MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jessoteric | 2025-12-11 20:16:37+00:00
IME this has been significantly reduced in newer models like 4.5 Opus and to a lesser extent Sonnet, but agree it's still sort of bad- mainly because the question you're posing is bad.

if you ask a human this the answer can also often be "yes [if we torture the library]", because software development is magic and magic is the realm of imagination.

much better prompt: "is this library designed to solve this problem" or "how can we solve this problem? i am considering using this library to do so, is that realistic?"
by heavyset_go | 2025-12-11 20:16:52+00:00
You can do all of this with SMS.

Kids know how to download or use free texting apps and sites, giving them access to potentially thousands of different numbers from which they can engage in harassment campaigns. In fact, it's an incredibly common tactic.

Similarly, someone from Minsk and Timbuktu can do the same thing, they have access to the same tools.
by adamzwasserman | 2025-12-11 20:16:59+00:00
The confound concern is fair: no cross-linguistic comparison is perfectly controlled. The bet is that the effect size (if any) will be large enough to be informative despite the noise. But you're right that it's not ceteris paribus in a strict sense.

Your proposal is interesting though. Synthetic manipulation of morphology within a single language. Have you seen this done? The challenge I'd anticipate is that "genderized English" wouldn't have natural text to train on, so you'd need to generate it somehow, which introduces its own artifacts. But comparing French vs artificially gender-neutralized French might be feasible with existing parallel corpora. Worth thinking about as a follow-up.

On the neural network → brain distance: agreed it's a leap. The claim isn't that transformers are brains, but that if both are extracting structure from language, they might reveal something about what structure is there to extract. Fedorenko's own comparison to "early LLMs" suggests she thinks the analogy has some merit.
by ad_hockey | 2025-12-11 20:17:51+00:00
I've been thinking about trying an alternative JSON library, but interested to hear opinions on whether jsoniter is still recommended. There are 208 open issues on the repo, and a question about whether it's still maintained[1]

Would particularly like to know if anyone has done a performance comparison with the new API coming in the stdlib[2], which feels like a better bet. That blog says:

The Marshal performance of v2 is roughly at parity with v1. Sometimes it is slightly faster, but other times it is slightly slower. The Unmarshal performance of v2 is significantly faster than v1, with benchmarks demonstrating improvements of up to 10x.

[1] https://github.com/json-iterator/go/issues/706

[2] https://go.dev/blog/jsonv2-exp
by Hizonner | 2025-12-11 20:18:22+00:00
Both of them, still, in some places, although she may get more lenient treatment because she's a juvenile. Other places have cleaned that up in various ways, although I think he's usually still at risk unless he actively turns her in to the Authorities(TM) for sending the picture.

And there's a subset of crusaders (not all of them, admittedly) who will say, with a straight face, that there is abuse involved. To wit, she abused herself by creating and sending the image, and he abused her either by giving her the idea, or by looking at it.
by cortesoft | 2025-12-11 20:19:21+00:00
This is really not true in my experience. In fact, all my experience has been with products that aren’t THAT expensive, and the individual dev teams do decide. These are SaaS products, and sometimes the total cost is under $1000 a year, and I still can’t get prices without contacting sales.

Also, it isn’t just ICs. I have worked as a senior director, with a few dozen people reporting into me… and I still never want to talk to a sales person on the phone about a product. I want to be able to read the docs, try it out myself, maybe sign up for a small plan. Look, if you want to put the extras (support contracts, bulk discounts, contracting help, etc) behind a sales call, fine. But I need to be able to use your product at a basic level before I would ever do a sales call.
by everdrive | 2025-12-11 20:20:11+00:00
>I've been the manager on the other side of a lot of situations that could be described like this. In many cases, it was hard to explain to the person that there were dozens and dozens of inputs that go into my decision making, including a lot of invisible factors and relationships that I was juggling.

I think this is also a really important counterpoint -- sometimes the person who "cares too much" is simply wrong, and is causing problems that should be avoidable. In other words, without more details it's hard to know if it's the manager or the direct report who is really the problem here.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-11 20:20:27+00:00
Code churn is an evil, negative value activity. Design sanely and carefully before settling upon a published, standard contract. Churn of external-facing APIs should be extremely rare to solve essential critical problems, not for pseudo-maintenance bikeshedding. Also, the "it's a hobby" excuse doesn't fly.

tl;dr: Stop changing and breaking shit unnecessarily.
by 9dev | 2025-12-11 20:20:37+00:00
If you generalise enough, all comparisons become useless: Sure, all Sapiens have common ancestors.

That doesn’t take away from the wonder of imagining people thousands of years ago literally travelling across half the earth to settle somewhere else, people we usually consider as extremely different and more "primitive" than we are.

