MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wavemode | 2025-12-06 19:04:08+00:00
> it’s as if a great library, say the Library of Congress, refused to tell where they got their books and how they got their books and who chose the books and whether all the books they had were in the catalogue and available or some were held back, kept secret.

I think "proprietary" is a better descriptor for Google Search's inner machinations, than "secret". The general concept of engineering a search crawler is well-trodden. Many companies have done it, there are open-source examples, and Google themselves have written blogs about their own.

It would probably be more apt to say, we know where the books came from and how they were acquired, we just don't necessarily know how the archive shelves in the basement are arranged and we don't know which employee is responsible for organizing them and we don't have the source code to the library's LMS. (All of which is true, by the way, for the LOC.) Proprietary, not secret.
by zozzle | 2025-12-06 19:04:29+00:00
JKR isn't advocating for anyone's human rights to be taken away, and she's never said anything of the sort. Her core point is that women and girls need single-sex spaces, services and other provisions because because male dominance in society, backed by violence and reproductive control, puts those who are female at a structural disadvantage, and that no matter how someone identifies, this material imbalance between the sexes hasn't gone away.

She's simply arguing that women shouldn't have to surrender the few hard-fought protections that were carved out to help level this unequal scenario in the first place.

Most people see this as basic fairness, not hate.
by zahlman | 2025-12-06 19:04:39+00:00
> Most likely you'll have to use a venv or the like and setup a special version of python just for that application.

Using venvs is trivial (and orders of magnitude more lightweight than a container). And virtually every popular package has a policy of supporting at least all currently supported Python versions with each new release.

You need to set up a venv because of how the language is designed, and how it has always worked since the beginning. Python doesn't accommodate multiple versions of a package in the same runtime environment, full stop. The syntax doesn't provide for version numbers on imports. Imports are cached by symbolic name and everyone is explicitly expected to rely on this for program correctness (i.e., your library can have global state and the client will get a singleton module object). People just didn't notice/care because the entire "ecosystem" concept didn't exist yet.

I have at least one local from-source build of every Python from 3.3-3.14 inclusive (plus 2.7); it's easy to do. But I have them explicitly for testing, not because using someone else's project forces me to. The ecosystem is just not like that unless perhaps you are specifically using some sort of PyTorch/CUDA/Tensorflow related stack.

> It's the standard now because system Python can't do it.

Your system Python absolutely can have packages installed into it. The restrictions are because your Linux distro wants to be able to manage the system environment. The system package manager shouldn't have to grok files that it didn't put there, and system tools shouldn't have to risk picking up a dependency you put there. Please read https://peps.python.org/pep-0668/, especially the motivation and rationale sections.

> major breakages in point version upgrades

I can think of exactly one (`async` becoming a keyword, breaking Tensorflow that was using it as a parameter name). And they responded to that by introducing the concept of soft keywords. Beyond that, it's just not a thing for your code to become syntactically invalid or to change in semantics because of a 3.x point version change. It's just the standard library that has changes or removals. You can trivially fix this by vendoring the old code.
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-06 19:06:18+00:00
>plenty of people could do both

Citation heavily needed.

Because here in the real world the barrier to entry in SW engineering jobs is significantly lower than the law bar or med school. Not to mention cheaper.

And yes of course, Americans have the highest salaries in the world for white collar professions, what other new information do you have that we don't already know?
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-12-06 19:06:19+00:00
No it is not. There is no license in that repository.

Relevant: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/82431

> When you make a creative work (which includes code), the work is under exclusive copyright by default. Unless you include a license that specifies otherwise, nobody else can copy, distribute, or modify your work without being at risk of take-downs, shake-downs, or litigation. Once the work has other contributors (each a copyright holder), “nobody” starts including you.

https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/
by Terr_ | 2025-12-06 19:06:21+00:00
My state has a neat legal trick that applies to most major highways: You can set up a big tall sign to advertise but it has to be for a product or service drivers can stop and buy on the premises.

