MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eichin | 2025-12-22 20:13:48+00:00
https://wiki.debian.org/UsingQuilt but the short form is that you keep the original sources untouched, then as part of building the package, you apply everything in a `debian/patches` directory, do the build, and then revert them. Sort of an extreme version of "clearly labelled changes" - but tedious to work with since you need to apply, change and test, then stuff the changes back into diff form (the quilt tool uses a push/pop mechanism, so this isn't entirely mad.)
by driveby20251222 | 2025-12-22 20:13:54+00:00
New account because I’m a lazy lurker, but “diversity related” projects could be as simple as trying to balance the number of studies done primarily on white males vs other groups. Especially in biomedical research, the gender of the population studied has a profound effect on the relevancy of results.

By many measures, over 75% of studies have historically focused on white male populations, which for a variety of potential research/treatment areas, is important to control for.

https://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+of+medical+studie...
by exceptione | 2025-12-22 20:13:57+00:00
The status quo is not in focus, let alone I would defend it. Your concerns about the status quo are really valid imho, how they should be dealt with would be an interesting other subject, but they are not a concern for the conservative movement, nor are there any signs one could expect even unintended good consequences. As such, as well-intending you might be, it only adds to confusion.

The bad consequences are, from a historical perspective, the least of a surprise.
by clintonb | 2025-12-22 20:13:57+00:00
You joke and folks downvote, but this is my biggest issue with WebStorm. I'm seriously considering switching for the first time in 16 years. Zed is quite snappy. The Claude Code integration in VS Code is brilliant. I've used the CLI in the JetBrains terminal. I had no idea I could revisit past conversations until I used the VS Code extension!
by DrPimienta | 2025-12-22 20:14:37+00:00
Look man, life was unironically just better for everyone back in the 90s. Minimum wage, median wage, highest earners, if you do the math everything was cheaper and wages were comparatively higher. Gas, food, electricity, housing, it was all cheaper. There were fewer regulations and less bureaucracy.

The buying power of a programmer in the 90s was much, much higher than an average programmer today.
by jleyank | 2025-12-22 20:14:43+00:00
I could see things being banned if they mask other substances that are banned and effective (or active). Like eating poppy seed bagels is supposed to mask opiats, etc.

Safety issues, perhaps. Fragments from digestion might look like smaller things which do something (bad). There's a whole lot that's not known re: biological mechanisms. The fact that drug design has worked this well is impressive.
by meowface | 2025-12-22 20:14:46+00:00
It could be the case that they become the hegemon and don't ever conquer anyone besides Taiwan and it still sucks due to how they treat ~20% of the Earth's population (their own citizens).

A liberal, democratic China becoming the hegemon is very possibly better than the status quo (especially under Trump and with the surge of far-right mainstreaming in the US), but China as it is now cannot be trusted to be a good steward of a hypothetical Pax Sinica, just as Trumpist America cannot be trusted.
by ack_complete | 2025-12-22 20:14:55+00:00
The keyboard I was mentioning isn't a laptop keyboard, actually, but laptop keyboards tend to be in a slightly better spot as the major vendors typically have Fn shortcuts for the missing keys, like Fn+B for Break, and they also document them in the user guides.

Detached keyboards seem to be more of a wild west, especially when they target multiplatform -- and it's always the stuff they don't document that screws you.
by habinero | 2025-12-22 20:15:23+00:00
Not true. Border agents were always tinpot dictators, but they're awful these days.

I personally know white collar professionals who were turned back at the border for having a B1 visa instead of a TN visa for temporary work, while another person in their group was let through with no problem. They've been using the same kind of visa for a decade before this. And they were white dudes from Canada.

My Mexican friends said they're not stepping foot in the US for the foreseeable future, and I don't blame them. They have families and can't risk being disappeared and potentially killed because of some idiot border agent.
by daveguy | 2025-12-22 20:15:25+00:00
Thank you for the clarification! I'm impressed. I've always been envious of the bicycle friendliness of roads in the Netherlands. Here in the US stroads and poor bike infrastructure still reigns. It really depends on the region.

