MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-30 04:14:53+00:00
> There's value in choice, and that value is being reaped by the worker precisely because of poverty programs make it possible.

It seems like you're ignoring the same thing you're objecting to: It's a dynamic system.

If long-haul trucking companies offer less desirable but higher paying jobs and easier jobs aren't paying a living wage then people would pick the harder job that lets them not starve. Which means the easier jobs would have to pay more in order to attract workers, unless those workers can get government assistance. If they can, the easier jobs can get people to work without paying more, because the assistance programs let them pick the easier job even at lower pay. In other words, the subsidies were supposed to go to the poor and instead they went to the lower-paying employers.

In a dynamic system the long-haul companies would then have to respond if it became more desirable to work somewhere the pay is low enough to get government assistance, except that the phase outs give the low-paying employers another advantage.

Say the undesirability of the job is good for $15k/year in additional compensation. However, if you got paid $15k more, you'd lose $10k to government benefit phase outs and additional taxes. To actually get paid $15k more, you'd have to "get paid" $45k more. Which is to say, the employer with the low-paying job can pay you $45k less.

But it's a dynamic system, so they might "only" pay you $35k less and then hire more people. The trucking companies would then have to pay $45k more than them when it used to be $15k. Even with Walmart paying less than before, their relative advantage has increased. But there are two ways to get something a long distance over land: A long-haul truck the whole way, or a short-haul truck to the rail yard, a freight train, and then another short-haul truck. So then instead of a truck driver getting higher pay per mile over 2000 miles of driving, a different one gets lower pay per mile over 60 miles of driving twice, and a rail company gets the rest.

So the low-wage subsidies cause the amount of higher-wage labor demand to go down by making it less competitive with non-labor alternatives to perform the same function, as labor is diverted to the lower-paying jobs even while enabling them to pay even less.

> There are other people for whom short-haul trucking is the less desirable choice than what they're doing now, or who work fewer hours than they're doing now.

All of that is already baked in to the existing numbers; the long-haul drivers get paid more because fewer people want to do it.

> Like perpetual motion or free energy machines, at the most miniscule scale there are exceptions and caveats, but those exceptions don't scale to a systems level.

Only they're not exceptions. If you subsidize something you get more of it. What happens if you subsidize low-paying jobs but not higher-paying jobs?
by frankc | 2025-12-30 04:16:11+00:00
Personally, I have been using beads for a few days on a couple of projects. I also like https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/beads_viewer which is a nice tui for beads (with some additional workflow i haven't tried). I have found its been useful for longer, multi-session implementations. Its easier to get back into the work. I wouldn't go so far as to it couldn't do the work without it, but so far it seems smoother. These things are hard to measure. I think the it's really not that different than how an engineering team would use jira but more hierarchical, which helps preserve context, and with prebuilt instructions for how the agent should use it.
by kibwen | 2025-12-30 04:16:51+00:00
> In fact, take any C program with UB, compile it, and get a dangerous executable. Now disassemble the executable, and you get an equally dangerous program, yet it doesn't have any UB.

I'd put it like this:

Undefined behavior is a property of an abstract machine. When you write any high-level language with an optimizing compiler, you're writing code against that abstract machine.

The goal of an optimizing compiler for a high-level language is to be "semantics-preserving", such that whatever eventual assembly code that gets spit out at the end of the process guarantees certain behaviors about the runtime behavior of the program.

When you write high-level code that exhibits UB for a given abstract machine, what happens is that the compiler can no longer guarantee that the resulting assembly code is semantics-preserving.
by luizfelberti | 2025-12-30 04:16:54+00:00
I also find this to be an elegant way of doing this, and it is also how the Thompson VM style of regex engines work [0]

It's a bit harder to adapt the technique to parsers because the Thompson NFA always increments the sequence pointer by the same amount, while a parser's production usually has a variable size, making it harder to run several parsing heads in lockstep.

[0] https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html
by BoorishBears | 2025-12-30 04:17:08+00:00
LLMs are worse at things where performance is based on subjective preference, it's as simple as that.

It's not just blog posts: the staunchest AI supporters are the quickest to call out slop in the default aesthetics of vibe-coded websites, or images, or music.

Pretty much anywhere that "taste" is supposed to be involved.
by RandomBK | 2025-12-30 04:17:10+00:00
I'm reminded of a diagram from the pitch doc for the original Diablo [0] that made its rounds across the web recently. The dungeon/town split was particularly sharp back then, but the broad design has stuck with modern ARPG design, either in the form of safe zones around town or explicit town zones.

A lot of this seems to be due to modern multiplayer design, with shared town instances and (usually) private dungeon/outside instances.

