MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Sevrene | 2025-12-17 19:56:01+00:00
Yeah you raise a good counterpoint, what you say is the other side of what I'm saying and totally valid. People can be manipulated, people need to put effort in to be virtuous- it's not always our default state. To not have a parent is to be responsible for yourself. It's better because you have responsibility and can decide for yourself, but it's worse because... well, you also have responsiblity.

My point isn't to blame the people for the fault of a few at the top, it's the give people the ability to recognise they have the power to prevent it. That does mean being more morally capable but it doesn't mean having all responsibility. So yeah we can talk about how social media owned by billionaires creates more extremism and harm, we can talk about how the commodification of politics reduces it to entertainment via perverse incentives. People aren't monoliths, no man an island, etc, etc. It's actually why I support this social media ban in the first place.
by rayiner | 2025-12-17 19:56:49+00:00
It depends on whether you think elections are better than “independent civil servants.” The system the founders created was one where the executive branch would be subject to the whims of the people via regular elections of the President.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, folks like Woodrow Wilson came up with this idea of the administrative state run by independent expert civil servants: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-study-of-ad.... The concept arose from Wilson’s hatred of democracy and immigration:

> The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes. A truth must become not only plain but also commonplace before it will be seen by the people who go to their work very early in the morning; and not to act upon it must involve great and pinching inconveniences before these same people will make up their minds to act upon it.

> And where is this unphilosophical bulk of mankind more multifarious in its composition than in the United States? To know the public mind of this country, one must know the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of Negroes. In order to get a footing for new doctrine, one must influence minds cast in every mold of race, minds inheriting every bias of environment, warped by the histories of a score of different nations, warmed or chilled, closed or expanded by almost every climate of the globe.

The idea of “independent agencies” staffed by neutral civil servants arises directly from this skepticism of democracy and voters.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-17 19:56:50+00:00
Canada Population Drops 0.2% in Third Quarter in First Decline Since Pandemic - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-17/canada-po... | https://archive.today/QeXed - December 17th, 2025

Canada's population decreases from July 1 to October 1, 2025 - https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/251217/dq251... - December 17th, 2025

Canada sees large drop in population amid international students crackdown - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/17/canada-populat... - December 17th, 2025

> “A major population adjustment is well underway, and it remains one of the biggest economic stories in Canada,” Robert Kavcic, senior economist at Bank of Montreal, said in a report to investors.

> “Among the impacts we’re tracking are: a significant weakening of the rental market, especially with the pipeline chock-full of supply; less pressure on services inflation; easing slack in the youth job market; and a likely pickup in productivity and growth in real gross domestic product per capita.”
by hylaride | 2025-12-17 19:57:30+00:00
> A planned economy is certainly a lot more viable now than it was in 1950, let alone 1920. The Soviet Union was in many ways just a century too early.

If the economy were otherwise stagnant, maybe. But top-down planning just cannot take into account all the multitudes of inputs to plan anywhere near the scale that communist countries did. Bureaucrats are never going to be incentivized anywhere near the level that private decision making can be. Businesses (within a legal/regulatory framework) can "just do" things if they make economic sense via a relatively simple price signal. A top-down planner can never fully take that into account, and governments should only intervene in specific national interest situations (eg in a shortage environment legally mandating an important precursor medicine ingredient to medical companies instead of other uses).

The Soviet Union decided that defence was priority number one and shoved an enormous amount of national resources into it. In the west, the US government encouraged development that also spilled over into the civilian sector and vice-versa.

> But a major failing of the Soviet economic system was that there simply wasn't good data to make decisions, because at every layer people had the means and incentive to make their data look better than it really was.

It wasn't just data that was the problem, but also quality control, having to plan far, far ahead due to bureaucracy in the supply chain, not being able get spare parts because wear and tear wasn't properly planned, etc. There's an old saying even in private business that if you create and measure people on a metric they'll game or over concentrate on said metric. The USSR often pumped out large numbers of various widgets, but quality would often be poor (the stories of submarine and nuclear power plant manufacturers having to repeatedly deal and replace bad inputs was a massive source of waste).
by giancarlostoro | 2025-12-17 19:57:45+00:00
> They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face

I strongly disagree, a Senior who cannot ask a "dumb question" is a useless developer to me. Ask away, we want to figure things out, we're not mind readers. Every good senior developer I know asks questions and admits when they don't know things. This is humility and in my eyes is a strong market for a good Senior Developer. The entire point of our job is to ask questions (to ourselves typically the most) and figure out the answers (the code).

Juniors could or should ask more questions, and by the time you're a Senior, you're asking key questions no matter how dumb they sound.
by tune-nova | 2025-12-17 19:57:51+00:00
You can't even imagine how little the rest of the world cares about this.