We have a backward orange fool running things for gems like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46357881

But it's just as much local political issues as national around here.
by scoofy | 2025-12-22 20:15:55+00:00
My background is philosophy of language. I studied formal/mathematical logic in grad school. I was always embarrassed that I couldn't code, but the computer sciences classes were teaching languages that were inscrutable for someone even with my background, with syntax heavily focused on jargony math and technical concepts like object orientation (likely java at the time).

Around 2010, I was talking about this with friend about this failing of mine, and he said "you should try python, I've heard it is popular with non-math folks." So I bought a book, and as soon as I opened it, I could just read it. It took me a couple days of reading to wrap my head around object orientation, but on the functional side, I could have written fizz buzz like, maybe half an hour after opening the book.

Humans have logic pre-built into our brains, it's just that we use natural language as our syntax. Python cleverly used as much of the natural language syntax as was practicable to remove the barriers to entry for non-math majors. Whitespace is perfect example of a natural language syntax feature.
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-22 20:16:26+00:00
The goal posts were never set at the "Turing test"

It's not a real thing. You do not remember the goal posts ever being there.

Turing put forth a thought experiment in the early days of some discussions about "artificial" thinking machines on a very philisophical level.

Add to that, nobody who claims to have "passed" the turing test has ever done an actual example of that thought experiment, which is about taking two respondents and finding out which is human. It is NOT talking to a single respondent and deciding whether they are an LLM or not.

It also has never been considered a valid "test" of "intelligence" as it was obvious from the very very beginning that tricking a person wasn't really meaningful, as most people can be tricked by even simple systems.

ELIZA was the end of any thought around "The turing test", as it was able to "trick" tons of people and show how useless the turing thought experience was. Anyone who claims ELIZA is intelligent would be very silly.
by rickydroll | 2025-12-22 20:16:30+00:00
I would have had almost no choice but to work for my father in the family rigging business, given that I was the first son of a first son. There's a good chance I'd be dead or severely disabled due to my lack of awareness (ADHD) of heavy machinery moving around me. If tech wasn't an option otherwise, I think I would have chosen to become an electrician—less chance of me becoming dead than moving machinery.
by feydaykyn | 2025-12-22 20:16:47+00:00
I am really sorry it happened to you, and wish you and your mother lots of resilience.

The following is very naive...

I have no experience in this, but since you're working in the banking system, you may know someone who knows someone etc ? It may go high enough that "something" happens, be it some help, or green light for a project to prevent scamming or anything really.

Where I live, banks have to control wire transfers, so for instance if someone wires money for "Brad Pit's kidney", the bank must prevent this. Actually it's a real case, and an undisclosed deal was made between the victim and the bank. Maybe there's something like this where you live?
by pcthrowaway | 2025-12-22 20:17:10+00:00
I haven't had consistent or full-time work in tech in 2 years (1 year since any work, 8-9 years in tech before that)

I'm still doing software work related to activism, but I haven't been looking for paid work because the pickings are incredibly slim for work aligned with my values. I'm planning to get into rope access work in a few months.

I'm not going to stop working on software as long as I'm able to provide value beyond what AI tooling can do, but I'm not hopeful for a return to the industry when I'm so misaligned with Big Tech™.
by TomasBM | 2025-12-22 20:17:24+00:00
Somewhat tangential to the article, but why is SQL considered a programming language?

I understand that's the convention according to the IEEE and Wikipedia [1], but the name itself - Structured Query Language - reveals that its purpose is limited by design. It's a computer language [2] for sure, but why programming?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_language
by robswc | 2025-12-22 20:17:37+00:00
Personally, as someone that has heard non-stop about how horrible the US is from Europeans ever since I was on the internet, I don't give statements from EU officials much weight. It isn't anything new.

