MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dilawar | 2025-12-07 16:04:24+00:00
> I've always assumed peer review is similar to diff review. Where I'm willing to sign my name onto the work of others. If I approve a diff/pr and it takes down prod. It's just as much my fault, no?

Ph.D. in neuroscience here. Programmer by trade. This is not true. Less you know about most peer revies is better.

The better peer reviews are also not this 'thorough' and no one expects reviewers to read or even check references. Unless they are citing something they are familiar with and you are using it wrong then they will likely complain. Or they find some unknown citations very relevant to their work, they will read.

I don't have a great analogy to draw here. peer review is usually a thankless and unpaid work so there is unlikely to be any motivation for fraud detection unless it somehow affects your work.
by StellarScience | 2025-12-07 16:04:55+00:00
> It's unfortunate that so many people end up parroting fanciful ideas without fully appreciating the different contexts around software development.

Of course that's true of both sides of this discussion too.

I really value DRY, but of course I have seen cases where a little duplication is preferable. Lately I've seen a steady stream of these "duplication is ok" posts, and I worry that newer programmers will use it to justify copy-paste-modifying 20-30-line blocks of code without even trying to create an appropriate abstraction.

The reality of software is, as you suggest, that there are many good rules of thumb, but also lots of exceptions, and judgment is required in applying them.
by patcon | 2025-12-07 16:04:58+00:00
You're right that "beef" isn't the right term, and I apologise for the lazy take.

But there was a values tension, and resulting values clash with someone who fell firmly on one side of the tension, seemingly a bit self-righteous in not feeling it to be a tension at all.

I find the tension totally understandable and even healthy, and not something to "just fix" in a clear way, as the youth might have readers believe.

My synopsis here got the +1 from a staff, so I'm assuming my experience in messy organizing gives me a decent read of the complexity of the situation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917234
by maccard | 2025-12-07 16:05:19+00:00
> The assumption here is that the MacBook is better because of soldering components rather than because Apple simply made a better chip and has a better OS than Windows.

That's your assumption - my point is that I don't care as long as it's actually good. The only part I really care about is the battery because it has a limited number of cycles that is shorter than the lifetime of the rest of the components.
by 9rx | 2025-12-07 16:07:18+00:00
> Or would C++98 also be considered a GC language due to auto_ptr?

auto_ptr does not exhibit qualities of GC.

> Are no_std Rust and freestanding C++ GC languages?

These are not different languages. A developer opting out of certain features as enabled by the language does not change the language. If one was specific and said "no_std Rust", then you could fairly say that GC is not available, but that isn't applicable here. We are talking about "Rust" as written alone.

> Does the existence of Fil-C change anything about whether C is a GC language?

No. While Fil-C is heavily inspired by C, to the point that it is hard to distinguish between them, it is its own language. You can easily tell they are different languages as not all valid C is valid Fil-C.
by jancsika | 2025-12-07 16:07:40+00:00
Could work like this:

1. You help your friend wash the dishes and notice their hefty, 5-quart stainless steel pot. You look it up on Amazon and it's like $50.

2. At $store, you see something that looks like that size and style of pot, but for only $10. What a steal! It's even ultralight so it should be easier to load in the dishwasher...

*Several months later*

3. Your pot is all warped to hell, making it difficult to cook evenly. But your friend's pot is probably fine for the next few decades if not longer. (Note: if this were an oven pan the warping would make it dangerous to use.)

4. To add insult to injury, $store got two more of your dollars just because.

I picked the 5-quart pot because I've seen one of these with my own eyes.