Learning that these people led in fact a life very similar to ours, were intellectually equivalent to us, had the same struggles and goals and aspirations we do (for the most part of course), is deeply fascinating, to me at least.
by roncesvalles | 2025-12-11 20:22:30+00:00
The risk is that lay people read comments like this and conclude "ergo, we need fewer programmers."

Nothing that the LLM is outputting is useful in the hands of somebody who couldn't have done it themselves (at least, given a reasonable amount of time).

The most apt analogy is that of pilot and autopilot. Autopilot makes the job of the pilot more pleasant, but it doesn't even slightly obviate the need for the pilot, nor does it lower the bar for the people that you can train as pilots.

The benefits of LLM programming are mostly going to be subsumed by the operator, to make their lives easier. Very little is gonna go to their employer (despite all the pressure), and this is not due to some principal-agent breakdown; it's just intrinsic to the nature of this work.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-11 20:22:54+00:00
The magic here is happening via the <script> tags, where you have access to the browser APIs like you would an <canvas> instead of <svg>. E.g. here's a sample I forked following the mouse using <svg> with <script> inside https://codepen.io/zamadatix/pen/emZXZKx?css-preprocessor=sc...

Libraries like three.js had SVG rendering as an option but it got deprecated as <canvas> with more direct GPU APIs was a lot more efficient and flexible.
by lII1lIlI11ll | 2025-12-11 20:23:53+00:00
You are giving authoritarians benefit of a doubt for no good reason. Vagueness in such laws is usually to allow selective enforcement by the people in power and not for you (a regular user) to have an "escape hatch" from negative consequences of the law. The reality of the situation is that there are currently no other ways to enforce age checks besides asking for an id and any kind of theoretical parental-controls-configured browser headers are years away from deployment, best case.
by Xss3 | 2025-12-11 20:25:13+00:00
Im shocked i had to scroll so far to find a real hard stop blocker mentioned.

Valve has no reason to care about using the HDMI trademark. Consumers dont care if it says HDMI 2.1 or HMDI 2.1 Compatible.

The connector isnt trademarked and neither is compatibility.

The oss nature of isnt one either as valve could just release a compiled binary instead of open sourcing it.

The 'get sued for copying the leak' argument implies someone would actually fancy going toe to toe with valves legal team which so far have rekt the eu, activision, riot games, microsoft, etc. in court.

Proving beyond doubt that valve or their devs accessed the leaks would be hard. Especially if valve were clever from the get go, and lets face it, they probably were. Theyre easily one of the leanest, most profitable, and savviest software companies around.
by jaffa2 | 2025-12-11 20:25:19+00:00
Why build an app? It seems the whole benefit here is it doesnt need any app. Its completely agnostic and simple. The value is in the data and the way he enters it in.

It sounds like a good system but i still believe it takes the discipline of a strong willed person to do the system no matter what system you use.

If i did this i would give up after 2 days. He says he redoes his list every night ready for the next day —- THAT is the secret here, not the specific system he uses.

I’ve tried all sorts over the years different tools, different systems , different philosophies, inbox zero, gtd etc They don’t work for me. I get by with a notepad and pen and i write lists as and when. Theres people out there and some even have YouTube channeks dedicatd to disseminating their productivity hack and workflows for evey tool Imaginable, and they are really enthusiastic about it.

It doesn’t do it for me im too free spirited.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-12-11 20:25:42+00:00
I for one disagree that software can't be "open source" if the OSI says it's not open source. There are varying degrees of open source. Since when do they get the right to define what is "open source"?

In my view, "open source" but doesn't give you permission to host a commercial service that directly competes with it, is still a degree of open source, and reasonable.
by Terr_ | 2025-12-11 20:25:49+00:00
> that's the plot of Die Hard 4

I must admit, the plausibility of corrupt government officials triggering a disaster to irreversibly steal bajillions of tax dollars hits a little differently today, 18 years later.

Not just due to the dramatis personae in charge, or the existence of cryptocurrencies, but also the real-world overlap of the two.
by joshmarlow | 2025-12-11 20:25:55+00:00
I think Grok's voice chat is almost there - only things missing for me: * it's slower to start-up by a couple of seconds * it's harder to switch between voice and text and back again in the same chat (though ChatGPT isn't perfect at this either)

And of course Grok's unhinged persona is... something else.
by hateselfdriving | 2025-12-11 20:25:59+00:00
Funny, I have another 30-40 years before I'm "dying off or moving to assisted living". Yet, because I work in software engineering and cybersecurity, you'll have to rip my human-driven cars out of my dead hands before I ever use or own a self-driving vehicle.

Don't get me wrong, as another commenter brought up, I hate traffic too, and the annual fatalities from vehicles are obviously a tragedy. Neither of them motivate me to sign away my rights and autonomy to auto manufacturers.