This removes much of the incentive for spamming enormous signs and renting them out to the highest bidder. That may change if it becomes really cheap to put a functional vending machine below.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-12-06 19:06:33+00:00
Yeah it's a huge waste to put that into one company's pocket instead of sharing it with OSM.

That reminds me, if anyone is in touch with the CoMaps folks... A feature to sync points and routes from my phone to my computer would be nifty. I don't record routes enough, and I often map places while I'm out without Wi-Fi.
by trimethylpurine | 2025-12-06 19:07:09+00:00
I thought that from reading the first part of the first meta sample too, but in that same paragraph is mention of a second study that apparently did find relevant issues at low doses in vitro of human cells at environmentally relevant concentration levels.

In fact the purpose of meta analysis is to compare and contrast the conflicting research and results on a topic. It's very useful when forming a scientific view.
by mvyshnyvetska | 2025-12-06 19:07:16+00:00
Interesting approach. A few questions:

How do you handle false positives from mutation strategies like Base64 or token smuggling? In my experience, a lot of "successful" jailbreaks from automated fuzzing don't actually produce harmful outputs — the model just gets confused and outputs gibberish that technically matches a keyword filter.

Also curious about your payload curation — are these tested against specific model families, or generic? The attack surface differs quite a bit between Claude, GPT-4, and open-source models.

The local-first angle is smart. Most enterprises I've talked to won't send their system prompts to a third-party SaaS for obvious reasons.
by hinkley | 2025-12-06 19:07:28+00:00
Something I only figured out in the ‘10s is that the main tax of code smells is during debugging. Debugging when taken to the level of art is less about sorting all of the possible causes for a problem by likelihood but by ease of validation.

Things that are cheap to check should be checked first unless they are really unlikely. You change the numbers game from trying to make the biggest cleaving lines possible, to smaller bites that can be done rapidly (and perhaps more importantly, mentally cheaply).

Code smells chum the waters. Because where there is smoke sometimes there is fire, and code smells often hide bugs. You get into Tony Hoare’s Turing award speech; either no bugs are obvious, or there are no obvious bugs.

So I end up making the change easy and then making the easy change because we have more code each week so the existing code needs to be simpler if someone is going to continue to understand the entire thing.

Perl doesn’t seem to have figured this out at all.
by Timon3 | 2025-12-06 19:08:33+00:00
> Because that’s not how homebrew works. And you can’t have a single image if you’re expecting people to install apps via their multiple different endorsed delivery mechanisms.

As the other poster said, Homebrew has nothing to do with this. Please read up on how the technology works before declaring this a contradiction.

> Because an App Store is ostensibly just a package manager. I get they’re making a distinction between desktop apps and CLI (homebrew does GUI apps too by the way), but when their emphasis is on “easy” and “one way to do things”, having two different ways to install apps contradicts their mission statement.

You don't install the same things using Homebrew and Flatpak. You install apps through Flatpak, and non-apps through Homebrew etc. There aren't two ways to install apps.

Are you referring to "casks" when talking about GUI apps through Homebrew? Is that even supported on Linux?

> If they actually cared about this mission statement AND had half the competence they claim, they’d build a unified UI that supports all use cases rather than expect people to learn those different tools and why it matters that they’re different.

No, you're just arbitrarily asking for them to make changes based on your misunderstandings of the use cases of each tool.

> The only reason you’d announce it would be because you hadn’t worked in this space before and feel a sense of achievement doing the bloody obvious. (And to be clear, I have zero issue with people having projects like these to learn new skills)

No, that's not the only reason, but you're looking at the project with an extremely narrow lense while not spending any time actually looking into the technology and project, so I can understand that it's the only reason you see.

> I am interested who you think this is targeting. Because they do specifically say this is for developers (amongst other people). And the reason they give (VSCode) is a pretty noob argument. If you can’t figure out how to install an IDE then you’re clearly tech savvy enough to be a developer.

