MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mstank | 2025-12-22 16:45:43+00:00
As the models have progressively improved (able to handle more complex code bases, longer files, etc) I’ve started using this simple framework on repeat which seems to work pretty well at one shorting complex fixes or new features.

[Research] ask the agent to explain current functionality as a way to load the right files into context.

[Plan] ask the agent to brainstorm the best practices way to implement a new feature or refactor. Brainstorm seems to be a keyword that triggers a better questioning loop for the agent. Ask it to write a detailed implementation plan to an md file.

[clear] completely clear the context of the agent —- better results than just compacting the conversation.

[execute plan] ask the agent to review the specific plan again, sometimes it will ask additional questions which repeats the planning phase again. This loads only the plan into context and then have it implement the plan.

[review & test] clear the context again and ask it to review the plan to make sure everything was implemented. This is where I add any unit or integration tests if needed. Also run test suites, type checks, lint, etc.

With this loop I’ve often had it run for 20-30 minutes straight and end up with usable results. It’s become a game of context management and creating a solid testing feedback loop instead of trying to purely one-shot issues.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-22 16:46:23+00:00
Yeah, I've gotten headway in this in other places I've worked... heavy advocate for the only requirement being a minimum length with the recommendation to use a "phrase" as well as not requiring rotation in terms of less than a year at a time if at all... though not strictly matching NIST, some ops find a never require change hard to swallow.

I wrote an authentication platform used by a few govt agencies. The irony is all my defaults match NIST guidelines (including haveibeenpwned lookup on password set/change), but needed to support the typical overrides for other hard requirements that tend to come from such agencies in practice.
by GuB-42 | 2025-12-22 16:46:47+00:00
Most importantly, the NSA is not just about spying, it is also about protection.

A weakness anyone can exploit in software Americans use is not a good thing for the NSA. If they were to introduce weaknesses, they want to make sure only they can exploit them. For instance in the famous dual_ec_drbg case where the NSA is suspected to have introduced a backdoor, the exploit depends on a secret key. This is not the case here.

On the other hand if Snowden has shown us anything, it is that the NSA is more stupid than it looks.
by Damogran6 | 2025-12-22 16:46:52+00:00
At the time the code was/is written, I'm betting carplay offered up a square viewport. Apple's since wanted to offer up multi-display solutions to be the AV/GUI for cars...I think Aston Martin took them up on that...but a number of other manufactures are backing off on that (GM) I suspect because they want to distance themselves from a look and feel you could get in other cars.

I'm not a fan of subscriptions, but in this case, the $10 seemed like good value for features. the map is better, and it's much better integrated into the HUD.

It felt like you were getting more, unlike having buttons that don't work unless you pay...weird psycholgical difference between a subscription and being held hostage.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-22 16:47:16+00:00
Why does it matter what others on HN think? Either you find a comment insightful, read it, upvote and move on. Or it isn't, or maybe it's outright wrong, and you try to correct it. Or you found some question in your head, so you ask that.

Not once have I wondered what "HN at large thinks" because it simply doesn't matter. What HN-the-collective thinks about things-in-general just isn't interesting, people's individual thoughts and opinions though, is so much more valuable to read and interesting.
by the__alchemist | 2025-12-22 16:47:39+00:00
I am trying to figure out how to run for office, e.g. state legislature. (NC) But it is complicated, and you have to register way in advance. Not sure how to get the word out and/or money, although the paperwork and getting on the ballot, isn't heinous. Also not sure how to make this work if there's already a dem incumbent in your district.

I want to run on this topic, and election/democratic reform so we can cut to the nib of it, but it's rough when I'm in a blue/gerrymandered district in a red state. Would want to challenge an actual red incumbent.
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-22 16:47:47+00:00
The positioning is interesting - claiming Rust's performance with Go's simplicity is basically every new systems language's promise since 2015. The key differentiator seems to be "zero-cost exceptions" which I assume means compile-time Result types without runtime unwinding overhead? That's compelling if true, since Rust's Result ergonomics can get verbose in deeply nested error chains.

