answer is individual album torrents)
by TimorousBestie | 2025-12-21 05:31:17+00:00
> One long-standing code is that they moderate YC companies less on HN, allowing criticisms like yours to stand:

Well, that’s what dang says he does. There’s no transparency and no publicly available data that would demonstrate adherence to the rule.

> To HN's credit I haven't seen this rule violated.

I don’t think you’d observe anything different if it were violated.
by asdff | 2025-12-21 05:32:07+00:00
What is interesting is it is happening with urban racoons too. I'm not sure what the selective pressure might be for smaller snouts. I don't think racoons are being killed like a dangerous bear might. I'd assume if any are being actively fed for looking cute it is very few of them, and those doing the feeding wouldn't be selective about it.

My best guess is that the short snout trait is in linkage with something else that is actually what is being selected upon. At least for racoons.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/raccoons-are-show...
by westurner | 2025-12-21 05:32:34+00:00
datasette and datasette-lite (WASM w/pyodide) are web UIs for SQLite with sqlite-utils.

For read only applications, it's possible to host datasette-lite and the SQLite database as static files on a redundant CDN. Datasette-lite + URL redirect API + litestream would probably work well, maybe with read-write; though also electric-sql has a sync engine (with optional partial replication) too, and there's PGlite (Postgres in WebAssembly)
by komali2 | 2025-12-21 05:32:57+00:00
> Why would you want to destroy your enemies' industries, is what you're asking?

Do you have any evidence that pirating is destroying industries? My guess is I can find the majority of this release by anna's archive on some combination of the pirate bay and the soulseek, or private music trackers. And yet, Spotify is still a thriving company, as is the entire music industry as a whole. There's even room for competing streaming services like Tidal and Youtube Music.
by vbezhenar | 2025-12-21 05:33:26+00:00
I don't feel like it's easy to self-host postgres.

Here are my gripes:

1. Backups are super-important. Losing production data just is not an option. Postgres offers pgdump which is not appropriate tool, so you should set up WAL archiving or something like that. This is complicated to do right.

2. Horizontal scalability with read replicas is hard to implement.

3. Tuning various postgres parameters is not a trivial task.

4. Upgrading major version is complicated.

5. You probably need to use something like pgbouncer.

6. Database usually is the most important piece of infrastructure. So it's especially painful when it fails.

I guess it's not that hard when you did it once and have all scripts and memory to look back. But otherwise it's hard. Clicking few buttons in hoster panel is much easier.
by silvertab | 2025-12-21 05:34:21+00:00
> It seems like you already understand the differences.

Honestly I was about to ask the same questions as the parent comment. Whenever I'm interested in something I usually look at what available tools exists out there already; seeing a new tool mentioned that I've never heard of before, my reflex is to ask "oh neat, what makes it different than the existing tools?". I don't think the question was ill-intended, just genuine curiosity; assuming that you wrote your library because you had no idea build123d existed rather than because you were unsatisfied with it and wanted to tackle the problem differently is a bit of a leap.
by shagie | 2025-12-21 05:34:36+00:00
That sounds correct. This issue would be when the decimal separator matches the argument separator. In that situation =IF(A1 > 42.1, B1, C1) would be equivalent to =IF(A1 > 42,1; B1; C1)

The possibility of incorrect parsing of equation with a variadic function that contains a decimal number in the equation.

However, this is a localization as even the functions change names.

https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/1flsvyu/separator_co...

It’s just a locale setting as to which is applied. If you use English (US or UK) then your argument separator will be a comma. If you use other languages, then a semi colon will apply. You’ll find most guidance online referring to English language functions and comma separators, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter. If you ship a spreadsheet to me that you wrote in German functions and syntax that contains: =SVERWEIS(X2;A:C;3;0) I’ll open that and find =VLOOKUP(X2,A:C,3,0)

This suggests client localization that is rendered differently with different language settings.
by technusm1 | 2025-12-21 05:34:41+00:00
Sorry about that - thanks for reporting it.

