MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phkahler | 2025-12-22 05:09:10+00:00
>> I think the internet would be a lot nicer place if people were held accountable for the things they say and do.

I agree. I've often advocated for zero anonymity by default. Everyone traceable by anyone. The thinking is that bad behavior (threats and such) could be reported. There was enough pushback to make me rethink that. People will still make threats when you know who they are - less often but they will. Offline (real world) harassment is still possible too without being identified, though thats getting harder every day.

Verified identity online is not the same thing as being held accountable.
by jamblewamble | 2025-12-22 05:09:33+00:00
Also 90% of the time when you finally manage to get someone to quote one of these "death threats" it turns out to be something like "I hope you die of cancer" or "You deserve to get shot" which are horrible but are not threats in any sense whatsoever.

This is why when you see yet another article about someone getting "death threats" they don't actually say what the threats are: most of the time they aren't threats at all.

On the other hand, sometimes people really do actually threaten people and if someone actually threatens you, the likelihood that he is 1000s of km away isn't particularly reassuring let me tell you.
by thegrim000 | 2025-12-22 05:09:36+00:00
>> Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine

"In February 2022, two days after Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine requested that the American aerospace company SpaceX activate their Starlink satellite internet service in the country, to replace internet and communication networks degraded or destroyed during the war.[2][3][4] Starlink has since been used by Ukrainian civilians, government and military.[3][5] The satellite service has been employed for humanitarian purposes as well as defense and counterattacks on Russian positions.[6]"

"In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...
by lll-o-lll | 2025-12-22 05:11:03+00:00
It’s about avoiding single points of failure.

> In the world you describe, you don’t have any durability when the network is impaired.

Yes, the real world. If you want durability, a single physical machine is never enough.

This is standard distributed computing, and we’ve had all (most) of the literature and understanding of this since the 70’s. It’s complicated, and painful to get right, which is why people normally default to a DB (or cloud managed service).

The reason this matters for this logging scenario is that I normally don’t care if I lose a bit of logging in a catastrophic failure case. It’s not ideal, but I’m trading RPO for performance. However, when regs say “thou shalt not lose thy data”, I move the other way. Which is why the streams are separate. It does impose an architectural design constraint because audit can’t be treated as a subset of logs.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-22 05:11:16+00:00
Me. Personally, no. I'm not out of moves. I'm making moves but I do have much less options than a few years prior. I'll make it through one way or another

But that's just me, as a late millennial that had some professional experience before the rug was pulled from under me. I have value to show to the few companies looking for actual labor. People a few years younger than me are absolutely thrown on a chess board with 2 pawns and told "good luck, I did these moves when I graduated... (with a bishop and Knight)". I don't know what actionable advice I can give outside of "survive until the market improves. Work on your portfolio and network if/when you can to prepare for that". But it's not great advice.
Ask HN: Why Python for Agents?
by k3ntaki | 2025-12-22 05:12:44+00:00
Why is Python the dominant language for LLM wrappers and agent frameworks?

For most LLM “agent” frameworks, the core work seems to be API orchestration, state management, retries, tool calling, and I/O—not numerical computing or data science. Given that, I’m struggling to understand why Python is the default choice over languages like Java, C#, or Go, which generally offer:

-stronger typing and compile-time guarantees -better concurrency and async models -higher throughput and lower latency for I/O-heavy services -more mature tooling for large, long-running backend systems

If the heavy ML work is happening remotely (via OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.), what advantages does Python provide here beyond ecosystem momentum? Is the choice mostly historical (ML roots), or are there concrete technical reasons Python is better suited for agent orchestration?
by mkroman | 2025-12-22 05:12:47+00:00
What I don't see mentioned here or in the article:

PostNord Denmark has been operating with massive losses for a while now, in part because they were required by law to be able to deliver everywhere in Denmark, when there were very little demand for it. The money just isn't there, which is why the law has been changed.

The cost of sending a letter was also just going up and up. In 2025, it cost $4.55 _per letter_.
by egl2020 | 2025-12-22 05:13:58+00:00
I once had an 1.75 hour commute each way, 3.5 hours daily. I had to program during the commute---otherwise there weren't enough hours in the day to get my work done. There were periods of laptop-closed thinking, but no daydreaming or looking at the scenery. No Internet connectivity, so I had to plan carefully.
by pfdietz | 2025-12-22 05:14:24+00:00
3000 is still 3x your number.

In evaluating the importance of this, you need to consider not only the time value of money, but also what one might call the "time value of technology". Does it make sense to make the technology long lived when it's improving so quickly? Or do you just replace it in a decade when things are much cheaper? Was "this PC will last 20 years!" ever a selling point?

