MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway17_17 | 2025-12-17 00:27:04+00:00
My reason for citing the package manager (and its popularity) as a reason I dislike Rust is because the language org that oversees the language oversees Cargo and its ecosystem. It’s not a tribal thing, it’s a “I feel like this choice enable the active pursuit of a societally/industry detrimental practice”. But I did and do concede that the package manager is not likely to be a part of an eventual formal definition of Rust.

Regarding that it might not be fair to ‘bitch’ about a language ‘existing and becoming popular’ over subjective disagreements: as I’ve said in other comments, and other places, I do not have any issue with developers using or enjoying Rust in their work, I’m all for people making software that is more economical in its usage of hardware and associated/entailed resources. I just don’t want Rust to be imported into existing codebases in other languages (and certainly not into software where it adds a non-copyleft dependency to a GPL’d core).
by password-app | 2025-12-17 00:27:51+00:00
Impressive image quality improvements. Meanwhile, AI agents just crossed a milestone: Simular's Agent S hit 72.6% on OSWorld (human-level is 72.36%).

We're seeing AI get better at both creative tasks (images) and operational tasks (clicking through websites).

For anyone building AI agents: the security model is still the hard part. Prompt injection remains unsolved even with dedicated security LLMs.
by infruset | 2025-12-17 00:28:08+00:00
I was waiting for a post like this to hit the front page of Hacker News any day. Ever since Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2 came out (mere weeks ago), I've been writing tens of thousands of lines of Lean 4 in a software engineering job and I feel like we are on the eve of a revolution. What used to take me 6 months of work when I was doing my PhD in Coq (now Rocq), now takes from a few hours to a few days. Whole programming languages can get formalized executable semantics in little time. Lean 4 already has a gigantic amount of libraries for math but also for computer science; I expect open source projects to sprout with formalizations of every language, protocol, standard, algorithm you can think of.

Even if you have never written formal proofs but are intrigued by them, try asking a coding agent to do some basic verification. You will not regret it.

Formal proof is not just about proving stuff, it's also about disproving stuff, by finding counterexamples. Once you have stated your property, you can let quickcheck/plausible attack it, possibly helped by a suitable generator which does not have to be random: it can be steered by an LLM as well.

Even further, I'm toying with the idea of including LLMs inside the formalization itself. There is an old and rich idea in the domain of formal proof, that of certificates: rather than proving that the algorithm that produces a result is correct, just compute a checkable certificate with untrusted code and verify it is correct. Checkable certificates can be produced by unverified programs, humans, and now LLMs. Properties, invariants, can all be "guessed" without harm by an LLM and would still have to pass a checker. We have truly entered an age of oracles. It's not halting-problem-oracle territory of course, but it sometimes feels pretty close for practical purposes. LLMs are already better at math than most of us and certainly than me, and so any problem I could plausibly solve on my own, they will do faster without my having to wonder if there is a subtle bug in the proof. I still need to look at the definitions and statements, of course, but my role has changed from finding to checking. Exploring the space of possible solutions is now mostly done better and faster by LLMs. And you can run as many in parallel as you can keep up with, in attention and in time (and money).

If anyone else is as excited about all this as I am, feel free to reach out in comments, I'd love to hear about people's projects !
by mothballed | 2025-12-17 00:28:17+00:00
It's a reasonable guess, but 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery. Usually they're committed during the day when people are at work, and if not that then deep in the night for maximum cover. 8:30 is almost like the ideal time if you actually want someone to be there and answer the door at an hour where it wouldn't cause enough alarm for them to answer the door with a weapon.
by vitus | 2025-12-17 00:29:13+00:00
> This is incorrect, the correct strategy is mostly to check the most probable match (the exception being if the people in that match has less possible pairings remaining than the next most probable match).

Do you have any hard evidence, or just basing this on vibes? Because your proposed strategy is emphatically not how you maximize information gain.