In any case, OP would have been better off paying me $38 for nothing but crushing their dream of buying a decent quality $10 frying pan.
Show HN: I built an LLM pipeline to sanitize client emails into JSON Scopes
by nejcgradisek | 2025-12-07 16:07:40+00:00
I got tired of copy-pasting client emails into ChatGPT and writing prompts. I built a wrapper that: Strips the email signatures/junk (Regex). Interrogates the vague parts. Outputs a Markdown table for the Scope. It's free to try here: https://www.scopelock.app/. Roast my code/prompt engineering.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2025-12-07 16:07:43+00:00
It seems like the GPT zero team is automating it! Up to very recently, no one sane would cite a paper with correct title but make up random authors- and shortly, this specific signal will be goodhearted away by a “make my malpractice less detectable MCP,” so I can see why this automation is happening exactly now.
by seec | 2025-12-07 16:07:46+00:00
I'm not against meta-analysis, but if those analyses rely on studies that have flawed methodologies, it is just an exercise in statistical hacking. With enough massaging, you will find something eventually.

I don't have time to check in detail; can you link the study finding issues at relevant doses?

Anyway, my thinking is that if there was such a big problem, we would have found it already. It affects the food supply of so many; it seems unlikely that there are significant issues that wouldn't show up in the population at large.

The real concern is environmental impact and, particularly, effects on insects. But since they are going to use something else that may or may not be worse, it's probably better to not ban the stuff until it can be proved that the damage is worse than the benefits…
by imiric | 2025-12-07 16:07:49+00:00
Indeed. The narrative that this type of issue is entirely the responsibility of the user to fix is insulting, and blame deflection 101.

It's not like these are new issues. They're the same ones we've experienced since the introduction of these tools. And yet the focus has always been to throw more data and compute at the problem, and optimize for fancy benchmarks, instead of addressing these fundamental problems. Worse still, whenever they're brought up users are blamed for "holding it wrong", or for misunderstanding how the tools work. I don't care. An "artificial intelligence" shouldn't be plagued by these issues.
by LexiMax | 2025-12-07 16:08:19+00:00
> How does anyone "control" an OSS project in the sense that you are talking about, so the ability to insert backdoors or activate kill-switches?

A government can control a piece of open source software the same way a big tech company does - with economies of scale. In other words, by throwing more money, resources, and warm bodies at their open source projects than anybody else.

The code itself might be under an open license, but project governance is free to remain self-interested and ignorant of the needs of the "community."

Any pull request accepted from outside isn't a mutual exchange of developer labor for the benefit of all, but the company successfully tricking an outside developer into doing free work for them.

Any pull request that runs counter to the interests of the company can and will be ignored or rejected, no matter how much effort was put into it or how much it would benefit other users.

Any hostile forks are going to be playing a catch-up game, as community efforts cannot outpace the resources of most large companies.
by petit_robert | 2025-12-07 16:09:46+00:00
Strange, for me it's the opposite.

Just yesterday, I moved some 100 lines of code using a hash quite a few times from the main module to a function using a reference to the hash.

if %args is the hash holding the data, '$args{key}' tells me the value of 'key' in the main module.

a reference to the hash passed to the function is noted like so : '$args = \%args';$args->{key} tells me value of 'key'

All I had to do to adapt the code was to replace '$args{' with '$args->{', done by the time I typed the replace command in my editor.

Funny that it just makes sense to me, must be something with the brain's wiring.
by swatcoder | 2025-12-07 16:10:42+00:00
Yup. People are taught DRY very early on, as an introductory "engineering" practice above the nuts and bolts of writing code.

But nobody really teaches the distinction between two passages that happen to have an identical implementation vs two passages that represent an identical concept, so they start aggressively DRY'ing up the former even though the practice is only really suited for the latter subset of them.

As you note, when you blindly de-duplicate code that's only identical by happenstance (which is a lot), it's only a matter of time before the concepts making them distinct in the first place start applying pressure for differentiation again and you end up with that nasty spaghetti splatter.
by llm_nerd | 2025-12-07 16:10:42+00:00
>Fabricated citations are not errors.

Interesting that you hallucinated the word "fabricated" here where I broadly talked about errors. Humans, right? Can't trust them.