When evaluating these technologies, you have to look at not just what they cost now, but how rapidly the cost is improving. Batteries are likely improving more quickly than turbines and heat exchangers.
by satvikpendem | 2025-12-22 05:14:42+00:00
Sure, you're like me, you're not a vibe coder by the actual definition then. Still, the general trend I see is that a lot of actual vibe coders do try to get their product working, code quality be damned. Personally, same as you, I stopped vibe coding and actually started writing a lot of architecture and code myself first then allowing the LLM to fill in the features so to speak.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-22 05:14:49+00:00
>Do you seriously believe that a lot of people in Vermont and Wyoming are working DoorDash?

Among the youth who cannot get into entry level work, or the displaced who can't find a new job: yes.

>Put your prejudices aside and look at the actual economic data.

https://www.pymnts.com/gig-economy/2025/gen-z-turns-side-gig...

>Side hustles account for 43% of the average hustler’s total income. That share climbs to 57% for Gen Z consumers and a striking 76% for those earning under $50,000 annually — turning what was once a cushion into a core source of liquidity.

Okay, your turn. Where's your economic data instead of "I know a young rocj dude who bought a house". Or is it easier to blame everyone else instead of taking a look at the reality around you.
by skissane | 2025-12-22 05:15:01+00:00
But, did you actually give the agent access to a tool to measure code coverage?

If it can't measure whether it is succeeding in increasing code coverage, no wonder it doesn't do that great a job in increasing it.

Also, it can help if you have a pair of agents (which could even be just two different instances of the same agent with different prompting) – one to write tests, and one to review them. The test-writing agent writes tests, and submits them as a PR; the PR-reviewing agent read the PR and provides feedback; the test-writing agent updates the tests in response to the feedback; iterate until the PR-reviewing agent is satisfied. This can produce much better tests than just an agent writing tests without any automated review process.
by godelski | 2025-12-22 05:15:13+00:00
While not mandatory, vi is part of the POSIX commands. I mean you could use ed or even hack your way with awk, sed, and/or grep but no one wants to deal with that bullshit. And if you're installing vi you might as well install vim, right?

I've been on a lot of systems and can't remember a single instance of not having vi (though I do vim). So pretty rare, like you said

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_POSIX_commands
by nradov | 2025-12-22 05:15:33+00:00
Remote piloting for landing an aircraft that size is problematic because you need more sensors on the aircraft plus a reliable, high-bandwidth, low-latency data link. That doesn't really exist in most places. When the military lands something like an MQ-9 Reaper they typically hand off control to a pilot located within line-of-sight right at the airfield. That obviously isn't practical for civilian general aviation.
by tombert | 2025-12-22 05:15:50+00:00
I think Haiku is in that "last 5%" phase. They have something that is 95% of the way there, it's 95% cool, but frustratingly, that last 5% is really important; there's a lot of boring, thankless work with any software that has broad reach.

Most people don't like doing it, but in order for the operating system to be "good", you really need most of this unsexy stuff to work; you need to be able to easily install WiFi drivers, you need to support most modern video cards, you need to suss out the minutia of the graphics APIs, you need to test every possible edge case in the filesystem, you need to ensure that file associations are consistent, etc.

I've mentioned this before, but this is part of what I respect so much about the Wine project. It's been going on for decades, each release gets a little better, and a lot of that work is almost certainly the thankless boring stuff that is absolutely necessary to get Wine to be "production ready".

I ran Haiku a bit on an old laptop, and I do actually like it. It's ridiculously fast and snappy (even beating Linux in some cases), and I really do wish them the best, but as of right now I don't think it's viable quite yet. I'm not 100% sure how they're going to tackle GPU drivers (since GPU drivers are almost an entire OS in their own right), but I would love to have something FOSS that takes us out of the codified mediocrity of POSIX.
by necovek | 2025-12-22 05:16:02+00:00
In a traffic jam situation, all-way stop is a "blocked intersection" if every vehicle obeyed it strictly (if there are cars coming from every direction, nobody has right of way and you can't apply the rule of yielding right).

Humans, luckily, never follow the rules to the letter, which made it reasonable to put them down like this: some will be more impatient/aggressive, others will establish eye contact and wave one another through, etc.

In a situation like this where you've got "drivers" who can't collaborate and learn on the spot, the rule does not make sense.
by lunr | 2025-12-22 05:16:27+00:00
As a widower who just sent his kid off to the grandparents to visit for a few days, and is now missing his person, his kid, who relies on him and feeling the effects of missing purpose...