[0] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/here-s-a-look-at-the-... (scroll down)
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-12-30 04:17:34+00:00
I think the key you point out is something that is worth observing more generically - if the LLM hits a wall it’s first inkling is not to step back and understand why the wall exists and then change course, its first inkling is to continue assisting the user on its task by any means possible and so it’s going to instead try to defeat it in any way possible. I see the is all the time when it hits code coverage constraints, it would much rather just lower thresholds than actually add more coverage.

I experimented with hooks a lot over the summer, these kind of deterministic hooks that run before commit, after tool call, after edit, etc and I found they are much more effective if you are (unsurprisingly) able to craft and deliver a concise, helpful error message to the agent on the hook failure feedback. Even just giving it a good howToFix string in the error return isn’t enough, if you flood the response with too many of those at once the agent will view the task as insurmountable and start seeking workarounds instead.
by deepsquirrelnet | 2025-12-30 04:18:14+00:00
I think this is my experience as well.

I tend to use a shotgun approach, and then follow with an aggressive refactor. It can actually take a lot of time to prune and restructure the code well. At least it feels slow compared to opening the Claude firehose and spraying out code. There needs to be better tools for pruning, because Claude is not thorough enough.

This seems to work well for me. I write a lot of model training code, and it works really well for the breadth of experiments I can run. But by the end it looks like a graveyard of failed ideas.
by OutOfHere | 2025-12-30 04:18:21+00:00
All such custom sites are increasingly unnecessary since modern thinking AIs like ChatGPT 5.2 Extended and Gemini 3 Pro do an incredible job surfacing good papers. In my experience, the benefit comes from using multiple AIs because they all have blind spots, and none is pareto optimal.

As a patient, sometimes I don't want the AI to have my entire medical history, as this lets me consider things from different angles. For each chat, I give it the reconstructed history that I think is sufficient. I want it to be an explorer more than a doctor.
by colanderman | 2025-12-30 04:18:25+00:00
I know only basics about mesh networks per se. I'm speaking here from a background in signal theory / amateur radio / research on the LoRa protocol. If you have specific questions on those aspects feel free to contact me, my e-mail is in my profile.

Is your goal nondetection? If so, know that triangulating a radio signal is fairly straightforward, even in a dragnet fashion. The exception I think is something like cryptographic DSSS (found in military use) wherein not only is the signal far below the noise floor, but the spreading function is not predictable by an adversary (LoRa being very much predictable). Even then, you're limited by physics to only be able to transmit so far without the signal being detectable near the transmitter.
by zephen | 2025-12-30 04:18:26+00:00
> "Zero cost abstractions" refers to some features of the language that provide functionalities with no runtime cost...

In that case, all languages provide zero cost abstractions.

> programming with a high level of control over the implementation is complex,
> (after all, the complexities of the borrow checker don't exist in C).

The point of an abstraction is to _hide_ complexity.

> This article explains the concept

The article is only half-right. People complain both about the semantics and the syntax, because Rust's implementation of both presents (in some cases) a huge cognitive load that simply doesn't exist in other languages.
by mangodrunk | 2025-12-30 04:19:08+00:00
I don’t want to take too much of a tangent, but in scientific studies, you are trying to understand some phenomena, and isolating variables can help with very complex things. A test is typically not that complex. Another example is the use of animals in testing medicine, it can help but it obviously would be much better to test directly on humans but we don’t for good reason.

Your position is reasonable and I do think isolation can be beneficial, but I still wouldn’t use mocking to do it.

>Smaller, more focused, cleaner tests are better in my opinion.

Cleaner is subjective. I can write “small” and “focused” functional tests that are also quick to run.

I am of the opinion that functional tests provide more value. They are testing more of the actual code than an approximation, which in turn gives a better indicator that it works. Functional tests are less likely to change unless the input/output changes.

Now let’s say you mock something in your function. Let’s say you make a change to that but the input and output are the exact same. Now you have to update your test.
by chongli | 2025-12-30 04:19:25+00:00
Check out the games by Jeff Vogel [1] of Spiderweb Software [2]. His games may not be pretty to look at but they feature worlds that are full of life and rich with detail. Monsters attack and damage towns, destroy buildings, leave citizens homeless and shopkeepers jobless, and may eventually wipe towns off the map.

Meanwhile, the world is also full of outside areas to explore and dungeons to plunder. However, no town is safe. Spend too much time delving dungeons and you may return to a smoking ruin instead of a town. Or you may arrive in the middle of a monster attack on the town and get to participate in its defence!

Of course, the townsfolk aren't helpless either. They have town guards, soldiers, and even imperial wizards who arrive to help out. The wizards even create magical barriers to patch up the holes in the town wall!

As for how the games play, they're very reminiscent of old school Ultima games such as Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. As a fan of UO, you may really enjoy some Spiderweb Software games. No multiplayer though, these are strictly single-player turn-based affairs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs

[2] https://spiderwebsoftware.com
by stevenhuang | 2025-12-30 04:19:43+00:00
You are wrong. There has been many reproductions. People don't study it because there is no known mechanism of action and so it's fringe.

