MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-09 05:01:36+00:00
> plenty of developer talent

> number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off

There aren’t the same thing.

> “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work

Probably not. But adapt open-source software for New Zealand’s government can. It just takes a rare combination of technical skill, executive function, leadership ability and emotional self-control to pull off.
by concinds | 2025-12-09 05:01:48+00:00
I hope so too, and I agree on the colored icons for pro apps. Mac user for 20 years, also using Windows on and off, and I've always liked the menu icons on Windows. A move away from minimalism that makes sense. The fact that they're not cargo-culting their 20 year old HIG is promising, really.

But they really should keep the indentations consistent, they're increasing cognitive load for no reason by not doing that.

I also like the hotkeys or whatever (the underlined letter in menu items and dialog box buttons), and maybe that is a fringe opinion among Apple users.
by verandaguy | 2025-12-09 05:02:37+00:00
Funny enough my impression of JS (the kind you'd write in 2007 more than the type you see now, mind you) is that it's remarkably tolerant; many idioms and operations which would cause, in other languages, runtime errors or compile errors, would just get steamrolled over in JS because of just how much built-in flexibility the uber-weak type system (plus liberal use of the prototype pattern in the stdlib) allows for.

- Wanna subtract a string from a number? That's not a type error, that's a `NaN` -- which is just a perfectly-valid IEEE 754 float, after all, and we all float down here.

- Hell -- arithmetic between arbitrary data types? Chances are you get `[object Object]` (either as a string literal or an *actual* object), which you can still operate on.

- Accessing an object field but you typoed the field name? No worries, that's just `undefined`, and you can always operate on `undefined` values.

Frankly, while I haven't had a frontend focus in about 15 years, I struggle to think of any situation where calling a stdlib function or standard language feature would result in an actual exception rather than just an off behaviour that'll accumulate over time the more of them you stack on eachother. I guess calling an undefined variable is a ReferenceError, but beyond that...

(This comment shouldn't be taken as an endorsement of this school of language design)
by echelon | 2025-12-09 05:02:48+00:00
The internet I grew up on barely had any moderation at all. Or polarization. Or algorithms that feed on that polarization.

I grew up in a conservative, religious family. The internet, forums, and IRC exposed me to lots of ideas outside my upbringing and helped shape who I am today.

I was already starting to really dig biology, science, and evolution as a teenager. Early internet culture helped tip the scale. I'm now LGBT, moderate, atheist. I did my undergrad in molecular bio and computer science. Without the internet, I really don't think that would have happened.

Critically, the internet was not so polarized back then. Conservatives and socialists and liberal democrats (were they a thing?) could all talk amongst one another and generally get along.

There was mud-slinging, to be sure, but nothing like what we see today. The platforms today willingly feed on this hate. We reward outrage and division. We ban posts and people we disagree with and then rub it in their faces.

Freedom from censorship used to be a liberal idea. Conservative culture dominated in the 80's, 90's, and early 00's. Conservatives were the chief agents of censorship. (There were tv shows about God and Jesus on prime time TV back then! "Touched By An Angel", FFS.)

It literally "wasn't okay" until Ellen and "Will and Grace" started breaking down barriers. Until that point, it was the more liberal minded folks on the internet that espoused freedom from censorship, sharing of different perspectives, acceptance, and understanding. (Interestingly, the ACLU at that time supported both sides of the political aisle! No favoritism - our rights matter regardless of politics or beliefs.)

After Obama's win, liberal culture and values started taking over. The internet was reaching widespread adoption throughout not only America, but the rest of the world.

It was shortly after this point that "Tumblr culture" started giving platform to more extreme and less tolerant liberal ideas. The people that used to uphold the values of freedom from censorship started being overshadowed by the ones that instead weaponized censorship against political enemies at the platform level. The Obama presidency was an incubation period to normalize this. Reddit, Tumblr, and lots of other forums became dominated by liberals censoring conservatives.

The first Trump presidency flipped the pendulum back. Media censorship used against liberals. The second Trump presidency got censorship at the platform level and garnered tech company alignment.