Firstly, just about every paper ever written in the history of papers has errors in it. Some small, some big. Most accidental, but some intentional. Sometimes people are sloppy keeping notes, transcribe a row, get a name wrong, do an offset by 1. Sometimes they just entirely make up data or findings. This is not remotely new. It has happened as long as we've had papers. Find an old, pre-LLM paper and go through the citations -- especially for a tosser target like this where there are tens of thousands of low effort papers submitted -- and you're going to find a lot of sloppy citations that are hard to rationalize.

Secondly, the "hallucination" is that this particular snake-oil firm couldn't find given papers in many cases (they aren't foolish enough to think that means they were fabricated. But again, they're looking to sell a tool to rubes, so the conclusion is good enough), and in others that some of the author names are wrong. Eh.
by logicprog | 2025-12-07 16:11:12+00:00
It's a detailed, complicated anthropological argument made by an expert — and he also does it in a very well-written way. I could attempt to lay out the argument myself, but ultimately everyone would be better served by just... reading the primary source, because I doubt I could do it sufficient justice. I recommend you actually just do the reading. But a general TLDR of the points made are:

- the estimates of how much time hunter-gatherers spent "working" were based on studies that either (a) watched hunter-gatherers in extremely atypical situations (no children, tiny band, few weeks during the most plentiful time of the year, and they were cajoled into traditional living from their usual mission-based lifestyle) or (b) didn't count all the work processing the food so it could even be cooked as time spent providing for subsistence, and when those hours are included, it's 35-60 hours a week of work even including times of enforced idleness pulling down the average

- the time estimates also counted enforced idleness from heat making it dangerous to work, or from lack of availability of food, or from diminishing returns, or from various "egalitarian" cultural cul de sacs, as "leisure" but at the same time...

- ... even the hunter gatherers themselves considered their diet insufficiently nutritious and often complained of being underfed, let alone the objective metrics showing that the were
by scythmic_waves | 2025-12-07 16:11:35+00:00
> as a code reviewer [you] are only expected to review the code visually and are not provided the resources required to compile the code on your local machine to see the compiler fail.

As a PR reviewer I frequently pull down the code and run it. Especially if I'm suggesting changes because I want to make sure my suggestion is correct.

Do other PR reviewers not do this?
by Nevermark | 2025-12-07 16:11:40+00:00
I see, you think actively preventing companies and individuals from interacting freely is the default. And it's a privilege allowed to?

Well I wonder who it is you think has the right to deny others the freedom to cooperate economically by default. Then, allow "privileges" so people can work together.

--

Aside from that moral upside-down world, what you are describing is a steep limit on copyrights, with forced source, i.e. trade secret, reveals.

So you are removing the huge incentives that copyright creates. If software were always trivial to build, or cost very little to build, that would not be problem. In real life, that would devastate software work, and we would all be poorer for it. Companies, individual software developers, and users.
by neilv | 2025-12-07 16:11:44+00:00
The "dollar stores" vary.

I've been able to find good deals on some things at Dollar Tree. Usually the good deals were a smaller quantity of a normal-quality brand-name item. I mostly avoid the substandard quality items. But even sometimes substandard is OK if, say, you want to make your political demonstration sign on white foamcore (much cheaper than the art supply store, and you don't care if it's smaller, thinner, or outgassing) rather than on an Amazon shipping box.

There was a Family Dollar across from a large public housing project here, where I also went looking for deals, but the shelf prices looked like a convenience store. I didn't find out whether they were fraudulently charging even more at the register like this article describes. (I hope it closed because the residents knew there was an affordable Market Basket a 20-30 minute walk away, over the city line and train tracks, and they were able to get there and find the time for it.)
by hesgoingpubpub | 2025-12-07 16:11:55+00:00
The 'acquirer' of Twitter then spent $300 million - presumably fraudulently embezzled from an excessive bonus at a car company - getting Trump elected, and wastefully f'ed with a bunch of already expensively cost-justified government contracts in government for 130 days.

Here's the car ad: Trump buys a Tesla from Elon Musk at the White House https://youtube.com/watch?v=VGOG_q7Vzxo&
by stdbrouw | 2025-12-07 16:12:02+00:00
The idea that references in a scientific paper should be plentiful but aren't really that important, is a consequence of a previous technological revolution: the internet.

