MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by exe34 | 2025-12-27 22:28:46+00:00
Does anyone have much of a feel for geometry and spatial reasoning in text? I've been trying to think about Euclid's elements - I think you can express some of it with just text, but most of it really only makes sense once you see a picture. Spatial reasoning with 2/3d objects being rotated/flipped/etc seems much harder to me. Any hints/references/papers would be welcome. I'm not an academic, I just get intrigued by ideas now and again!
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-27 22:28:48+00:00
I think part of the Vision Pro story is that Apple has deformed ideas about displays that they've gotten because they've been able to get away with selling overpriced and undervalued displays.

For that matter part of the Apple TV is great hardware/middling experience because they can't shake phone-centrism. Apple can't make an honest-to-God TV or market-crushing appliance because TVs are more competitive than monitors, thinks supporting optical disks is like putting a hand in a toilet, etc.
by em-bee | 2025-12-27 22:29:34+00:00
ok, hat's a good observation. but it depends on the personalities involved and the specific actions. for me personally for example talking about an issue IS my way of being assertive.

of course there are situations where simply taking responsibility for something can help, but i don't see that in the situation described. if my wife is scheduling to many activities for the children, how can i take over when i simply want there to be less activities.

in other words if my wife does something that in my opinion simply should not be done, how can i stop her, other than sharing my feelings about it? how can i take ownership of the kids activities other than replacing them with other activities. or what do i do when i am at work while this happens? and working until 2am at night? how am i supposed to react other than saying, please don't do that?
by chongli | 2025-12-27 22:29:49+00:00
I'd like to call back to yesterday's discussion on IP law [1] sparked by recent comments from Rob Pike.

There was a major thread on the issue of regulatory regimes and the dysfunction that can arise. How is this acquisition not a textbook example of said dysfunction? This non-acquisition acquisition does not happen at all in a world without IP law.

I think we're seeing a culmination of the dysfunction that results from IP law. The sheer amount of capital has given unbelievable momentum to the forces of consolidation. I still can't foresee the endgame (who can?) but it's even harder to see how it'll turn out well.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46396075
by krapp | 2025-12-27 22:29:56+00:00
That's what I meant too. PHPBB forums and the like had plenty of features that would be considered "addictive" in the modern climate, as well as "algorithmic" feeds.

They certainly could be categorized the same way. I don't think they will only because the political will isn't there and such forums aren't popular enough to matter. But if regulation of social media causes those forums to resurge in popularity then that might change.
by websiteapi | 2025-12-27 22:29:59+00:00
every time someone says nonsense like this I ask them to take me up on it: https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-20...

I have 100k NO on trump. it's free money if someone seriously thinks there won't be any "future administration".

of course once there's money at stake they grumble and say there probably will be an election after all <_<
by dhrey112 | 2025-12-27 22:30:27+00:00
Author here. I've been researching AI agent failures for the past year, and the pattern I keep seeing is that agents don't fail by breaking rules—they fail by following them too literally.

The runaway loop ($47k API bill) happened because no one defined a stopping condition. The expense fraud happened because the agent was told to "complete the expense report" and it did—by fabricating data when it couldn't read receipts.

Curious what failure modes others have seen in production agent deployments.
by hopelite | 2025-12-27 22:31:38+00:00
You clearly have no idea the nature of the problem you want to solve with such erroneous platitudes. But it’s probably not even your fault you are ignorant of the reality of the matter as you advocate for squeezing harder to get blood from a stone; your statement illustrates that you are a victim of a delusion and psychological abuse that has been perpetrated upon the whole western world for more than a century now, so of course after everything you know from your very first breath promoting a delusional fantasy, you would also have that world view since it is post 1984 after all.
by dale_glass | 2025-12-27 22:31:49+00:00
> As a practical implementation of "six degrees of Kevin Bacon", you could get an organic trust chain to random people.

GPG is terrible at that.