We just need to stop.

Stop the algorithmic ranking of content. Stop the extreme polarization. Stop the tit-for-tat banning of people. The indoctrination into hating the "other side".

I appreciate that we won't easily come together and find unity. But at the same time, why use that as an excuse to stop trying? When people and ideas can freely be exchanged without folks attacking one another, there can be friendship even amongst disagreement.

If we keep building tools to censor "the other side" they will eventually be used against us.

We're building 1984 and thinking it serves us. It doesn't.
by aryonoco | 2025-12-09 05:02:59+00:00
Yeah I just implemented a new stack and noticed OpenTofu now supports client side encryption for the state files in with keys stored in Azure KeyVault (in the latest 1.11 release). AWS and GCP had been supported for a while.

Client side state encryption was one of the things which HashiCorp always gatekeeped for HashiCorp Cloud and never implemented in the Open Souce / Sourece Available versions.
by chickensong | 2025-12-09 05:03:01+00:00
I agree the industry needs to grow up. The YOLO move fast, what tests, what security, sucks. I'm having a hard time seeing your vision of individually licensed professionals though. I hear what you're saying, but it seems totally unrealistic IMO.

Your comparisons (pharmacist, nurse, electrician) are all part of specific regulated industries, in roles where the individual's actions can mean life or death. Software engineers, and the greater IT domain, cover an incredibly wide area, reaching into most other industries. Most of these people have very little chance of directly influencing a life or death situation.

Say you take a subset of software folks, create a regulated standard for licensing your real professionals, they get ethics and safety training, take tests, get certs, etc.. They're hopefully good, quality engineers, perhaps sought after by regulated industries. How are those individuals going to stop ads in your fridge? It's not their call. A business dude at Samsung or whoever is going to pitch the latest invasive ad idea with projected revenue, execs will smell profit and direct engineering to implement. Unless there's regulation of the home appliance industry or the advertising industry, Samsung won't give a shit about hiring your expensive licensed engineers for the job.

I don't know what you're talking about regarding perfect consumer knowledge in a free market. To my understanding, a free market is just dynamic pricing based on supply and demand and competition between sellers, but I'm not particularly educated in economics. Regardless, you don't need perfect knowledge to be informed or make a purchasing decision.

I replied to your original post because it's common sentiment I see often, where outrage sparks an appeal to some authority to fix things, which I find frustrating because it's often not actionable or realistic. I applaud the spirit of your call to the community to do better, but I don't agree with your specifics and the vague wish for consequences from above.

Our views aren't completely incompatible though, you're angry, I'm angry, and we're talking about it which is a win in my book. I'm promoting a different type of grassroots resistance, but by all means fight the fight to enact your vision of regulation somehow.
by derefr | 2025-12-09 05:03:21+00:00
I think they mean big-D "Distributed", i.e. in the sense that a DHT is Distributed. Decentralized in both a logical and political sense.

A big DynamoDB/Spanner deployment is great while you can guarantee some benevolent (or just not-malevolent) org around to host the deployment for everyone else. But technologies of this type do not have any answer for the key problem of "ensure the infra survives its own founding/maintaining org being co-opted + enshittified by parties hostile to the central purpose of the network."

Blockchains — and all the overhead and pain that comes with them — are basically what you get when you take the classical small-D distributed database design, and add the components necessary to get that extra property.
by toomim | 2025-12-09 05:03:38+00:00
Lovely analysis!

But one issue: it's not actually the case that "all CRDTs are OTs".

OT is the feature of Transforming and Operation. This requires two things: (1) Operations, and (2) Transforming them so that they do the same thing when applied from one place in distributed time vs. another place in distributed time.

However, there are plenty of CRDTs that (a) do not have operations, and also plenty of CRDTs that (b) do not transform operations.

Consider a typical state-based CRDT like LWW register. It does not have operations; it just has a current state: the value of the register. And it does not transform operations. It just always computes the current value of the register.

