MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by akdev1l | 2025-12-26 05:40:32+00:00
> can be more stable than relying on a distro's fixed release cycles

Stability for a distro means “doesn’t change” not “doesn’t crash”.

Debian/ubuntu are stable because they freeze versions so you can even create scripts to work around bugs and stuff and be sure that it will keep working throughout that entire release.

Arch Linux is not stable because you get updates every day or whatever. Maybe you had some script or patch to work around a bug and tomorrow it won’t work anymore.

This does not say _anything_ about crashing or bugs, except that if you find a bug/crash on a stable system then it is likely you can rely on this behaviour.
by layla5alive | 2025-12-26 05:41:50+00:00
That sounds like great family teamwork. I wish my partner would entertain changing their diet to accommodate this (I've asked). I imagine the challenges of life are slightly more tractable when you genuinely deal with serious adversity as a family unit.

I understand it means an extra burden for all; but to me, voluntarily doing something challenging together for a family members' benefit seems preferable to facing each adversity largely independently.

As an aside, while likely much better than uncontrolled, 6-7% A1C still seems on the high end for lifelong. You probably already know this, but exercise immediately after carbohydrate consumption can also help - e.g. family walk after dinner (another thing my partner isn't interested in)
by avaer | 2025-12-26 05:42:29+00:00
I somewhat take issue as a LangChain hater + Mastra lover with 20+ years of coding experience and coding awards to my name (which I don't care about, I only mention it for context).

Langchain is `left-pad` -- a big waste of your time, and Mastra is Next.js -- mostly saving you boilerplate.

But I think the primary difference is that Python is a very bad language for agent/LLM stuff (e.g. static typesystem, streaming, isomorphic code, strong package management ecosystem is what you want, all of which Python is bad with). And if for some ungodly reason you had to do it in Python, you'd avoid LangChain anyway so you could bolt on strong shim layers to fix Python's shortcomings in a way that won't break when you upgrade packages.

Yes, I know there's LangChain.js. But at that point you might as well use something that isn't a port from Python.

> what would you say indicates a high quality candidate when they are discussing agent harnessing and orchestration?

Anything that shows they understand exactly how data flows through the system (because at some point you're gonna be debugging it). You can even do that with LangChain, but then all you'd be doing is complaining about LangChain.
by beingfit | 2025-12-26 05:43:01+00:00
Do you use it for workouts, especially for longer periods everyday? I’m a constant Apple Watch user and workout everyday, but I do find the battery life lacking when I’m out on hikes for a few hours. My watch is only a few years old and is supported for watchOS upgrades.

My guess is that the sensors use a lot of energy (even when the display is normally off) and that the longer one uses it for workouts within a day (with the sensors continuously on [1]) and the older the watch is, the lower the battery life.

[1]: there is a setting to in the workout app to reduce the frequency of GPS and heart rate readings during walking, running and hiking workouts when low power mode is also turned on
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-26 05:43:49+00:00
> JavaScript is also classically modeled as a gelatinous mass of smoldering tires

TypeScript exists? So I'm not too sure that everyone is focusing entirely on memory safety...

> So then we see an enormous amount of effort being spent to try to replace everything written in C with Rust when that level of effort should have been able to e.g. come up with something which is easy enough for ordinary people to use that it could plausibly displace WordPress but has a better security posture.

I feel like this is somewhat... inconsistent? At the risk of oversimplifying a bit (or more), Rust is "something which is easy enough for ordinary people to use that it could plausibly displace [C/C++] but has a better security posture" (not saying that it's the only option, of course). So now that all that effort has been expended in producing Rust, you want to just... forgo applying the solution and redirect that effort to working on solutions to other problems? What happens when you come up with solutions to those? Drop those solutions on the floor as well in favor of solving yet other issues?