Scaling up the problem to larger sizes, is it worth explicitly spending an action to confirm a match that has 99% probability? Is it worth it to (most likely) eliminate 1% of the space of outcomes (by probability)? Or would you rather halve your space?

This isn't purely hypothetical, either. The match-ups skew your probabilities such that your individual outcomes cease to be equally probable, so just looking at raw cardinalities is insufficient.

If you have a single match out of 10 pairings, and you've ruled out 8 of them directly, then if you target one of the two remaining pairs, you nominally have a 50/50 chance of getting a match (or no match!).

Meanwhile, you could have another match-up where you got 6 out of 10 pairings, and you've ruled out 2 of them (thus you have 8 remaining pairs to check, 6 of which are definitely matches). Do you spend your truth booth on the 50/50 shot (which actually will always reveal a match), or the 75/25 shot?

(I can construct examples where you have a 50/50 shot but without the guarantee on whether you reveal a match. Your information gain will still be the same.)
by thomasfromcdnjs | 2025-12-17 00:29:48+00:00
shameless plug: I'm working on an open source project https://blocksai.dev/ to attempt to solve this. (and just added a note for me to add formal verification)

Elevator pitch: "Blocks is a semantic linter for human-AI collaboration. Define your domain in YAML, let anyone (humans or AI) write code freely, then validate for drift. Update the code or update the spec, up to human or agent."

(you can add traditional linters to the process if you want but not necessary)

The gist being you define a bunch of validators for a collection of modules you're building (with agentic coding) with a focus on qualifying semantic things;

- domain / business rules/measures

- branding

- data flow invariants — "user data never touches analytics without anonymization"

- accessibility

- anything you can think of

Then you just tell your agentic coder to use the cli tool before committing, so it keeps the code in line with your engineering/business/philosophical values.

(boring) example of it detecting if blog posts have humour in them, running in Claude Code -> https://imgur.com/diKDZ8W
by bee_rider | 2025-12-17 00:29:58+00:00
I’m not too worried about starting to write like a bot. But, I do notice that I’m sometimes blunt and demanding when I talk to a bot, and I’m worried that could leak through to my normal talking.

I try to be polite just to not gain bad habits. But, for example, chatGPT is extremely confident, often wrong, and very weasely about it, so it can be hard to be “nice” to it (especially knowing that under the hood it has no feelings). It can be annoying when you bounce the third idea off the thing and it confidently replies with wrong instructions.

Anyway, I’ve been less worried about running local models, mostly just because I’m running them CPU-only. The capacity is just so limited, they don’t enter the uncanny valley where they can become truly annoying.
by gwking | 2025-12-17 00:30:02+00:00
I appreciate the even tempered question. I’ve been using mypy since its early days, and when pyright was added to vs code I was forced to reckon with their differences. For the most part I found mypy was able to infer more accurately and flexibly. At various times I had to turn pyright off entirely because of false positives. But perhaps someone else would say that I’m leaning on weaknesses of mypy; I think I’m pretty strict but who knows. And like yourself, mine is a rather dated opinion. It used to be that every mypy release was an event, where I’d have a bunch of new errors to fix, but that lessened over the years.

I suspect pyright has caught up a lot but I turned it off again rather recently.

For what it’s worth I did give up on cursor mostly because basedpyright was very counterproductive for me.

I will say that I’ve seen a lot more vehement trash talking about mypy and gushing about pyright than vice versa for quite a few years. It doesn’t quite add up in my mind.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-17 00:30:05+00:00
> It's making it more similar to how just about every other language already uses the Roman alphabet.

There is no way "every other language already uses the Roman alphabet."