(For more on the relationship between OT and CRDT, see my notes at braid.org/meeting-111.)
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-09 05:03:51+00:00
The right-wing extremism we now have in the US is the expected knee-jerk reaction to the left-wing extremism that came before it.

In both cases there's a few true believers and a lot of opportunists who use the cause as a way to further their own agenda. It happened with the left (the master branch rename being the stupidest example), it's now happening in the right, with big words and performative actions such as ICE raids while the root cause of the problem is not addressed (industries reliant on large-scale illegal immigrant labor are left alone).

The right answer is somewhere in the middle of the two camps. Unfortunately until then people suffer on both sides while opportunists use the conflict for their own interests.
by visarga | 2025-12-09 05:03:54+00:00
That is a good approach, bottom up, manage complexity. But the general picture is - you set the direction and hold the model responsible, it does the actual work. Think of it as your work is the negative of the AI work, it writes the code, you ensure it tests that code. The better test harness you create, the better the AI works. The real task is to constrain the AI into a narrow channel of valid work.
by alyxya | 2025-12-09 05:04:13+00:00
I’ve had a hard time parsing what exactly the paper is trying to explain. So far I’ve understood that their comparison seems to be models within the same family and same weight tensor dimensions, so they aren’t showing a common subspace when there isn’t a 1:1 match between weight tensors in a ViT and GPT2. The plots showing the distribution of principal component values presumably does this on every weight tensor, but this seems to be an expected result that the principal component values shows a decaying curve like a log curve where only a few principal components are the most meaningful.

What I don’t get is what is meant by a universal shared subspace, because there is some invariance regarding the specific values in weights and the directions of vectors in the model. For instance, if you were doing matrix multiplication with a weight tensor, you could swap two rows/columns (depending on the order of multiplication) and all that would do is swap two values in the resulting product, and whatever uses that output could undo the effects of the swap so the whole model has identical behavior, yet you’ve changed the direction of the principal components. There can’t be fully independently trained models that share the exact subspace directions for analogous weight tensors because of that.
by wredcoll | 2025-12-09 05:04:16+00:00
Except there are people right on this forum who will happily talk about how dogs deserve fewer/no rights. Do you think that this makes the "dogs" feel welcome and do you think that these words have no effect?

Like, it's cool and great that you personally are in a position where most of the ideologies of hate aren't affecting you, right now, personally, but is it too much to ask that you spare a thought for the people it does affect?
by valbaca | 2025-12-09 05:04:19+00:00
> Dollar General said it was “committed to providing customers with accurate prices on items purchased in our stores, and we are disappointed any time we fail to deliver on this commitment”. In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”

LOVE LOVE putting what their PR says right next to what their lawyers say in court.

We absolutely need this more in this kind of reporting of late-stage capitalism.
by bcrosby95 | 2025-12-09 05:05:35+00:00
I always choose self service because that's where the volume is. I can wait in one of any Costco lines with 4 carts and 1 person checking them through, or I can wait in the line with 4 carts and 6 self service checkouts.

Despite the math working out insanely well for self service checkout, sometimes the gamble still doesn't pay off and the single employee burns through 4 carts faster than 6 self service checkout kiosks.

Costco does pretty good here though, drug stores go slow as hell.
by ipython | 2025-12-09 05:05:42+00:00
You can bound risk on ai agents just like an atm. You just can’t rely upon the ai itself to enforce those limits, of course. You need to place limits outside the ai’s reach. But this is already documented best practice.

The point about ai not having “skin” (I assume “skin in the game”) is well taken. I say often that “if you’ve assigned an ai agent the ‘a’ in a raci matrix, you’re doing it wrong”. Very important lesson that some company will learn publicly soon enough.
by sreekanth850 | 2025-12-09 05:06:37+00:00
I think all modern system even scylla db do commit batch no fsync on every write, you either need throughput or durability both cannot exist together. Only thing what redpanda claim is you have to do replication before fsync so your data is not lost if the written node is dead due to a power failure. this is how scylla and cassandra works, if iam not wrong, so even if a node dead before the batch fsync, replication will be done before fsync from memtable,so other nodes will bring the durability and data loss is no longer true in a replicated setup. single node? obviously 100% data loss. but this is the trade off for a high tps system vs durable single ndoe system brings. its how you want to operate.
by anon291 | 2025-12-09 05:08:01+00:00
India is not going to partner militarily with anyone, European or not, for the exact reason that Europe now find itself in.