I think another explanation for allocation of effort here is due to the difference between creating a solution and applying a solution. At the risk of oversimplifying yet again, "replace C with Rust" is applying a known solution with known benefits/drawbacks to a known problem. Can you say the same about "[i]mprov[ing] the various legacy issues with distribution package managers so that people stop avoiding them even for popular packages in favor of perilous kludges like npm and Docker", let alone coming up with an easy-to-use more secure WordPress replacement?
by gorgoiler | 2025-12-26 05:43:53+00:00
”After the UK implemented its Online Safety Act the country’s VPN usage surged as teens sough [sic] to skirt age checks on social media platforms and pornography websites.”

The report they link to presents no evidence that the surge was from “teens”. Practically, it’s also wrong to categorize all popular sites that opted into the geo-block as being social or adult. For example, imgur.com is by all sensible definitions a general purpose image upload site with 3M DAU worldwide. It is as much a “pornography website” as YouTube or Reddit.

I would suggest this article be corrected to instead say “usage surged as netizens sought to avoid online ID checkpoints and mandatory facial recognition”, but that’s bordering on inflammatory in the other direction.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-26 05:46:20+00:00
It does say in the follow up tweet "To the others, I apologize for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault."

Good energy, but we definitely need to direct it at policy if wa want any chance at putting the storm back in the bottle. But we're about 2-3 major steps away from even getting to the actual policy part.
by linguae | 2025-12-26 05:47:37+00:00
Assuming this post is real (it’s a screenshot, not a link), I wonder if Rob Pike has retired from Google?

I share these sentiments. I’m not opposed to large language models per se, but I’m growing increasingly resentful of the power that Big Tech companies have over computing and the broader economy, and how personal computing is being threatened by increased lockdowns and higher component prices. We’re beyond the days of “the computer for the rest of us,” “think different,” and “don’t be evil.” It’s now a naked grab for money and power.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-12-26 05:49:36+00:00
I completely agree I prefer the original language as it offers more choice in how to try to consume it. I believe search engines segment content by source language though, so you would probably not ever see such content in search results for English language queries. It would be cool if you could somehow signal to search engines that you are interested in non-native language results. I don’t even tend to see results in the second language in my accept languages header unless the query is in that language.
by teekert | 2025-12-26 05:49:55+00:00
I guess the term "tent" is pretty broad, this is what I see: [0], the cotton does not take being in water very well.

But I guess a synthetic ultra light tent will do better.

I also assumed the tents were already there when he arrived (complete assumption, but the term campsite conjures up a place with tents already there), and so must be of the more heavy more stationary kind.

Anyway, the point is, I also had this question: Where do you go when you mess up your tent like that? How can a dam in a layer of water make it dry? Don't you need a dam and then pump it dry.

This is going too far, I just wanted to defend the question. Maybe it's a cultural difference.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=de+waard+tent&ia=images&iax...
by Kerrick | 2025-12-26 05:50:20+00:00
The PickAxe is still amazing. You can buy the fifth edition (for Ruby 3.3) in paper now, or the sixth edition (for Ruby 4.0) as a beta ebook now.

5th: https://pragprog.com/titles/ruby5/programming-ruby-3-3-5th-e...

6th: https://pragprog.com/titles/ruby6/programming-ruby-4-6th-edi...

For a timeline-oriented reference of changes, check out https://rubyreferences.github.io/rubychanges/ and its individual pages.
by rramadass | 2025-12-26 05:50:43+00:00
These sort of books are meant to be discursive in nature giving one an exposure to various facets in a domain. That is their "theme". For a layman/common reader this is actually quite welcome since it does not drown-him-in-depth/demotivate-him but gives an overview (possibly interconnecting) of the subjects involved.

For example the Stillwell book i mentioned above has chapters on Arithmetic, Computation, Algebra, Geometry, Calculus, Combinatorics, Probability and Logic thus making it an excellent book to peruse.
by kulahan | 2025-12-26 05:50:57+00:00
It’s extremely easy to say that things could and should be better, but it’s about as useful as saying that things “can’t” be done.

The problem isn’t that nobody wants things to get better, it’s that we disagree on how to get there. This has literally always been the case.

