MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ramses0 | 2025-12-11 19:53:01+00:00
I looked this up for a laser-based projector, Class 2 is "blink reflex should protect you" and "don't be a doofus and stare into it for a long time". Look up the classifications on the google and you'll see other things like "don't look into the rays with a set of binoculars" and stuff.

Class 1 is pretty darned safe, but if you're continually bathed by 50 passing cars an hour while walking on a sidewalk... pitch it to a PhD student you know as something they should find or run a study on.
by almosthere | 2025-12-11 19:53:03+00:00
No, no, you can't get away with saying "calling what we have now "capitalism" is quite a stretch, the meaning of that word is now so vague as to render it meaningless"

This is just simply not true. There are too many young people that want to be lawyers or ivory tower word architects, but the time for "winning arguments" because you're narrative is to make people believe untrue things, just does not work anymore.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-12-11 19:53:38+00:00
I agree. I've worked in places that discourage "cute" names and the result is often things like having to decide between using CoreMainHttp and MainHttpCore. Or worse, two things with exactly the same name, but two different APIs, with projects sometimes taking both as a dependency at the same time. Or even obsolete parts of the org chart encoded into dependency names, like "DataOrgUtils" when the "Data Org" stopped existing several reorgs ago, when our current VP was an intern and nobody else even worked here.

Without some central control of names though, even "cute" ones tend to converge on the same handful eventually: Phoenix (and other classical allusions like Plato's Cave, etc.), Keymaster/MCP (and other 80s childrens' movie references), Simpsons characters, Star {Trek,Wars} references. These are all attractors for the kind of people that tend to be in IT/SWE even if the actual namespace (all possible ASCII-expressable words) is much larger.
by alexjplant | 2025-12-11 19:53:42+00:00
I've played in bar bands (doing covers) for 12 years now. My current project is going on hiatus due to some members leaving and us having to find new ones. We played our last show very recently and were talking about how we have an actual fanbase that's grown through friends, spontaneous discovery, and social media primarily through my bandmates' doing. Before the show and between sets I'm always going out of my way to do something in service of the performance instead of talking to people in the crowd that are watching us.

It then occurred to me that a decent part of the reason that I perform live is a selfish one - on some level I'd rather demonstrate social utility by being a human jukebox than have to interact with people normally. Apparently I'd rather chug water and double-check the setlist after getting off stage than drink a beer and introduce myself to people. As ironic as it sounds there's a certain security to being on stage that insulates you from having to hang out with people while still scratching the itch to go out.

Maybe I'm psychologizing myself too much but it's a thought. Definitely something I'm going to work on regardless.
by moron4hire | 2025-12-11 19:53:47+00:00
Yeah, I don't like the comparisons of JS to Lisp, because I think they mostly center on the existance of the map and filter methods of Array. To me, that's just not what Lisp is about. C# has map/filter/etc, and we don't say C# is-a Lisp.

And there are many other such features that were once unique/unique-ish to Lisp, that were major selling points for using Lisp at the time, but are now pretty common across a very diverse set of languages. Garbage collection being one. Higher order functions being another.

Lisp's big idea that stuck to being unique to Lisp is homoiconicity. It's the one thing that continues to be valuable enough to warrant using Lisp, despite everything else that has been stolen and copied.

Of course, not that I ever used Common Lisp, and not that I use Racket anymore. I enjoyed the hell out of programming in Racket. Up until the point I needed to access a database. Man, who's got time for that Jankasarous Rex? But I really would love a homoiconic language for the .NET CLR. That would be pretty sweet.
by iberator | 2025-12-11 19:54:04+00:00
Alcohol is not perfect for health but quite amazing social lubricant for a healthy social life (more sex, friends and social life = longer lifespan!).

Civilizations that banned alcohol and drugs are typically violent and poor.

Mental health is important, and nothing is black and white. There is a magical number for risk/rewards at around 0.09%% AFIK nd not often than once per week. (around 2x less than 'recommended' amount in UK by goverment hehe)

SCIENCE! :)
by fluidcruft | 2025-12-11 19:54:44+00:00
It probably depends on what you're working on. For the most part relying on a high-quality library/module that already implements a solution is less code to maintain. Any problems with the shared code can be fixed upstream with more eyeballs and more coverage than anything I build locally. I prefer to keep my eyeballs on things most related to my domain and not maintain stuff that's both ultimately not terribly important and replaceable (if push comes to shove).