You'll find a lot of papers from, say, the '70s, with a grand total of maybe 10 references, all of them to crucial prior work, and if those references don't say what the author claims they should say (e.g. that the particular method that is employed is valid), then chances are that the current paper is weaker than it seems, or even invalid, and so it is extremely important to check those references.

Then the internet came along, scientists started padding their work with easily found but barely relevant references and journal editors started requiring that even "the earth is round" should be well-referenced. The result is that peer reviewers feel that asking them to check the references is akin to asking them to do a spell check. Fair enough, I agree, I usually can't be bothered to do many or any citation checks when I am asked to do peer review, but it's good to remember that this in itself is an indication of a perverted system, which we just all ignored -- at our peril -- until LLM hallucinations upset the status quo.
by dijit | 2025-12-07 16:12:15+00:00
One thing I'm reflecting on here is just how boring these screen grabs are.

Even if I consider how my PC looked in 2002, the 2015 screenshots are far and away uglier than my desktop experience.

Yet... I produce... very little. At least when compared to these absolute titans, who have contributed much more to my computing experience than most - certainly more than myself, I find it somewhat unsettling.

This is how my laptop looked in 2015 (it's a screenshot from 2017, but the configs were the same): https://sh.drk.sc/~dijit/2017-11-19-003840_4480x1440_scrot.p...
by seec | 2025-12-07 16:12:18+00:00
I mean, they are generally excellent motorcycles. Their monocylinders are super smooth with great handling.

But often you have to deal with those weird engineering decisions that make repairs annoying. My local garage is a BMW car specialist, and it appears that it's basically the same deal.

Funnily enough, in my youth I visited the BMW factory in Munich, and I was amazed back then. But the maintenance fails to amaze as much, haha.
by jrmg | 2025-12-07 16:12:27+00:00
1) Misleading advertising? Yes. Obviously this is true if you accept both that their prices are generally higher, and that they’re advertising low prices.

2) They’re in more convenient locations - often on the drive home already - and are smaller so are faster to get in and out of when you’re hurrying to or from work.

3) If you’re _not_ working, they’re probably cheaper to _get to_, especially if you can’t drive, because they’re closer.

I’m not as up in arms about this as some - in some respects this is just a new iteration of the corner store or bodega, which have always been a little more expensive than supermarkets (and often a little disorganized…) - but it is the truth.
by ulrashida | 2025-12-07 16:12:46+00:00
Unfortunately while catching false citations is useful, in my experience that's not usually the problem affecting paper quality. Far more prevalent are authors who mis-cite materials, either drawing support from citations that don't actually say those things or strip the nuance away by using cherry picked quotes simply because that is what Google Scholar suggested as a top result.

The time it takes to find these errors is orders of magnitude higher than checking if a citation exists as you need to both read and understand the source material.

These bad actors should be subject to a three strikes rule: the steady corrosion of knowledge is not an accident by these individuals.
by 9rx | 2025-12-07 16:12:59+00:00
C++ didn't add GC until relatively recently, to be fair. When people from 30 years ago get an idea stuck in their head they don't usually ever change their understanding even as life continues to march forward. This isn't limited to software. If you look around you'll regularly find people repeating all kinds of things that were true in the past even though things have changed. And fair enough. There is only so much time in the day. You can't possibly keep up to date on everything.
by logicprog | 2025-12-07 16:13:10+00:00
Constant, backbreaking work was not a feature of hunter-gatherer societies in the way it was of early agricultural societies, yes; at the same time, they still worked equal to or longer hours than we did, at things we would likely consider quite grueling and boring (mostly food processing), and what they got out of it was a level of nutrition even they regularly considered inadequate; moreover, a lot of the reason the average per day work estimate is so low, as the paper covers briefly, is that there were very often times, especially during the winter, where food simply wasn't accessible, or during the summer, where it was so hot it was dangerous to work, so there was enforced idleness, but that's not the same thing as leisure.
by grayhatter | 2025-12-07 16:13:16+00:00
> This is true, but here the equivalent situation is someone using a greek question mark (";") instead of a semicolon (";"),

No it's not. I think you're trying to make a different point, because you're using an example of a specific deliberate malicious way to hide a token error that prevents compilation, but is visually similar.