But the real test is compile times and cognitive overhead. Rust's borrow checker is theoretically elegant but practically brutal when you're learning or debugging. If Rue can achieve memory safety without lifetime annotations everywhere, that's genuinely valuable. However, I'm skeptical - you can't eliminate tradeoffs, only move them around. If there's no borrow checker, what prevents use-after-free? If there's garbage collection, why claim "lower level than Go"?

The other critical factor is ecosystem maturity. Rust's pain is partially justified by its incredible crate ecosystem - tokio, serde, axum, etc. A new language needs either (1) seamless C FFI to bootstrap libraries, (2) a killer feature so valuable that people rewrite everything, or (3) 5+ years for the ecosystem to develop. Which path is Rue taking?

I'd love to see real-world benchmarks on: compile time for a 50k line project, memory usage of a long-running web server compared to Rust/Go, and cold start latency for CLI tools. Those metrics matter more than theoretical performance claims. The "fun to write" claim is subjective but important - if it's genuinely more ergonomic than Rust without sacrificing performance, that could attract the "Python developers wanting systems programming" demographic.
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-22 16:48:07+00:00
This advice remains relevant but I think it misses an important nuance about how career design actually works in practice. The metaphor of "design" implies you're building something from scratch with full control, but career development is more like gardening - you can influence conditions but not force outcomes.

The key insight is recognizing the misalignment between your goals and your manager's goals. Your manager optimizes for team output and organizational needs. Your career growth is a secondary concern - important, but not primary. This creates a fundamental principal-agent problem. The solution isn't to become adversarial, it's to be explicit about your goals and negotiate actively rather than hoping they'll be noticed.

Practically, this means: (1) Having quarterly conversations where you explicitly state "I want to work on X technology" or "I'm aiming for senior by Q3" rather than assuming good work will be rewarded automatically. (2) Building skills outside your job scope through side projects, open source, or internal tools that solve real problems. (3) Being willing to change companies when growth stalls - the biggest salary/title jumps come from job changes, not promotions.

The dangerous flip side is over-optimization. I've seen engineers obsess over "career design" to the point where they won't touch any task that doesn't directly ladder to their promotion case. That creates fragile specialists who can't adapt when their niche technology becomes obsolete. Better approach: have a direction, but maintain broad skills and genuine curiosity. The most interesting career paths come from unexpected opportunities you recognized because you had wide exposure, not rigid planning.
by merpkz | 2025-12-22 16:48:16+00:00
I still have a piece of glass in back of the palm of my right hand. Threw a rock at an old CRT and it exploded, after a couple of hours I noticed a little blood coming out of that part of hand. Many, many years later was doing xray for a broken finger and doctor asked what is that object doing there? I shrugged, doc said, well it looks like it's doing just fine, so might as well stay there. How lucky I am to have both eyes.
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-22 16:48:26+00:00
This is technically impressive but I'm skeptical about real-world adoption. The fundamental question is: what problem does this solve that Kotlin + Jetpack Compose doesn't? Compose already has declarative UI, excellent tooling, and first-party support. Rust's memory safety benefits matter less in app-land where performance bottlenecks are typically network I/O or image processing, not memory management.

The compelling use case would be sharing business logic between iOS/Android/desktop/web. If you can write core logic in Rust once and have thin UI layers per platform, that's valuable. But Iced's UI abstraction needs to be good enough that you're not fighting platform-specific behaviors constantly. Flutter tried this approach and succeeded commercially but still gets criticized for "not feeling native" on either platform.

Performance is where this could shine. Rust + Iced should theoretically have lower memory overhead and faster startup than the Kotlin runtime + Compose. For apps that manipulate large datasets locally (photo editors, video editors, CAD tools), avoiding GC pauses matters. But for typical CRUD apps that are 90% API calls and list scrolling, I doubt users would notice the difference.