I haven’t been able to reproduce a freeze at 99% yet. If you’re willing, could you share a bit more detail (approx folder size / number of files, and whether CPU or memory spiked near the end)?

If you’re open to it, I’d also be happy to jump on a quick call or screen share to debug this together — totally optional. You can reach me at my support email mentioned in the About DedupX menu item. I’d really like to track this down and fix it.
by Avicebron | 2025-12-21 05:34:50+00:00
Sure, and I would be lying if the libertarian bacon-wrapping of what I said was more than an litmus test and karma play, but the concept of good governance on a company like PG&E is so far out of the realm of possibility since citizen's united (and the public warping of perspective to agree with it) I don't see a very reasonable path forward to getting these (lovely, sweet, pure-hearted, well-meaning, community-oriented, positive, hard-working) people under control.

EDIT: *language, think of the children.
by true_religion | 2025-12-21 05:36:32+00:00
If you're a 'startup', you'll never need any of that work until you make it big. 99% of startups do not make it even medium size.

If you're a small business, you almost never need replicas or pooling. Postgres is insanely capable on modern hardware, and is probably the fastest part of your application if your application is written in a slower dynamic language like Python.

I once worked with a company that scaled up to 30M revenue annually, and never once needed more than a single dedicated server for postgres.
by 4q34qq | 2025-12-21 05:37:54+00:00
I've been high basically for 15 years straight and was a professional athlete during that time in a sport that requires a lot of coordination. I know many other athletes that are heavy users, the majority of the best athletes I've ever known were actually. So how do you think that works?

I don't trust anyone else on the road because all of you are comically bad drivers compared to someone like me.
by ehnto | 2025-12-21 05:37:59+00:00
I think you might be misunderstanding the article actually, this is about AI solving tasks as measured by how long it takes a human to solve the task. The AI could potentially solve it much quicker, but the use of "human time to solve" is an attempt to create a metric that reveals long horizon complexity (as I understand it anyway).

It's interesting because like the article notes, AI is really smashing benchmarks, but actual usefulness in automation of thought work is proving much more elusive. I think that collective experience of AI just not being that useful, or as useful as benchmarks suggest it should be, is captured in this metric.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-12-21 05:39:18+00:00
Steve did so much more than teaching Drop City to build domes.

He invented zomes - like domes, but made up of parallelograms rather than triangles so that they can be stretched to create vertical walls.

He invented numerous unpowered solar technologies including skylights that closed and opened automatically based on temperature, and unmotorized solar trackers. Due to the constraints of the time, these all depended on freon, but had Steve been working in the 21st century other safer refrigerants could have done the job as well.

He envangelized about the possibilities of passive heating systems, like Water Wall (which he used in his own home).

He believed passionately in the importance of solar technology not being taken over by large corporations, a belief that sadly didn't end up structuring the industry.

He invented an osmotic heat pipe, stolen from him by the Hughes Corp. and used to cool flight suits in fighter jets.

In 1981, I (a 17yr old from London travelling the USA by bus) spent a night on Steve's patio arguing about cross-subsidies (e.g. cities helping to pay for the cost of electrical and telephone systems in rural areas). We didn't agree but it was a cracking night.

In 2019, I sat on the same patio with a much diminished but still sizzling mind, and now lived only 60 miles away from him. Although it was not unexpected, I was still sad to see at the end of TFA that Steve finally died earlier this year. He was a giant of the alternative technology movement of the 60s/70s and early 80s, and stands as one of my heroes in life to this day.
by weitendorf | 2025-12-21 05:39:46+00:00
Generally I agree with your takes and find them very reasonable but in this case I think your deep experience might be coloring your views a bit.

LLMs can hurt less experienced engineers by keeping them from building an intuition for why things work a certain way, or why an alternative won't work (or conversely, why an unconventional approach might not only be possible, but very useful and valuable!).