Of course things could be better. Life could be perfect. Lacking this solution you’re hand-waving, it’s useless drivel.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-26 05:52:07+00:00
> Even Obamas detractors admit he spoke well. True, but i find JFKs speeches are on a different level from that. And it's not just him, but the contrast is particularly striking.

My off the cuff observation is that there is a lot less mastery of language than there used to be in America. I'm not really sure why, but compare the grand language used by the early political leaders to, say, Obama, and it's striking. And that's not saying Obama is a bad speaker! He has a ton of charisma and makes you want to like his ideas by the way he presents them. But he's never given something on the level of Lincoln's Gettysburg address (in my opinion at least).
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-26 05:53:00+00:00
Yeah, I can definitely see a breaking point when even the false platitudes are outsourced to a chatbot. It's been like this for a while, but how blatant it is is what's truly frustrating these days.

I want to hope maybe this time we'll see different steps to prevent this from happening again, but it really does just feel like a cycle at this point that no one with power wants to stop. Busting the economy one or two times still gets them out ahead.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-26 05:55:39+00:00
I'm sure the Chinese, Russians, and other adversaries of the west will welcome any intentional weakening of network security to "protect children".

Any back doors, crippled encryption, etc, is a way in for their intelligence services. I find it baffling that politicians are so careless with their national sovereignty. It's especially worrying that a lot of populist support for this nonsense is indirectly supported by the before mentioned adversaries. There's a well documented history of especially Russian and Chinese propaganda aimed at supporting fringe populist parties. The agenda with that is complex but it isn't necessarily with friendly intentions.

Both Russia and China have isolated their own populations from the normal internet and effectively their countries run on centralized infrastructure where private VPNs are no longer allowed and traffic is monitored, filtered, and analyzed. Additionally, especially China has long targeted academic and enterprise network security for industrial espionage reasons. Weak government security has caused a few embarrassing situations across especially EU governments (e.g. Germany) with scandals related to over reliance on Chinese technology for telecommunications (huawei) and components for energy, auto motive, etc.

The point here is that those countries calling for this the most are also the most at risk of being compromised like this.
by mgaunard | 2025-12-26 05:56:11+00:00
I just turn off trackpads, I'm not interested in that kind of input device, and any space dedicated to one is wasted to me. I use nibs exclusively (which essentially restricts me to Thinkpads).

My arms rest on the body, the last thing I want is for it to be a material that leeches heat out of my body or that is likely to react with my hands' sweat and oils.
by inkyoto | 2025-12-26 05:56:20+00:00
They are after the personal use VPN clients, but corporate users will follow soon.

Using the corporate VPN for personal purposes, including social media, is generally against corporate policy and is frowned upon (at least officially) in most businesses and organisations. It is also fraught with complications and could lead to disciplinary action or other unpleasant consequences. Just because the policy is not enforced does not mean it won’t be in the future.

If governments start targeting personal VPN's, it is only a matter of time before businesses crack down on unauthorised corporate VPN use as it will increase their risk of legal action stemming from employees’ missteps or misdeeds.
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-26 05:56:58+00:00
> "at the moment" implies that Go would need to change for that statement to change

I agree that "at the moment" could imply that Go would need to change for that statement to change, but I think it could also imply that "effectively/practically" could change as well since "effectively/practically" in this context implies a particular state of knowledge about known exploits (i.e., that there are none). If someone releases a practical data race exploit for real-world Go codebases tomorrow, "effectively/practically" would no longer hold, and therefore the statement would no longer hold despite Go not changing. The representation of the state of knowledge is part of why I suggested the lawyer-y version :P
by sokoloff | 2025-12-26 05:57:37+00:00
> it saddens me that there are so many artist-SWEs like me, because the golden handcuffs can kill your dreams.