> The American dependency has been destroyed but what fills that empty space?

This is honestly a bit crazy right? You can depend on yourselves? I can't believe I need to tell Europe that they should look into the meaning of swaraj.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-09 05:08:20+00:00
To use an analogy: Imagine a spreadsheet with 500 smoothie recipes one in each row, each with a dozen ingredients as the columns.

Now imagine you discover that all 500 are really just the same 11 base ingredients plus something extra.

What they've done here is use SVD, (which is normally used for image compression and noise reduction), to find that "base recipe". Now we can reproduce those other recipes by only recording the one igredient that differs.

More interestingly it might tell us something new about smoothies in general to know that they all share a common base. Maybe we can even build a simpler base using this info.

At least in theory. The code hasn't actually been released yet.

https://toshi2k2.github.io/unisub/#key-insights
by jazzyjackson | 2025-12-09 05:08:35+00:00
The cost isn't for the item, it's for the paperwork attesting to the acquisition and delivery of the item.

Whether one screw or 500 screws are ordered, it still takes an hour or two to fill out the forms and submit the invoice.

Think of $37 as the "fuck off" price, except the buyer has no one else to buy from because the seller is the only one meeting FARS/CMMC regulations
by wvenable | 2025-12-09 05:09:23+00:00
> This is clear because there are lots of very successful competing products to Microsoft’s buffet.

Is there? Maybe Google docs.

It's amazing that Microsoft has, for the most part, not really changed their fundamental office software for over a decade and yet there is very little actual competition. People call it bland but I've yet to see any real competition to the whole package.
by guiambros | 2025-12-09 05:09:34+00:00
Same; avid reader of printed books here. I have more pdfs I can count (most coming from Humble Bundle impulse buying), but nothing beats physical books for me.

I got a remarkable pro, and it's just slightly better than screen. Being able to annotate books is actually a welcomed addition, and the screen is pretty decent. But flipping screen is slow (compared to a printed book), and going back and forth between pages is a hassle. Until we have the speed of a tablet (read: instant), with the screen quality of an e-ink, I don't think I'll voluntarily retire printed books.

Now, I have an O'Reilly subscription (two actually, through school and ACM), but the app is sadly horrendous, as OP mentioned. Hard to believe this is actually their core business.
by fwipsy | 2025-12-09 05:09:58+00:00
If the baker loans to the butcher so that the butcher can buy from the baker, then the baker comes out ahead only if the butcher is good for the money.

You need something of substance exchanged, not just delivered. Nvidia hasn't gotten anything of substance from OpenAI yet.

I don't know shit about AI, but Nvidia could still give me $100b to buy their GPUs. Now I build a datacenter and Nvidia gets to claim $100b worth of sales AND a $100b stake in my datacenter. As I understand it, that's what's earning Nvidia all this side-eye.
by lmm | 2025-12-09 05:11:21+00:00
> If you want to fight back against that, my experience has been that giving terrible estimates or refusing to give them at all will not result in more autonomy or authority.

In my experience giving terrible estimates or refusing to give them at all is the least bad course of action. It wastes less of your time than any realistic alternative, it does no noticeable damage to the business or your own position, and the people who want to paint you as just trying to avoid accountability were going to find a way to do that anyway.
by crambs | 2025-12-09 05:11:23+00:00
For Mon, Dec 8, 2025 (high seas scandal):

Themed mode: https://www.gossipdle.com?snapshot=N4IgDiBcDaAMA0BGeDmqRhX4C...

The hint says "Forensic accounting proves Head Bartenders have the highest embezzling ratio of all professions" means definitively that the Head Bartender is embezzling? But I'm not sure why that is, as the wording of the hint doesn't indicate that ALL Head Bartenders are embezzlers, unless it means "highest ratio" is literally 1.0.