Sure, it could be kids, a partner, a spouse, or a friend or family. But it could also be the rest of the team on the weekly bowling league, the puppies at the shelter who need playtime each week with a volunteer human, the community one serves as a volunteer firefighter, the homeless shelter where one helps serve the weekly dinner, the neighbor who needs help with yard upkeep, or any other parts of the village where one lives that relies on you, and makes you feel included, involved, and fulfilled inside by having that purpose.
by danwilsonthomas | 2025-12-22 05:16:28+00:00
I've seen something similar when using Pydantic to get a list from structured output. The input included (among many other things) a chunk of CSV formatted data. I found that if the CSV had an empty column - a literal ",," - then there was a high likelihood that the structured output would also have a literal ",," which is of course invalid Python syntax for a list and Pydantic would throw an error when attempting to construct the output. Simply changing all instances of ",," to ",NA," in the input CSV chunk reduced that to effectively zero. A simple hack, but one that fit within the known constraints.
by linehedonist | 2025-12-22 05:16:50+00:00
Certainly the world’s climate is worse. Wealth inequality is worse. I try hard not to be nostalgic, and even so I have to admit lots of things are not as good as they were in the 60s.

It’s not even like the physical infrastructure is all that much better. I live in a house built in the 50s, and clearly the people living in it then led a pretty similar life to mine. It just cost me a lot more money.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-22 05:17:49+00:00
There’s a lot more to having kids than the relatively short window when they’re very young and waking up a lot in the middle of the night.

Before having kids I read so much about this difficult period and thought it was going to be the defining feature of having kids.

Then you go through it and one month you realize they’re sleeping through the night. Then you have an entire lifetime.

So yeah, it’s not fun. But it’s also such a tiny segment of parenthood that the emphasis on it feels pretty excessive.
by nowittyusername | 2025-12-22 05:19:00+00:00
That phenomenon and others is what made it obvious that COT is not its "thinking". I think COT is a process by which the llm expands its processing boundary, in that it allows it to sample over a larger space of possibilities. So its kind of acts like a "trigger" of sorts that allows the model to explore in more ways then without COT. First time I saw this was when I witnessed the "wait" phenomenon. Simply inducing the model to say "wait" in its response improved accuracy of results. as now the model double checked its "work". funny enough it also sometimes lead it to produce a wrong answer where otherwise it should have stuck to its guns. But overall that little wait had a net positive affect. Thats when i knew COT was not same as human thinking as we dont care about trigger words or anything like that, our thinking requires zero language (though it does benefit from language) its a deeper process. Thats why i was interested in latent processing models and foray in that matter.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-12-22 05:19:31+00:00
> This commuter rail experience is probably familiar to many of us, but it's specific to commuter rail - being a passenger on a subway or in a car/bus is too chaotic or bumpy to do this.

I second this. It is hard for me to do anything productive on a bus because the stop/start frequency is too high and more physically demanding than a train.
by necovek | 2025-12-22 05:20:07+00:00
Most intersections I've seen in Serbia cities like Belgrade have "preferential" roads even if they are equally loaded and similarly sized: so, one direction will have either "stop" or "yield" signs, and another will not. Everyone slows down because you don't see the stop/yield sign for the orthogonal streets until you come closer to the intersection.

Perhaps we are just more used to traffic lights being off/broken (and we are, as this is, anecdotally, more like a weekly occurrence at some point during your trip to work, for instance)?
by aspenmayer | 2025-12-22 05:20:44+00:00
Those two novels of Nylund's really captured the "dark forest" concept well, though I won't say more so as to avoid spoilers.

I haven't read the source material so I can't speak to the books, but the adaptations of 3 Body (Problem) that I've watched, both the Tencent and Netflix ones, also explore similar themes to Nylund's works. Heck, I just discovered that Liu Cixin coined the "dark forest" term, though he isn't the first to explore it.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-22 05:20:47+00:00
> I am paid premium while the clients watch Netflix and later whine about running out of money.

This really bothered me when I was in social situations with college students who would alternate between bragging about how much they spent on DoorDash and complaining about how they’re always struggling with money.

It was only a handful of people out of a larger group of mostly rational students, but it drove me crazy.
by zarzavat | 2025-12-22 05:21:02+00:00
It's all very well being more public, until a government decides to make 5 years of social media history an entry condition[0], and moreover imprisons those people who are denied entry instead of simply sending them home on the next flight[1].

I have no problem with this per se, as I have no plans to go to the US this decade, but I do worry about contagion. Perhaps being a public person on the internet is an idea whose time has come and gone.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dz0g2ykpeo.amp

[1] https://amp.dw.com/en/german-nationals-us-immigration-detain...
by burningChrome | 2025-12-22 05:21:07+00:00
My dev friends used to do this as a sort of inside joke around the office. If you were cool and hip, you wrote emails like this as a way to sort of thumb your nose at the establishment.

I did it for a while until I was considered a "senior" dev and one of the VP's pulled me aside and said it reflects poorly on me when I'm not using proper grammar. He said as a senior dev in the org, I should hold myself to a higher standard. At which time, I started using proper grammar.