If you'd spend 5 seconds reading up on the technology, you could easily steelman a better argument.
Show HN: ContextPacker code context API for your agent without vector databases
by rozetyp | 2025-12-06 19:08:40+00:00
Every time I wanted to give an LLM context from a codebase, I ended up doing this:

- Set up a vector DB - Write chunking logic - Run an indexer - Keep it in sync with git on any change

For just answer this question about this repo, it felt a bit too much. So I built a small API instead: you send a repo + question, it sends back the files an LLM actually needs (not sure how novel this is at all?).

What it does:

You call an HTTP endpoint with a GitHub repo URL + natural language question (better if specific, but this will also work: How does auth work? What validates webhook signatures? etc).

The API returns JSON with 1–10 ranked files: - `path`, `language`, `size`, full `content` - plus a small `stats` object (token estimate, rough cost savings)

You plug those files into your own LLM / agent / tool. There's no embeddings, no vector DB, no background indexing job. It works on the very first request.

Why I built this?

I just wanted to ask this repo a question without:

- Standing up Pinecone/Weaviate/Chroma - Picking chunk sizes and overlap - Running an indexer for every repo - Dealing with sync jobs when code changes

This API skips all of that. It's meant for:

- One-off questions on random repos - Agents / tools that hop across many repos - Internal tools where you don't want more infra

Does it work at all?

On a small internal eval (177 questions across 14 repos, mix of Python, TS, monorepos + private ones):

- A cross-model LLM judge rated answers roughly on par with a standard embeddings + vector DB setup - Latency is about 2–4 seconds on the first request per repo (shallow cloning + scanning), then faster from cache - No indexing step: new repos work immediately

Numbers are from our own eval, so treat them as directional, not a paper. Happy to share the setup if anyone wants to dig in.

How it works:

1. On first request, it shallow clones the repo and builds a lightweight index: file paths, sizes, languages, and top-level symbols where possible.

2. It gives an LLM the file tree + question and asks it to pick the most relevant files.

3. It ranks, dedupes, and returns a pack of files that fits in a reasonable context window.

Basically: let an LLM read the file tree and pick files, instead of cosine-searching over chunks.

*imitations:

- Eval is relatively small (177 questions / 14 repos), all hand-written – directional, not research-grade - Works best on repos with sane structure and filenames - First request per repo pays the clone cost (cached after)

Try it:

- Live demo: https://contextpacker.com - DM me for an API key – keeping it free while I validate the idea.

If you're building code agents, "explain this repo" tools, or internal AI helpers over your company's repos – I'd love to hear how you'd want to integrate something like this (or where you think it will fall over). Very open to feedback and harsh benchmarks.
by pas | 2025-12-06 19:09:13+00:00
it becomes a disorder when the person faces "too many" difficulties due to their difference (instead of enjoying the advantages)

and of course there are extreme cases, like the many non-verbal people (who likely wouldn't be able to live alone, their communication is limited to poking at pictures on a board), and the truly end of the spectrum where nothing sort of institutionalization can provide the environment and care necessary for survival

but of course having our society somehow become so narrow allows for the economic efficiency to even have the surplus that then we give to people with these disorders (in the form or care, attention, medical research, and so on)
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-12-06 19:09:23+00:00
Emergence and Reduction are not all that mysterious

Say you want to see what a car is made of. You can take it apart (reduce it) into parts on the workshop floor. Now you know what it's made of.

But you have to put it back together again before you have something you can start and drive away (emergent properties)

At no point does anything magical happen:

parts x organization_of_the_parts <-> the working car

reduction <- -> emergence
by afavour | 2025-12-06 19:09:32+00:00
The discussion is about the form in which you share papers. With HTML you just share the HTML file, it opens instantly on basically any device.

If you distribute the paper as XML with an XSLT transform you need to run something that’ll perform that transform before you can read the paper. No matter whether that transform happens on the server or on the client it’s still an extra complication in the flow of sharing information.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-12-06 19:10:07+00:00
Whether or not something is "free" is a separate matter and subject to how the software is licensed. If there is no license it is, by definition "source available", not open source. "source available" is not some new distinction I'm making up.