The real barrier is developer experience. Kotlin has incredible IDE support via IntelliJ/Android Studio, instant hot reload, comprehensive documentation, and thousands of libraries. Rust's mobile tooling is immature by comparison. Unless you're already a Rust shop building a performance-critical app, the learning curve probably isn't justified. I'd love to be proven wrong though - more competition in the mobile development space would be healthy.
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-22 16:48:46+00:00
Aaronson's take is characteristically grounded. The Willow chip announcement was impressive technically but the media coverage predictably overshot into "RSA is dead" territory when the actual achievement was improving error correction rates. The relevant timeline question is: when do quantum computers solve problems faster than classical computers for commercially useful tasks (not just contrived benchmarks)?

The error correction milestone matters because it's the gate to scaling. Previous quantum systems had error rates that increased faster than you could add qubits, making large-scale quantum computing impossible. If Willow actually demonstrates below-threshold error rates at scale (I'd want independent verification), that unblocks the path to 1000+ logical qubit systems. But we're still probably 5-7 years from "useful quantum advantage" on problems like drug discovery or materials simulation.

The economic argument is underrated. Even if quantum computers achieve theoretical advantage, they need to beat rapidly improving classical algorithms running on cheaper hardware. Every year we delay, classical GPUs get faster and quantum algorithms get optimized for near-term noisy hardware. The crossover point might be narrower than people expect.

What I find fascinating is the potential for hybrid classical-quantum algorithms where quantum computers handle specific subroutines (like sampling from complex distributions or solving linear algebra problems) while classical computers do pre/post-processing. That's probably the first commercial application - not replacing classical computers entirely but augmenting them for specific bottlenecks. Imagine a drug discovery pipeline where the 3D protein folding simulation runs on quantum hardware but everything else is classical.
by yoan9224 | 2025-12-22 16:49:00+00:00
The dystopian part isn't that AI impersonation is possible - we've known that for years. It's that Meta proactively created an AI profile without explicit opt-in, using someone's personal photos and life events to train a simulacrum that interacts with their actual friends. This crosses a fundamental consent boundary that feels qualitatively different from "AI suggested you write this reply."

The legal framework is completely unprepared for this. Current identity theft laws require financial harm or fraud intent. But what's the legal status of an AI that impersonates you with your own data on a platform you actively use? It's not fraud in the traditional sense, but it's definitely some kind of identity violation. We need new categories: "computational identity theft," "algorithmic impersonation," something that recognizes the harm of having your digital self puppeteered by a corporate AI.

The metadata implications are worse than people realize. Even if you never post personal content, Meta can infer relationship status, location patterns, health issues, political leanings from likes, tags, and behavioral signals. An AI profile built from that could plausibly interact in your name with significant accuracy. The person being impersonated might not even know unless someone explicitly asks "wait, did you really say that?"

The immediate solution is legislation requiring explicit opt-in for any AI feature that generates content attributed to a user's identity. No defaults, no dark patterns, no "we'll enable it and let you opt out later." But the deeper problem is the power asymmetry - these companies own the platforms and the data, so they define what's acceptable. We need data portability rights and mandatory AI disclosure so users can at least migrate to platforms that don't pull this.
by hodgesrm | 2025-12-22 16:49:01+00:00
WSJ reporting on toxic fumes in aircraft has been excellent. There was a previous article in September that highlighted the problem. [0]

Problems like these make the value of good reporting obvious. If you want to be a muckraker this is a golden age.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/air-travel-toxic-fumes...
by gigatexal | 2025-12-22 16:49:18+00:00
If I take the question to mean: "you still have to work but you can't work in tech, what would you do?" I had thought about this around the time of the last layoffs that we had ... and I think I'd go to a trade school to become an electrician.

BUT ... to be 100% honest there's nothing I am really any good at other than tech. I guess I could try my hand at teaching. Would that be a good enough loop hole? I could maybe teach Econ 101 at a junior college probably. It'd be a huge pay cut but it'd be better than being jobless.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-12-22 16:49:22+00:00
But in your comment history, you literally don't write like this.