I think problem solving is optimization in the face of constraints. Generally using LLMs IME, the more you're able to articulate and understand your constraints, and prescriptively guide the LLM towards something it's capable of doing, the more effective they are and the more maintainable their output is for you. So it really helps to know when to break the rules or to create/do something unconventional.

Another way to put it is that LLMs have commodified conventional software so learning when to break or challenge convention is going to be where most of the valuable work is going forward. And I think it's hard to actually do that unless you get into the weeds and battle/try things because you don't understand why they won't work. Sometimes they do
by VerifiedReports | 2025-12-21 05:39:49+00:00
Nobody said he did. He said the RIGHT lane was a TURN LANE. Which means the lane to the left of it could count on the people TURNING, not going straight.

WTF, YOU made the comment: "If the right lane goes straight"

You might as well say, "if the people on the opposite side of the road cross the median..."
by dwohnitmok | 2025-12-21 05:39:51+00:00
To be clear this doesn't mean that it takes the AI > 4 hours to do the task. METR is measuring the difficulty of tasks by how long it takes a human to do the same task. This benchmark is saying that Opus 4.5 can now do tasks (related to AI R&D, coding foremost among them) that take human experts > 4 hours (at a 50% reliability level; whether that's actually useful depends on of course the cost of failure). It is silent on how long it takes AI systems to do those tasks. In theory an AI system could take longer than that (in practice it's usually significantly shorter).

This is of course quite highly correlated with an AI system being able to churn through a task for a long time. But it's not necessarily the same thing.

Of course the big questions are going to arise if/when we start passing lines like 8 hours (a whole work day) or 40 hours (a whole work week).
by edent | 2025-12-21 05:40:16+00:00
Built it and they will come.

OK, it was a mixture of things. I told my friends about it and they were sufficiently nerdy to try it out.

I responded to early feedback - specifically about creating a leaderboard. Originally it was all anonymous but people wanted to see how well they'd done.

My wife and I gave an interview to a local BBC radio station which gave it a little bump. Similarly, when it is mentioned on reddit and other sites we pop up and talk about it.

It was also picked up by a couple of academic papers, which gave it a bit of credibility. As did our recent integration with OpenStreetMap.

There's a far amount of schema.org metadata which probably helps with SEO.

But, other than that, who knows? I've had plenty of projects which didn't do as well. Sometimes the Web rewards nice things.
by fragmede | 2025-12-21 05:42:55+00:00
Back then, that is. It probably cost $250k in 1990 for them to record Frizzle Fry in a studio, handwave $500k in 2025 dollars. But Bandcamp on MacBook and some gear from GuitarStudio, round to $15k and your time. neither of which isn't trivial or cheap, but it's not 1990 no more.
by twotwotwo | 2025-12-21 05:44:27+00:00
METR is using hours of equivalent human effort, not actual hours the agent itself spends, so by their methodology, your task might qualify as one where it pulls off much more than 4h of human work.

"Human hours equivalent" itself is an interesting metric, because: which human? Or rather, I'm sure they had a coherent definition in mind: presumably a human reasonably competent at whatever the specific task is. But hours the abstract human standard would spend is different from the hours any specific person, say you or I, would spend.

In particular, some of the appeal (and risk!!) of these things is precisely that you can ask for help with things that would be quick work for someone (who knows jq, or a certain corner of the PyPI library ecosystem, or modern CSS, or TypeScript annotations, or something else) but not for you.
by bentobean | 2025-12-21 05:45:24+00:00
> We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months.

If true, how much of this is a result of:

1. Genuine technical advancement

or:

2. Shoveling trillions of dollars into compute resources in order to service incoming LLM requests in a way that is completely unrealistic over the long term?

In other words… are we talking about genuine, sustainable innovation that we get to take with us moving forward and benefit from? Or are we talking about an “improvement” that is more akin to a mirage that will eventually disappear when the Ponzi scheme eventually collapses?