Sometimes dreams are just fantasies. I love programming and puzzle-solving. I’d love it slightly more if I could just do it in whatever field or direction stuck my fancy, but I’ve made peace with the idea that we get paid that golden handcuff compensation in exchange for someone else choosing the puzzles we work on to be ones valuable and relevant to them.
by kukkeliskuu | 2025-12-26 05:58:23+00:00
For me, it has gone through stages.

Initially I was astounded by the results.

Then I wrote a large feature (ad pacing) on a site using LLMs. I learned the LLMs did not really understand what they were doing. The algorithm (PID controller) itself was properly implemented (as there is plenty of data to train on), but it was trying to optimize the wrong thing. There were other similar findings where LLM was doing very stupid mistakes. So I went through a disillusionment stage and kind of gave up for a while.

Since then, I have learned how to use Claude Code effectively. I have used it mostly on existing Django code bases. I think everybody has a slightly different take on how it works well. Probably the most reasonable advice is to just keep going and try different kind of things. Existing code bases seem easier, as well as working on a spec beforehand, requiring tests etc. basic SWE principles.
by rramadass | 2025-12-26 06:01:52+00:00
This is what i immediately thought of too. Some more links;

Research Software Engineers - https://researchsoftware.org/

Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_software_engineering (checkout References/Further Reading etc.)

Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/ResearchSoftwareEng/

PS: LinkedIn shows me a bunch of jobs with this designation (though many seem to be AI/ML related).
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-26 06:02:34+00:00
I'm Assuming his Twitter is private right now, but his Mastodon does share the same event (minus the "nuclear"): https://hachyderm.io/@robpike/115782101216369455

And a screenshot just in case (archiving Mastodon seems tricky) : https://imgur.com/a/9tmo384

Seems the event was true, if nothing else.

EDIT: alternative screenshot: https://ibb.co/xS6Jw6D3

Apologies for not having a proper archive. I'm not at a computer and I wasn't able to archive the page through my phone. Not sure if that's my issue or Mastodon's
by ks2048 | 2025-12-26 06:02:55+00:00
I was going to say "a link to the BlueSky post would be better than a screenshot".

I thought public BlueSky posts weren't paywalled like other social media has become... But, it looks like this one requires login (maybe because of setting made by the poster?):

https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s
by saghm | 2025-12-26 06:03:36+00:00
For what it's worth, quite a lot of libraries don't use NFA/DFA style regexes and instead use something like PCRE, which aren't not necessarily linear in the worst case. I'd hope that URL pattern matching wouldn't need recursive backtracking or whatever, but probably quite a lot of the time people use libraries with the less performance implementations they're not intending to use those features either, so it probably wouldn't be the first time anyone accidentally make their matching way slower from this if that's what happened here.
by cynicalsecurity | 2025-12-26 06:03:43+00:00
There is no such thing as "diabetes", people should start distinguishing between type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes - they are different diseases. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease with no cure, not caused by food, lifestyle or weight, and is an absolute living hell; while type 2 diabetes is caused by excessive weight and can sometimes be put into remission or even fully cured through weight loss.

Learn about type 1 diabetes to understand why this distinction matters.

Type 1 diabetes is not caused by food or weight. It results from an autoimmune reaction that completely destroys insulin-producing beta cells. No one understands what causes type 1 diabetes, but generally it's believed to be caused by viruses and infections. Sometimes you can read about "genetic factor", but overall majority of people with type 1 diabetes have no family history of this disease.

The incidence of type 1 diabetes has been increasing in many countries, and researchers do not yet understand why. It most often appears in children and young adults and currently has no cure.

Once again: type 1 diabetes appears to be random and has no cure. It's not caused by food or weight in the slightest. And your life (of life of your child and yours too) suddenly becomes an absolute living hell. Think about it for a second.

For some unknown reason public awareness of type 1 diabetes is hugely limited compared with other incurable diseases. For example, in the UK more people live with type 1 diabetes than with HIV, yet until someone is directly affected, they usually know nothing about this disease. It hits them like a train.
by jackyinger | 2025-12-26 06:05:18+00:00
I remember a time when users had a great deal more control over their computers. Big tech companies are the ones who used their power to take that control away. You, my friend are the insincere one.