Many languages are internally consistent in how they use it, but those that are aren't consistent with each other. And then there is English, which does pretty much everything any other language which uses the Roman alphabet does somewhere, and probably a few that none of the other extant languages normally using that alphabet do with it, on top.
by newAccount2025 | 2025-12-17 00:30:14+00:00
The specification task is indeed a lot of work. Driving the tool to complete the proof is often also a lot of work. There are many fully automatic proof tools. Even the simplest like SAT solvers run into very hard computational complexity limits. Many “interactive” provers are more expressive and allow a human to help guide the tool to the proof. That takes intuition, engineering, etc.
by thisoneisreal | 2025-12-17 00:30:38+00:00
My framing for this is "mass production of stimuli." Before industrialization, the number of things grabbing your attention at any given moment wasn't super high. But once you had mass production, and especially the innovation of extrinsic advertising (associating psychological properties not intrinsic to the product being advertised itself), we were all suddenly awash in stimulating signals. But like this article notes, those stimuli go mostly unfulfilled by the action we take (buying the thing, opening the app), and so we all have this low level background noise of frustration and dissatisfaction.

EDIT: Some later posts mentioned it, but philosophers and religions have contemplated this stuff for centuries. Nevertheless I do think it's an exacerbated problem in the modern world due to technology and scale.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-12-17 00:30:41+00:00
You got downvoted, but I think you are right in a way. Direct neurophysiological recording is not a panacea because either 1) you can't implant electrodes in your participants ethically, 2) Recordings usually are limited in number or brain areas. That said, I think the key is "convergent evidence" that spans multiple levels and tools of analysis. That is how most progress has been made in various areas, like autism research (my current work) or memory function (dissertation). We try to bridge evidence spanning human behavior, EEG, fMRI, structural MRI, post-mortem, electrode, eye-tracking, with primate and rodent models, along with neuron cultures in a dish type of research. We integrate it and cross-pollinate.
by simonw | 2025-12-17 00:30:57+00:00
I think the most interesting thing about this is how it demonstrates that a very particular kind of project is now massively more feasible: library porting projects that can be executed against implementation-independent tests.

The big unlock here is https://github.com/html5lib/html5lib-tests - a collection of 9,000+ HTML5 parser tests that are their own independent file format, e.g. this one: https://github.com/html5lib/html5lib-tests/blob/master/tree-...

The Servo html5ever Rust codebase uses them. Emil's JustHTML Python library used them too. Now my JavaScript version gets to tap into the same collection.

This meant that I could set a coding agent loose to crunch away on porting that Python code to JavaScript and have it keep going until that enormous existing test suite passed.

Sadly conformance test suites like html5lib-tests aren't that common... but they do exist elsewhere. I think it would be interesting to collect as many of those as possible.
by singhkays | 2025-12-17 00:31:53+00:00
GPT Image 1.5 is the first model that gets close to replicating the intricate detail mosaic of bullets in the "Lord of War" movie poster for me. Following the prompt instructions more closely also seems better compared to Nano Banana Pro.

I edited the original "Lord of War" poster with a reference image of Jensen and replaced bullets with GPU dies, silicon wafers and electronic components.

https://x.com/singhkays/status/2001080165435113791
by Bender | 2025-12-17 00:33:19+00:00
I park mine by having no IP address, MX record is "0 ." meaning it does not receive email, the SPF record is "v=spf1 -all" and DMARC is a strict reject, CAA is 0 issue ";", BIMI is "v=BIMI1; l=; a=;". I do the same for wildcard DNS.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-12-17 00:33:27+00:00
I remember when resting-state had its oh shit moment when Power et al (e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22019881/) showed that major findings in the literature, many of which JD Power himself helped build, was based off residual motion artifacts. Kudos to JD Power and others like him.
by heikkilevanto | 2025-12-17 00:33:52+00:00
I admit I have never worked with it, but I have a strong feeling that a formal verification can only work if you have a formal specification. Fine and useful for a compiler, or a sorting library. But pretty far from most of the coding jobs I have seen in my career. And even more distant from "vibe coding" where the starting point is some vaguely defined free-text description of what the system might possibly be able to do...
by nullbound | 2025-12-17 00:34:26+00:00
While I do sympathize with the thought behind it, general user is already equating llm chat box as 'better browsing'. In terms of simple positioning vis-a-vis non-technical audience, this is one integration that does make fiscal sense.. if mozilla was a real business.