See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46175760
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-12-06 19:10:15+00:00
Python must have libav bindings somewhere, you could certainly run that check in-process.

Off the top of my head, it's probably in the container metadata, so you'd just need libavformat and not even libavcodec. Pass it a path, open it, scan the list of streams and check the codec magic number?
by nis0s | 2025-12-06 19:10:43+00:00
What’s dangerous about this idea? It’s simply wrong because let’s think back to why people formed nation states. The core ideas are related to cultural identity and protection for who you classify as your people. The Jewish people have always suffered by being targeted because of their religion or culture, that’s why it makes sense that they should have their own country. What do you think countries are for? It’s an establishment of collective will and power for navigating systemic forces. There’s a lot more to this, but then we’re just taking about political science and history. In general, groups of people with distinct characteristics need to have safe havens, they cannot rely on others for protections. People need to protect their countries, that’s where they’re safest.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-06 19:10:54+00:00
Nobody with a brain should be surprised by this. Nationalism is the way of war, it requires wars and thus it leads to wars without fail. Those who embrace it, know that.

A unified Europe is a huge barrier impeding both nationalism and wide-scale wars. Russia embraced nationalism first, it became the state's ideology during Putin's second term, the first extravagant military parade in new Russia happened in 2005, around that time the Russian presidency started promoting the nationalist philosopher Ivan Ilyin who was a Nazi sympathizer [1].

The US started on the nationalist path also during the second term of the current president. The push is now underway to get other European countries to join.

The attacks on the EU and encouragement of Russia pursue the same effect as the Munich Agreement of 1938 which opened the doors for the massive and massively-cruel WW2 in Europe. Who knows, we may even get a new Molotov-Ribbentrop, under the name of Ukrainian Peace Accord. The leaders of the major players in the new emerging conflict are remarkably similar to the old ones.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Ilyin
by morshu9001 | 2025-12-06 19:11:00+00:00
Couldn't they have figured out one decent way to do things before releasing features to all users? I tried Scala for a bit then decided it was complicated for no good reason.

Idk about Haskell, but I used Erlang which is also purely functional. No matter how long I used it and tried to appreciate its elegance, it became clear this isn't a convenient way to do things generally. But it was designed well, unlike Scala.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-06 19:11:05+00:00
But that has the same cause.

When you buy a Windows PC, the first thing a lot of tech people will do is format it and put on a clean install of Windows without all of the OEM crapware, or in these days install Linux if grandma is just using email and Facebook anyway.

If you try to do that on your Android device, your bank app is broken, most importantly not because of anything the alternate OS is doing wrong, which causes the vast majority of people to not want to do it even if it means suffering the OEM crapware, with no way for the alternative OS to fix it. And that in turn allows the OEMs to get away with locked bootloaders etc., because then they're not losing sales to a competitor that lets you remove the crapware when nobody can do it either way.
by Teever | 2025-12-06 19:12:07+00:00
What I'd like to see is a stationary lab / communication relay that processes samples that are brought to it by a variety of rovers that can be launched with the lab or in other missions.

It would be neat to see different companies, schools, or nations come up with variations on the rovers that only need to support the common interface of passing materials to the lab for analysis.

You could even drop more labs and build a network of them and expanding the range of your little rover nodes.

Once you have a decent rover design sorted out you can work on mass producing it and achieving economies of scale.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-12-06 19:12:33+00:00
When we first moved to our rural area here the high speed wireless situation was atrocious and we found that because of that the local gas station & convenience stores still had a pretty active business renting DVD/BluRay movies. Until we could finally get decent high speed Internet without caps, we did that (and bought BluRay discs as well) which was only about 5, 6 years ago.