Do people in California care that slightly under 50% of my state's population are at or below poverty level? Do they care that most of the rest spend 55-60% of our income on food? Do they care that our life expectancy is 15 years lower than that in California, mostly because of terrible pollution caused by extraction and processing of minerals which our beloved government then sells to the US and several European countries, and pockets the money?

Do they care about conflict minerals in general, used to build electronics for their enjoyment? Have they done anything about this?

This American political bickering does not even register on our radars when choosing a web browser.

"Europe's problems are the world's problems but the world's problems are not Europe's problems.", as India's Mr. Jaishankar is fond of saying.

The same can be said about the US.
by scrollop | 2025-12-17 19:58:07+00:00
Alright so we have more benchmarks including hallucinations and flash doesn't do well with that, though generally it beats gemini 3 pro and GPT 5.1 thinking and gpt 5.2 thinking xhigh (but then, sonnet, grok, opus, gemini and 5.1 beat 5.2 xhigh) - everything. Crazy.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-17 19:58:17+00:00
I feel a bit skeeved out about the standard practice of just letting keys hang free and loose in ~/.ssh/ as it is already (leveraging e.g. Secure Enclave on Macs is much better IMO), let alone putting them in a place where they're liable to be unintentionally uploaded or freely accessible to anybody who happens to come into possession of my thumb drive.
by montroser | 2025-12-17 19:58:20+00:00
This looks so very cool, and so then all the more thought provoking that the tests themselves are closed-source, unlike the rest of the codebase. In this evolving world of rapidly improving llm coding agent productivity, the idea that the tests are more important than the implementation starts to ring true.

I was thinking about sqlite's test landscape as described here, in relation to simonw's recent writing about porting/recreating the justHTML engine from python to js via codex, nearly "automatically" with just a prompt and light steering.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-12-17 19:58:45+00:00
You are making an argument for strict enumeration, in other words that officers can only be removed via impeachment because it is the only removal method explicitly listed in the Constitution. That argument was formally rejected by SCOTUS in 1926[1], and really only in force for lifetime appointment judges today.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers_v._United_States
by toss1 | 2025-12-17 19:58:52+00:00
>>you're attempting to parse a random combination of tea leaves and chicken entrails

It is exactly the opposite — it is reading the actual language used for its intended meaning.

Every CEO is expected to not only understand the issues he faces and is managing, but to ALSO carefully choose the words to describe the situation and the intentions of the organization he leads.

When a CEO makes a statement about what should be a core fundamental principle of an organization, we can certainly expect that CEO to choose their words carefully.

Those words are, or at least should be, the exact opposite of "tea leaves and chicken entrails".

If the CEO is sloppy and the chosen words should actually be considered "tea leaves and chicken entrails", that is a different problem of a less-than-competent CEO.

If those words were actually chosen carefully, consider these two statements:

The actual statement: "[I don't] want to do that. It feels off-mission"

A different statement: "This is a core fundamental principle of Mozilla and I will not lead the company in that direction — not on my watch".

One could technically say "they both say 'Not today'".

But that would be absurd, and stupidly throwing out significant meaning in what the CEO chose to say and how he chose to say it.

He made the first vague statement with weasel words instead of something resembling the bold and unambiguous statement resembling the second statement.

The statement he did make is "I don't want to", which type of statement has often preceded an eventual "sorry, we had to".

There is a lot to make Firefox users nervous, and his choice of statement here did not help matters.
by spectreflow | 2025-12-17 19:58:54+00:00
Encryption is no longer a “nice-to-have” feature — it’s one of the only defenses standing between an organization and catastrophic data exposure.

Modern attacks move fast, exploit anything they can find, and often bypass traditional security layers. When everything else fails, encryption is the barrier that decides whether stolen data becomes a headline—or a useless pile of scrambled nonsense.

If applied correctly, encryption turns sensitive information into an unreadable artifact, shielding organizations from fines, lawsuits, ransom demands, and irreparable reputational damage. It is the last stand when perimeter security breaks.
by mustache_kimono | 2025-12-17 19:58:54+00:00
> So the prediction that incautious and unverified unsafe {} blocks would cause CVEs seems entirely accurate.

This is one/the first CVE caused by a mistake made using unsafe Rust. But it was revealed along with 159 new kernel CVEs found in C code.[0]

It may just be me, but it seems wildly myopic to draw conclusions about Rust, or even, unsafe Rust from one CVE. More CVEs will absolutely happen. But even true Rust haters have to recognize that tide of CVEs in kernel C code runs something like 19+ CVEs per day? What kind of case can you make that "incautious and unverified unsafe {} blocks" is worse than that?

[0]: https://social.kernel.org/notice/B1JLrtkxEBazCPQHDM
by prmoustache | 2025-12-17 19:59:03+00:00
I also vacuum my dining/kitchen area daily, I actually sweep de re vacuuming, and it only takes me a couple of minutes to do it and this is part of the many things I wouldn't even want to get rid of as it is one among many other things thay allows my body to be active.