I have family that has migrated _from_ Europe to the US, they still seem to hold this attitude that they know what is best for the US. They come live here for a higher quality of life and income, then go vacation in Europe like kings, talking about how much cheaper things are, without an ounce of irony. Not sure how they do it.
by numbers_guy | 2025-12-22 20:17:58+00:00
It's the classic breakup story, one party is just done and want to cut contact, but the other party is still hopeful and wants to find a way to restore the relationship.
The EU is not independent minded in the same way that China and Russia are. That's the problem with them. Their leaders don't want to act independently from the US, because the European wealthy and politically connected classes consider themselves transatlantic, and they want to keep enjoying close ties to the US, even as the US pulls away.
by lukax | 2025-12-22 20:18:12+00:00
17 years ago I went to a summer vacation with my family (still a teenager). That meant 10 days without any internet connectivity. I just got my first laptop and I was allowed to take it with me. I was reverse engineering MSN Messenger's user to user and profile picture exchange protocol from TCP dumps. MSN Messenger did not use any encryption. Before I went to the vacation I recorded a bunch of sessions with Wireshark (maybe it was still Ethereal back then). Then for 10 days I was just trying to figure out from the dumps how the binary protocol worked and was writing the code without any way to test it. When I came back I just had to fix some minor bugs and it worked. Fun times.
by iwontberude | 2025-12-22 20:18:52+00:00
Reminiscent of how most water which used to melt into the Great Salt Lake is now being used to farm Alfalfa, which only makes up 1% of their GDP and far fewer jobs than other industries. Of course if this continues for another generation, toxic arsenic dust will pollute and force the failure of Salt Lake City and surrounding regions. Luckily this will cause the agricultural industry to fail (after killing many people) and nature will heal itself.
by dboreham | 2025-12-22 20:19:13+00:00
Perhaps worth recapping that he hates them due to a specific personal event (the same is true for everything he does, if you dig deep enough to find the reason). In this case he developed a golf resort on the East Coast of Scotland. Meanwhile wind generators were also being deployed immediately offshore. He became enraged that the view from his new development was blighted by the turbines. So it isn't even due to oil industry bribery. It's personal.
by beembeem | 2025-12-22 20:19:19+00:00
Unlike solar, wind at the utility scale virtually always improves load factors, lcoe, and a host of other economics vs a personal installation.

Generally utility scale solar buys cheap panels that aren't as energy dense as those purchased by rooftop consumers, so you could make the argument. However, the efficiency and energy density of the ever-growing turbines installed by utilities, particularly off-shore, are far more efficient than anything you would install yourself. E.g. average annual wind speed typically improves with altitude, and having a taller turbine can reach those larger sustained wind speeds. Whereas, utilities and consumers almost always install solar near-ish ground level and see the same sky, perhaps the utility installs in a sunnier corner of geography. Consumers potentially benefit from the shading of panels, and lower distribution costs.
by agalunar | 2025-12-22 20:19:21+00:00
I believe Peano dot notation works the other way ’round;

A . B : C :. D

would be, as I understand it, equivalent to:

((A B) C) D

The “general principle” is that a larger number of dots indicates a larger subformula.¹

What if you need to nest parentheses? Then you use more dots. A double dot (:) is like a single dot, but stronger. For example, we write ((1 + 2) × 3) + 4 as 1 + 2 . × 3 : + 4, and the double dot isolates the entire 1 + 2 . × 3 expression into a single sub-formula to which the + 4 applies.²

A dot can be thought of as a pair of parentheses, “) (”, with implicit parentheses at the beginning and end as needed.

In general the “direction” rule for interpreting a formula ‘A.B’ will be to first indicate that the center dot “works both backwards and forwards” to give first ‘A).(B’, and then the opening and closing parentheses are added to yield ‘(A).(B)’. The extra set of pairs of parentheses is then reduced to the formula (A.B).³

So perhaps one way of thinking about it is that more dots indicates more separation.