I didn't think twice about it in the article. But I don't read all lowercase as "friendly." It reads curt. Like you didn't have time. Which makes me not want to ask you for help. It's what my boss does when he has 12 seconds to help people, and it discourages people from messaging him.

It also makes it hard to read where a sentence ends.

I'm a little surprised to see so many people not just say this is a better way to write, but that merely capitalizing your sentences is the corpo propaganda way of writing.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-12-22 16:49:41+00:00
Norway also wasn't populated until after the last ice age. As an American archaeologist, old stuff is also quite common here. The fun examples I like to use are the structures in Tucson older than Rome.

Your "local archeologist" is one of the staff at the state historic preservation society [0], though you'll likely have more luck contacting a local university archeologist if you find anything.

[0] https://www.ohiohistory.org/preserving-ohio/state-historic-p...
by scapbi | 2025-12-22 16:49:43+00:00
My main background is in mathematics, and after 15 years working in big data, I am now focusing on machine learning and AI. Not flashy technologies, but practical ones that can do things beyond what a normal human can do alone.

As for the human side, I have already shared my story within a closed community where other engineers know me personally. I am not begging for help; my goal is to inform more people about this situation and, if I am fortunate, to find others who are willing to join me in this fight.
by JanisErdmanis | 2025-12-22 16:49:55+00:00
From analytical arguments considering a rather generic error type, we already know that for the Shor algorithm to produce a useful result, the error rate with the number of logical qubits needs to decrease as ~n^(-1/3), where `n` is the number of bits in the number [1].

This estimate, however, assumes that interaction can be turned on between arbitrary two qubits. In practice, we can only do nearest-neighbour interactions on a square lattice, and we need to simulate the interaction between two arbitrary qubits by repeated application of SWAP gates, mangling the interaction through as in the 15th puzzle. This two-qubit simulation would add about `n` SWAP gates, which would then multiply the noise factor by the same factor, hence now we need an error rate for logical qubits on a square lattice to be around ~n^(-4/3)

Now comes the error correction. The estimates are somewhat hard to make here, as they depend on the sensitivity of the readout mechanism, but for example let’s say a 10-bit number can be factored with a logical qubit error rate of 10^{-5}. Then we apply a surface code that scales exponentially, reducing the error rate by 10 times with 10 physical qubits, which we could express as ~1/10^{m/10}, where m is the number of physical qubits (which is rather optimistic). Putting in the numbers, it would follow that we need 40 physical qubits for a logical qubit, hence in total 400k physical qubits.

That may sound reasonable, but then we made the assumption that while manipulating the individual physical qubits, decoherence for each individual qubit does not happen while they are waiting for their turn. This, in fact, scales poorly with the number of qubits on the chip because physical constraints limit the number of coaxial cables that can be attached, hence multiplexing of control signals and hence the waiting of the qubits is imminent. This waiting is even more pronounced in the quantum computer cluster proposals that tend to surface sometimes.

[1]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11432-023-3961-3
by kierangill | 2025-12-22 16:49:57+00:00
Agreed here. A key theme, which isn’t terribly explicit in this post, is that your codebase is your context.

I’ve found that when my agent flies off the rails, it’s due to an underlying weakness in the construction of my program. The organization of the codebase doesn’t implicitly encode the “map”. Writing a prompt library helps to overcome this weakness, but I’ve found that the most enduring guidance comes from updating the codebase itself to be more discoverable.
by Damogran6 | 2025-12-22 16:50:00+00:00
Bundling. You get 5 things, one of which makes the other ones worthwhile. Yeah, I get it...

By the same token, all ranges of Mini Cooper now have the B48 turbo 4...the top of the list had a bigger turbo and improved intake...the bottom two I suspect are identical with differing software.