Now, personally, I would like to have sane defaults, where I can toggle stuff on and off, but we all know which way the wind blows in this case.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-17 00:34:44+00:00
My point is that treating it as the tree it is, is the only way to really make it impossible to produce invalid HTML. You could also actually validate not just syntax, but also semantic.

> Not a lot of tree oriented output as you make it libraries.

That was actually the point of my library, although I must admit, I haven't implemented actually streaming the HTML output out, before having composed the whole tree. It isn't actually that complicated, what I would need to implement would be to make part of the tree immutable, so that the HTML for it can already be generated.
by yongjik | 2025-12-17 00:35:42+00:00
> Turns out that somehow Midjourney is so commonly searched for, that Google has started serving them in search results for a meaningless English phrase that just means a Korean forgot to switch off of their English keyboard when searching for.

BTW, this happens all the time in Korea, because it's extremely common for someone to type something while forgetting to switch to the correct input method. Try these, for example:

추ㅜ gozjsbtm elwmsl vkdlTjs
by UncleEntity | 2025-12-17 00:36:19+00:00
> I also want agents to be able to consistently prove software correct...

I know this is just an imprecision of language thing but they aren't 'proving' the software is correct but writing the proofs instead of C++ (or whatever).

I had a but of a discussion with one of them about this a while ago to determine the viability of having one generate the proofs and use those to generate the actual code, just another abstraction over the compiler. The main takeaway I got from that (which may or may not be the way to do) is to use the 'result' to do differential testing or to generate the test suite but that was (maybe, don't remember) in the context of proving existing software was correct.

I mean, if they get to the point where they can prove an entire codebase is correct just in their robot brains I think we'll probably have a lot bigger things to worry about...
by onoesworkacct | 2025-12-17 00:36:24+00:00
the next generation of humans growing up will not even care whether media is real or not any more. The saturation of AI content and FUD around real content is going to blur the lines to the extent that there's no point even caring about it. And it's an intractable problem.

hopefully this leads to greater importance of seeing things with your own wetware.
by cxr | 2025-12-17 00:37:16+00:00
Few know that Firefox's HTML5 parser was originally written in Java, and only afterward semi-mechanically translated (pre-LLMs) to the dialect of C++ used in the Gecko codebase.

This blog post isn't really about HTML parsers, however. The JustHTML port described in this blog post was a worthwhile exercise as a demonstration on its own.

Even so, I suspect that for this particular application, it would have been more productive/valuable to port the Java codebase to TypeScript rather than using the already vibe coded JustHTML as a starting point. Most of the value of what is demonstrated by JustHTML's existence in either form comes from Stenström's initial work.
by maniacwhat | 2025-12-17 00:37:59+00:00
I wonder this about the massive increase in crawlers too.

What happened to the computer misuse act? If I specifically state that my site is not to be crawled, via robots.txt and other mechanisms, why does continuously hammering it not count as illegitimate access? Do they need to breach some sign in / explicit t+c agreement for that to apply?
by tialaramex | 2025-12-17 00:38:02+00:00
From my reading of the article I think they understood why we'd want these two primitives for CAS, but they weren't clear (whereas your answer is better here) on whether that's a thing we care about today in 2025. ARM vs x86-64 matters for many people today whereas if we only wanted the other primitive for the M68k well, sorry Amiga fans but who cares.

Without immersion in the "Why" of each technological niche it can be hard to judge whether you're reading advice that really hasn't been relevant in decades ("The ASCII character set is not supported on all computers") or that's still important to your work today ("The file naming conventions may vary from one system to another")
by nhaehnle | 2025-12-17 00:39:12+00:00
My thought as well, but the question is: does it matter for what the survey is trying to achieve?

Some people will interpret it one way, some a subtly different way, but is there a reason that people's interpretation changes over time in a way that is more rapid and more significant than the underlying question of how good their life is broadly? Probably not.