Some people install domotic, always choose escalators and elevators over stairs, do everything they need to not move their ass during the day only to pay for a gym pass and spend more time at the gym than they have provably saved avoiding "living".
by the_af | 2025-12-17 19:59:15+00:00
> It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet, but also often dumb. In fact, it seems likely. More of an indictment of the rest of the places on the internet.

Almost every (non-troll) online community that is relatively peaceful and has some semblance of moderation to remove flamewars thinks of itself as "the best community". Usually as compared to reddit, though if it's on reddit they will compare themselves to some other (hated) sub.

It's a fact of the internet. Every online community thinks of itself as the smartest, more thoughtful, more civilized. HN is no exception.

It goes without saying HN is not the smartest or more thoughtful online community. It's just... ok. Not the worst, not the best. Certainly NOT the place with the smartest people, though some smart people frequent it. As a regular, you can soon figure out HN's unspoken rules, blindspots, and areas where the group opinion is more likely to be accurate.
by scrollop | 2025-12-17 19:59:18+00:00
This one is more powerful than openai models, including gpt 5.2 (which is worse on various benchmarks than 5.1 which is worse than 5.1, and that's where 5.2 was using XHIGH, whiulst the others were on high eg: https://youtu.be/4p73Uu_jZ10?si=x1gZopegCacznUDA&t=582 )

https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/simplebench
by nkmnz | 2025-12-17 19:59:34+00:00
I stand corrected! It's 52% that don't even START the first video![0] Other studies report that number at 35%.[1]

One thing that's more consistent are average completion rates hovering around 5%.

[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aav7958 as cited by [1]

[1] https://openpraxis.org/articles/606/files/66d16716e6c09.pdf
by 3uruiueijjj | 2025-12-17 20:00:13+00:00
I've never found anything to back this up, but my impression was that both the Python / Numpy and Fortran 90 slicing operations were directly inspired by MATLAB (although most of the ideas go back to at least Algol 68).

It also helps that Fortran compatibility is a must for pretty much anything that expects to use BLAS.
by Cpoll | 2025-12-17 20:00:15+00:00
It's possible those arguments are correct. I wouldn't give up Google and SO, but I suspect I was learning faster when my first stop was K&R or a man page. There's a lot of benefit in building your own library of knowledge instead of cribbing from someone else's.

Of course no-one's stopping a junior from doing it the old way, but no-one's teaching them they can, either.
by rockostrich | 2025-12-17 20:00:19+00:00
You don't even need to do that. You can just put each set of repos in a directory on a per-account basis and set up git-configs for each. The top of my `.gitconfig` looks like

[includeIf "gitdir:~/Work/"] path = .gitconfig_work [includeIf "gitdir:~/OpenSource/"] path = .gitconfig_opensource

where `Work` is where all of our repos associated with our GitHub EMU go and `OpenSource` is where I clone all of the open source repos I need to contribute to for work. Our EMU policy doesn't allow us to use our EMU accounts on other repos (or maybe this is just a general restriction of EMU) so I have that set-up to use my personal GitHub.
by fsflover | 2025-12-17 20:00:21+00:00
https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/04/10/apple-makes-it-re...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42014588

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433
by nicbou | 2025-12-17 20:00:33+00:00
Is this an ad or a question?

I would say domain knowledge and experience. I've been in my industry for long enough to spot situations where my work will have disproportionate impact. The longer I am in this industry, the more knowledge, contacts and followers I have, so I can be very effective at building things, getting them validated, and finding users for it.
by rayiner | 2025-12-17 20:00:53+00:00
That’s a good analysis. But the simpler route is that there is no such thing as an “independent” agency. That’s a 20th century creation. The constitution doesn’t even talk about an “executive branch.” It vests the executive power in a single office—the President. (“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America”).

Can congress create a law that provides for congressional aides to exercise power “independent” of Congress members? No. Can Congress create a law that provides for judicial law clerks to exercise power “independent” of Article III judges? No. It’s an extremely easy question. Myers v. United States got the right answer almost 100 years ago.
by nevir | 2025-12-17 20:00:54+00:00
Juniors are also more likely to be the MOST proficient/comfortable with AI tooling.

Pair them with a senior so they can learn engineering best practices:

And now you've also just given your senior engineers some extra experience/insights into how to more effectively leverage AI.

It accelerates the org to have juniors (really: a good mix of all experience levels)
by throwawaypath | 2025-12-17 20:01:01+00:00
>Britons are indigenous, Anglos and other “White Brits” are invaders.