¹ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pm-notation/dots.html

² https://blog.plover.com/math/PM.html

³ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pm-notation/dots.html

See also https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pm-notation/index.html and https://muse.jhu.edu/article/904086.
by zzo38computer | 2025-12-22 20:19:27+00:00
I also think that you should be able to do stuff without requiring internet access, and also should be able to do stuff without requiring electrical power, etc. You should not be overly reliance on technology. They can be useful (in many ways), but should not be mandatory to rely on, and furthermore should avoid damaging the natural environments for such technology, and also avoid damaging the possibility of working without them.
by SunshineTheCat | 2025-12-22 20:20:24+00:00
Yea I've never been a fan of the whole "makes law enforcement's job easier" arguments.

As though personal rights/liberties are trumped by a cop needing to do paperwork or leave his desk.

Plus, when you follow this to its natural/extreme conclusion, the absolute easiest thing for law enforcement would be to arrest you for no reason at all.

The rationalization for this policy of course could simply be that probable cause is "inconvenient."
by Delk | 2025-12-22 20:20:38+00:00
That replaces number two and is the correct alternative in most cases.

There are cases where a password manager may not solve the problem, though. It doesn't help if I forget my disk encryption or work AD password and I need to be able to login before I can get to the password manager in the first place. Enterprise IT is also where you find some of those frustrating password policies, such as long and complex passwords with mandated changes every month or two, and where you usually can't choose your management tools.

Of course those particular passwords usually get typed so often that remembering them isn't much of a problem. And password managers work well for pretty much all secrets that aren't needed that often.
by pigpop | 2025-12-22 20:20:49+00:00
This is a problem but it's a known one which both Google and Anthropic seem to be making progress towards solving. I've had a full on argument with Gemini 3 where it turned out I was wrong and it correctly stuck to its guns and wouldn't let me convince it otherwise. It eventually got through to me about the mistake I made and I learned something useful from it. Sonnet and Opus are still a bit too happy to tell you "you're absolutely right" but I've noticed more pushback creeping in in the right places. It's a tough balance to get right, nobody wants to pay for a service that just tells them "no" whenever they want to try something silly or unconventional.
by rsync | 2025-12-22 20:20:56+00:00
Wait, wait - aren’t you the cookie engineer Who did the site about cloud flare and did the auditing of the malware sites hosted by cloudflare?

OK, now I remember - it was this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38496499

... which I was very intrigued by and I tried to contact you via your web based email submission on cookie.engineer but it broke/failed.

Would you please elaborate[1]:

- who was the person who ran crimeflare, etc.

- Where can I learn about the lawsuit(s) that made them suspend this reporting/indexing ?

I am (potentially) interested in resurrecting these efforts but would like to have a better understanding of them first.

[1] email info@rsync.net if you don't want to respond publicly.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-22 20:21:02+00:00
It's the attitude and marketing. Maybe not "flagrant" but "ambitious," "aggressive," and "expansive." I don't know the name of any other public surveillance/camera company, but I've heard about Flock, and the same is probably true of any of my neighbors who are even the least bit tech-following. They are also ambitiously funded for growth and expansion and their outward press attitude is congruent.

Other camera companies would like to see steady year-over-year growth in camera sales. Flock would like to see the world blanketed in 24/7 surveillance.

They make themselves a lightning rod as a business strategy.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-12-22 20:21:36+00:00
> This is why we're seeing the bulk of gains from things like MCP and, now, "agents".

This is objectively not true. The models have improved a ton (with data from "tools" and "agentic loops", but it's still the models that become more capable).

Check out [1] a 100 LoC "LLM in a loop with just terminal access", it is now above last year's heavily harnessed SotA.

> Gemini 3 Pro reaches 74% on SWE-bench verified with mini-swe-agent!