0. Alice's GPG trusts Alice's key tautologically.
1. Alice's GPG can trust Bob's key because it can see Alice's signature.
2. Alice's GPG can trust Carol's key because Alice has Bob's key, and Carol's key is signed by Bob.

After that, things break. GPG has no tools for finding longer paths like Alice -> Bob -> ??? -> signature on some .tar.gz.

I'm in the "strong set", I can find a path to damn near anything, but only with a lot of effort.

The good way used to be using the path finder, some random website maintained by some random guy that disappeared years ago. The bad way is downloading a .tar.gz, checking the signature, fetching the key, then fetching every key that signed in, in the hopes somebody you know signed one of those, and so on.

And GPG is terrible at dealing with that, it hates having tens of thousands of keys in your keyring from such experiments.

GPG never grew into the modern era. It was made for persons who mostly know each other directly. Addressing the problem of finding a way to verify the keys of random free software developers isn't something it ever did well.
by shermantanktop | 2025-12-27 22:32:01+00:00
Because my attention should be directed at what I want to do, when I want to, not a nagging number that sits there being more than zero.

And when I do pay attention to it, I don't want to spend 20 minutes going through the 180 emails that I've been cc'd on. It's literally not worth my time or dilution of my attention. When I have attempted to get on top of this by doing all the curation and rule-authoring that productivity mavens shout about, it works for a little while but entropy sets in.

I'm just not into scripting my own life and maximizing my productivity, and my job does not pivot on prompt email responses. So my email is a garbage dump with tire fires in it, and I know that, and I get on with the things I know are actually important.

I'm not recommending this! It's just the compromise that I have settled in to. But if you wonder "why would anyone," this is it.
by hxtk | 2025-12-27 22:32:36+00:00
It's how code is written in Google (including their open-source products like AOSP and Chromium), the ffmpeg project, the Linux Kernel, Git, Docker, the Go compiler, Kubernetes, Bitcoin, etc, and it's how things are done at my workplace.

I'm surprised by how confident you are that things simply aren't done this way considering the number of high-profile users of workflows where the commit history is expected to tell a story of how the software evolved over time.
by culi | 2025-12-27 22:33:09+00:00
Yes exactly. Voting for the 2026 focus areas is happening now btw. The next year's interop usually releases around February

https://webkit.org/blog/17320/submit-your-ideas-for-interop-...

And yes JPEG XL support is often the most requested feature and the major browsers have responded. Google and Firefox are both willing to take it on but Firefox's biggest concern is with the reference decoder which has some major security flaws. They basically want to wait until libjxl/jxl-rs is performant enough

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064

Here's the current issue for that proposal if you want to get involved

https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/994
by jtrn | 2025-12-27 22:33:44+00:00
The hate is so irrational I can’t stop feeling that any project that even uses Conda HAS to be terrible. Like a chef that creates a recipe with shit as an ingredient. I could exchange the shit for sugar, but why bother, the chef is obviously insane.
I’m really sorry if anyone that worked in this ever reads this. But Conda is just triggering me.
by mmcclure | 2025-12-27 22:34:16+00:00
This is very cool, but goodness I wish they'd give an option for a password-based login after the initial verification. In ~10 minutes of playing with it I had to go through 4 email confirmation steps.

I'm very much into the product itself, but that would get extremely tiresome if I was trying to use it consistently. I assume I have to be using it wrong in some way for there to be that much friction...
by Aurornis | 2025-12-27 22:35:09+00:00
The "off switch" is a protein within the parasite that they turned off with genetic modifications. They didn't actually find a treatment that could be used on wild parasites.

> Gaji and his team might have found a lead, though: in a new study, they have shown that switching off just a single protein inside the microscopic parasite can kill it.

> The protein, TgAP2X-7, appears to be essential to the parasite's ability to invade a host, form plaques, and self-replicate. To prove this, the team genetically modified some parasites so that their TgAP2X-7 proteins function normally unless auxin (a plant hormone that regulates growth) is added, in which case the proteins would quickly degrade.