> and you as a code reviewer are only expected to review the code visually and are not provided the resources required to compile the code on your local machine to see the compiler fail.

What weird world are you living in where you don't have CI. Also, it's pretty common I'll test code locally when reviewing something more complex, more complex, or more important, if I don't have CI.

> Yes in theory you can go through every semicolon to check if it's not actually a greek question mark; but one assumes good faith and baseline competence such that you as the reviewer would generally not be expected to perform such pedantic checks.

I don't, because it won't compile. Not because I assume good faith. References and citations are similar to introducing dependencies. We're talking about completely fabricated deps. e.g. This engineer went on npm and grabbed the first package that said left-pad but it's actually a crypto miner. We're not talking about a citation missing a page number, or publication year. We're talking about something that's completely incorrect, being represented as relevant.

> So if you think you might have reasonably missed greek question marks in a visual code review, then hopefully you can also appreciate how a paper reviewer might miss a false citation.

I would never miss this, because the important thing is code needs to compile. If it doesn't compile, it doesn't reach the master branch. Peer review of a paper doesn't have CI, I'm aware, but it's also not vulnerable to syntax errors like that. A paper with a fake semicolon isn't meaningfully different, so this analogy doesn't map to the fraud I'm commenting on.
by robin_reala | 2025-12-07 16:13:21+00:00
Meanwhile, GitHub is removing Toasts from Primer, their design system.[1] They’re next to impossible to implement in a way that retains accessibility across all needs, and if you try to restrict their usage to places where accessibility doesn’t matter so much (simple ephemeral confirmations) people misuse them anyway.

It’s notable that accessibility isn’t mentioned once in this post, or, in fact, in the component’s documentation.

[1] https://primer.style/accessibility/toasts/
by gaigalas | 2025-12-07 16:13:27+00:00
Explaning is hard. Examples often work better. You need to be able to show an example where deduplication would be made worse by applying DRY, otherwise it's hard to argue using just vague descriptions.

I totally agree with deduplication, but only when it's shown. Otherwise it's too easy, and I've seen people try to use this argument to justify slop many times.
by daviddever23box | 2025-12-07 16:13:28+00:00
I do wonder whether the announcement regarding Intel manufacturing low-end SoCs is triggering this dissatisfaction.

Setting aside the political side-effects of throwing support behind Intel and its US government-backed investment, we've seen movement on modem chip development and low-end SoCs for sub-MacBook Air and iPhone Air / SE / other models.

Perhaps this is the classic low-end / high-performance bifurcation problem (i.e., Srouji is focused on high-performance chips while the greater executive class is focused on service of the Walmart demographic, e.g., Made-In-USA, inexpensive, wider market acceptance).
by luc_ | 2025-12-07 16:13:43+00:00
++ When an EU outlet says, "Given the annual savings, this sum will pay for itself in less than a year. In the past, the state transferred millions to the US company Microsoft, primarily for the use of office software and other programs."

You know they want sovereignty.

WRT the criticism on this move by "the opposition" saying, ""It may be that on paper 80 percent of workplaces have been converted. But far fewer than 80 percent of employees can now work with them properly.""

I think this natural pressure will also be helpful for re-tooling IT infra and support companies to being more sovereign.
by imiric | 2025-12-07 16:13:53+00:00
> LLMs aren’t guns.

Right. A gun doesn't misfire 20% of the time.

> The problem with using them is that humans have to review the content for accuracy.

How long are we going to push this same narrative we've been hearing since the introduction of these tools? When can we trust these tools to be accurate? For technology that is marketed as having superhuman intelligence, it sure seems dumb that it has to be fact-checked by less-intelligent humans.