There may be cultural differences that make it tricky to do comparisons between cultures / countries, but it should give something useful when looking at the same culture / country over time.
by keeda | 2025-12-17 00:39:15+00:00
I think Mozilla can get pretty far with one of the smaller open source models. Alternatively, they could even just use the models that will inevitably come bundled with the underlying OS, although their challenge then would be in providing a homogenous experience across platforms.

I don't think Mozilla should get into the game of training their own models. If they did I'd bet it's just because they want to capitalize on the hype and try to get those crazy high AI valuations.

But the rate at which even the smaller models are getting better, I think the only competitive advantage for the big AI players would be left in the hosted frontier models that will be extremely jealously guarded and too big to run on-device anyway. The local, on-device models will likely converge to the same level of capabilities, and would be comparable for any of the browsers.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-17 00:39:39+00:00
It doesn't indicate moral decay at all. It just confirms what we already know about the human psyche being vulnerable to certain types of content and interactions. The species has always had a natural inclination towards gossip, drama, intrigue, outrage, etc.

It only looks like "decline" because we didn't used to give random people looking to exploit those weaknesses a stage, spotlight, and megaphone.
by gcheong | 2025-12-17 00:40:03+00:00
Unless you have a paying customer willing to pay you with just a promise of something to be delivered (see kickstarter et al, Steve Blanks's customer discovery, etc.), you don't. If it solves a problem you have and in a better way for you than other solutions then you personally get immediate value from it. From there, it's possible others may have the same problem and will be willing to pay for it. It's not guaranteed but the number of people getting value from the software will be at least n = 1.
by f311a | 2025-12-17 00:40:43+00:00
From original repository:

Verified Compliance: Passes all 9k+ tests in the official html5lib-tests suite (used by browser vendors).

Yes, browsers do you use it. But they handle a lot of stuff differently.

selectolax 68% No Very Fast CSS selectors C-based (Lexbor). Very fast but less compliant.

The original author compares selectolax to html5lib-tests, but the reality is that when you compare selectolax to Chrome output, you get 90%+.

One of the tests:

INPUT: <svg><foreignObject></foreignObject><title></svg>foo

It fails for selectolax:

Expected: | <html> | <head> | <body> | <svg svg> | <svg foreignObject> | <svg title> | "foo" Actual: | <html> | <head> | <body> | <svg> | <foreignObject> | <title> | "foo"

But you get this in Chrome and selectolax:

<html><head></head><body><svg><foreignObject></foreignObject><title></title></svg>foo </body></html>
by mothballed | 2025-12-17 00:41:15+00:00
Authorities and the university have also been asking for tips but then flipping the script as soon as they get them: "Accusations, speculation and conspiracies we're seeing on social media and in some news reports are irresponsible, harmful, and in some cases dangerous."[]

Also worth noting... at one point the arrested the wrong guy.

They have no clue. And become hostile when people try to come up with one. While scrubbing student profiles and simultaneously claiming they have no knowledge of doing so. The whole thing is a total clown show and nothing said by the authorities is to be believed without independent verification.

[] Brown University spokesperson Brian Clark
by duskwuff | 2025-12-17 00:42:04+00:00
> With Korean, it looks more jarring, as the input method is apparently very different, and seems to map the keys for unrelated latin letters to Hangul letters?

More or less, yes. Each Hangul character represents a syllable, and is composed of two or more components (jamo) representing individual phonemes (like vowels or consonants) which make up the syllable. The keys on a Korean keyboard are mapped to those jamo.

Further details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language_and_computers
by edmundsauto | 2025-12-17 00:42:34+00:00
The San Diego PD is a gigantic clusterfuck of cronyism, illegal behavior, civil rights violations, and other unsavory issues. For a while it was run by the federal level, because SDPD was basically deemed incompetent. Think things like allowing college students to nearly die is isolation.

Sexual assault allegations, shooting a 16 year old in the back recently garnered a $30M settlement.

SDPD is a joke.