So it could be helpful research for something, but there are a lot of proteins within parasites that are necessary for growth and survival. Turning any number of proteins off could end the parasite's ability to do something, but that's not helpful unless you also have a mechanism to induce that change without harming the host.
by saghm | 2025-12-27 22:35:33+00:00
My health insurance from AWS was about the same coverage/cost that I got from a startup I worked at that had 10 employees for a year or so afterwards, but the insurance from the startup had much better humans for me to talk to when there were issues. As for the extra money, my point was that I've found my quality of life is higher working for companies where I know where I stand in the medium-to-long term.

I definitely don't have any illusions that this is based on a number of personal factors (e.g. my overall financial situation making any additional income not likely to drastically change my quality of life and the somewhat unorthodox medical needs of someone in my family causing me to need to talk to the insurance company a few times a year to sort things out). The comment at the beginning of this thread was asking " Who would join a startup these days?" though, so my answer is basically "someone like me". I don't pretend to have any idea how many others like me there are, only that the tradeoffs for larger companies don't really make much sense for me.
by jghn | 2025-12-27 22:35:35+00:00
An example I like to use are groups that put their autofmratter into a pre-commit. Why should I be held to the formatting rules for code before I send my code to anyone?

I'm particular about formatting, and it doesn't always match group norms. So I'll reformat things to my preferred style while working locally, and then reformat before pushing. However I may have several commits locally that then ge curated out of existence prior to pushing.
by Barrin92 | 2025-12-27 22:35:43+00:00
>Having decentralized entertainment platforms

How? I don't even think decentralized is the appropriate term. They're distributed entertainment platforms in that they're protocol based, but regarding the distribution of content there's nothing in it that decentralizes reach. The social graph of Twitter and Mastodon could in principle be identical.

Malicious actors don't need to control algorithms. States running influence campaigns on say, Youtube or Facebook don't actually control any algorithm, they adapt their content to what does well on the platform. And they could equally do this, one could argue even more effectively, on the fediverse.

Saying the Fediverse solves top down influence is like thinking that Bitcoin solves wealth inequality. The distribution of the network is completely agnostic to the centralization of the content.
by tw04 | 2025-12-27 22:35:43+00:00
We’ve started instituting a “no phones” policy when the kids have sleepovers to try to combat this at least a little bit, and have constant conversations about why things like Instagram are toxic and we should just try to spend our time enjoying life.

Obviously I’m also posting here while I wait in the car waiting to pick someone up, but I actively make an effort to unplug on a regular basis.
by hlieberman | 2025-12-27 22:36:11+00:00
If there is an aircraft evacuation and someone is getting their bag out of the carry-on, the proper response is punching them in the face and throwing them onto the ground so people can step over (or on) them.

With seat pitches so tight these days, the idea that an evacuation can be done by unprepared people in 90 seconds is a pipedream, even before taking into consideration people trying to get their luggage.
by immibis | 2025-12-27 22:36:44+00:00
Is it not simple? Tell the passengers they'll be able to get their bags back during an emergency. Don't just say "leave your bags" - say "leave your bags, you'll get them back later". After drilling into passengers nonstop to never leave their bags unattended is it any surprise passengers don't leave their bags unattended? No, it isn't.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-12-27 22:37:36+00:00
Not really.

The gist of it is if Google decides to build GMail but Gmail silently deleted emails that it did not find entertaining enough so you didn’t even know they were ever sent to you.

The article is saying some people see ActivityPub as a communication protocol like Gmail where you expect all messages to be delivered, while others see it as an entertainment protocol where the goal is to entertain the user.
by g-b-r | 2025-12-27 22:37:59+00:00
As I had already finished a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46405900 when I found out it had died, here it is:

FACT: There's a lot that the United States can do to make the situation much worse or better.

FACT: However bad the current situation is, continuing the emissions will keep worsening it.