Jessica Utts, a well respected statistician

> Despite Professor Hyman's continued protests about parapsychology lacking repeatability, I have never seen a skeptic attempt to perform an experiment with enough trials to even come close to insuring success. The parapsychologists who have recently been willing to take on this challenge have indeed found success in their experiments, as described in my original report.

https://ics.uci.edu/~jutts/response.html
by dilyevsky | 2025-12-30 04:19:51+00:00
I think what you're describing is TLS1.3 Finished verification so that happens after DoH response during the actual handshake. Basically this works because ECH is fairly new and there's no HSTS-style "always use ECH for this site" configuration yet. And ofc this only works if you configured FortiGate as your DNS (corp network) or if it's doing MITM (though I'd expect browser would verify cert fingerprint for DoH connections as well).
by ggm | 2025-12-30 04:20:47+00:00
Putting to one side Buffets statements to p/e it's hard not to look at tesla and say "hmm. That's not possibly coming true" -because it's hypothesised on south Sea bubble "he invents something amazing" belief, not innate sold goods returns on investment.

Yet, nobody who was long in tech stocks these last 15 years is really regretting it.

Companies I loathe (on political beliefs) have amazing returns. There isn't a government on the planet who does not want what Palantir claims to be able to do. What's the tangible there? It's McKinsey, with pixie dust.

If Robert Macnamara was alive today, he wouldn't be in government service or working for Ford.
by BeauNer | 2025-12-30 04:24:33+00:00
As the United States sprints headlong into an AI-dependent future, we’re ignoring a fundamental vulnerability: we are training an entire generation to lean on machines to think, decide, and act for us. Kids growing up with AI as default cognition are losing basic skills of reasoning, memory, and problem solving because they assume the answers are always a chat away. Meanwhile, critical infrastructure — data centers, power grids, communication networks — is increasingly intertwined with complex AI systems that most Americans don’t understand and can’t operate without.

That dependency isn’t just a technical risk — it’s a national security threat. If hostile actors like China, Russia, or even sophisticated independent hackers were to knock out key data centers or cripple the electrical grid, the AI lifelines the country depends on could vanish overnight. What happens when we’ve forgotten how to think for ourselves and the machines go dark? This isn’t speculation — it’s a warning we need to take seriously.
by philsnow | 2025-12-30 04:24:37+00:00
One thing that is really useful about the distinction is that almost necessarily, there are different scales involved.

Ultima VI was the first of its (mainline, not 'online' or 'underworld') series to not really have the "town/dungeon/overworld" distinction. It got fairly awkward to have towns and the overworld be on the same "layer", because the towns could really only have a dozen or so buildings because otherwise they'd take up the entire overworld.

Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom kind of have the same issue: there appear to only be a few dozen Gerudo for instance, and only a few hundred people total in the entire world.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-12-30 04:25:05+00:00
I got hooks working pretty well for simpler things, a very common hello world use case for hooks is gitleaks on every edit. One of the use cases I worked on for quite awhile was getting hooks that ran all unit tests at the end before the agent could stop generating. This approach forces the LLM to then fix any unit tests it broke and I also enforce 80% unit test coverage in same commit. I found it took a bit of finagling to get the hook to render results in a way that was actionable for the LLM because if you block it but it doesn’t know what to do it will basically endlessly loop or try random things to escape

FWIW I think your approach is great, I had definitely thought about leveraging OPA in a mature way, I think this kind of thing is very appealing for platform engineers looking to scale AI codegen in enterprises
by RaftPeople | 2025-12-30 04:25:29+00:00
> Once again, that's only true at the surface level.

Can you provide concrete examples of the things that you think are foundational in software? I'm thinking beyond "be organized so it's easier for someone to understand", which applies to just about everything we do (e.g. modularity, naming, etc.)

For every different approach like OOP, functional, relation DB, object DB, enterprise service bus + canonical documents, microservices, cloud, on prem, etc. etc., they are just options with pros and cons.

With each approach the set of trade-offs is dependent on the context that the approach is applied into, it's not an absolute set of trade-offs, it's relative.

A critical skill that takes a long time to develop is to see the problem space and do a reasonably good job of identifying how the different approaches fit in with the systems and organizational context.

Here's a real example:

A project required a bunch of new configuration capabilities to be added to a couple systems using the normal configuration approach found in ERP systems (e.g. flags and codes attached to entities in the system controlling functional flow and data resolution, etc.). But for some of them a more flexible "if then" type capability made sense when analyzing the types of situations the business would encounter in these areas. For these areas, the naive/simple approach would have been possible but would have been fragile and difficult to explain to the business how to get the different configurations in different places to come together to produce the desired result.