[1] - https://github.com/SWE-agent/mini-swe-agent
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-22 20:21:46+00:00
Cops can't win that game. If they patrol black neighborhoods they're accused of profiling and discrimination. If they don't, they're accused of cowardice and again, discrimination. The cold truth is there are racial discrepancies in American crime statistics which can't be hand-waved away as manifestations of police bias, but nobody wants to talk about that.
by Alex2037 | 2025-12-22 20:22:16+00:00
sure, they could, hypothetically, close the borders and begin a campaign of forced insemination, but those babies would have no fathers to provide for them, and the state - any state - really resents footing the bill for child rearing, going as far as forcing victims of infidelity, fraud, or rape to pay child support. the state - any state - wants to give you as little as possible and to take as much as possible from you, for the delta between giving and receiving is its lifeblood.

the ideal family has two full-time working parents, paying a mortgage and car loans, consuming as many high-margin domestic products as possible, rearing as many children (future laborers and consumers) as possible, with little to no assistance from the state. and you simply can't have that by force. if you could, you might as well drop the pretense and openly treat your population as slaves.
by Hemospectrum | 2025-12-22 20:22:38+00:00
Rather than downvoting you, I will speak up to say I don't see what you're seeing. Spaces around hyphens, yeah, sure, but LLMs prefer em dashes, and even that is unreliable, because it's borrowed from habits that real humans have had for many years.

For me, the more important indicator is the content. I see reports of personal experience, and thoughts that are not completely explained (because the reader is expected to draw the rest of the owl). I don't see smugly over-the-top piles of adjectives filling in for an inability to make critiques of any substance. I don't see wacky asides amounting to argumentum ad lapidem, accomplishing nothing beyond insulting readers who disagree with a baseless assertion.

I think it's likely you have drawn a false positive.
by forgetfreeman | 2025-12-22 20:23:05+00:00
Uh yeah, no. For all of the same reasons that Cliff Notes do not stack up against actually reading the assigned literature. For all of the same reasons that skimming search results to win lazy arguments online doesn't stack up against an actual formal education on whatever the argument is about. For all of the same reasons an hour of Youtube University doesn't produce the same outcomes as a decade of experience working in the trades. See the pattern?
by meowface | 2025-12-22 20:23:14+00:00
Part of it is ideas and ideals. America represents ideas of liberty, liberalism, democracy, and individualism. The USSR/Russia and China represent the exact opposite.

America has failed to live up to those ideals (slavery, plunder, toppling democratically elected leaders to install military dictatorships, unnecessary wars with mass civilian casualties) on multiple occasions, but if you at least look at things on paper, America is selling a better product. And with the (now gutted) aid we provided to the world, and the economic boons of American consumer demand helping to speed up industrialization of poorer countries, benefits weren't just lofty principles.

One nice thing about American ideals is that, domestically, Americans who respect them can fight for them and fight for their preservation and expansion. There exists a noble thing to fight for which can in fact be fought for, and that thing encompasses the principle of not ever permitting people in other countries to suffer so that the United States may gain. Good luck doing any of that in Russia or China in 2025, and likely also in 2050.
by eichin | 2025-12-22 20:23:30+00:00
When they built the new High School in my old home town in western CT one of the local archaeologists (day job: science teacher) did some exploration on site and discovered all sorts of stuff - no funding for a proper dig so they capped it and put up a plaque about it (ISTR they put the tennis courts on top since that disturbed it least?)

So, yeah, there's lots of archaeology in New England, it's just that a lot of it is literally buried or otherwise not called out. (And "in the US, 100 years is a long time; in the UK, 100 miles is a long distance" is also Just How It Is...)
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-22 20:23:34+00:00
> I am an American and didn’t vote for this bullsh*t.

Isn't the whole principle about democracy and freedom that you all stick together no matter what political party/parties is in power? If you're just throwing your hands up in the air because your party isn't the one in control, what kind of democracy is that? The whole point is working together with opponents for common goals.

Otherwise, may I interest you in an insurrection? Pretty hot and trendy these times.
by SamDc73 | 2025-12-22 20:23:52+00:00
Even with something like a 5090, I’d still run Q4_K_S/Q4_K_M because they’re far more resource-efficient for inference.

Also, the 3090 supports NVLink, which is actually more useful for inference speed than native BF16 support.

Maybe if you're training bf16 matters?