What happens when these companies decide they suddenly don't like you, cancel your subscription, and suddenly you're not allowed to drive, or I suppose rather use, the vehicle you "own"? It will become the same "subscription to life" dystopian nightmare everything else is becoming.

Or how about how these subscriptions will never be what the consumer actually wants? You'll be forced to pay for useless extra features, ever increasing prices, and planned obsolescence until they've squeezed maximum value out of every single person. I mean imagine trying to work with Comcast to get your "car subscription" sorted.

You know else reduces traffic and fatalities? Allowing workers to actually work from home. Driving during COVID was a dream come true. Let's let the commercial real estate market fail as it was primed to.
by jaredsohn | 2025-12-11 20:26:02+00:00
I started tracking everything I ate three years ago and even posted about it via this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32552288

I updated it substantially via AI this summer (includes micros, compounds, and various other stats and a webpage with charts now) and then I started making diet changes based on these new features. Is really neat to compare data from before and after those changes. And like you suggested, I keep making improvements to the system and to myself and it becomes really satisfying / motivational.

Is still driven by simple text files.
by em-bee | 2025-12-11 20:26:03+00:00
in at least some european companies, contacting employees during off hours is already illegal.

what we need is better protection for employees, and especially for parents.

in my vision childcare times are counted towards pension times. stay at home times are required to be taken by both parents equally, so that their careers are affected equally and there is no question on who has to throttle their career because it's both.

that still leaves a career difference between those who have children and those who don't. not sure what to do about that other than serious tax benefits for every child. in germany you get 250euro per month per child in cash until the child is grown up. unconditionally. that's a start, but may not be enough. somehow the income difference needs to be made up. not having children should simply not have benefits in terms of income and career.

just throwing out ideas here: how about preferential hiring for parents? but that's difficult to enforce. same goes for promotion.

actually, with automation taking over jobs maybe the simplest solution to equalize career chances is to reduce everyones working hours. if working time is limited to 20 or at the most 30 hours per week, then childless people get more free time, but parents get more time for their children without having to throttle their careers.
by alistairSH | 2025-12-11 20:26:19+00:00
"Free Speech" in the American legal sense (1st Amendment to the Constitution) applies to government prohibition on speech, with a particular emphasis on political speech.

It doesn't prevent one person from prohibiting speech... I can tell a pastor to stop preaching on my lawn. But, the government cannot tell a pastor not to preach in the publicly-owned town square (generally, there are exceptions).

There are arguments that certain online forums are effectively "town squares in the internet age" (Twitter in particular, at least pre-Musk). But, I always found that analogy to fall apart - twitter (or whatever online forum) is more like an op-ed section in a newspaper, IMO. And newspapers don't have to publish every op-ed that gets submitted.

Also, the 1st Amendment does not protect you from the consequences of your speech. I can call my boss an asshole to his face legally - and he can fire me (generally, there are labor protections and exceptions).
by ls612 | 2025-12-11 20:26:42+00:00
Yeah it’s a long and complex topic. Perun takes the same view as those people you linked but I think there’s several interlinked developments driving this, one of which is the pace of advancement in space access. Even if it won’t work today this is realistically a 20 year project regardless of Trump’s desire to have it by 2028, and if launch costs fall another order of magnitude between now and then and you can make really small interceptors it changes the math a lot. There’s also the broader game-theoretic and strategic stability (or really strategic metastability but this is a whole long and complicated digression) issues which tldr means that if you think such a thing could be possible it would allow any actor who could accomplish it to alter the fundamental MAD equilibrium we have lived under for 80 years and this would come with immense first mover advantages.
by buildbot | 2025-12-11 20:26:55+00:00
Amusingly the lenses are worse than silicon at transmitting that wavelength.

1550nm might be worse for sensors because a good portion of the light is only being dumped into the metal layers - pure silicon is mostly transparent to 1550nm. Not sure how doped silicon would work. I can tell you that 1070nm barely works on an IQ3 Achromatic back…

https://www.pmoptics.com/silicon.html
by hodgesrm | 2025-12-11 20:26:59+00:00
Austen's command of language and empathy for her characters is second to none. I love the hook at the end of this passage from Pride and Prejudice.

``And of this place,'' thought she, ``I might have been mistress! With these rooms I might now have been familiarly acquainted! Instead of viewing them as a stranger, I might have rejoiced in them as my own, and welcomed to them as visitors my uncle and aunt. -- But no,'' -- recollecting herself, -- ``that could never be: my uncle and aunt would have been lost to me: I should not have been allowed to invite them.'' This was a lucky recollection -- it saved her from something like regret.

https://pemberley.com/janeinfo/ppv3n43.html
by frmersdog | 2025-12-11 20:27:05+00:00
This is a good rundown of (the history of) the appeal, particularly to male viewers. I hesitate to call the melodrama "incidental", though, as the female viewers it drew in were the ones who saved the franchise (per Tomino) when it initially failed to take off. The creators recognized where their bread was being buttered, which is why so many series in the franchise (including the ones most grounded in some semblance of mechanical and military knowledge) end up centering around either love stories or a troupe of unusually handsome young men.