There is no simple rule you can train someone on to spot when this is the right approach and when it is not. It's heavily dependent on the business context and takes experience.
by pertymcpert | 2025-12-30 04:25:39+00:00
Opus 4.5 is categorically a much better model from benchmarks and personal experience than Opus 4.1 & Sonnet models. The reason you're seeing a lot of people wax about O4.5 is that it was a real step change in reliable performance. It crossed for me a critical threshold in being able to solve problems by approaching things in systematic ways.

Why do you use the word "chasing" to describe this? I don't understand. Maybe you should try it and compare it to earlier models to see what people mean.
by cyberax | 2025-12-30 04:26:02+00:00
What consequences? Who doesn't like music?!? Oh, and I'll just throw that candy wrapper on the ground. After all, it's of no consequence.

You THINK that your rule-breaking has no consequences. This is called in the safety science "normalization of deviance", and it usually leads to more and more rules being ignored. And not necessarily by _you_ but by other people.

This is colloquially known as "being a bad example".
by pertymcpert | 2025-12-30 04:26:02+00:00
To repeat my other comment:

> Opus 4.5 is categorically a much better model from benchmarks and personal experience than Opus 4.1 & Sonnet models. The reason you're seeing a lot of people wax about O4.5 is that it was a real step change in reliable performance. It crossed for me a critical threshold in being able to solve problems by approaching things in systematic ways.
by psidium | 2025-12-30 04:27:10+00:00
I work at a enterprise tech company that has kinda of a monopoly on its market. The hate I get when I mention I work there is so big… I can only imagine what a MS Teams dev would get these days. The worst is when they complain about the UI… when I’m one of the few frontend focused devs there.

I’ve had a government worker stop processing my request and start complaining about the product I build. Lost a good half an hour trying to understand their bug but we didn’t get anywhere
by coderatlarge | 2025-12-30 04:27:30+00:00
i just ran into a situation activating a new device in which apple were trying to send to a device i had forgotten to “properly” remove from that icloud account.

and also another situation in which the 2fa code would flash on the remote device and disappear in a fraction of a second. i eventually captured it with screen recording but every time i did it the code was not accepted.

my conclusion: apple had silently ruled that i would not be allowed to activate using that particular icloud account. no idea why. i tried a different one and things went through ok.

arbitrary power in practice.
by roywiggins | 2025-12-30 04:27:45+00:00
If the LLM never gets a chance to try to work around the block then this is more likely to work.

Probably one better way to do this would be, if it detects a destructive edit, block it and switch Claude out of any autoaccept mode until the user re-engages it. If the model mostly doesn't realize there is a filter at all until it's blocked, it won't know to work around it until it's kicked the issue up to the user, who can prevent that and give it some strongly worded feedback. Just don't give it second and third tries to execute the destructive operation.

Not as good as giving it a checkpointed container to trash at its leisure though obviously.
by pertymcpert | 2025-12-30 04:28:31+00:00
Why did you jump to the assumption that this:

> The new normal isn't like that. Rewrite an existing cleanly implemented Vanilla JavaScript project (with tests) in React the kind of rote task you can throw at a coding agent like Claude Code and come back the next morning and expect most (and occasionally all) of the work to be done.

... meant that person would do it in a clandestine fashion rather than this be an agreed upon task prior? Is this how you operate?
by sgustard | 2025-12-30 04:28:37+00:00
I just Googled "kids magic show in Durban" and his ad showed up in the top slot (sorry if this post has swamped your ad bill); and as a bonus, the Gemini AI blurb also touted him: "For kids' magic shows in Durban, look for local entertainers like Big Top Entertainment..."

Doesn't seem like the issue is he's being outbid by international conglomerates with million dollar budgets. Maybe the kids magic show market has cooled in South Africa? Or users have left Google? Curious what we are to conclude here.
by safety1st | 2025-12-30 04:29:34+00:00
I think he's aimed in the right direction with the observation about short videos.

I tried to load his website. It took a full minute to come up. Maybe that's the HN hug of death or something, but this is surely issue #1 to resolve.

Beyond that I would ask whether targeting the "young'uns" directly is the correct strategy. His business is party entertainment, kids' birthday parties could be the biggest slice of that, but the kid isn't the purchasing decisionmaker, and there are all these other opportunities (like corporate events) too.

And then I would consider whether paying for ads in shorts is the right or only way to approach the world of video. The thing about video is it's huge, lucrative, and eating up more of people's time every year. People are moving from the text Internet, to watching videos. I would think given the nature of the business this guy has raw footage which can be turned into entertaining videos, or can produce it pretty quickly. I'm increasingly surprised by how much some people can earn on Youtube, by creating videos that also function as marketing collateral for their business. He will ultimately need to geotarget to get customers, so yeah that's probably paid ads, but a good YouTube channel would build authority, making sales easier to close, and might also make him more money than you'd expect via ad revenue.