In non-themed mode: Gossipdle Tue, Dec 9, 2025

https://www.gossipdle.com?snapshot=N4IgDiBcDaAMA0CBMjXPgRk9r...

The hint says "There are more innocents than criminals in row 3" implies there are 3 innocents and 1 criminal? But I'm not sure why that is, because if there were 4 innocents and 0 criminals, it would still be true that there were more innocents than criminals in row 3.

Also the page says to report issues in a specific format but it's not clear how to actually do that?

Also it seems like the themed version and the plain version take you to different days late in the day (Dec 8 vs Dec 9 just prior to 9PM MST).
Show HN: PyAtlas – Interactive map of the most popular Python packages on PyPI
by flo12392 | 2025-12-09 05:11:46+00:00
PyAtlas is an interactive map of the top 10,000 most-downloaded packages on PyPI.

Each package is represented as a point in a 2D space. Packages with similar descriptions are placed close together, so you get rough clusters of the ecosystem (web, data, ML, etc.). You can: Simply explore the map, search for a package you already know, or explore points nearby to discover alternatives or related tools

Useful? Maybe, maybe not. Mostly just a fun project for me to work on. If you’re curious how it works under the hood (embeddings, UMAP, clustering, etc.), there are more details in the GitHub repo!
by anon291 | 2025-12-09 05:12:19+00:00
I think if America were whiter there would be a more unified desire to intervene in Europe. As it is America is not simply European ancestry . You underestimate how much sway the Latinos and blacks have. I can tell you that they literally do not care about Ukraine or Russia... Why should they? There's no historical link, and the ones that do exist are negative.
by jojobas | 2025-12-09 05:12:54+00:00
You must be somewhat right, however only 4 gets biased up:

In [18]: n = 10000000

In [19]: tally = [0,0,0,0,0,0]

In [20]: for i in range(n): ...: tally[(random.randint(0,9)+ random.randint(0,9))%6]+=1 ...:

In [21]: tally Out[21]: [1600008, 1600460, 1699599, 1799697, 1699604, 1600632]
by wredcoll | 2025-12-09 05:12:59+00:00
> Critically, the internet was not so polarized back then. Conservatives and socialists and liberal democrats (were they a thing?) could all talk amongst one another and generally get along

Really? 4chan has been around preaching death and hatred to all sorts of minorities for, like, 20+ yeara at this point and it's hardly the first or only.

It's great that there are better places on the web than 4chan, but those places, without exception, are better because they ban the hateful and intolerant.

> The Obama presidency was an incubation period to normalize this. Reddit, Tumblr, and lots of other forums became dominated by liberals censoring conservatives

This is such a weird lie to insert in the middle of this rant and it really makes you wonder about the rest of it.

No one is required to tolerate assholes spewing hate no matter how liberal or tolerant you are supposed to be.
by jdpage | 2025-12-09 05:14:32+00:00
Yes, the understanding is that trans people were always trans. It may have taken time for them to understand that and perhaps more to decide to adopt that identity publicly, but they're not "not trans" before that. Other queer identities are generally thought of the same way in queer communities: many people have early experiences (e.g. fixating on same-sex characters in fiction the way peers might opposite-sex characters) that they later realise were early expressions of their orientation.
by aeonfox | 2025-12-09 05:14:47+00:00
Just to test out the OP articles theory, I was about to write some unit tests. I decided to let Opus 4.5 have a go. It did a pretty good job, but I spent probably as much time parsing what it had done as I would have writing the code from scratch. I still needed to clean it up, and of course, unsurprisingly, it had made a few tests that only really exercised the mocking it had made. A kind of mistake I wouldn't be caught dead sending in for peer review.

I'm glad the OP feels fine just letting Opus do whatever it wants without a pause to look under the covers, and perhaps we all have to learn to stop worrying and love the LLM? But I think really, here and now, we're witness to just another hype article written by a professional blogger and speaker, who's highly motivated to write engagement bait like this.