That was half the equation; the other half being the transition from toy-based to model-based merchandising, as you said, which drew back in the male fans.
by InvertedRhodium | 2025-12-11 20:27:33+00:00
This is wildly unpopular, for good reasons, but if I want to get a third dog I need to apply for and get a license from the council - they’ll come round, inspect my property and ensure that it’s adequate for a number of dogs, that it’s secure and my current pets are well treated before issuing it.

The disconnect between this and children seems wild to me. Why don’t we display the same amount of concern for children?
by swatcoder | 2025-12-11 20:27:53+00:00
- Essentially zero input or transactional latency

- Proven effective after 14 years of heavy use

- Celebrated by user

- Zero dependencies

- Maximally portable

- Outage-proof

- Compatible with all backup systems and most version control systems

Have you considered that stuff like this is already "more productive" for fluent users than almost any alternative could be?

Somewhere along the line, product people started to mistake following design trends and adding complexity for productivity, forgetting that delivering the right combination of fluency, stability, simiplicity are often the real road to maximizing it.
by zzo38computer | 2025-12-11 20:27:55+00:00
I hardly get any contributions, questions, etc even though I have published them on GitHub (although some people do watch and/or star them, but I don't really care much how many stars it has).

I think you can disable issues but not pull requests, as far as I know.

It might be helpful to allow to disable pull requests too, and possibly to hide how many stars/watchers there are and hide the list of forks (people could still star, watch, and/or fork the repository, but they would not be listed on that repository if the display of those features are disabled).

Whether or not GitHub accepts these ideas, it can be an idea that other services (e.g. Codeberg) can consider adding such options if they want to do (as well as other things).
by insane_dreamer | 2025-12-11 20:28:43+00:00
that's not what source available means to me -- it just means you can look at the source code -- what you can actually do with that code, or whether or not you need a paid license, whether you can use the code in a non-commercial case only but not commercial, all of those are nuances that would be specified in the license. There are many different options from highly restrictive to highly permissive -- the only thing they have in common is that you can see the source code.

"open source" can have restrictions too. GPL is highly restrictive because it requires any code linked with the GPL code to be GPL too.
by talljeff68 | 2025-12-11 20:28:49+00:00
Thank you for the thoughts. Relative "made up words", what if the concepts reference things that didn't exist before their definition in these specifications?

ie: At one point "hyperlink" and "Uniform Resource Locator" were made up words. No different that say "web log" (blog) and "Client-Server Architecture" were being made up as well.

I contend that both "Artipoint" and "Cortex Layer" have similar parallels in the sense they refer to concepts newly formulated or at least are captured into a formalism with a label for the first time!
by pdimitar | 2025-12-11 20:29:32+00:00
Yes, sadly. And before somebody quickly interjects: he not just was not an a-hole, he was extremely kind, calm and always supportive. You almost never hear him say: "I am too busy right now, can we do this later?".

Seriously. Almost never.

Yep. Still got fired.

And he was not rising or anything. Was a small hardcore team, zero politics were involved, they were tight-knit, loved them. But there was only so much the CTO could do; it was a startup that was under the boot of a bigger org he was actually working in. He fought for good paychecks for everyone, and generous severance too. But had no say if the higher echelons said that somebody had to be let go.

There's no moral of the story except "don't sweat your job, they'll replace you the next day". Treat it as a transaction, not as a second family.
by ludwigschubert | 2025-12-11 20:30:52+00:00
The first Distill publication[0] made tasteful use of minimal interactivity through JavaScript/d3.js[1] on top of SVGs. Many of the illustrations were initially drawn in GUI editors.

(Outstanding work by Shan Carter; it’s what I first saw of his style and it’s what made me want to join his team.)

[0] https://distill.pub/2016/augmented-rnns/ [1] https://github.com/distillpub/post--augmented-rnns/blob/mast...
by contingencies | 2025-12-11 20:31:36+00:00
If you're in the area don't miss the Mỹ Sơn ruins ("perhaps the longest inhabited archaeological site in Mainland Southeast Asia") or the old French EFEO museum, now the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_S%C6%A1n
by criddell | 2025-12-11 20:31:43+00:00
What's been your favorite?

I wasted too much time tweaking Enlightenment. I remember that was fun but I don't really remember much about actually using it.

OS/2's Workplace Shell feels like the biggest lost opportunity (and has nothing to do with UNIXy stuff). I really liked Rexx and the SOM stuff felt cleaner than what became COM in Windows.