Generally, you are correct that having multiple libraries to choose among is concerning, but it really depends. Mostly it's stylistic choices and it can be hard to tell how it integrates before trying.
by infamousbolt | 2025-12-11 19:54:50+00:00
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by Sevrene | 2025-12-11 19:55:18+00:00
I return to you "Have you not been paying attention?"

Trump didn't rise to power because of democracy, it was in spite of it, Trump literally tried to overturn the election results and still subverts the people's choice by continuing to spread that lie. He talks of jailing his opponents, plays dirty, doesn't respect the rules or democratic institutions. He is the antithesis of democracy and the people (using democracy) voted him in. The people failed themselves and their own people but they did so not as first order goals.

Spartacist uprising, mensheviks vs bolsheviks, etc- people didn't turn away from democracy because democracy itself failed them, they turned away from democracy because they had some idealist world they wanted to get to– by force (i.e not democratic). This is what motivated communist uprises and hitler's brownshirts to subvert the election. Note that this says nothing as to whether they are correct or not in their worldview. Hitler shares this type of thinking and he took advantage of it – just like Trump destroys the media "fake news" or makes voting harder, if we, the people, didn't allow it, we would prevent it one way or another. The problem with Trump or Hitler isn't that they're "too democratic", it's that they subverted the process debasing it in turn.

There is power in the collectve. Unions got this via bloodshed so that they need not bleed more. If we devalue unions because some unions are bad we just live in a world in which capital get to rule and bloodshed returns. It's a regression. It's not the right strategy, we need to work together despite our differences in solidarity despite the fact democracy sometimes leads to imperfect outcomes, all in order to prevent dictators, ensuring they govern with mandate and consent, not authoritarian force.

It's not one single institution like "Congress". Democracy isn't just voting it requires free and fair elections which require free and fair political discourse which requires transparency, and mass media that informs doesn't distorts, etc. If we don't value these the next step isn't voting on it democratically, it's violence to enforce totalitarianism. In some ways, we're already there. Lets not inadvertently enable it.
by dolftax | 2025-12-11 19:55:23+00:00
The structured vs open-ended distinction here applies to code review too. When you ask an LLM to "find issues in this code", it'll happily find something to say, even if the code is fine. And when there are actual security vulnerabilities, it often gets distracted by style nitpicks and misses the real issues.

Static analysis has the opposite problem - very structured, deterministic, but limited to predefined patterns and overwhelms you in false positives.

The sweet spot seems to be to give structure to what the LLM should look for, rather than letting it roam free on an open-ended "review this" prompt.

We built Autofix Bot[1] around this idea.

[1] https://autofix.bot (disclosure: founder)
by thomassmith65 | 2025-12-11 19:56:28+00:00
With a good programmer, if they do multiple passes of a refactor, each pass makes the code more elegant, and the next pass easier to understand and further improve.

Claude has a bias to add lines of code to a project, rather than make it more concise. Consequently, each refactoring pass becomes more difficult to untangle, and harder to improve.

Ideally, in this experiment, only the first few passes would result in changes - mostly shrinking the project size, and from then on, Claude would change nothing - just a like a very good programmer.

This is the biggest problem with developing with Claude, by far. Anthropic should laser focus on fixing it.
by comex | 2025-12-11 19:56:41+00:00
I think you're right. My mistake. Maybe the best option is `&mut windows_sys::core::BSTR` (using the unsafe BSTR type I mentioned), since that way the same BSTR type can be used for the two arguments. Or `*mut BSTR`, since windows-rs itself seems to prefer raw pointers for whatever reason, though I found crates using windows-rs that seem to successfully use references.

I am slightly suspicious that Raymond Chen might have been confused. The link in that post has the text "forget to set the output pointer to NULL", but in the linked post (the original link is broken but it's at [1]), the implementation actually set the output pointer to a garbage value rather than leaving it untouched. I wonder what the marshalling implementation actually looks like…

But at any rate, treating the out pointer as uninitialized is definitely the safe option. I'm not 100% sure whether it can legitimately point to non-null, but if it does point to non-null, then that value is definitely garbage rather than something that needs freeing.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091007-00/?p=16...
by dvh | 2025-12-11 19:56:54+00:00
Lot of missing words like kit, sit. And wth is kinkajou? I also did word game many years ago, it took maybe 1 day to code but the rest of the week I've spent filtering out garbage from corpus (names, shortcuts, non-words, non-English words). You can use it: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dvhx/game-word-puzzle/refs...
by cons0le | 2025-12-11 19:57:02+00:00
The only real answer is to unionize. But every time that gets mentioned here, ~90% of people are against it. I notice SWE try to cultivate that "rockstar" persona, the last thing people want to do is admit they need each other / take collective action.