Categorically false. "The English people are an ethnic group [...] native to England." [0]

"[White Brits] is an ethnicity classification used for the White population identifying as English..." [1]

The English are the native and indigenous ethnic group to England (London). White Brits are a category that includes the English.

>Of course, separating them out at this point has become difficult.

There is no separation nor difficulty: English people are the indigenous and native group to London.

QED.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_British#
by kkfx | 2025-12-17 20:01:15+00:00
In the past, for technological reasons, because it is technology that determines every civilisation, cities were rich places, because they had trade, nearby arts and crafts; knowledge and economy travelled in this way.

Today, for similar reasons, cities are chicken coops where the inmates are not much different from the human batteries in The Matrix; they live to work, generally without realising it, for masters who are no longer in the city. Technologically, they are failed places, because they cannot evolve without being rebuilt from scratch, and they cannot be rebuilt on such a scale, both due to the impact of the work and the quantity of raw materials required.

Most people never weigh the real cost of a modern city; they are so accustomed to owning nothing that they think what is there is natural, ignoring what they don't see, whether underground (like the cathedral with mega-pumping stations to mitigate flooding beneath Tokyo) or in the surrounding areas to bring water and food, because we all eat, but in the city no one produces.

The cities of the coming century are ghettos, polluted and devastated, where misery is concentrated like a compound, while wealth leaves the compound to reclaim life in nature.
by rajvarkala | 2025-12-17 20:01:16+00:00
I think what you described would be a good definition of outcome. But, Who bills customers that way if you think about software providers? The prevailing models are fixed fee , hourly fee or infra-spend fee.

There is an argument to be made that SaaS tools tap the tool budget whereas AI agents can tap the worker budget of companies.

I am looking to understand more nuances here.
by bastardoperator | 2025-12-17 20:01:18+00:00
Over a decade ago, the maintainer of SQLite gave a talk at OSCON about their testing practices. One concept that stood out to me was the power of checklists, the same tool pilots rely on before every flight.

He also mentioned Doctors Without Borders, who weren't seeing the outcomes they expected when it came to saving lives. One surprising reason? The medical teams often didn't speak the same language or even know each other's names.

The solution was simple: a pre-surgery checklist. Before any procedure, team members would state their name and role. This small ritual dramatically improved their success rates, not through better technique, but through better communication.

https://sqlite.org/src/ext/checklist/3070700/index
by richardfeynman | 2025-12-17 20:01:51+00:00
There is no global hate movement against lefties that encourages and relishes in their pain. There is for Jews, who despite accounting for only 2% of the US population are victims of 69% of religious-based hate crimes. Doing the math, Jews are 35x more likely to be the victim of a hate crime. This is not true for lefties.

(This is a general statement responding to your analogy. As I mentioned in my earlier comment, I don't even know if this professor was Jewish or why he was killed.)
by ike2792 | 2025-12-17 20:02:18+00:00
It's a fair question to ask "who are independent executive agency heads accountable to" in a constitutional context. It is true that the Executive Branch has grown far beyond what the Founding Fathers could have imagined, but the idea of a unitary executive is that the President is responsible and accountable for everything that happens in the Executive Branch. If the voters don't like what the Executive Branch is doing, they can replace the President in the next election. What happens if voters don't like what independent executive agencies are doing? There's no democratic recourse.

Think of a scenario where a President was elected with a large-ish majority and promised during the campaign to change broadband regulations to reduce broadband prices across the country. Unfortunately, the FCC commissioners were all appointed by the previous president and block this policy change that the voters clearly support. How does that square with democratic accountability?
by XorNot | 2025-12-17 20:02:42+00:00
For me everything goes in Keepass. And the only thing I want in life is the ability to change a password from Keepass in a standardized way.

Instead we've got Passkeys and the general promise by omission that I will be banned from using Keepass to store and backup my passwords as I see fit on my own devices.

People want me to trust the corporate overlords who at every turn have practiced lock in and rent seeking tactics.
by ivanstojic | 2025-12-17 20:02:59+00:00
I started reading the article and immediately got hit by the incorrect statement in the opening:

> If AI agents help each support employee handle 30% more tickets, that's like adding 30 new hires to a 100-person team, without the cost.

I think this is an oversimplification designed to make LLMs seem more profitable than they actually are.
by scrollop | 2025-12-17 20:03:05+00:00
https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/simplebench

Just do it.

I use a service where I have access to all SOTA models and many open sourced models, so I change models within chats, using MCPs eg start a chat with opus making a search with perplexity and grok deepsearch MCPs and google search, next query is with gpt 5 thinking Xhigh, next one with gemini 3 pro, all in the same conversation. It's fantastic! I can't imagine what it would be like again to be locked into using one (or two) companies. I have nothing to do with the guys who run it (the hosts from the podcast This day in AI, though if you're interested have a look in the simtheory.ai discord.

I don't know how people use one service can manage...