If you’re young enough not to remember a time before forced automatic updates that break things, locked devices unable to run software other than that blessed by megacorps, etc. it would do you well to seek out a history lesson.
by wrs | 2025-12-26 06:05:41+00:00
To be clear, this email isn't from Anthropic, it's from "AI Village" [0], which seems to be a bunch of agents run by a 501(c)3 called Sage that are apparently allowed to run amok and send random emails.

At this moment, the Opus 4.5 agent is preparing to harass William Kahan similarly.

[0] https://theaidigest.org/village
by cruffle_duffle | 2025-12-26 06:06:08+00:00
You have to be so careful with that stuff though. Some of those knockoff legos are absolutely infuriating to assemble and don’t fit together right—not just with actual LEGO but even with themselves.

There is a definite element of “you get what you pay for” when it comes to that stuff. Unfortunately… because some of those knockoff kits look super cool.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-12-26 06:06:22+00:00
Probably not, but at the time Google had a better reputation than it does today and I’m guessing Tony had gotten bored by that point.

I don’t have firsthand knowledge regarding the timeline, but I believe the entire product concept for nest required an internet connection and internet server dependencies, didn’t it? Like a fallback mode makes sense and I’m pretty sure there was one, but a lot of the capabilities they were targeting needed internet capabilities. For example could you control the thermostat with your phone only after the acquisition? I think that happened before, and I think it was a foundational part of the concept?
by schoen | 2025-12-26 06:06:25+00:00
There have been some asynchronous secure messenger projects in the past (Pond and Secure Scuttlebutt come to mind). High latency is really important for defeating traffic analysis, but people are so unaccustomed to it now because of all the engineering work that's gone into successfully reducing the latency of almost all of our communication systems. Accepting high-latency messaging as a defense against traffic analysis might involve psychology even more than engineering: cultivating patience.
by fkarg | 2025-12-26 06:07:16+00:00
The base material needs to be of a minimum quality for that experience to be enjoyable, I presume. I totally see the value of that, which is one of the reasons to sometimes reduce playback speed below what my default would be. Writings from Tolkien are maybe some of the best suited for that, but I'm not 100% convinced it would work for what I'm reading currently, so I might just try it anyway - the Foundation series from Asimov.
by bigyabai | 2025-12-26 06:07:35+00:00
> What power do big tech companies have

Aftermarket control, for one. You buy an Android/iPhone or Mac/Windows device and get a "free" OS along with it. Then, your attention subsidizes the device through advertising, bundled services and cartel-style anti-competitive price fixing. OEMs have no motivation not to harm the market in this way, and users aren't entitled to a solution besides deluding themselves into thinking the grass really is greener on the other side.

What power did Microsoft wield against Netscape? They could alter the deal, and make Netscape pray it wasn't altered further.
by user_7832 | 2025-12-26 06:08:12+00:00
I understand that low BG is typically much more capable at making itself fatal than high BGs (T1 myself, like half the people in this thread.)

> > Abbott Diabetes Care stated that certain FreeStyle Libre 3 and FreeStyle Libre 3 Plus sensors provide incorrect low glucose readings.

My understanding is the problem is probably the same, or likely related to, the pressure low - where basically if you eg lie down on the side of the sensor, it can produce a false low sugar reading.

Presumably, this could push some (already sick) people towards DKA. DKA can go from "slightly bad" to "crazy bad" in a span of hours. (Don't, or do ask me how I know.)

Add in reluctance of people to go to the hospital in the US, and I can totally see how people might've died because of it.

It's a bit of a swiss cheeshole/perfect storm - poor BG management, likely not well enough to afford a hospital, possibly already sick - and unfortunately I'd imagine economically struggling people are likely to have a significant overlap of many of these at the same time. Tragic, but realistic, given the sheer scale of many people use these devices.