Always puts a smile on my face when I see this is still a thing in certain circles. Nonconformity isn't quite dead - and that's a good thing.
by Nursie | 2025-12-22 05:21:12+00:00
I upgraded to windows 11 as soon as it was offered. Even went out and bought a tpm addon for my motherboard - not that I needed one 100% but activating the onboard one on Zen 3 at the time was thought to cause stuttering…

Anyway, why would I do that?

Well, I got windows free at some point, a lot of years ago, and I am happy enough to jump through a few hoops to keep that going. I don’t use it day to day, I’m not sure why anyone would. I use MacOS and Linux as daily drivers.

But once in a while there’s a game I want to play that’s not that Linux-friendly, and there’s windows up to date and supported, without MS getting another cent out of me since about 2009. What’s not to like?
by DaSHacka | 2025-12-22 05:21:36+00:00
> trump pissing away a century of hard-won soft power handed the century to China

Right, it's all Trump's fault, not the fault of the boomers that sold our country's manufacturing base out to China in the 60's onward which gave them their start, and that we've never recovered from.

But no, I'm sure it's the orange man who still hasn't done 1/3rd of the things we voted him in to do, that is the problem. Average deportation rates are still below Obama's terms, "Mr. President, there's too much winning!!". What a joke, I wish he did half the things you all claim he does, we'd be much better off.
by ggm | 2025-12-22 05:21:53+00:00
I don't understand how this confers political benefit to the republicans or the white house. Can somebody explain a non conspiracy model how this helps them electorally running into the midterms?

Is there some way aside from the obvious mistruths they can demonstrate its the democrats fault, and achieve some electoral advantage?

Wyoming is extremely "red" according to Web searches (I am not an american)

My default assumption here is, it cannot, and this is going to cost them seats.
by hattmall | 2025-12-22 05:22:57+00:00
Unless you are deficient it's not the vitamin D. It's a whole host of other processes that benefit your body from sun exposure and the activities that go along with it. The Vitamin D is just a marker that we can detect that can also be related to that same exposure. So there's a huge number of things for which people with high levels of Vitamin D do not suffer but supplementing has no effect because the vitamin D is only correlated not causative.
How do you handle international taxation for subscription apps?
by SamyakKhetan | 2025-12-22 05:23:12+00:00
I have a Flutter app with Razorpay payments charging $10/month. I need to add sales tax/VAT based on user location but I'm confused about the implementation. For my home country (India) I know I need to add 18% GST. But what about users in the US, EU, UK, Canada, etc? Do I need to register for tax in every country? At what revenue threshold do you typically start worrying about this? I see small SaaS products handle this somehow. Do you just charge tax in your home country initially and ignore the rest? Use a service like Paddle or Merchant of Record? What's the simplest approach when starting out? Would appreciate hearing from anyone who's implemented this.
by temporallobe | 2025-12-22 05:23:55+00:00
A polygraph is just an intimidation tool. I have family who worked for 3-letter agencies who “failed” polygraphs, only to have them retaken a day later and “pass”. The polygraph examiners are pretty darn good at intimidating subjects, which understandably affects their vitals, causing false positives left and right. Heck, I have a 30-40 mmHg higher blood pressure reading in any doctor’s office than I do at home due to white coat syndrome. I can’t imagine how being interrogated would for something I didn’t do would affect me.
by tombert | 2025-12-22 05:23:58+00:00
I'd argue that pirating apps is actually the wrong direction for this, not for any kind of ethical objection, but since it's kind of a concession that these applications can't be replicated in a non-awful pricing model.

I think the better way is honestly just to make something competitive, preferably FOSS, and I actually do think we're getting there. Blender, for example, is an extremely decent animation tool nowadays, Krita is a very good digital art program, OpenToonz/Tahoma2D are pretty ok 2D animation programs, Godot is a decent-enough game engine, etc.

Yeah there are still gaps and I'm not claiming everything has parity with everything with awful pricing models, but I think we're getting there, and I think that's a more sustainable model than piracy.
by panick21_ | 2025-12-22 05:24:38+00:00
When people start talking about battery technology that has not even reached scale as any kind of political solution, you know people have lost the plot.

Taking one look at just the cost required for the network, even outside of the cost of any generation at all, you realize this is an insane and slapping a few solar panels down is far from a solution.

And also lets not ignore that places that have done a lot of the 'lets just build renewable and hope for the best' have very high energy prices. And maybe possible maybe sodium batteries might show up will not solve these issues.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-22 05:24:53+00:00
In 1825? Certainly not one that ran on electricity, much less something that had meaningful safety features.

I used to play with a Maytag machine machine motor. It had a single cylinder, ran on gasoline, and had a kick-start. It was from, IIRC, 1926.

The exhaust would have been plumbed to the outdoors, but other than that the expectation was that there would be a gas-fired engine running in the house while the washing was done.