There was something quite nice and nostalgic about it.
by skybrian | 2025-12-06 19:13:51+00:00
That’s not the Turing Test; it’s just vaguely related. The Turing Test is an interactive party game of persuasion and deception, sort of like playing a werewolves versus villagers game. Almost nobody actually plays the game.

Also, the skill of the human opponents matters. There’s a difference between testing a chess bot against randomly selected college undergrads versus chess grandmasters.

Just like jailbreaks are not hard to find, figuring out exploits to get LLM’s to reveal themselves probably wouldn’t be that hard? But to even play the game at all, someone would need to train LLM’s that don’t immediately admit that they’re bots.
by oncallthrow | 2025-12-06 19:14:15+00:00
> Perl always had a significant amount of what you might call "BOFH" culture, which came from its old UNIX sysadmin roots. All of those passive aggressive idioms and in jokes like "RTFM", "lusers", "wizards", "asking for help the wrong way" etc.

> [...]

> Cultural conservatism as a first principle.

Counterpoint to this: Rust. Rust has a similar RTFM/"wizards" culture, but is not culturally conservative (in any sense of the word).

My two cents: Perl's "culture" had little to do with its fall. I think Perl's problems run much deeper. Perl is built on rotten foundations. It's fundamentally a scripting language (albeit with bolted on additions to make it kinda-OOP), and it therefore has all the problems that scripting languages have for building large software projects.

Those problems have no quick fix, and indeed fixing them would require throwing the language out entirely -- at which point, why not simply switch to another language entirely (which is exactly what happened...).
by hglaser | 2025-12-06 19:14:15+00:00
It was indeed originally conceived as 5 seasons, but the creator Tony Gilroy has consistently said shortening it was his decision because the production was too long and taxing:

"We were halfway through shooting season 1, coming through Covid, and the monumental size of the show, the effort, and everything else was just dawning on us. We realized that I didn't have enough calories to do it, and Diego's face couldn't take the timing, because it just takes too long to make it."

https://www.gamesradar.com/entertainment/star-wars-tv-shows/...

"By that point, the work that was required to make the show, at its minimum, was just dazzlingly blinding to look at. And Diego was like ‘Oh my god, we told them we’d do five years.’ Nobody, if we were gonna do it like this, you couldn’t physically do it. It was just impossible."

https://screenrant.com/andor-tony-gilroy-original-five-seaso...
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-12-06 19:14:29+00:00
Honestly some of the posts defending "it could be true!!" when nearly any rational reading of it would deem it "fake beyond a reasonable doubt" are just tiresome at this point.

Like you say, it's easy to have a rational discussion that these adverts are dumb and annoying, and purporting this fan fiction as truth just weakens the case.
by nine_k | 2025-12-06 19:15:02+00:00
Exactly. Perl is about experimenting, trying things your way, and discovering new and good ways to write programs. Which is a wonderful capability for research and discovery, and for art or recreation, but not that great for industrial production.

This is why Perl was quite fit for the job at the dawn, or, rather, the detonation phase of the Internet explosion in late 1980s and early 1990s, along with Lisp and Smalltalk that promote similar DIY wizardry values. But once the industry actually appeared and started to mature, more teamwork-friendly languages like Java, PHP, and Python started to take over.
by quesera | 2025-12-06 19:15:06+00:00
The web precedes commercialization, but many tons of money were pumped into the web post-commercialization, so a lot changed quickly after that.

There were free ways to get on the net, and to host web pages, before 1995. And for many years after that, you could pay for ISP access, which would come with the ability to host pages.

We're still paying for ISP access, we just get fewer services with it. That could change.
by zbentley | 2025-12-06 19:15:43+00:00
> However, if you try `dis.dis('ATOMS_IN_THE_WORLD = 10*50')` you will get LOAD_CONST 10, LOAD_CONST 50...

I do not get that, I get LOAD_CONST 500.

Tested on: Python 3.9.3 MacOS (Apple provided), 3.13.3 (uv provided) MacOS and Linux, and 3.14.0 (uv provided) MacOS and Linux.