FACT: Digging in on dying technologies supports the prosperity of our less idiotic adversaries.

FACT: You will be downvoted to oblivion by people who are more aware of what the actual facts are.
by detourdog | 2025-12-27 22:38:44+00:00
I'm unable to follow the point of the significance of GLP1s. I also wouldn't describe the expense as biotech I think healthcare is a better description.

Finally the US's current healthcare system is truly broken. Our elected officials choose to ignore the issue and act as if we are fortunate to have this system. Which must be the least efficent way to deliver healthcare.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-12-27 22:39:24+00:00
When I worked for a tollway (not SF so maybe they're different), toll violations were enforced by mailing a ticket to the offender after the fact. There weren't any patrols out on the road looking for violators. Don't pay the fine (plus the toll), don't get to renew your license plates. We had agreements with some other states for enforcement against their vehicles in our state. The cameras rarely were unable to get a good enough view of the license plate for the CSRs to not be able to find out whose vehicle it was.
by xvxvx | 2025-12-27 22:39:46+00:00
From their site: 'Employee mental health and wellbeing is another core focus at MongoDB. It’s important for us to help break the stigma around mental health and provide our employees with the support they need, especially at work. We are dedicated to providing our employees with valuable tools to face all of life’s challenges and offer mental health programs that provide confidential assistance from qualified professionals.'

https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/culture/employee-benefi...

Never trust this horseshit!
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-27 22:40:03+00:00
"Bored" is the worst motivation. Was just re-watching Neon Genesis Evangelion and appreciating it more than before (can only imagine the fights the director had with the money people at the end!) and enjoyed Asuka Langley Soryu saying "Kiss me because I'm bored" and concluding "That's the last time I kiss a boy because I'm bored!"
by andy99 | 2025-12-27 22:40:16+00:00
> Japanese passengers “are going to get out of the aircraft,” Mr Careen said, while travellers in North America appear most likely to delay evacuating to retrieve their belongings.

I’d speculate that Japanese passengers expect to promptly get their stuff back while North Americans know they are effectively throwing it in the garbage, and so are more tempted to grab a few things.

I don’t think people should grab their bags in an emergency, but it’s amazing to me that airlines act like they can’t even understand why people do. It feels like common sense about a low trust society, and airlines do nothing whatsoever to engender trust otherwise.
by ffsm8 | 2025-12-27 22:40:16+00:00
It seems you're unaware just how many people are climate change sceptics - and not just in the uneducated groups, it's all over the spectrum.

Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised about this at all. If anything, I think it might even be the same cause: because climate change sceptics were being suppressed before Trump.

To be upfront: I'm not American, but it's hard not to notice how the narrative has changed all over the internet.

My personal perspective to the climate crisis has always been a defeatist attitude, I was always in favor of green energy etc, but that's primarily because it would also improve the local area, Air quality etc. from a climate change perspective, it was always pointless, because that's a global issue and cannot be solved by internal regulation in a singular country
by 65a | 2025-12-27 22:40:18+00:00
In a signature context, you probably want someone else to know that "you" signed it (I can think of other cases, but that's the usual one). The way to do that requires them to know that the key which signed the data belongs to you. My only point is that this is actually the hard part, which any "replacement" crypto system needs to solve for, and that solving that is hard (none of the methods are particularly good).
by axiolite | 2025-12-27 22:40:24+00:00
Why should a delivery driver pay the toll for the road to my house, and not me? Why should I be able to exploit flat-rate product pricing like that and skim some money from all customers of the delivery service?

Why should I pay the toll to drive to a friend's house? They're the one getting the benefit out of having easy access to transportation.

What if my taxes pay for all the roads in my town, while the neighboring town chooses to implement tolls instead? Why should I get double-taxed? Prisoner's dilemma and race-to-the-bottom?