We honestly should have unionized 20 years ago when the outsourcing started
by panick21_ | 2025-12-11 19:57:10+00:00
I have been using is since early Alpha and overall its pretty good. Certainty bug early on but now that I'm thinking on it I don't remember hitting any real issues in a few months now.

I still think the name Pop!_OS is dumb, they should just call it CosmicOS, as this new desktop is their defining feature and its a great name.

What is really amazing is that thanks to Cosmic now becoming an important part of Wayland, along with others, the community in total can finally move protocol forward that were blocked by really dumb ideological conflicts that are holding back Wayland. If Cosmic can take Gnome market share, people will be more willing to move on protocols without Gnome and hopefully eventually Gnome will realize that they have to implement this stuff, or at least large users of Gnome will realize it.

My with for Pop!_OS next major feature would be to embrace ZFS and build around it.

I'm also looking forward to seeing full Cosmic on ReduxOS.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-11 19:57:10+00:00
> if you have experienced the latest FSD, Waymo's and now Rivian's bet is just so obviously the exact wrong bet

I have. It’s wild for anyone to say this.

Waymo works. FSD mostly works, and I seriously considered getting a Tesla after borrowing one last week. But it needs to be supervised—this is apparent both in its attention requirement and the one time last week it tried to bolt into a red-lit intersection.

The state of the art is Waymo. The jury is still out on whether cameras only can replicate its success. If it can’t, that safety margin could mean game over for FSD on the insurance or regulatory levels. In that case, Rivian could be No. 2 to Waymo (which will be No. 1 if cameras only doesn’t pan out, given they have infinite money from Google). That’s a good bet.

And if cameras only works, you’ll still have the ultra premium segment Tesla seems to have abandoned and which may be wary of licensing from Waymo.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-12-11 19:57:11+00:00
Super fun, congrats! Works really well

My only feedback is just that the homepage had a lot of elements that distracted me initially - I wasn't sure if I had to type something (the input examples changing all the time made me think it was important to fill it out)

I ended up clicking "Start Game" on a whim and was glad that I could check it out immediately. Maybe make the "I just want to play now" option/button/CTA larger/more obvious (i.e. giving it more focus)?

To test it again, I just typed some words in the input bar, it forced me to login, I chose the Google login, I was then brought back to https://endless-wordsearch.com/#/sso-callback but the top right button still says Sign In, and my input was lost. So I assume the login didn't work?

I typed my input again, a popup appeared (mentioning Clerk)... then it finally logged me in. Now I'm back at the homepage, and my input has been lost again :-)

I typed my input a third type, and now I'm getting "Generation failed".
by verdverm | 2025-12-11 19:57:25+00:00
I mean more the guts of the agentic systems. Prompts, tool design, state and session management, agent transfer and escalation. I come from devops and backend dev, so getting in at this level, where LLMs are tasked and composed, is more interesting.

If you are only using provider LLM experiences, and not something specific to coding like copilot or Claude code, that would be the first step to getting the magic as you say. It is also not instant. It takes time to learn any new tech, this one has a above average learning curve, despite the facade and hype of how it should just be magic

Once you find the stupid shit in the vendor coding agents, like all us it/devops folks do eventually, you can go a level down and build on something like the ADK to bring your expertise and experience to the building blocks.

For example, I am now implementing environments for agents based on container layers and Dagger, which unlocks the ability to cheaply and reproducible clone what one agent was doing and have a dozen variations iterate on the next turn. Real useful for long term training data and evals synth, but also for my own experimentation as I learn how to get better at using these things. Another thing I did was change how filesystem operations look to the agent, in particular file reads. I did this to save context & money (finops), after burning $5 in 60s because of an error in my tool implementation. Instead of having them as message contents, they are now injected into the system prompt. Doing so made it trivial to add a key/val "cache" for the fun of it, since I could now inject things into the system prompt and let the agent have some control over that process through tools. Boy has that been interesting and opened up some research questions in my mind
by burningChrome | 2025-12-11 19:57:26+00:00
You just encapsulated my 20 years being a developer - mostly on the front-end side.