I will happily take advantage of that when the car's out of warranty. (I have the base motor)
by pcarroll | 2025-12-22 16:50:03+00:00
WireGuard itself can be configured to work either way.

Our target market is smaller teams and people with limited IT skills. So, we chose not to send all traffic through the vpn. The only traffic going through the VPN is traffic to and from your other devices (in your account). Internet access is still through your default network.

In the Pro version, you can route specific destinations through other peers, also belonging to you. An example use case here would be accessing your web banking while on vacation in a distant country. You would route your bank website through your home connection.

Similarly, our access control is only restricting traffic that comes from your devices on the wireguard network. We do not interfere with the settings of your own personal firewall.
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-22 16:50:05+00:00
>It would be interesting to see the internal post mortem.

What post mortem? The whole fleet reverted to it's "baseline" of acting like a hysterical teenager on day 1 of driver's ed. Obviously there's serious collateral damage to overall system performance when you just create thousands of those people out of thin air but that's "other people's problem" as far as waymo is concerned.
by sseagull | 2025-12-22 16:50:10+00:00
I’ve been working on splitting an idea out from government-funded academia into an industry-supported non-profit. Universities kind of like that, and industries (at least in my scientific domain) are fairly receptive to consortium-type arrangements.

Of course, industry is pretty gun-shy right now too, due to the general economic conditions and AI sucking all the investment out of everything else. So it’s not going according to plan.
by boston_clone | 2025-12-22 16:50:14+00:00
Is that because strong Republican-voting states are such bastions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

Last time I checked, places like Texas are using traffic cameras to track down women who get healthcare out of state, bragging about killing people, and posting State Troopers outside of bathrooms.

Or maybe you're talking about Arkansas, where they recently deregulated the employment of children under 16.

Or maybe you meant Florida, which led the nation in banned books for 2025.

Or maybe Tennessee where they allow for the refusal to solemnize gay marriage after the passage of HB 878.

Maybe you're alluding to states like Louisiana and Mississippi, which have the highest per capita incarceration rates in the US.

Seriously, humor me here - what in your opinion has become more "entropic" in VA since they started voting more consistently blue?
by imadatalla | 2025-12-22 16:51:14+00:00
The asymmetry of it all rings true: the "unbearable pain" shows up first (and sometimes instantly) for people on the receiving end of automated decisions, long before it's felt by system deployers -- a CV silently filtered out by automation, or a person physically or virtually canceled by an automated drone. By the time incentives flip for deployers, the workflows are already entrenched.
by nebula8804 | 2025-12-22 16:51:19+00:00
There is a much nicer visual tool that helps you visualize this: https://thetruesize.com/. (It works best on desktop)

You can place a state/country on top of another country and see the true size. Helps to make up for the improper sizing caused by map projections.

I use it to help my lovely dutch friends realize why I can't just bike to work. :)
by nasmorn | 2025-12-22 16:51:35+00:00
I agree. When new programmers come from uni they sometimes barely did any programming. So at some time in their life they got to actually put in the time and learn how to be a competent developer. It is obviously great if you can do it on somebody else dime in a 9 to 5 but if you can’t get that you should just put in the time and learn. In the end you can at best get paid for the value you can create and if you are incompetent that is not going to be a lot
by hammock | 2025-12-22 16:51:52+00:00
> They aren't "all over the place" in the US, and I certainly don't have a local archaeologist that I can just call up… The Northeastern US is quite recent with human presence

Fun fact, New England has at least 71 different stonework “prayer sites” that are all astrologically aligned.

Two of the most notable are King Philip’s Cave (Sharon, MA) with a stone aperture through which a "dagger of light" appears specifically during the winter solstice, and Pole Hill (Gloucester, MA) which has fixed boulders that align with the summer solstice sunrise/sunset and the winter solstice sunrise.

Here is a research paper talking about all of them: https://neara.org/pdf/wantofanail.pdf

There are lots of historical preservationists in New England that you can call up. If you want my help finding one let me know where you are located.