Why should I have to deal with having my license plate stolen, and police time wasted (who are paid out of taxes), because of people who don't pay the tolls?
by quadruple | 2025-12-27 22:41:38+00:00
I am not a kernel developer, so I don't really have any idea what this means, but CIX appears to have patches in the Linux kernel[0], so I assume mainlining more stuff is in the works?

[0] https://lwn.net/ml/all/20250609031627.1605851-1-peter.chen@c...
by tw04 | 2025-12-27 22:42:07+00:00
> Remember when it was Reality TV that was supposed to be the downfall of civilizations?

I’d say we’ve already got measurable statistics. When half of genz isn’t dating or married, it’s signaling trouble.

https://aibm.org/commentary/gen-zs-romance-gap-why-nearly-ha...

Now, we can discuss if that’s good or bad for the planet, but it’s not great for humanity.
by tptacek | 2025-12-27 22:42:46+00:00
What's funny about this is that the whole idea of the "web of trust" was (and, as you demonstrate, is) literally PGP punting on this problem. That's how they talked about it at the time, in the 90s, when the concept was introduced! But now the precise mechanics of that punt have become a critically important PGP feature.
by toss1 | 2025-12-27 22:42:49+00:00
But this is particularly egregious

>>"...She asked for an extension to complete her treatment, or at the least a short period to consult with her medical providers about whether and how she might be able to return to work before the treatment was completed. .."

>>"An extension of Annie’s leave would have cost MongoDB nothing. We made it clear that they did not need to pay her or hold her job open for her. We just asked them not to fire her while she was in such a vulnerable state, as we feared that would result in tragedy. We just wanted a little more time to get her stabilized."

There is no plausible need of management that would outweigh simply letting someone stay on the books as "employed-on-unpaid-leave" for some extra weeks or months.

Whoever did this should be held personally responsible for negligent harm.

And yeah, never touching their software, IDGAF how useful it is.

Sickening
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-12-27 22:42:57+00:00
These are not fish specific to religious people.

Helping in these areas is what makes us human. If you need to invoque a deity to explain the action, good for you. The most important part is that help is provided.

Now, unexpected pregnancies is not the strong part of Christianity. When you start to promote teaching about sex and birth control we can talk.
by scoofy | 2025-12-27 22:43:17+00:00
The point of the article is that you're paying one way or another. Roads aren't free to build and/or maintain... in fact, it's extremely expensive to build and maintain them. It's just that all levels of gov't have allowed the gas tax get inflated away through both inflation and efficiencies.

Determining who pays to maintain these systems is a political decision, but it certainly makes sense that we should really be charging people who use them. Adding a luxury tax to folks who want to skip traffic seems like a free lunch for everyone else. At the end of the day, suburbanites want to force the rural and urban dwellers to subsidize their primary mode of transportation (large, dense highways), but it's becoming more and more politically untenable.
by aipatselarom | 2025-12-27 22:44:01+00:00
Unusual yes, but I wouldn't call them hyperbolic (in the context of its meaning in this thread).

Also, wrt. to the Summer of Love, I would think its values are in the complete opposite side of what's being discussed here.

Excerpt from its Wikipedia page [1]:

"Many opposed the Vietnam War, were suspicious of government, and rejected consumerist values. In the United States, counterculture groups rejected suburbia and the American way and instead opted for a communal lifestyle. Some hippies were active in political organization, whereas others were passive and more concerned with art (music, painting, poetry in particular) or spiritual and meditative practices."

That doesn't sound compatible with "young people these days are so desperate to show off their skills, to the point of faking it, to get jobs in the government or the industry".

But perhaps you could tell us how they relate, after all, you were there, right?

1. Although I think Wikipedia is trash.
by varispeed | 2025-12-27 22:44:02+00:00
Theory is that highly skilled people (e.g. capable of creating functioning business) are too valuable for big corporations. They are building their own wealth, instead of corporate shareholder's. Governments in the West are lobbied to crush SMEs and force small business owners into corporate slavery. Once you no longer can run your own business and run out of money, you will have no choice but accept a job at corporations for peanuts.