I figured out rather quickly to do the least amount of work, stay off the radar, do the cool stuff on my own time and saw my role as a corporate code jockey as nothing more than a way to pay my bills and keep a roof over my head.

All of my romantic ideas of being a developer, writing beautiful code and getting the pat on the back for such a great job? It all evaporated within the first two years.

Its just not worth it any more and you completely nailed it why.
by rvnx | 2025-12-11 19:58:28+00:00
It's the only reasonable choice you can make. As an employee with stock options you do not want to get trashed on Hackernews because this affects your income directly if you try to conduct a secondary share sale or plan to hold until IPO.

Once the IPO is done, and the lockup period is expired, then a lot of employees are planning to sell their shares. But until that, even if the product is behind competitors there is no way you can admit it without putting your money at risk.
by krick | 2025-12-11 19:58:30+00:00
Indeed. So I don't really understand what this proposal tries to achieve. It even explicitly says that dict → frozendict will be O(n) shallow-copy, and the contention is only about O(n) part. So… yeah, I'm sure they are useful for some cases, but as Raymond has said — it doesn't seem to be especially useful, and I don't understand what people ITT are getting excited about.
by paddleon | 2025-12-11 19:59:11+00:00
> comparing artificial to real neural networks

I had a sad day in college when I thought I'd build my own ANN using C++.

First thing I did was create a "Neuron" class, to mimic the idea of a human neuron.

Second thing I did was realize that ANNs are actually just Weiner filters with a sigmoid on top. The base unit is not a "neuron".
by ivape | 2025-12-11 19:59:12+00:00
I'm a big user of Gemini voice. My sense is that Gemini voice uses very tight system prompts that are designed to give you an answer and kind of get you off the phone as much as possible. It doesn't have large context at all.

That's how I judge quality at least. The quality of the actual voice is roughly the same as ChatGPT, but I notice Gemini will try to match your pitch and tone and way of speaking.

Edit: But it looks like Gemini Voice has been replaced with voice transcription in the mobile app? That was sudden.
by llbbdd | 2025-12-11 19:59:15+00:00
I won't blame Azure directly without a direct reason to, but as a developer often in the market for cloud providers it's definitely not the most reassuring that they're seemingly having so many migration pains.

A bit of an aside, I've only personally used Azure on one project at one company but their console UI had some bizarre footguns that caused us problems more than once. They have a habit of hiding any controls and options that your current logged-in user doesn't have permissions to use. In some cases that manifested as important warnings or tools that I wasn't even aware of (and were important to me!), but the owner of the company and other global admins could see. AWS, at least for a lot of the services last time I used it, was comfortable greying most things out with a tooltip telling you your user is missing X permission, which was way more actionable and the Azure version gave me whiplash by comparison.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-11 19:59:45+00:00
> As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is".

I've seen a lot of this in younger engineers, too, but taken to such extremes that it's counterproductive for everyone.

"Resume driven development" is the popular phrase to describe it: People who don't care if their choices are actively hostile to their teammates, the end users, or anyone else as long as they think it will look good on their resume.

This manifests as the developer who pushes microservices and kubernetes on to the small company's simple backend and then leaves for another company, leaving an overcomplicated mess behind.

It's not limited to developers. One of the worst project managers I encountered prided himself on "planning accuracy", his personal metric for on-time delivery of tickets. He's push everyone to ship buggy software to close tickets on time. Even weirder, he'd start blocking people from taking next sprint's tickets from the queue if they finished their work because that would reduce his personal "planning accuracy" stat that he tracked.

We even had a customer support person start gaming their metrics: They wanted to have the highest e-mail rate and fastest response time, so they'd skim e-mails and send off short responses. It made customers angry because it took 10 e-mails to communicate everything, but he thought it looked good on his numbers. (The company tracked customer satisfaction, where he did poorly, but that didn't matter because he wanted those other achievements for his resume)
by ge96 | 2025-12-11 20:00:54+00:00
these videos are saying Golden Dome (or at least missile defense) is currently not good enough

the one above and this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdPTpRfhdWM

which you know credibility who knows

edit: the "not good enough" part I mean kill vehicle trying to lock onto the right target not decoys

but I've only started looking into this, not that I really have a say in it as a civilian just along for the ride
by raahul_rahl | 2025-12-11 20:01:00+00:00
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